December, 1879, our fourth month in the pack, came in with crisp cold
weather; and as the days passed with the ice about us thickening and
the pack showing signs of some stability, we began again to breathe
without the subconscious dread that each minute was to be our last.
After a few days thus, we even settled into the winter routine of the
ship, released our dogs, and commenced to take some interest in the
wonders of the Arctic night.
For a month, under the shadow of death, personalities had been
forgotten, personal idiosyncrasies submerged. Now with the easing of
that strain, our likes and dislikes, our personal vanities, and the
ordinary problems of existence in the Arctic, popped up once more.
De Long began to worry over scurvy. No Arctic expedition previously of
which we had knowledge had been free of it; in many of them, scurvy,
even more than ice, had been responsible for their tales of horrible
suffering, death, and disaster. Overmuch salt was apparently the cause
of scurvy; proper diet, proper water, and proper exercise were the
antidotes prescribed by Dr. Ambler, and De Long plunged vigorously into
a program designed to protect us from that loathsome disease.
Exercise to fortify our bodies, the easiest of the requisites to
provide, received immediate attention. On December 2, after the first
night in weeks during which the captain felt secure enough to take off
his clothes when turning in, came a new order.
We were lounging round the messroom, hungrily waiting for breakfast
while Tong Sing padded about between pantry and table, setting out the
oatmeal, the coffee, and the thick slices of bread when the door from
the captain’s stateroom swung back, and with a grave,
“Good morning, gentlemen,” in came De Long, holding a paper in his hand.
“Good morning, captain,” we replied in a ragged chorus, and hardly
waiting till the skipper had seated himself, slid into our chairs. As
usual, I lifted the cover of the oatmeal dish and started to serve.
“Wait a minute with that, Melville; I want to read this order.” The
captain adjusted his glasses, stroked his mustaches a moment while
scanning what he had written, then in his scholarly manner read,
“Until the return of spring, and on each day without exception when
the temperature is above thirty degrees below zero, the ship will be
cleared regularly by all hands from eleven a.m. till one p.m. During
this period every officer and man will leave the ship for exercise on
the ice, which should be as vigorous as possible. No one except the
officer entering the noon observations in the log will for any purpose
during this period return to the ship.
(Signed) GEORGE WASHINGTON DE LONG,
Commanding.”
De Long as he finished, passed the paper to the executive officer on
his right, and ordered crisply,
“Chipp, have all the officers initial this now, and then publish it to
the crew at quarters.” In a more conversational tone, he added to us,
“I suppose, gentlemen, the order’s obvious enough. We’ve got to go and
get some exercise or we’ll all stagnate in this darkness and make it
easier for scurvy to get us. I’ve chosen the time when at least there’s
a little twilight, even though the sun’s gone. Does anybody have any
suggestions regarding exercises?”
The paper (together with Chipp’s pencil) passed back and forth across
the table as one after another, starting with Chipp, we initialed the
order, but no one had any comments to make. Once more I started to
dish out the oatmeal. Danenhower, at the foot of the table, signing
last, tossed the sheet of paper to Tong Sing, who shuffling across the
wardroom, with an Oriental bow laid it down before the captain.
“Here, Chipp, take this to read to the crew,” said the skipper,
starting to push it toward the exec, then on second thought, holding
it an instant while his eyes glanced perfunctorily down the column of
initials below his signature. A deep flush came over his cheeks as he
read and he stiffened a little in his chair, but without looking up, he
announced sternly,
“Mr. Collins, I see you failed to sign this. What’s the matter?”
There was an instant of tension, then,
“Collins isn’t here yet, captain,” put in Chipp swiftly. “He’s often
late for breakfast. Thinks that having to take the observations on
the midwatch is such a strain, he’s got to sleep in every morning to
recuperate, I guess. I’d tell him later.”
“Oh, yes, I forgot that Mr. Collins is not usually with us for
breakfast.” The skipper’s flush faded, he finished pushing the order
to Chipp. “Very well, have him sign when he shows up. Now with respect
to the exercise for the crew, Chipp, serve out a couple of footballs.
They may want to play. And tell them that anyone who wishes can get
permission to take a rifle and go hunting.”
“Aye, aye, sir!” Chipp folded the order, shoved it into his jacket.
“But I’m not so keen on that hunting business, captain. Skulking around
through all these broken hummocks, the men’ll be shooting each other or
the dogs, thinking that they’re bears or seals or something. It always
happens.”
“I won’t shed any tears over the dogs, anyway,” growled Dunbar. “I
think shooting a couple of dozen of ’em ‘by mistake’ would be a good
thing!”
