January dragged away, followed in dreary succession by February, March,
and April, and the _Jeannette_ drifting aimlessly with the pack, was
still solidly frozen in. Our lives were only a wearing repetition of
what had gone before—fierce cold, alarms, the roaring and tumbling
of the ice pack, tremendous squeezes and pressures from the floes,
and night and day the wheezing of the steam pumps, pumping, forever
pumping. It seemed almost a reasonable supposition to conclude that
we must have the whole Arctic Ocean nearly pumped dry to judge by the
length of time we had been at it and by the huge masses of ice banked
up against our bulwarks and spreading out over the floes where the
streams of sea water flowing from our scuppers had frozen.
A few minor triumphs and reliefs we had, but not many. In late January
the sun came back over the horizon for the first time in seventy-one
days, to reveal that we had all bleached strangely white in the long
Arctic darkness. On the mechanical side, I had succeeded, after many
heartbreaking disappointments, in supplanting the main boiler with
the two little ones; and that, aided by the never ending efforts of
Nindemann in plugging leaks (which had cut the hourly flow nearly in
half), had resulted in gradually reducing our coal consumption to only
a quarter of a ton a day. We shot a few bears and a few seals, which
gave a welcome variety to our diet of salt beef and tasteless canned
meat; we even had hopes of knocking down some birds but there we were
disappointed.
“No, Melville,” the captain gravely rebuked me, when empty-handed I
returned to the ship after a February tramp over the floes and pushed
my shotgun disgustedly into the rack, “birds have more sense than men.
No bird with a well-regulated mind would possibly trust himself out in
this temperature.”
On the debit side, the temperatures reached unbelievable depths.
57° below zero was recorded by our thermometers (the spirit ones,
for the mercurial bulbs froze solidly at around -40°). The pack ice
reached thicknesses of thirty-five and forty feet below the water
where underrunning floes, freezing together, consolidated into a kind
of glacial layer cake. Contemplation of these formations, measurable
whenever the floes near us cracked apart, gave a gloomy aspect to the
ship’s chances of ever getting free of the pack. And the irregular and
formidable surface of the pack also gave us cause for thought, now
that in the growing daylight we could see in what state the upheaval
of January 19th had left the ice around us. Sledging across the pack
was impossible; as soon might one think of getting from the Bronx to
Brooklyn by dragging a team of dogs and a sledge over the Manhattan
housetops. Here and there, conditions were even worse. Sharvell, with
the impressionability of youth, came in from an exploring trip with
eyes popping to tell me,
“Say, chief, five miles north o’ ’ere, the ice is standing in mountains
’igher nor our mast’eads!”
“Yes, Sharvell, it’s quite likely.”
“Shall I tell the skipper, sir, or will you?” he asked anxiously.
“Why bother him about it?”
“If ’e knew, it’d save work, sir. ’E’d quit ’aving the bug’unter clean
an’ mount that big walrus ’ead with the tusks that ’e’s so busy fixing
up. ’Cause when that ice gets to us, sir, we’re through, an’ it’ll be
a terrible lot o’ work for us sailors dragging that ’eavy walrus ’ead
over the pack. ’E better quit now, an’ ’e will, sir, when I tells ’im
abaht them mountains of ice!”
But I told Sharvell to forget it, for I doubted that with all his other
worries, the captain would be much exercised over mountains five miles
off.
Aside from the aspect of the ice, we had troubles closer home.
Especially forward in the deckhouse and crew spaces, the inside of the
ship which now we had to keep above the freezing point to save our
pumps from damage, was damp and disagreeable beyond expression, with
moisture condensing on all cold surfaces and dripping from the beams
into the men’s bunks.
Finally to deepen our gloom, Danenhower failed to respond favorably to
treatment, and the doctor had to perform several more operations on his
eye, coming at last to the conclusion that Dan must, till we escaped
from the ice, remain a chronic invalid confined in darkness to his
cabin, with no great hope of saving his sight even should he then get
back to happier surroundings and decent hospital facilities.
