June 21st came, the longest day in the year. Further south, to ordinary
people, that meant more daylight; to us, with daylight twenty-four
hours every day, it meant only that the sun stood on the Tropic of
Cancer, having reached his most northerly declination. Ruefully we
considered that. The sun was as far north as possible, as high in our
heavens as he would ever get, though even so, at noon he stood not so
high, only about 40° above the horizon. We would never receive his
rays any more direct; instead, from now on they would become even more
slanting, and less hot as he went south. And we were still held in
the ice. Our case for release began to look less hopeful, and we went
around that day with cheerless faces. Long afterward, picked out of the
Siberian snows, I salvaged the captain’s journal and looking through it
was particularly impressed by what he put down for June 21, 1880. So
aptly did he express the situation and our feelings of desolation that
day, that I repeat it here.
“June 21st, 1880. Monday.
“Discouraging, very. And yet my motto is ‘Hope on, hope ever.’ A
very good one it is when one’s surroundings are more natural than
ours; but situated as we are it is better in the abstract than in
realization. There can be no greater wear and tear on a man’s mind
and patience than this life in the pack. The absolute monotony; the
unchanging round of hours; the awakening to the same things and the
same conditions that one saw just before losing one’s self in sleep;
the same faces; the same dogs; the same ice; the same conviction that
tomorrow will be exactly the same as today, if not more disagreeable;
the absolute impotence to do anything, to go anywhere, or to change
one’s situation an iota; the realization that food is being consumed
and fuel burned with no valuable result, beyond sustaining life; the
knowledge that nothing has been accomplished thus far to save this
expedition from being denominated an utter failure; all these things
crowd in with irresistible force on my reasoning power each night as I
sit down to reflect on the events of the day, and but for some still
small voice within me that tells me this can hardly be the ending of
all my labor and zeal, I should be tempted to despair.
“All our books are read, our stories related; our games of chess,
cards, and checkers long since discontinued. When we assemble in the
morning at breakfast, we make daily a fresh start. Any dreams, amusing
or peculiar, are related and laughed over. Theories as to whether we
shall eventually drift northeast or northwest are brought forward and
discussed. Seals’ livers as a change of diet are pronounced a success.
The temperature of the morning watch is inquired into, the direction
and velocity of the wind, and if it is snowing (as it generally is)
we call it a ‘fine summer day.’ After breakfast, we smoke. Chipp
gets a sounding and announces a drift east-southeast or southeast,
as the case may be. We growl thereat. Dunbar and Alexey go off for
seals with as many dogs as do not run away from them _en route_. The
doctor examines Danenhower and Iversen, his two chronic patients.
Melville draws a little for this journal, sings a little, and stirs
everybody up to a realization that it is daytime. Danenhower (from his
stateroom) talks incessantly—on any and all subjects, with or without
an audience. The doctor moralizes between observations; I smoke; Mr.
Newcomb makes his preparations for dredging specimens; Mr. Collins has
not appeared, his usual hour being 12:30 in the afternoon. Meanwhile
the men have been set at work; a sled and dogs are dispatched for the
day’s snow for washing purposes. The day’s rations are served out
to the cook, and then we commence to drift out on the ice to dig
ditches, to look at the dogs, calculate the waste in the ice since
yesterday, and the probable amount by tomorrow. The dredge is lowered
and hauled. I get the sun at meridian, and we go to dinner. After
dinner, more smoke, more drawing, more singing, more talk, more ditch
and canal-making, more hunting, more dog inspection, and some attempts
at napping until four p.m., when we are all around for anything that
may turn up. At 5:30 time and azimuth sight, post position in cabin,
make chart, go to supper at six, and discuss our drift, and then
smoke, talk and general kill-time occupations till ten p.m., when the
day is ended. The noise subsides; those who can, go to bed; I write
the log and my journal, make the observations for meteorology till
midnight. Mr. Collins succeeds me four hours, Chipp him four hours,
the doctor next four hours, Mr. Collins next six hours, I next two
hours, Melville next two hours, and I end the day again, and so it
goes.
