Of our passage to the Alaskan Peninsula, there is not much to record.
It was a shakedown cruise literally enough. The _Jeannette_, between
the newly added weight of her hull reenforcements and the excessive
amount of stores and coal aboard, was so grossly overloaded she had
hardly two feet freeboard left amidships, and she labored so heavily
in the seas as a consequence that for seagoing qualities, I do her no
injustice when I say that as a ship she was little superior to various
of Ericsson’s ironclad monitors with which I fell in on blockade
duty during the late war. Indeed, had it not been for our masts and
spars, our nearly submerged hull would no doubt have pleased even John
Ericsson himself as affording a properly insignificant target for enemy
gunfire.
From our second day out, when the breeze freshened a bit from the
northwest and De Long, easing her off a few points to the southward,
spread all our canvas to take advantage of it, we were under both sail
and steam, but with the seas breaking continuously over our rail and
our decks awash most of the time. With our negligible freeboard, we
lifted to nothing but took all the seas aboard as they came, rolling
heavily and wallowing amongst the waves about as gracefully as a pig in
a pen.
In this wise, we discovered a few things, among them the fact that we
were burning five tons of coal a day and making only four knots with
our engines, which gave us hardly a hundred miles for a day’s run.
Lieutenant Chipp, an excellent seaman if there ever was one but who had
not before been out in the _Jeannette_, was certain he could do as well
under sail alone as I was doing under steam, with a consequent saving
of our coal, and persuaded the captain to let him try. So below we
banked our fires, while the sailors racing through the rigging loosed
all our square sails in addition to the fore and aft rig we already had
set.
It was interesting to watch Chipp’s disillusionment. With all canvas
spread up to the fore and main topgallant sails (the _Jeannette_
carried nothing above these) Chipp started bravely out on the starboard
tack, but in the face of a northwest breeze, he soon found that like
most square riggers, she sailed so poorly by the wind, he had to pay
her off and head directly for Hawaii before we began to log even four
knots. That was bad enough but worse was to come. Having spent most of
the afternoon watch experimenting with the trim of the sails, Chipp
finally arrived at a combination to which we logged about four and
a half knots, though in the direction of our destination, Unalaska
Island, we were making good hardly three. Thus trimmed we ran an hour
while the seagoing Chipp in oil skins and boots sloshed over our awash
deck from bowsprit to propeller well, his beard dripping water, his
eyes constantly aloft, studying the set of every sail from flying jib
to spanker in the hope of improving matters.
In this apparently his inspection gave him no cause for optimism, for
after a final shake of the head, he decided to come about and try her
on the port tack, to see if by any chance she sailed better there, as
is occasionally the case with some ships owing to the unsymmetrical
effect of the drag of the screw. Stationing himself amidships, Chipp
gave the orders.
Down went the wheel. Then came the final shock. To his great
discomfiture, Chipp was wholly unable to bring the lumbering
_Jeannette_ into the wind and come about! Twice he tried, only to
have the ship each time hang “in irons” with yards banging and sails
flapping crazily till she fell off again and picked up headway on her
old tack. After two failures, De Long tried his hand at it, then
Danenhower made an attempt, but in spite of the nautical skill of all
her deck officers and the smart seamanship of her crew, the _Jeannette_
simply could not be made to tack. For all they could do under sail, the
_Jeannette_ might still be on that starboard tack headed for Honolulu,
if the captain had not finally given up in disgust and roared out to
his executive officer in the waist of the ship struggling with the
sheets to square away for another attempt,
“Belay that! Leave her to me, Chipp! I’ll tack this tub!” and reaching
for the bell pull, he rang the engine room,
“Full speed ahead!”
Knowing De Long’s impetuous nature, I had for some time been suspecting
such a result and in the engine room, I had both coalheavers and
engineers standing by, so I was ready with both boilers and machinery.
I yanked open the throttle myself, and our back-acting connecting rods
began to shuttle athwartships. Quickly our shaft came up to fifty
revolutions. Above I heard the captain bellow,
“Hard a’ lee!”
This time, driven by her screw, the _Jeannette_ maintained her headway,
came obediently up into the wind, fell off to starboard, and quickly
filled away on the port tack. When I poked my head above the machinery
hatch coaming to observe results, there was the crestfallen Chipp just
outboard of me, busily engaged in securing all on his new course, and I
could not resist, a little maliciously, suggesting to him,
“Hey, brother! You want to stay at sea? Well, while you’re still young
enough to learn, take my advice and study engineering. Sailing ships?