Oddly enough through all this, after the first week’s struggle with
the leak, we continued our scientific and meteorological observations.
The captain clung to that routine as to a lifeline, which perhaps to
him mentally it was, constituting his solitary claim to conducting a
scientific expedition. For of explorations and geographical discoveries
there were none; on the contrary instead of a steady drift northward
which might uncover new lands or at least get us to higher latitudes,
we shuffled aimlessly about with the pack, occasionally drifting
northward for some weeks to De Long’s obvious delight, only to have
the drift then reversed and to his intense depression of spirits, to
turn out some clear morning to find himself gazing once again across
the pack at the familiar mountainous outline of the north side of
distant Wrangel Land. But after March, even this sight of far-off land,
depressing as it was from its associations, was denied us, for as
the season advanced the pack, still zigzagging over the polar sea as
aimlessly as ever, failed to get quite so far south again; from that
time on we saw land no more and the world for us became just one vast
unbroken field of broken ice.
Only one hope kept us going. No one really knew what happened to that
moving pack in summer time—no one before us had ever wintered in it,
involuntarily or otherwise. So we lived on in the expectation that
as the days lengthened and the thermometer rose above zero, summer
weather and the long days under the midnight sun would sufficiently
melt the ice to break up the pack, and if by then we still had any
coal left, permit us to do some little exploring northward before with
bare bunkers we loosed our sails and in the early fall laid our course
homeward.
In that spirit then, we cheerfully greeted the advent of May, and as
if to justify our confidence, May Day burst upon us with gorgeous
weather—no clouds, and glistening at us across the ice a brilliant sun
which even at midnight still peeped pleasantly over the horizon, and a
temperature which in mid-afternoon reached the unbelievable height of
30° F., only two degrees below freezing. We were positively hot. All
hands (except of course Danenhower) turned out on the ice to bask in
the sunshine, with the queer result that many of us came back aboard
with our complexions sunburned to a fiery red and unable at first to
believe it. Our hopes started to mount; if the sun could do that to
such weather-beaten frost-bitten hides as ours, what would it not do to
the ice imprisoning us? Release was seemingly just around the corner of
the calendar—by June 1 at the outside, say.
But meanwhile, awaiting that happy event, the captain prudently ordered
(lest more casualties go to join the luckless Danenhower) that snow
goggles be worn on all occasions by all hands except when actually
below on the ship.
So May moved along, made notable mainly by a positive flood of bears,
which daily kept us on the jump. The bears, ravenous with hunger after
a long winter, were attracted to the _Jeannette_ by mingled scents,
mainly canine, which to their untutored nostrils probably meant
food. But we had long since lost any fear of ice bears and the dogs
apparently never had any, so the cry of—
“Bear ho!”
was the immediate signal for whoever had the captain’s permission
(which now meant practically anyone off watch) to seize a rifle from
the rack placed conveniently at the gangway, and be off. We became so
contemptuous of the bears, that we chased them even with revolvers, and
if necessity had arisen, would no doubt have done so barehanded, for
I have never seen a bear which would rush a man. Except when brought
to by the dogs, with a man in sight all that ever interested the bear
was to get behind the nearest hummock or into an open lead, where
swimming with only his nose above water, he could escape the rain of
bullets from our Remingtons and Winchesters. The vitality of the bears
was amazing. Unless filled so full of lead that the mere weight of the
bullets as ballast slowed them down enough for the dogs to bring them
to a stand where a close range shot into the brain finished them off,
they usually got away.