“Belay that, Dunbar, you wouldn’t be so heartless,” piped up
Danenhower. “Don’t destroy my last boyhood illusion. What would life in
the Arctic be without our dogs, anyway?”
“Still hell, Dan, if you ask me, either with or without ’em,” replied
the ice-pilot grimly, passing his plate to me for oatmeal. “But getting
back to the question of exercise, cap’n, I think letting the men hunt’s
a fine idea. Surprising how far a man goes thinking that at the _next_
waterhole he’ll surely get a seal!”
The surgeon laughed softly.
“He’ll be surprised all right if he goes with you, Dunbar,” drawled
Ambler. “I’ve done it and I know. Every time you say a thing’s a mile
away across this ice, the only reason it isn’t two miles off is because
it’s three. The men’ll be surprised all right if you take them hunting.”
Virginian and Yankee, the doctor and the ice-pilot were off again
on their favorite argument, Dunbar’s gross underestimation of the
distances he covered on his many scouting trips over the ice. But I had
another problem on my mind, and as soon as I had washed down my oatmeal
with the hot coffee (which by now Danenhower had managed to get Ah Sam
to turn out as a strong black concoction) I went on deck to struggle
with my distilling apparatus.
Historically, there is no doubt that scurvy, the seaman’s curse since
the days of Noah’s voyage in the _Ark_, has always resulted on long
cruises from the absence of fresh vegetables, the over-abundance of
salt beef, and the impure water (contaminated from the bilges) which
marked the sailor’s diet. And no one who has ever seen the swollen
joints, the rotting teeth, the hemorrhages under the skin, and the
bloated faces of the victims, but strains to fight shy of scurvy as a
shipmate.
Fresh vegetables, the first defense against this scourge, we could only
carry in limited degree when we left San Francisco, and they had long
since been exhausted. Of canned vegetables, especially tomatoes, we had
a considerable supply and on these we leaned heavily as an antidote.
Then of course we had three barrels of lime-juice, the specific remedy
introduced in 1795 by Sir Gilbert Blake with such good results in the
British Navy that ever since then the British tars, forced to drink
the stuff regularly, have been called in derision “limeys” by their
Yankee cousins. But in spite of all this we did not feel safe. Other
Arctic expeditions within the last fifty years, as strongly fortified
as we with lime-juice and in some cases as well supplied with canned
vegetables, had before the end of a winter in the ice found scurvy
decimating them in spite of their precautions.
We were fitted out with copies of every printed record of polar
exploration that either in the United States or in Europe, Bennett
or his satellites on the _New York Herald_ could lay hands on. And
De Long, a good student if the Navy ever produced one, spent hours
in his cabin poring over the accounts of his contemporaries and his
predecessors in the ice puzzling out that riddle. Why in spite of
lime-juice and canned vegetables, in spite of pure fresh water daily
replenished from melting ice, had even our immediate rivals in the race
to the Pole still fallen prey to scurvy?
Their books gave no answer, but our experiences in getting water
by melting ice from the floebergs round us soon gave us a clue. We
had been led to believe that when sea water froze under very low
temperatures, the salt in it crystallized out, rose to the freezing
surface as an efflorescence, and was washed or blown away, leaving the
ice free of salt and fit to be melted into good drinking water. Indeed
Dr. Kane, whose words at that time were accepted as gospel truth on all
matters Arctic, had written,
“Ice formed at a temperature of -30° Fahrenheit will yield a perfectly
pure and potable element.”
And confirming this, Lieutenant Weyprecht, of the Austrian expedition
which in latitude 81° N. had discovered Franz Josef Land only a few
years ago, said that they found that ice over “a certain thickness”
yielded a pure water.
We were confident therefore when we entered the pack that we needed
only to send out a party with pick-axes to obtain from the nearest
convenient spot on the floe an abundant supply of fresh water for
drinking, cooking, and washing purposes. But we were unpleasantly
surprised to discover that we could find not a particle of ice
anywhere, whether cut from the top, the bottom, or the middle of the
floe, whether taken from old floes fifteen feet thick or young ice a
foot thick, that did not contain from twenty to thirty times as much
salt per gallon as even the poorest water Dr. Ambler felt he could
safely allow our men to drink continuously.