“Our meals necessarily have a sameness. Canned meat, salt beef, salt
pork, and bear meat have the same taste at one time as another. Each
day has its bill of fare, but after varying it for a week we have, of
course, to commence over again. Consequently we have it by heart, and
know what we are going to get before we sit down at table. Sometimes
the steward startles us with a potato salad (potatoes now rotting too
fast for our consumption), or a seal’s liver, or a bear’s tongue;
but we generally are not disturbed in that way. Our bill of fare is
ample and good, our water is absolutely pure, and our fresh bread is
something marvelous. Though disappointed day after day we are cheerful
and healthy, and—here we are.”
And to all that I can fervently say “Amen!”
June on the whole was chilly and disagreeable. The temperature rarely
got above 32° F., and yet in spite of that the ice did keep on wasting,
from direct absorption of sunlight, of course. The ship came up
somewhat through the softening ice to a lighter draft, owing to our
considerable consumption of coal and stores since late November when we
were frozen in after our transit of the ice-canal. But as an offset to
this cheering rise, she heeled gradually more to starboard, adding to
our discomfort.
Meanwhile, De Long kept Dunbar, who naturally was a good walker,
scouting far and wide over the pack looking for open leads, which
might promise a break-up of the pack and a chance of escape through
one of them. June 28th, Dunbar, duck-hunting in the dinghy in a little
lead about a mile from the ship, came back in the late afternoon with
thirteen ducks, but with what was far more exciting, the news that the
lead had suddenly opened up, that he had followed it (open here and
there to a width of half a mile) at least fifteen miles before turning
round. And from there it still stretched northward as far as he could
see!
De Long was immediately all excitement. If only we could get the
_Jeannette_ across that single mile of solid ice between, there was no
telling how far north we might go along that lead! He dragged Chipp
into his cabin and went over with him the possibilities of blasting out
the intermediate ice. While Chipp was calculating how far our supply of
gunpowder would take us, De Long, eager to size up the situation on the
spot, hastily departed to examine the lead for himself.
About midnight, he came back into the cabin, tossed his parka onto the
table. Chipp, surrounded by a sea of papers containing his computations
on the explosive powers of gunpowder, handed the captain a sheet
containing his conclusions. De Long pushed it aside without even a
glance.
“Never mind, Chipp, we won’t need it. I got there just in time to watch
that lead close up so tight you can’t get a toothpick into it now!
At least I had the melancholy satisfaction of realizing that if the
_Jeannette_ had been there, she would in all probability have been in
for a very fine squeezing!”
And so June ended. We were still in the ice. Danenhower, thin and
bleached, was worse. Iversen seemed to be improved; while still
occasionally hysterical, his delusions of mutiny were no longer obvious.
July came and went. We dressed ship on July 4 in a thick fog and a
chilling mist. The flags came down at midnight (there was no sunset)
all covered with frost. Rain, mist, and fog were general. Our hopes for
what the summer sun would do for us began to fade. And even the few
glimpses we got of the sun, instead of cheering the captain up, further
irritated him. For De Long being now navigator and having finally after
days of delay got a shot at the sun on meridian for latitude, hopeful
that the drift had carried us north, glanced at his sextant only to
exclaim in anguish,
“Look at that altitude! All the sun shows me is how much closer I’m
getting to the South instead of to the North Pole! If ever a man had
justification for profanity, this southerly drift is it! The Bible says
that Job had many trials and tribulations which he bore with wonderful
patience, but I’ll bet he was never caught in pack ice! Nor drifted
south when the wind was blowing north! But then Job’s may have been an
ante-glacial period!” De Long picked up his pipe and nearly bit the
stem in half. But a puff or two of tobacco partly, at least, restored
his equanimity. Putting his sextant back in its case, he remarked to
Chipp, also engaged in shooting the sun,
“I suppose we might as well look at it philosophically. As Jack says,
‘It’s all in a cruise, boys; the more days, the more dollars!’”