We had queer experiences with the bears. On one occasion, exploring
one of the narrow leads in the pack about a quarter of a mile from the
ship, the captain was sculling unconcernedly along in the dinghy when
he found himself facing an ice bear not a hundred feet off. Wholly
unarmed, De Long regarded the bear with dismay. He could not run, for
over broken ice he was no match in speed for Ursus; besides he was
in a boat, which prevented running away, for while the water was an
obstacle to him, to the bear it was merely the most convenient means
of transportation. Inquisitively the bear advanced; De Long, unable to
do anything else, sat and stared, trying out the power of the human eye
as a defence. The bear, only fifty feet off, still approached, sniffing
curiously and De Long, short-sighted though he was, said he could
clearly make out where the short hairs ended at the edge of the bear’s
beautiful black nose. The captain quickly concluded there was nothing
in hypnosis as applied to polar bears. So gripping his oar, prepared to
fend off the bear should he approach closer to the boat, he sang out
lustily,
“Ship there! A bear! A bear!”
At this, the bear, more puzzled than ever, sat down on the ice to
contemplate De Long and was still seriously thinking him over, trying
to make him out, when a pack of dogs hove into sight from under the
_Jeannette’s_ stern, followed by several seamen, and off lumbered the
bear.
So long as we had the _Jeannette_ under us, the plethora of bears meant
at most only a break in the monotony of our existence and a welcome
change in our salt beef diet. Should we have to abandon ship, however,
they offered a ray of hope. For convinced now that we could never drag
across the upheaved pack pemmican enough to keep us from starvation
till we reached Siberia, we looked on the bears as a possible source of
fresh meat on the hoof which we might with a little luck knock over as
we went along and thus keep life in our bodies.
The only other springtime event to compare with the bears was a
brilliant idea which struck De Long.
While he never discussed his family with me or with anyone, De Long,
alone among the ship’s company which had sailed from San Francisco,
had a wife and a child to occupy his thoughts. I have no doubt that
frequently in the dreary months when I saw him, as I did one morning,
abstractedly gazing out over the pack, his mind was far away from us,
perhaps dwelling on that moment in the tossing whaleboat off the Golden
Gate when Emma De Long had to the last possible instant clung round his
neck in her farewell kiss. Drifting backward down the years from that,
his thoughts on this morning evidently got to the days of his youth as
an ensign aboard the U.S.S. _Canandaigua_. While cruising through the
Channel ports, he had amongst the dikes and mills of northern France
and Holland courted Emma Wotton, and as he thought of that landscape,
so different from the ice-fields round the _Jeannette_, his keen mind
saw a connection. He waved me to join him.
“Melville,” he asked, obviously off again on the one ever-present
topic, coal, “what’ll you do to keep your pumps going when the coal’s
all gone?”
I pointed aloft.
“Cut down our masts and spars and burn them,” I replied. “They’re
useless anyway.”
“And when they’ve gone too, what then?” De Long’s clear blue eyes gazed
at me fixedly, as if he had me there.
“Break up our bulwarks, the deckhouses, and the main deck, and shove
those into the fires too. They’ll all burn fine.”
“And after that, what?” he asked relentlessly, puffing away on his
ever-present pipe.
“I guess then we abandon what’s left of the _Jeannette_ and take to
the ice, captain. I’ll admit I can’t keep any boilers going while I’m
cutting the foundations out from under them for firewood. When the main
deck’s gone, I guess we’re through.”
De Long looked gravely at me through his glasses, bent his head a
little to shield his pipe from the cold wind sweeping the deck, and
irrelevantly asked me,
“Melville, have you ever been in Holland?”
“Why—yes,” I mumbled, taken aback at his sudden change of front. “I
guess it’s tulip time there now, captain. And quite a different scene
from all this ice that’s sprouting round us in the merry springtime
here. Why?”
“I was there in the springtime once also,” parried the captain. “Lovely
scene. I just wonder if we couldn’t make the scenery round here
resemble Holland in the springtime a little better. You remember the
tulips, eh, chief? Do you by any chance remember anything else in the
Dutch landscape—some windmills, for instance?”
And then a great light dawned on me. I looked at my captain with added
respect. What did the Dutch have all those thousands of windmills for
except to meet the same problem we faced—to pump water!