During our initial few weeks in the pack we regarded this situation
with incredulity, the same incredulity I have no doubt that the
medieval alchemist displayed when his dabbling revealed a fact failing
to conform to the principles of matter set forth by the master,
Aristotle—it simply could not be so! We concluded at first that perhaps
the ice immediately around us had not been formed at low enough
temperatures, or that it had not yet had time to reach that “certain
thickness.” But having nevertheless to get drinking water the while we
waited for temperature and time to form round us the pure ice for our
permanent supply, we were reduced to scouting far and wide over the
floes, scraping together from drifts here and there enough snow to melt
up for our minimum needs.
But as 1879 faded into 1880, we drifted to the northward, and the
Arctic winter struck us in all its cold fury, we were given a choice
opportunity to try to our hearts’ content ice of every thickness,
formed under every temperature from barely freezing down to -60° F.,
and we could no longer blink the facts. On this matter, the masters
from Dr. Kane to Lieutenant Weyprecht were about as reliable as a lot
of gabbling old witches—what they said simply was not so!
In the absence of any startling geographical discoveries or of any
marked progress toward the Pole, that we had exploded a third Arctic
fallacy (those respecting the Kuro-Si-Wo Current and Wrangel Land
being the first two) gave to Captain De Long and Dr. Ambler a sense
of having accomplished something at last. For Dr. Ambler deduced from
the observed fact that all floe ice retained some salt, the mystery of
the scurvy problem in previous expeditions. These, using floe ice more
or less mixed either with pure snow or ice formed from melting snow,
had obtained water passably potable but actually (though their fixed
misconceptions kept them ignorant of it) containing so much salt that
in spite of lime-juice rations and what-have-you in the way of canned
vegetables, the scurvy had struck them down.
That deduction made it simple for us. All we had to do was to avoid the
use of tainted floe ice and we would be the first Arctic expedition in
history to dodge the scurvy. And in case the _Jeannette_ Expedition
discovered nothing else, to bring that discovery back home would at
least salve in some measure our pride as explorers.
But if we were not to use the floes, where then was our water to
come from? The obvious answer seemed to be from carefully selected
snowdrifts, but as we floated north with the pack, we learned the
futility of that. The drifts we relied on for the first weeks after we
entered the pack were soon used up and Nature never replenished them.
Apparently off the north coast of Siberia in the early fall it snowed,
but as we drifted to the north of Wrangel Land and the temperature,
falling far below zero, stayed there, to our dismayed astonishment
we learned that in the ordinary sense it never snowed where we were!
Apparently the intense cold froze all the vapor out of the atmosphere,
leaving such a trifling percentage in the dry air that regardless of
other favorable conditions for a fine snowfall, there just wasn’t
enough moisture to provide the makings. The result was that in a gale
when a temperature change brought snow, all that fell was a fine
powdery deposit, ice mainly, which driven by the wind cut into our
faces like needles. What was worse for us however (for in most cases
we could stay inboard during a blow) was that the gale drove these
particles over the pack with such force that they acted like a sand
blast on the surface of the floes, with the net result that when the
wind died, such drifts as we could find were so complete a mixture of
powdered floe and driven snow as to be heavily salted and wholly unfit
for human needs.
Now, while we could find no newly formed safe drifts, it had not been
wholly impossible for us to get sufficient good snow from the old ones
by going further and further afield in the pack until the last gale
in November. This after making us “shoot the rapids” so to speak in
that canal, had left us stranded miles from our original refuge in a
pack of what was mostly relatively young ice. Naturally there were no
old drifts in that vicinity and the captain, at first fearful of being
torn away at any minute, was reluctant to permit anyone to get out of
sight of the ship in searching for snow. Willy-nilly, therefore, we
got our water by scraping the tops of nearby drifts formed in the last
storm. This was so salty, however, that within two days Dr. Ambler
had several of the officers and most of the crew under treatment for
diarrhoea. Aside from the ordinary effects of this disorder in reducing
the vitality of those afflicted, to us it was especially disastrous,
for since the “heads” on the ship were for obvious reasons shut up, we
had for months been using portable “heads” made of tenting, set up on
the ice some little distance from the ship. It needs little imagination
therefore to understand what diarrhoea meant to a man under the
frequent necessity of hastily rushing off through the Arctic night to
a flimsy canvas tent to sit there in the bitter cold of a temperature
some thirty degrees or more below zero.
Given a few weeks of such excessive salinity in our water and it was
obvious that scurvy would get us, but that at least would take several
weeks. De Long was faced with the imperative necessity of rectifying
the situation within a few days or of risking the loss of his crew as
a result of the unavoidable physical exposure which diarrhoea entailed
under our peculiar circumstances.