In a few years, they’ll all be as dead as triremes! Better start now.
Let me lend you a good book on boilers!”
But Chipp, still hardly willing to believe that he was beaten, seized a
belaying pin, waved it in my direction, retorted hotly,
“Get below with your greasy machinery and sooty boilers! They’re the
ruination of any vessel! Sails dead, eh? Unship that damned propeller
of yours and I’ll tack her!” He jammed his sou’wester viciously down
over his ears and ignoring my offer strode forward to check the set of
the jibs.
De Long, leaning over the bridge, peering down at me over his dripping
glasses, took my gibe at sails more philosophically.
“Well, chief,” he observed, “she handles now like nothing I ever sailed
in before, but I suppose it’s my fault, not hers, she’s so low in the
water. When we’ve burned some of this coal and lightened up, perhaps
she’ll do better.” He puffed meditatively at his pipe while he turned
to examine the compass. We were hardly within six points of the wind.
In dismay De Long muttered, “Heading north! This course will never do
if we want to get to Alaska this season. I guess we’ll have to douse
sail, stick to the engines, and lay her dead into the wind, west
nor’west for Unalaska, till the breeze shifts anyway.” He cupped his
hands, shouted after his first officer,
“Mr. Chipp!”
Chipp, just passing the fore shrouds, turned, looked inquisitively up
at the bridge.
“Mr. Chipp, furl all sail! We’ll proceed under steam alone till further
orders!”
For three days we kicked along with unfavorable weather through
rain, mist, and head seas. The _Jeannette_ labored, groaned, and
with no canvas to steady her, rolled and pitched abominably. Our
two scientists, Newcomb and Collins, at the first roll went under
with seasickness, and as the weather grew worse their misery passed
description, though as is usual in such cases, they got scant comfort
from the rest of us. What queer quirk of the seagoing character it is
that makes the sailor, ordinarily the most open-hearted and sympathetic
of human beings, openly derisive of such sufferings, I know not, but we
were no exceptions, and towards Collins in particular, whose puns had
occasionally made some of us in the wardroom self-conscious, we were
especially barbed in our expressions of mock solicitude.
But if the seasickness of our men of science excited only our mirth,
no such merry reaction greeted our discovery that Ah Sam, our Chinese
cook, was also similarly indisposed. At first that Ah Sam was seasick
was solely a deduction on our part to account for his complete
disappearance from the galley, and the fact that for meal after meal
we had to make out in the messroom with only such cold scraps as
Charley Tong Sing, the steward, dished out. But when two days went by
thus, Ah Sam’s whereabouts became a matter of concern to all of us and
especially to the doctor. Still where he had stowed himself, even the
bosun could not discover, and to all our inquiries about Ah Sam and to
all our complaints about the food, we got from Charley only a shake of
the head and in a high singsong the unvaried reply,
“Ah Sam, he velly sick man now. Cholly Tong Sing, he no feel so good
too.”
With this unsatisfactory state of affairs in our supply department
we had perforce to remain content, until after three days of total
eclipse, Ah Sam rose again, one might say, almost from the dead.
I had just come up from the humid engine room to the main deck, and
still bathed in perspiration, had paused to get my lungs full of fresh
salt air before diving aft into the shelter of the poop. For a moment,
with the wind blowing through my whiskers, I clung to the main shrouds.
With both feet braced wide apart on the heaving deck, I stood there
cooling off, when from the open passage to the port chartroom, which
was the as yet unused workroom for Newcomb’s taxidermy, I heard in the
doctor’s unmistakable Virginian accent,
“Well, I’ll be damned! Lend a hand here, Melville!”
I poked my head through the door. Ambler, who I afterwards learned had
been tracking down the source of some mysterious groans, had pulled
open a locker beneath the chart table, and there, neatly fitted into
that confined space, was the lost Ah Sam!
I gasped. Have you ever seen a seasick Chinaman? The combination of Ah
Sam’s natural yellow complexion with the sickly green pallor induced
beneath his skin by _mal de mer_, gave him a ghastly appearance the
like of which no ordinary corpse could duplicate. To this weird effect
his shrunken body contributed greatly, for he had certainly disgorged
everything he had ever assimilated since emigrating from China. (The
evidence for this apparently exaggerated statement was such as to
convince the most incredulous, but I will not go into details.)
Surgeon Ambler, holding his nose with one hand, grabbed Ah Sam by the
pigtail and unceremoniously jerked him forth. Immediately Ah Sam sagged
to the deck, his eyes rolling piteously.
