September passed, and the hoped-for gales which might break up the
pack and allow us to escape, or at least to work into a winter harbor
in distant Wrangel Land, failed to materialize. October came and went
in the same manner, no real gales, no winds strong enough to have any
effect on the ice, nothing but daily gusts of fine snow which cut our
faces and spoiled our footing for exercise. Frozen in, we went with the
ice drift, in a general northwesterly direction, till the rocky outline
of Herald Island faded into the hummocky horizon to the south, while
our continued failure to sight land to the westward made it less and
less likely every day that Wrangel Land stretched northward as we had
been led to expect. But we were not idle. After all, our expedition was
a scientific one. Aside from attempting to reach the Pole, aside from
discovering new lands in this unexplored ocean, our major aim was to
add to the world’s knowledge of the Arctic seas, of the Arctic skies,
of magnetic phenomena, of meteorological information and of animal life
in the unknown north. For these purposes we were the most elaborately
equipped expedition which had ever gone north. We carried two
scientists and God only knew what varieties of scientific instruments
gathered from the Smithsonian Institution and the Naval Hydrographic
Office.
Since exploration and discovery were for the present out of question,
De Long turned to all hands intensively on these scientific phases.
On the ice a hundred yards from the ship so as to be unaffected by
the iron in her, we set up a canvas observatory, with compass, dip
circle, anemometer, rain-gauge, barometer, pendulum, and a variety
of thermometers. Over the side, through a hole chopped in the thick
ice, we provided an opening for our dredge and our drift lead. Hourly
we took observations (and carefully recorded them) of every type of
phenomenon for which we were equipped to measure—magnetic variation
and dip, wind velocity and direction, humidity, air pressure and
temperature, gravity readings, temperature of the sea at top, bottom,
and points in between, salinity of the sea water, speed and direction
of drift—all this data laboriously read night and day in the Arctic
chill went into our logs. And for the zoological and botanical side
of our expedition, all hands were directed to bring in for Newcomb’s
inspection specimens of anything found on the ice, under, or above it,
which meant that whatever our guns could knock down in the form of
birds or beasts, or our hooks could catch in the way of fish, passed
under Newcomb’s scrutiny before (in most cases) they went to Ah Sam and
were popped into the galley kettles.
And to top off all in completing our polar records, we brought along
an extensive and expensive photograph outfit, intending to get a
continuous record of our life in the Arctic and particularly some
authentic views of Aurora Borealis.
So there being nothing else to compete with it for our time, science
received a double dose of attention, too much in fact. Taking the
multitude of readings every hour (there were sixteen thermometers alone
to be read) kept the watch officer hopping, and as each of us, except
Collins and Newcomb, had ship and personnel matters to look after,
it became to a high degree a nuisance. Most of this scientific work
naturally should have fallen to Collins and Newcomb, but unfortunately
matters in their departments went none too smoothly. The captain
received a severe jolt when he learned that the photographic outfit,
entrusted to Collins’ care, was practically useless because our
meteorologist had neglected when buying his photographic plates in San
Francisco to get any developer for them and that not a picture he
took could be developed till we got back to civilization. When on top
of this, one of our barometers and some of our precious thermometers
entrusted also to Collins were carelessly broken, the captain began to
mistrust Collins as a scientist and loaded a considerable part of the
observation work on Chipp, on Ambler, and on me—a development which did
not help to make any more amicable the attitude of Collins towards his
shipmates.
Speaking frankly, after two months’ close association in the cabin
of the _Jeannette_, we were beginning to get tired of each other’s
company. Life on shipboard is difficult at best with the same faces at
every meal, the same idiosyncrasies constantly rubbing your nerves, the
same shortcomings of your messmates to irritate you; but ordinarily
there are compensations. Shore leave gets you away from your shipmates,
while foreign ports, foreign customs, foreign scenes, and foreigners
give flavor to a cruise that makes life not only livable but to my mind
rich in variety, and to a person like myself, completely satisfying.