De Long, Ambler, Chipp, and I held an ambulant council of war. Muffled
in our parkas, we first searched the pack around us for suitable
snowdrifts in the forlorn hope that perhaps the men had missed a good
one. We found a few that to the taste seemed passable, but in each
case the hope faded when the surgeon squeezed a drop of silver nitrate
into a melted sample, and inevitably the milky white reaction showed
excessive salt.
Not very hopefully we scanned the “head” situation. No chance of
improvement there. Since the ship was immovably frozen into the ice,
we dared neither to reopen the “heads” on the ship nor bring the ones
on the floe any closer to the gangway without risking an outbreak of
contagion.
So there being no safe water available from the pack ice, no hope of
getting any from snowfalls, and the absolute need of providing some
quickly lest the next movement of the ice find us with a helpless crew
unable even to abandon ship, it was the conclusion of the council that,
regardless of cost, we must make our own from sea water. Naturally
enough since I was engineer officer, De Long turned that problem over
to me.
Ordinarily it would not have been much of a problem technically. On
the ship steaming normally, and feeding her boilers from the sea, I
might have bled some steam off the auxiliary line, put it through a
distilling coil or worm we had fitted in our engine room, and collected
the resulting fresh water. But we were not only not steaming normally,
we were not steaming at all, because for the reasons I have given
previously our fires were out, our firerooms were cold, and our boilers
were emptied.
Aside from that, there was another angle to it that griped the captain.
To take sea water and distill it over into fresh water you’ve got to
boil it. That takes heat, and heat takes coal, and coal was of all
things we had aboard the most precious, more so even than food, for in
a pinch with our food exhausted we might go out on the pack with rifles
and knock down bears, seals, and walruses enough to exist on, but where
in those icy wastes could we go to knock down even one ton of coal to
feed our boilers when our bunkers were emptied? For we had left only
ninety tons, which (save for the scanty supply I doled out to Ah Sam
daily for cooking, and to Bosun Cole for stoking the two stoves forward
and aft to keep men and officers from freezing to death) under the
captain’s orders I was religiously husbanding, so that if ever we were
released by the pack, we might be able again to fire up our boilers and
do some of that exploring for which we had come north.
Up to now, to live at all, we had had to burn coal enough to run the
galley and our heating stoves; from now on, if we were to live without
scurvy, we would have in addition to burn coal enough to run some kind
of an evaporator. What kind it might be, to give us safe water and
still consume the least possible quantity of “black diamonds,” the
captain left to me.
The problem started not with “How much water do we need?” but with “How
little water can we get by on?” I canvassed this question with the
doctor, the captain, the exec, Ah Sam and finally Jack Cole—all of whom
had something to contribute on what was the least possible quantity
needed for drinking, for cooking, for tea, and for washing—and I came
out with the answer that 40 gallons of water a day, about a gallon and
a quarter for each one of our thirty-three men, was the irreducible
minimum.
Naturally for this quantity, which was more or less in line with the
daily capacity of any really ambitious Kentucky moonshiner’s still, it
was foolishness to think of firing up so large a kettle as one of our
main boilers. Thinking over what else we had, my recollection lighted
on a small Baxter boiler which we had brought along to furnish steam
for driving an Edison electro-magnetic generator and illuminating the
ship with his newfangled carbon lamps. Edison’s generator having proved
a flat failure (probably because it got soaked in salt water on our
stormy crossing of Behring Sea) the captain had ordered the whole works
dismantled and struck below into the hold. Without further delay, I
had Lee and Bartlett resurrect the Baxter boiler (leaving the rest of
the outfit below) and this little boiler with the help of my machinist
and fireman, I soon had rigged up inside the deckhouse, with its steam
outlet hooked to a small coil set outside in the open air on top of the
deckhouse, where the cold air would act as a very effective condenser
on the vapor passing through the worm.
Meanwhile, not waiting for this contraption to get into action, at the
surgeon’s suggestion the skipper ordered Cole to break out from the
hold a couple of barrels of lime-juice, which on December 2 for the
first time on the cruise, he started to issue. In our mess, a pitcher
of this stuff was placed on the table at dinner, where under the
watchful eye of the surgeon, each one of us, sweetening it to taste,
had to drink an ounce. For the crew, Alfred Sweetman, carpenter, was
given the responsibility of seeing that the men took theirs, and as
each watch laid below for dinner, under Sweetman’s observation, each
man was handed a tin cup with his ration of lime-juice and an ounce of
sugar to sweeten the unsavory mess, and compelled to drink it before he
could draw his food ration. Months of storage in casks had not improved
its flavor any, so in spite of Ambler’s gaze and Sweetman’s vigilance,
had it not been for the sugar generously served out to sweeten the
dose, I have little doubt that, scurvy or no scurvy, all sorts of
ingenious dodges would shortly have been developed to avoid swallowing
that tart medicine.