Also holding my nose, I seized our cook by one shoulder and dragged him
out on deck, where the surgeon gave him a dose of chloroform, which
composed him somewhat. Why he had not already died, shut up in that
locker, I cannot comprehend except on the assumption that he grew up
in one of those stinkpot factories which Chipp, who was an authority
on that country, claimed Chinese pirates maintain. But fearful lest he
die yet unless kept out in the air, the captain planked him down at
the lee wheel, where under the constant eye of the helmsman, he could
not again crawl off to hide in some glory hole. There, clutching with
a death grip at the spokes as the wheel spun beneath his fingers, Ah
Sam stayed till next day, a fearful sight with pigtail flying in the
breeze and eyes almost popping from their sockets each time a green sea
came aboard; and whenever she took a heavy roll, poor Ah Sam’s lower
jaw sagged open and his tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. Such a
picture of abject despair and utter anguish as that Chinaman, I never
saw.
The fourth day out the weather cleared, moderated somewhat, and the
wind shifted to the northeast, so that assisted again by our sails,
running on the starboard tack and keeping our desired course, we made a
little over five knots for a day’s run of one hundred and thirty miles.
As we steamed toward Alaska, we gradually settled down with Chipp
laboring continuously to get everything properly stowed. On deck,
Ice Pilot Dunbar, Bosun Cole, and Ice Quartermaster Nindemann were
designated as watch officers, with the seamen under them divided into
two watches of four hours each. Below in the black gang, I divided
my little force of six men into two watches of six hours each with
Machinist Lee and Fireman, 1st Class, Bartlett in charge of the other
two men comprising each watch.
For twenty-three days we stood on toward Unalaska Island in the
Aleutian chain, a run of about two thousand miles from San Francisco.
With better weather, our various landsmen began to show on deck,
having acquired sealegs of a sort. Newcomb, first up, fitted out the
port chartroom as his taxidermy shop, spread his tools, and went
fishing over the side for albatross almost as soon as he was able to
drag himself out of his bunk. With a hook and a line baited with a
chunk of salt pork towing astern in the broken water of our wake, he
waited patiently but without results while an occasional bird wheeled
overhead, till at last, still wan from retching, he turned in, leaving
his hook overboard. But Newcomb, whom the doctor and I (chaffing him
on his Yankee accent) had nicknamed “Ninkum,” was decidedly game.
It needed no more than a call from Ambler or me on sighting a new
albatross eyeing from aloft that bit of salt pork, of
“Hey, Ninky, quick! Come and catch your goose!” to bring little
Newcomb, aflame with scientific ardor, tumbling up from the poop to man
his line hopefully.
At last an albatross measuring some seven feet in wing spread, which
for this ocean is good-sized, swooped down and swallowed the bait, and
a bedlam of cries from the anguished bird ensued which attracted the
notice of all hands. Then came a battle, in which for a while it seemed
debatable whether the albatross, flapping its huge wings frantically at
one end of the line would come inboard, or whether little Newcomb, not
yet wholly up to par, tugging on the other end, would go overboard to
join it amongst the waves. But Newcomb won at last, landed his bird,
promptly skinned it, and prepared it for mounting. And so much has the
prosaic power of steam already done to kill the ancient superstitions
of the sea, that this albatross, ingloriously hooked, came to its death
at the hands of a bird-stuffer without objection or visible foreboding
from any mariner aboard.
At last, twenty-three days out of San Francisco, with our bunkers
nearly empty from fighting head winds, and anxious to make port before
the coal gave out completely and forced us to rely on our sails alone,
we made the Aleutian Islands, only to find them shrouded in thick fog.
For Danenhower, our navigator, trouble started immediately. The only
chart he had covering that coast was one issued thirty years before by
the Imperial Russian Hydrographic Office, and it was quickly apparent
that numberless small islands looming up through rifts in the fog were
not down on the chart at all, while others he was looking for, were
evidently incorrectly located.
Worst of all, Danenhower could not even accurately determine our own
position, for when the sun momentarily broke through the clouds, the
horizon was obscured in mist, and when the fog lifted enough to show
the horizon, the sun was always invisible beneath an overcast sky. For
hours on end, Danenhower haunted the bridge, clutching his sextant
whenever the horizon showed, poised like a cat before a rat-hole, if
the sun peeped out even momentarily, to pounce upon it. But he never
got his sight.