July ended, and we were still in the ice. Such a miserable month we
were glad to be rid of.
August opened. Looking back over two thirds of the spent summer, with
the highest temperature only 38° F. on the hottest day, all hands began
to despair. So also, I think, did the captain, for he changed the
schedule for taking meteorological observations, requiring them only
once every three hours instead of hourly.
We came to the middle of the month, with the only change in our
condition an increase in our heel to 7-1/2°, a change indeed in
something, but not an improvement. We began to get morose—summer was
fast fading, we were not released, and our hopes of doing anything
in 1880 or in any succeeding year were vanishing into space. I tried
to cheer the mess up by singing (if I say it myself, for an engineer
I have a very good voice), Irish songs and ditties having been my
specialty since early in my Civil War days on blockade. Whether I
cheered up anyone except myself with the sound of my voice, I do not
know, but I did get some sullen looks for my efforts from Collins, who
being Irish himself may have thought I failed to do justice to the
songs of his native land. Collins (who also imagined _he_ could sing)
reciprocated by regaling us with melodies from _Pinafore_, then only
two years old, but I thought he did the English far more violence than
I did the Irish. In this conclusion, I have as independent evidence
the reactions of Newcomb, who, whenever I sang in the cabin, continued
reading wholly oblivious of me, but whenever Collins opened up on
_Pinafore_, immediately closed his book and remembered that he had a
gull or a seal that required stuffing.
As August dragged along, the little pools of water covering the floes
round about the ship now began to give us real cause for depression by
freezing over at night with a skin of ice which failed to melt until
the next noon. When that commenced, what chance was left for the sun to
have any effect on floes still thirty and more feet in thickness?
And to add to our woes, we found that as a result of our southerly and
easterly drifting, we had been steadily going backward. We were much
closer to our starting point, Herald Island, in late August than we had
been in early May. A whole summer’s drifting in the pack, and for a
Polar Expedition, we had got worse than nowhere!
Meanwhile, the wearing days crawled by and we chafed at our
impotence—well, well-equipped and eager to do something, we lay idle.
I could have chewed nails for a change; our captain was even more
ambitious—entering his cabin one evening with a sketch for his journal,
he looked at me and asked abruptly,
“Know Hamlet, chief? No? Well, for something to do, like Hamlet I can
say,
“‘Wouldst drink up eisel? Eat a crocodile? I’ll do it!’
“And so I would, chief, if there were any eisel and a few crocodiles
in our stores, and by so doing I could change our position to one of
usefulness. Well, what have you got there for my journal? Another
sketch of this eternal ice?”
August 31st, the last day of summer, came and went. We were still fast
in the pack. As a confirmation that summer was gone, we saw again that
evening for the first time in months a faint aurora in the sky. De
Long climbed to the crow’s-nest with a telescope, took a look around.
A desert of ice in all directions, nothing but ice, ice, ice! He came
down from aloft, all hope of release gone. Calling the carpenter,
he ordered him to commence preparing our portable deckhouse for
re-erection. Sending for me, he asked me to accompany him on a tour
of the bunkers, to reassure himself, no doubt, on the coal question.
Together, lighting our way with oil torches, we clambered through
the dusty bunkers, the captain checking by eye my statements of the
quantity in each one. Coming out, De Long musing over the figures,
declared feelingly,
“God forbid anything happens to make us go back to steam pumping. Only
fifty-three tons of coal—an equal weight in diamonds would not tempt me
to exchange! For that coal, chief, has got to last us through another
winter in the pack!”
Only _another_ winter? What reason, I wondered, had he for supposing
the end of a second winter would find us any closer to release? But the
pack had far from exhausted its versatility, as I soon enough found
out.