On June 5, 1881, a Sunday morning, we got back to the _Jeannette_. In
the early afternoon, in honor of our safe return. De Long with his eyes
hardly visible through his bandages, conducted a Thanksgiving Service,
attended only by Ambler and myself, for the other two usual members
of the congregation, Chipp and Dunbar, were both on the sicklist. In
further celebration of the event, the captain ordered in the evening
the issue of a double ration of whiskey forward, which ceremony
conducted in the forecastle by Jack Cole drew a somewhat larger
attendance, I believe.
Our sicklist was now considerable—Danenhower, Chipp, Newcomb, Dunbar,
and Alexey, with the skipper himself really belonging there, but
nevertheless permitted by the doctor to be up so long as he stayed off
the ice for a few days till his cut had a fair chance to start to heal.
Chipp, Newcomb, and Alexey were still badly off from lead poisoning,
but Tong Sing, our steward, had recovered sufficiently to go back on
duty and was now mainly engaged in tending the sick when not actually
serving.
From this unsatisfactory state of our personnel, I turned my attention
after a week’s absence once more to the _Jeannette_ and what was going
on round her. Henrietta Island was rapidly dropping abaft our beam as
we drifted westward past its northern side and it was evident that we
would soon drop it out of sight. Jeannette Island had already vanished
from our world.
But the action of the ice about us attracted most attention. Not
since November, 1879, had we seen so much moving ice near the ship,
the effect undoubtedly of nearby Henrietta Island. The day after my
return, we found our floe reduced to an ice island about a mile one
way and half of that the other, with ourselves about a hundred yards
from the western edge, while all about us was a tumbling procession
of floebergs, shrieking and howling as they rolled past. Leads opened
and closed endlessly in the near distance with ridges of broken floes
shooting thirty feet above the pack. The roaring of the breaking floes
sounded like continuous thunder. And in all this turmoil our ice island
with the _Jeannette_ in it moved majestically along. Meanwhile we from
our decks regarded it, thankful that our floe was not breaking up to
crush our ship and leave our heavy boats and sledges to the mercies of
that chaos, a half mile of which with a sledge lightly loaded only, off
Henrietta Island we had barely managed to survive.
Another day passed, leaving the island in our wake. The moving ice
closed up again with long rows of piled up floes all about us, one
huge ridge of blocks seven to eight feet thick riding the pack not a
hundred and fifty yards away from our bulwarks. And yet one more day
and the captain got a sight, showing we were going due west at a fair
rate, which if continued, unless we turned north, would ultimately
bring us out into the Atlantic, though the chances seemed better for a
resumption of our northwest drift toward the Pole. But toward either of
these, now that we had some discoveries to add to the world’s charts,
we looked forward hopefully. At any rate, since we had to leave the
matter to the pack, for the present our motto was obviously “Westward
ho!”
June 10th came with our drift still steadily westward, clear weather,
and the temperature about 25° F., well below freezing though above
zero, which for us made it very pleasant weather. Alexey came off the
sicklist, and so also did Dunbar; leaving only Chipp as a bedridden
case, and Newcomb, up but acting as if he were exceedingly miserable,
which I guess he was. Danenhower, permanently on the sicklist, was
allowed on deck an hour a day for exercise that the doctor hoped would
gradually restore his health and save his one good eye, which now
showed some signs of getting over its sympathetic inflammation. During
these hourly periods, Dan was sternly ordered to keep in the shade and
wear his almost opaque shield, but unfortunately our overbold navigator
stepped out into the sun and pulled aside the glass, attempting to get
at least one decent look around. Instead he had an instant relapse of
his inflamed eye which nearly drove both Ambler and the captain wild.
Fortunately, the captain had had all his bandages save one small one
removed from his injured skull by now, or I think he would have ripped
them off in his attempts to tear his hair over the results of Dan’s
reckless disobedience.
Except for this unfortunate mishap, June 10 passed away pleasantly
enough. With no more thought than that it was just another day in the
pack, most of us turned in at 10 P.M., concerned only about whether
our drift next day would continue west or change to northwest. But
I, having the watch from 9 P.M. to midnight, remained on deck. At 11
P.M., I was disturbed by a succession of heavy shocks to the ship
which increased in frequency till as midnight approached there was
such a thumping and thundering of cracking ice about us and so much
reverberation as the shocks drummed against our hollow hull, that the
uneasy deck beneath me quivered as I had not felt it since two years
before when we had been underway with all sail set. So violent was
this disturbance that De Long, asleep below, lost all thought of rest,
pulled on his clothes and scrambled on deck to see what was up.