Between thick fogs and racing tides, with our little coal pile getting
lower and lower, we had a nerve-racking time for two days trying to get
through Aqueton Pass into Behring Sea, the _Jeannette_ anchored part of
the time, underway dead slow the remainder, nosing among the islands,
often with only the roar of breakers and the cawing of sea birds on the
rocks to give warning through the mists of the presence of uncharted
islets. Finally we slipped safely through, and to the very evident
relief of both captain and navigator, on Saturday, August 2, dropped
anchor in the harbor of Unalaska.
Naturally our first concern on entering port was coal. A brief glimpse
around the land-locked harbor showed the Alaska Fur Company’s steamer
_St. Paul_, the schooner _St. George_, owned by the same firm, and
the Revenue Cutter _Rush_, but not a sign of our coal-laden schooner,
the _Fanny A. Hyde_, nor any report of her having already passed
northward on her way to our rendezvous at St. Michael’s. So I went
ashore with Captain De Long to canvass the local fuel situation. We
found eighty tons of coal belonging to the Navy, the remnant of a
much larger lot sent north some years before, but so deteriorated
by now from long weathering and spontaneous combustion as to be in
my opinion nearly worthless. Even so, that being all the coal there
was I was investigating the problem of getting it aboard when the
commander of the Revenue Cutter requested we leave it for his use,
because it would be his sole supply in getting back to San Francisco
in the fall. Naturally we in the _Jeannette_, anxious to get as far
north as possible before dipping into what our consort was carrying for
us, were not wholly agreeable to waiving our claim as a naval vessel
to that coal in favor of the Revenue Service, but this difficulty was
soon adjusted by the offer of the Alaska Company’s agent to refill
our bunkers with some bituminous coal he had on hand, his company to
be reimbursed for it in New York by Mr. Bennett. This happy solution
settled our fuel question for the moment, so while the natives took
over the job of coaling ship, I turned my attention for a few hours to
making myself acquainted with the island.
After nearly a month at sea, I found Unalaska pleasant enough, with its
green hills surrounding the harbor and its small settlement, comprising
mainly the houses of the Fur Company’s agents and employees, their
warehouses, and last and perhaps most important just at this time, a
Greek church. It seems that the steamer _St. Paul_, which we found
in the harbor on our arrival Saturday, had just come down two days
before from the Pribilof Islands loaded with sealskins, and carrying
as passengers from those tiny rocks practically all the bachelor
sealers of Pribilof in search of what civilization (in the form of
metropolitan Unalaska) had to offer. All Thursday and Friday there was
great excitement here as the native belles paraded before the eager
eyes of these none too critical prospective bridegrooms. By Saturday,
most choices were made and the Greek Catholic Church had a busy day
as the couples passed in a continuous procession before the altar and
the Russian priest tied the knots. There being no inns or dwellings
to accommodate the multitude of honeymooners, the problem was simply
enough solved by each newly-wedded couple going directly from the
church door for a stroll among the nearby hills. By afternoon, only
some few of the sealers, idealists undoubtedly, who were unable to
discover among the native women anyone to suit them, were still left
wandering disconsolately about the town, peering into every female
face, in a queer state of indecision which the smiles of Unalaska’s
beauties seemed unable to resolve.
Between coaling ship, taking aboard furs for winter clothing, and
receiving some six tons of dried fish for dog food, we on the
_Jeannette_ were kept busy for the three days of our stay, while our
nights were enlivened by the most vicious swarms of mosquitoes it has
ever been my misfortune to encounter, and all attempts to keep them out
of my bunk with the ill-fitting bed curtains were wholly futile. My
bald spot was an especial attraction for them; in desperation I was at
last forced to sleep in my uniform cap.
On August 6, we hoisted anchor and got underway, with the whole town on
the waterfront to see us off amidst the dipping of colors and a salute
from three small guns in front of the Fur Company’s office. I made out
plainly enough in the crowd the Russian priest with his immense beard,
but De Long and I differed sharply over the presence of any of the
brides amongst the throng. So far as I could judge, there were no women
there, merely a large crowd of men waving enviously after us as we
circled the harbor on our way toward Arctic solitude.
With our usual luck, we bucked a head wind for all the first day out,
but to our great gratification, on the second day the wind shifted to
the southward and freshened so that we logged the almost unbelievable
day’s run of a hundred and seventy-three miles for an hourly average
of seven and a quarter knots—for the _Jeannette_ almost race horse
speed! But it was too good to last. Next day we had dropped down to a
little under six knots, and then the breeze failed us altogether and
we finished the last three days of our run to St. Michael’s with our
useless sails furled, under steam alone at our usual speed of four
knots.