“Ah, you see it, do you?” asked the captain, gratified. “Melville, can
you rig up a windmill here to run our pumps?”
“Can do, brother!” I exclaimed enthusiastically. “I’ll turn to on it
right away; before long you’ll see a windmill going round here in the
Arctic to beat the Dutch!”
This job was rather intricate for our facilities, windmills not being
exactly in a sailor’s line, but aided by Lee, machinist, and Dressler,
blacksmith, we contrived it. Lee especially was a great help, which
might seem somewhat surprising, for having been shot through both hips
in the second day’s fighting while helping Grant drive back Beauregard
at Shiloh, Lee was rather slow and unsteady on his feet. But there was
nothing the matter with his hands and he soon had Dressler’s crude
forgings turned up in our lathe into a crankshaft and connecting
rods, so that by the time Sweetman had made the wooden arms of the
windmill, we were ready to go. Paradoxically, the one thing which on
a ship we were best prepared to furnish, the sails themselves, failed
to work well on our first trial. The mill occasionally hung on the
center because the heavy canvas sails sagged too much to hold the
wind. Chipp, responsible for making the sails, watched them in pained
silence, but having no canvas more suitable, soon rectified the matter
in a novel manner. Sending Noros and Erichsen down on the ice, he had
them collect some dozens of the empty meat cans littering the ice
floes, and beating these out flat, he laced them together with wire,
and soon had our mill-arms covered with fine metal sails! Impelled by
these, our windmill, mounted on the starboard wing of the bridge, was
soon rotating merrily and, connected by a special rig to a bilge pump
in the fireroom, was pushing overboard in grand style all our leakage.
So well did it work, that we quickly were enabled to shut down the
steam cutter’s boiler, leaving only the little Baxter boiler going for
distilling and in case the wind died down (which in the pack it rarely
did) for unavoidable steam pumping.
So to our intense relief as spring drew on to its close, we got our
coal consumption down again to 300 pounds a day, as it had been before
that leak started to chew into our bunkers in such ravenous fashion.
Which was a very fortunate thing for us, for with only sixty tons of
coal left to go on, our days on the _Jeannette_ would indeed otherwise
have been numbered. Not least among the blessings which resulted was
the improved cheerfulness of De Long at this success. He once more
began to have some hope that when the ice broke up, we would have coal
enough to do some exploring, so that he might again without too much
shame on his return face our sponsor’s sister, Miss Bennett, the ship’s
godmother, the “Jeannette” whose name we bore.
As the long days dragged out under the May sun, we eagerly watched
the floes, noting with satisfaction the increasing number of rivulets
coursing toward every crack and hole in the pack, and how under the
intense sunlight, the cinders and ashes about the ship fairly seemed
to burrow their way down into the snow. (Watching the striking manner
in which everything dark soaked up the sunshine and settled, De Long
half-humorously suggested that we all take a day off and pray for some
miracle which might make all the snow and ice about us black and thus
hasten its disappearance.)
And so we came to May 31, to our discouragement still held in the
unbroken pack which, as measurements close about us showed, was still
four feet thick. We decided to defer the day of our liberation to July
1, giving the sun another month to work on the ice. But to damp our
spirits, June 1, the first day of summer as we reckoned it, opened in a
snow storm which continued through June 2 also, accompanied by a heavy
gale which drove the snow, soft and mushy now, along in horizontal
sheets.
When the snow finally ceased, the captain, optimistic again, began
to prepare for the day of our release. First of all, fires were
discontinued in the stoves fore and aft, thus saving a little coal.
Next, all hands and the cook were turned to on knocking down our
portable deckhouse and clearing the main deck, so that looking like a
ship once more, we might be able to spread sails and get underway when
the wind served (provided, of course, the ice let go of us first).
Several days’ hard work accomplished this task, and with the topside
shipshape again, we needed only to hang our rudder to be fully ready to
go, but here again we had to wait on the ice which still clung solidly
to our rudder post.