With the sun even at midnight above the horizon, he had little
difficulty seeing, and of course none at all in hearing. About eighty
yards from us, a lane had opened in the pack some ten feet wide, while
all about us as we watched, cracks were zigzagging across the surface
of our floe to the accompaniment of thunderous detonations as the thick
ice split. And all the while, the heavily listed _Jeannette_, still
fast in the ice, rocked in her bed as in an earthquake.
For ten trying minutes this went on, and then with a terrific report
like a bomb exploding, the floe split wide apart beneath us, the
_Jeannette_ lurched wildly to port and suddenly slid out of her cradle
into open water! There she rolled drunkenly for a moment, till coming
finally erect she lay free of the ice at last in a swiftly widening bay!
So rapidly did all this happen that the skipper, clinging to the rail
of his reeling bridge, saw the situation change from that of a ship
frozen in to one underway before he could give a single order. But
immediately after, with the ship still rocking heavily,
“All hands!” was echoing fore and aft, and I rushed below to close
the gates in our watertight bulkheads and stand by my steam pumps,
not knowing what effect this sudden release of our bow from the ice
might have on that leak we had been pumping, so it seemed, forever.
Paradoxically, however, the leak immediately decreased, probably
because our freed stem floated several feet higher than before, so
I returned quickly on deck to find the crew under the captain’s
directions busily engaged in preparing to re-ship our long-disused
rudder. This, delayed by frozen gudgeons, took some hours. But when
it was completed, and everything meanwhile had been cleared away from
booms and yards for making sail, the _Jeannette_ for the first time
since 1879 (though we never saw the irony of that till later) was again
ready to maneuver as a ship.
Amidst the hoarse orders of the bosun and the noise of seamen clearing
running rigging and scrambling out on frosty yards to loose the
preventer lashings on the long-unused sails, I climbed to the bridge.
There I found De Long calmly smoking his pipe while he eyed the smooth
black water in our bay, now perhaps a quarter of a mile wide between
the separated edges of our late island.
“Shall I fire up the main boilers, captain, and couple up the propeller
shaft?” I asked anxiously.
“How much coal have you left, chief?” he countered.
“Only fifteen tons, sir.”
Fifteen tons. That would keep us going only three days normal steaming.
De Long thought a moment.
“No, chief, don’t light off. There’s no place for the engines to take
us anyway and we might burn up all our fuel just lying here. Save the
coal; we may need it to keep us from freezing next winter. We’ll make
sail if we have to move, but just now, all we can do is get some lines
ashore and tie up to that starboard floe, till we see what the pack is
about.”
So instead of trying to move, Cole ran out the lines to ice-anchors on
our bow and quarter and we moored to the floe.
Then began a desperate fight with De Long struggling to save his ship
should the ice close in again before it broke up completely and let us
escape. A measurement nearby showed the ice sixteen feet thick; deeper
than our keel. If the pack, pressing in on us now, got a fair grip on
our sides, we should be squeezed between thicker ice than ever before
we had been, in a giant nutcracker indeed. But what could we do about
it? The water lead was short, there was no escape from it ahead or
astern. Just one chance offered itself. A little ahead of where we lay,
on our port bow was a narrow canal joining two wider bays in the parted
pack. If we could only fill that canal up with heavy floes, they might
take the major thrust of the closing pack, thus saving us from the full
pressure. Savagely the men on watch turned to and fought with lines
and grapnels, hooking loose floebergs everywhere and dragging them
through the water into that canal, anchoring them there as best they
could.
We had made fair progress on filling the gap, when at 7:30 A.M. the ice
started to advance. The sight of that massive pack slowly closing on
us like the jaws of doom, quickened our muscles, and we strained like
madmen shoving drifting ice into the opening ahead. Just then, as if
playing with us, the pack halted dead, giving us a better chance to
finish the job.