But in the polar ice, we came quickly to the realization that life on
the _Jeannette_ was life on shipboard at its worst—a small cramped
ship, a captain who socially had retired into himself, only a few
officers, and not a solitary compensation. No possibility of shore
leave, no foreign ports—nothing but the limitless ice pack holding us
helpless and no hope of any change (except for the worse) till summer
came and released us. And, impossible to conceal, a mental despondency,
as ponderable and as easily sensed as the cold pervading the ship
gripped our captain as we drifted impotently with the pack between
Herald Island and Wrangel Land, a thousand miles from that Pole which
in a blare of publicity from the _Herald_, he had set out in such
confidence to conquer.
Gone now were all the fine theories about the Kuro-Si-Wo Current and
the open path to the northward through the Arctic Ocean that its warm
waters would provide. We had only to look over the side at the ice
floes fifteen feet thick gripping our hull to know that the “black
tide” of Japan had no more contact with these frozen seas than had the
green waters of the Nile. And just as thoroughly exploded was that
other delusion on which we had based our choice of route—the Herr
Doktor Petermann’s thesis that Wrangel Land was a continent stretching
northward toward the Pole along the coasts of which with our dog teams
we could sledge our way over firm ground to the Pole. Every glimpse we
got of it as we drifted northwest with the pack for our first eight
weeks showed conclusively enough that Wrangel Land was nothing more
than a mountainous island to the southward and not a very large island
at that. As for Dr. Petermann and his idea that Greenland stretched
upward across the Pole to reappear on the Siberian side as Wrangel
Land, if that ponderous German scientist who so dominated current
European opinion on polar matters could have been forced to spend a
week in our crow’s-nest observing how insignificant a speck his much
publicized Wrangel Land formed of the Arctic scene, I am sure the
result would have been such a deflation of his ego and his reputation
as might be of great benefit at least to future explorers even if too
late to be of service to us in the _Jeannette_, already led astray by
the good doctor’s teachings.
How much the general knowledge amongst our officers that every theory
on which the expedition had been based was false had to do with the
lack of sociability and of harmony among us, and how much of it may
have been owing simply to our physical imprisonment in the ice, I will
not venture to say. But in my mind, the belief of all that as a polar
exploring expedition we were already a failure, doomed never to get
anywhere near the Pole, had a decided, if an unconscious, bearing on
the reactions of all of us, and most of all on the captain and on
Collins, both of whom had brought along massive blank journals whose
pages they had confidently expected to fill with the records of their
discoveries.
The captain’s journal I sometimes saw, as each evening around midnight
he toiled over his entries. Instead of records of new lands discovered,
of the attainment of ever-increasing latitudes exceeding those around
83° North reached by the English through Baffin Bay and Smith Sound,
how it must have gnawed the captain’s heart that his entries had
to be confined to such items as my struggles with our distilling
apparatus, our difficulties with such newfangled gadgets as telephones
and electric generators, or the momentous facts that Aneguin, Alexey,
or Captain Dunbar (as the case might be) had chased a polar bear (or
perhaps a walrus) which had been shot (or had escaped). All of these
happenings to De Long’s chagrin must be recorded as having occurred in
the low seventies, latitudes far to the south of those reached even
by the insignificant and ill-equipped caravels of Dutch seamen three
hundred years ago in their explorations of Spitzbergen.
What Collins put in his journal, I never knew. But I can well imagine
how much it must have irked him, a newspaper man accustomed to live
in an atmosphere of printing presses rumbling away over their grist
of momentous world events to be spread daily before the eager eyes of
_Herald_ readers, to have nothing to record except perhaps his personal
sense of injustice. Yet put down something every day he did, for I can
still see him, his long drooping mustaches almost sweeping the pages,
religiously bending over the leather-bound ledger every afternoon in
his chilly cabin in the _Jeannette’s_ poop, pouring the bitterness of
his soul onto those pages, building up a record with which I doubt not
he hoped when we returned to civilization to blast De Long out of the
Service in disgrace.