Below, I got my machinery and boilers in shape to move. With no fear of
dangerous temperatures any more, I connected up all piping, moved the
engines by hand, secured all cylinder heads, and filled both boilers
to the steaming level (through the sea cocks this time), and started
generally to clean up the machinery spaces. For a small black gang,
only six all told, this was slow work, so to avoid being caught with
the pack suddenly parting and my machinery not ready to turn over, I
pushed my gang hard. Consequently I was doubly annoyed when I noted
several times that Nelse Iversen, one of my coalheavers and ordinarily
a willing enough worker, showed decided signs of soldiering whenever
my back was turned. I cautioned Bartlett who had charge of his watch,
to get Iversen started, but after another hour, seeing he still tended
to hide in the bunkers rather than scale rusty floorplates, I yanked
Iversen up sharply for it.
“Come to now, Nelse, and get behind that scaling hammer! Or will it
take a little extra duty to keep you out of that bunker and on the job?”
Iversen, now that I got a closer look at him, looked queer in the
eyes, so when, his slow mind having digested my statement, he finally
answered, I was quite ready to believe him.
“Ay tank, chief, Ay work so hard Ay can. Ay ban sick man. My belly, she
ache bad!”
“So, eh?” I said sympathetically. “Why didn’t you tell Bartlett that an
hour ago? Go up and see the doctor right away. What ails you, diarrhoea
again?”
“No; de odder way.”
“Constipation, huh? Well, you’re lucky. On this bucket, that’s a better
thing to have than diarrhoea any day. Go up to the doctor and get some
castor oil. And don’t come back till it’s quit working.” I eased him
over toward the fireroom ladder, and started him on his way toward
Ambler.
But after a day had elapsed, I began to wonder whether the doctor’s
castor oil had somehow been affected by the cold or whether my
coalheaver had evaded swallowing his dose, for Iversen still showed
the same tendency to shirk work and hide in the bunkers in spite of
Bartlett’s frequently breaking him out of there. So taking Iversen in
hand myself, I escorted him up to the dispensary to see personally
that there was no foolishness about his taking his medicine, and
calling Tong Sing, I sent him off to find the doctor who was out on the
ice.
The minute Tong Sing disappeared, Iversen poked his head out the door,
looked both ways quickly, then as if satisfied, hastily shut the door
and to my complete bewilderment, stealthily approached me, cupped his
hands over my ear and whispered,
“Chief, Ay no ban sick, Ay ban vatched! Dere ban mutiny on foot here!”
Mutiny? I stared at Iversen incredulously. The men were having a
veritable hell in their life there in the Arctic, but what could they
gain by mutiny? And who would lead it? For an instant I had a vague
suspicion, but I resolutely put that out of my mind. Preposterous!
I looked at Iversen intently. But there could be no doubt as to his
sincerity. He was serious, all right.
I pushed him down into a chair, ordered sharply,
“Wait there, Nelse! I’ll get the captain!” and closing the door behind
me, I shot out of the dispensary and across the cabin to the captain’s
stateroom forward in the poop. Fortunately De Long was there, writing
in his journal.
“Come with me, skipper. I want you to hear something. Right away!”
Puzzled unquestionably at my haste, De Long dropped his pen, put down
his meerschaum pipe, stretched his six-foot frame up out of his chair,
and reached for his parka.
“No, you don’t need that, captain; just as you are. We’re only going to
the dispensary.”
“Oh, all right. Who’s hurt now?”
“Nobody, but come along!” I started back for the dispensary with De
Long following, puffing leisurely at the retrieved meerschaum which was
his greatest comfort and his inseparable companion.
Iversen started up from his chair as we entered, saluted the captain,
and again swiftly scanned the cabin outside before he closed the door.
“Now, Nelse, tell the captain,” I said briefly.