De Long came down off the bridge to encourage the men with the
grapnels. Standing on the edge of the canal, directing the work, was
our ice-pilot. Approaching him along the brink of the pack, the captain
looked down through the cold sea at the submerged edge of the floe, the
blue-white ice there glimmering faintly through the water till lost in
the depths; then he looked back at the _Jeannette_ with her tall masts
and spreading yards erect and square at last across the Arctic sky,
while her stout hull, stark black against the ice, seemed grimly to
await the onslaught.
“Well, Dunbar,” asked the skipper, “what do you think of it?”
Dunbar, worn and dour, had his mind made up.
“No use doing this, cap’n,” he replied dully, indicating the men
heaving on the grapnel lines. “Before tonight, she’ll either be under
this floe or on top of it! Better start those men, instead o’ hauling
ice, at getting overboard the emergency provisions!”
De Long shook his head. He couldn’t agree. In terrible winter weather,
the sturdy _Jeannette_ had often beaten the pack before; he couldn’t
believe that she would fail us now.
At ten o’clock, the ice started to advance once more. Our job in
plugging the canal was finished. We had done all that man could do.
Now it was up to the _Jeannette_. But as we watched that pack come
on, flat floes and tilted floebergs thick and jagged, urged forward
by endless miles of surging ice behind, our hearts sank. In spite of
our thick sides and heavy trusses, the contest between hollow ship and
solid pack looked so unequal.
On came the pack. The bay narrowed, thinned down to a ribbon of water
on our port side, vanished altogether. The attacking floes reached our
sides, started to squeeze. The _Jeannette_, tightly gripped, began to
screech and groan from end to end. With bow lifted and stem depressed,
she heeled sharply 16° to starboard, thrown hard against the floe
there, while we grabbed frantically at whatever was at hand to avoid
being hurled into the scuppers. Then to our intense relief, the ice
we had pushed into the canal ahead came into play, took the further
thrust, and stopped the advance, so that for the moment everything
quieted down, leaving our ship in a precarious position, but at least
intact. Our spirits rose. Perhaps we had saved her!
Thus we lay for two hours till eight bells struck. Cole, a little
uncertain as to routine now, glanced up at the bridge. De Long nodded,
so Cole piped down for mess, and with our ship pretty well on her beam
ends, one watch laid below. There clinging to the stanchions, they ate
the dinner which the imperturbable Ah Sam, still cooking in all that
turmoil, had somehow, by lashing his pots down on the tilted galley
range perhaps, managed to prepare.
At two bells, mess was over and most of us on deck again, hanging to
the port rail. Soon we got another jam, listing us a little further
and still more raising our tilted bow, but the _Jeannette_ took it
well and I did not consider it anything serious, when suddenly, to
everybody’s alarm, my machinist Lee, whose station at the time was down
on the fireroom floor running the little distiller boiler, shot out the
machinery hatch to the deck, shouting,
“We’re sinking! The ice is coming through the side!”
“Pipe down there, Lee!” ordered the captain sharply. “Don’t go
screaming that way to all hands like a scared old woman. You’re an
experienced seaman; if you’ve got any report to make, make it to me as
if you were one! Come up here!”
Lee, white and shaking, climbed up the bridge ladder, his
wound-weakened hips threatening to collapse under him. The captain
beckoned me, then faced Lee.
“What is it now, Lee?”
“Her seams are opening below, sir! The sides are giving way!”
“Is that all?” asked De Long bruskly. “What are you frightened at then?
Here, Melville; lay below with him and find out what’s wrong!”
With the reluctant Lee following, I climbed down into the fireroom.
There was no water there.
“What in hell’s the matter with you, Lee?” I asked angrily. “Do you
want to shame me and the whole black gang for cowards? What set you
off?”
“Look there, chief!” cried the agitated machinist. He led me into the
starboard side bunker. We were well below the waterline. The air there
was so full of flying coal dust it was difficult to breathe, and as the
ship thumped against the ice outside, new clouds of dust continuously
rose from our panting sides. “Look at that! She’s going fast!” yelled
Lee, indicating with his torch. I looked.
The closely-fitted seams in the thick layer of planking forming our
inner skin had sprung apart an inch or more, and as we watched, these
cracks opened and closed like an accordion with startling frequency;
but outboard of that layer we had a double thickness of heavy planking
which constituted our outer shell, and though I could see traces of
oakum squeezing out of the seams there, that outer planking, pressed
by the ice hard in against the massive timbers of our ribs and trusses,
was holding beautifully and there were no leaks.