When the last pipe joint was tightened up, Bartlett fired the Baxter
boiler and we commenced distilling. Our first few days at it were to
my surprise pretty much a failure, for the distilled water which we
collected up on deck in a barrel set underneath the outlet of the
condensing worm, while better than the melted snow, still tested far
too high in salt for safe use, and our diarrhoea continued unabated.
This puzzled me (not to mention severely disappointing the captain) and
it took some hours of sleuthing about to discover the trouble. I then
found that we were feeding the boiler from a tank atop the deckhouse.
This tank was filled by the seaman on watch who hauled water to the
topside in a bucket from a hole chopped in the floe alongside. Unless
the man was careful (and a sailor working outside in a temperature of
30° below zero is interested only in speed and not in care) he would
slop the sea water over both coil and deckhouse, from which places
enough trickled down into the fresh water barrel to ruin completely our
day’s output. Having discovered this, I promptly rigged a pan over the
barrel to catch the drip and looked hopefully for better water. But
my hopes were dashed once again when, watching Surgeon Ambler test
a sample from our next barrel of water (the result of a whole day’s
distilling), I saw to my disgust the sample turn as milky as ever
immediately he dropped a little silver nitrate into it.
By now, we had been suffering four days from diarrhoea and the
situation was serious. I dropped everything else to devote my whole
time to watching the operation of our evaporator, endeavoring by an
analysis of what I could see done and what theoretically must be going
on inside the apparatus from firebox to receiving barrel, to locate
the reason or reasons why from our sea water feed, we failed to get
over and condense a pure steam, leaving all the salt behind as a brine
in the boiler. Thinking at first we might be boiling off the water
too fast, I had Bartlett damp his fire somewhat to make less steam,
but I soon found that that solved nothing. For with too little steam
going up through our condensing coil in the frigid atmosphere outside,
the condenser promptly froze up and burst a pipe, putting a stop to
distilling altogether till Lee thawed out the coil and repaired the
leak.
But hardly had we resumed operation again when what I saw gave me the
answer. Bartlett started up his little feed pump, and began vigorously
to pump cold water into the hot boiler to bring up the level in the
glass. Promptly, as shown by the needle on the gauge, the pressure in
the boiler tumbled and the water in the sight glass started to bubble
vigorously. And that had been our difficulty. The sudden injection of
cold feed water evidently created a vacuum in the steam space. Under
the reduced pressure the hot water in the boiler had boiled off so
violently that it carried salt spray up with the steam and over into
the distiller, where it ruined our make.
Now I had it.
“Enough, brother!” I sang out to Bartlett. “Stop that pump, haul fires
and secure everything!”
And from then on, alternating between sweating over that hot boiler
and freezing on our enforced trips to the “head,” Bartlett, Lee, and I
struggled all through the night. We shifted the location of the feed
water line inside the little boiler to a point as far away from the
steam space as we could get it, and inserted a constriction in the
steam line to the feed pump so that no one could, even by accident,
start the pump suddenly or make it stroke at anything more than dead
slow speed.
In the early morning, we finished, refilled the boiler, fired up, and
again started distilling. When we had to feed the boiler, we fed slowly
(which was the only way the pump would now run), and I felt sure from
the slight fluctuation of the pressure gauge that I had at last ensured
operation steady enough to eliminate priming. And when at noon with
the barrel half full of distilled water, Bartlett, Lee, and I, in the
front row of a cluster of fellow sufferers, gathered wearily round the
surgeon as he poised his silver nitrate solution over the test cup, I
felt there was some warrant for the hearty cheer which echoed down the
deck when Ambler announced,
“Very pure, chief!”
So ended our struggle to get fresh water. And in a few days our
intestinal troubles ended too, a result for which all hands were
devoutly thankful. But when I reported our success to the captain,
while he was even more laudatory in congratulating me than anyone
else had been, still for him there was a fly in the ointment which
completely took the edge off his enthusiasm.
“How much coal does that distiller use up, Melville?” he queried.
“About two pounds of coal per gallon of water made, sir,” I answered.
He figured mentally a moment, blinked sadly at me through his glasses,
then muttered,
“Two pounds per gallon, chief? Why, it’s nearly a hundred pounds of
coal a day just for distilling! That expenditure will ruin us if we
have to keep it up. Snow, snow! That’s what we need!”