Once more Iversen cupped his hands, whispered into the captain’s ear.
De Long’s jaw dropped abruptly. His pipe fell from his mouth and only
by a quick lunge did I save it from hitting the deck. But insensible to
that, De Long, immovable, only stared at Iversen, searching his face as
I had done. Finally he shook his head, muttered,
“It just can’t be! Where’d you get this, Iversen?”
“Yah, cap’n. Ay tal you it ban yust lak Ay say! Ay ban asked to yoin.
Ay no say, Yah; Ay no say, No; so Ay ban vatched clost. Dey kill me
for’ard if Ay tal!”
De Long looked at me. I handed him back his pipe, which, wholly
unconscious of his action, he took.
“What do you make of this, chief? It looks serious if Iversen’s right!”
“Sounds crazy to me, but it might be so. Depends on who’s in it and how
many. The men are all armed, you know. The rifle rack’s right at the
gangway. Anybody can help himself, and lots of ’em are out on the ice,
guns in hand this minute. But why they should want to mutiny, I can’t
see, unless the ice has affected their minds.”
Shocked at Iversen’s report; impressed by the gravity of the situation
if Iversen were right, for there already with weapons in their hands
were the mutineers, the captain still looked skeptically at my grimy
coalheaver. Why should his crew mutiny? But on the other hand, what had
Iversen to gain by lying about it? And Iversen, a steady man, always
carefully attentive to his duty, was just the type of seaman who might
be trusted to stand with his captain at all hazards.
“Well,” said De Long grimly, “let’s get into this! Now, Iversen, who’s
behind it?”
But there the captain ran into a stone wall. Iversen, very nervous now,
became evasive, dodged the questions, and apparently in mortal fear
of his life, refused to name the mutineers, repeating only over and
over again how, for two days, he had been closely watched. Threats,
promises, got nothing more out of him. Finally the captain, baffled,
took a new tack.
“See here, Iversen, they can’t hurt you, and nobody else’ll get hurt
either if you tell. I can manage it then. There are eight officers
here; surely there are some of the crew will join us! I’ll get all
the mutineers, if you’ll name them, out on the ice on some pretext. I
don’t care if they do go armed. Then we’ll haul in the gangway and from
behind the bulwarks we can hold the ship! A couple of nights freezing
on that ice will bring them round, all right! They’ll come cringing
back, hands in the air, begging to be taken aboard. Out with it now!
Who’s the leader?”
Iversen, more nervous than ever, shuffled to the door, opened it a
crack to assure himself no one was eavesdropping outside, then faced
us, and tremblingly blurted out,
“Sharvell!”
An amazing change came over the captain. He dropped into a chair,
roared with laughter.
“Sharvell? That’s rich! That lad? He’s not even a man yet! Nobody’d
follow him in a mutiny any more than a child! Hah, hah!” But abruptly
he stopped laughing, for Iversen was now weeping hysterically, tears
running down his coal-stained cheeks. Soberly De Long looked at him,
then took me by the sleeve, pulled me aside a little, and whispered,
“I guess the mutiny on the _Jeannette’s_ over, chief. I thought there
was somebody crazy in it, and now I know who. Send for the doctor,
quick! I’ll stay here with Iversen.” He started to light his pipe
again.
“I’ve already got the steward out looking for him, captain,” I replied.
“Ambler ought to be here any minute. And I guess you’re dead right,
brother! Poor Iversen!”
It was so. Immediately Surgeon Ambler came aboard, we turned the
weeping coalheaver over to him. An hour later, when, after a careful
examination, Iversen under Cole’s surveillance had been led forward, he
confirmed our fears. Iversen, if not already insane, was trembling on
the border of it. Only observation over several days could prove which.
De Long, much relieved at first by freedom from dread of any mutiny,
was nevertheless badly enough depressed by the doctor’s report.
“First a blinded officer,” he muttered, “now a crazy seaman! What’ll
this ice do to us next?”