“Keep your head next time, Lee,” I advised gruffly as I came out of
the bunker. “We’re doing fine! Now mind that distiller, and don’t salt
up the water!” Blinking my eyes rapidly to clear them of coal dust,
I climbed on deck to inform the captain that there was no cause for
alarm—yet.
So we lay for the next two hours, with the poor _Jeannette_ groaning
and panting like a woman in labor as the pack worked on her. At six
bells, the captain, confident now that the worst was over and that
she would pull through, took sudden thought of the future. The ship
was a remarkable sight; what a picture she would make to print in the
_Herald_ on her return.
“Melville,” said the captain, puffing calmly away at his meerschaum,
“take the camera out on the ice and see what you can get in the way of
a photograph.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
Early in the voyage, when Collins had been relieved of that task, I
had become official photographer. I went to the darkroom, got out the
camera, tripod, black hood, and a few of the plates which I myself had
brought along and for which I had a developer. Stepping from our badly
listed starboard rail directly onto the ice there, I picked a spot
about fifty yards off on the starboard bow and set up my clumsy rig.
The view was marvelous. Heeling now 23° to starboard, the spar deck,
covered with men clinging to the rigging, the rails, and the davits
to keep from sliding into the scuppers, showed up clearly; while with
her black hull standing sharply out against the white pack, and with
bow and bowsprit pointing high in air and stem almost buried, the
_Jeannette_ looked like a vessel lifting while she rolled to a huge
ice wave. Never again would I see a ship like that!
I exposed a plate, then, for insurance, another; and folding up my rig,
stumbled back over the ice to the ship, laid below to the darkroom
on the berth deck, poured out my chemicals and proceeded with much
difficulty (because of the extraordinary list) to develop the plates,
which in that climate had to be done immediately or they would spoil.
In the vague red light of a bull’s-eye lantern, I was struggling in the
darkroom with this job, when the ship got a tremendous squeeze, the
berth deck buckled up under my feet, and amidst the roar of cracking
timbers, I heard Jack Cole’s shout,
“All Hands! Stations for Abandon Ship!”
Leaving the plates in the solution but extinguishing the red lantern, I
hastily closed the darkroom door and ran on deck.
“Water coming up now in all the holds! I think that last push tore the
keel out of her!” announced the captain briefly as I ran by him toward
the cabin to get out the chronometers and the compasses. “I’m afraid
she’s through at last, chief!”
Behind me as I ran, I heard in rapid succession the orders to lower
away the boats, to push overboard the sledges, and to commence passing
out on the ice our emergency store of pemmican. Carefully I lifted out
the two chronometers and the four small compasses which it was my job
to save. Below me I could hear water gushing up into the afterhold,
while from above on the poop deck came the creaking of frozen cordage
and blocks as the falls ran out and our heavy boats dropped to the
ice. As tenderly as I could, I gripped the chronometers, sprang out on
the ice, and deposited my burden in the first cutter, already hauled a
little clear of the ship’s side.
The next few minutes, against a background of rushing water, screeching
ice, and crunching timbers, were a blur of heaving over the side and
dragging well clear our pemmican, sledges, boats, and supplies.
Lieutenant Chipp, so sick in his berth that he could not stand, was
dressed by Danenhower, and then the two invalids went together over the
side, the half-blinded navigator carrying the executive officer who
guided him.
I got up my knapsack from my stateroom, tossed it into the cabin in
the poop, and then turned to on our buckled deck in getting overboard
our stores while below us the ship was flooding fast. De Long, himself
checking the provisions as they went over the side, looked anxiously
round the spar deck, then asked sharply of the bosun,
“Where’s the lime-juice?”
Our last cask of lime-juice, only one-third full now, was nowhere in
sight.
“Down in the forehold, sor,” said Cole briefly.
The forehold? Hopeless to get at anything there; the forehold was
already flooded. De Long’s face fell. There would be no distilled water
any more; no more vegetables at all; nothing but pemmican to eat and
salty snow from the floes to drink on our retreat over the ice, a bad
combination for scurvy. The solitary anti-scorbutic we could carry was
that lime-juice. He had to have it.
“Get it up!” ordered De Long savagely.
“I’ll try, sor,” answered the bosun dubiously. He went forward
accompanied by several seamen, peered down from the spar deck into
that hold. Water was already pouring in a torrent from the forehold
hatch, cascading away over the berth deck into the lee scuppers. It
was impossible to get into the hold except by swimming down against
the current through a narrow crack left in the hatch opening on the
high port side which, the ship being so badly listed to starboard,
was still exposed. Yet even if a man got through, what could he do in
the blackness of the swirling water in that flooded hold to find and
break out the one right cask among dozens of others submerged there?
But then that barrel, being only partly full, might be floating on the
surface on the high side to port. There was a slight chance. Jack Cole
looked round at the rough seamen about him.
“Any of yez a foine swimmer?” he asked, none too hopefully, for aside
from the danger in this case, sailors are notoriously poor swimmers.
“I try vot I can do maybe, bosun.” A man stepped forth, huge Starr,
our Russian seaman (his name probably a contraction of Starovski), the
biggest man on board. “Gif me a line.”
Swiftly Cole threw a bowline round Starr’s waist. No use giving him a
light; the water pouring through would extinguish it. He would have to
grope in blackness. Starr dropped down to the berth deck. Standing in
the water on the low side of the hatch, he stooped, with a shove of his
powerful legs pushed himself through against the current, and vanished
with a splash into the flooded hold. Cole started to pay out line.
How Starr, swimming in ice water in that Stygian hole amidst all sorts
of floating wreckage there, ever hoped to find that one barrel, I don’t
know. But he did know that the ship, flooded far above the point at
which she should normally sink, was held up only by the ice, and that
if for an instant, the pack should suddenly relax its grip, she would
plunge like a stone and while the others on the spar deck might escape,
he, trapped in the hold, would go with her.
With a thumping heart, Jack Cole “fished” the line on Starr, paying
out, taking in, as the unseen swimmer fumbled amongst the flotsam in
the black hold. Then to his astonishment, the lime-juice cask popped up
through the hatch and following it, blowing like a whale, came Starr!
Another instant and Starr, tossing the barrel up like a toy, was back
on the spar deck, where all coming aft, Jack Cole proudly presented
his dripping seaman and the precious cask on his shoulder, to the
captain.
De Long, with his ship sinking under him, paused a moment to shake
Starr’s hand.
“A brave act, Starr, and a very valuable one. I’m proud of you! I’ll
not forget it. Now, bosun, get Starr here a stiff drink of whiskey from
those medical stores on the ice to thaw him out!”
The lime-juice, still borne by Starr, went over the side, the last of
our provisions. The floes round about the _Jeannette_ were littered
with boats, sledges, stores, and an endless variety of everything else
we could pitch overboard. With our supplies gone, I tried to get down
again on the berth deck aft to my stateroom to salvage my private
possessions, but I was too late. The water was rising rapidly there,
and was already halfway up the wardroom ladder, so I went back into
the cabin in the poop above, where I had before tossed my knapsack, to
retrieve it and get overboard myself.
The deck of the cabin was a mess of the personal belongings of all
the wardroom officers—clothes, papers, guns, instruments, bearskins,
stuffed gulls, that heavy walrus head over which Sharvell had once been
so concerned (and apparently now, rightly) and Heaven knows what else.
Pawing over the conglomerate heap was Newcomb, uncertain as to what he
should try to save. As I retreated upwards into the cabin before the
water rising on the wardroom ladder, De Long stepped into the cabin
also from his upper deck stateroom, and seeing only Newcomb fumbling
over the enormous pile of articles, inquired casually,
“Mr. Newcomb, is this all _your_ stuff?”
Pert as ever in spite of his illness, Newcomb replied with the only
statement from him that ever made me grin,
“No, sir; it’s only part of it!”
And even the captain, broken-hearted over his ship, looking at that
vast heap, stopped to laugh at that.
But from the way the deck was acting beneath me, there was little time
for mirth, so I seized my knapsack and walking more on the bulkhead
than on the deck, got outside the poop, followed by the captain
carrying some private papers, and Newcomb lugging only a shotgun.
Things moved rapidly now on the doomed _Jeannette_. The ship started to
lay far over on her beam ends, water rose to the starboard rail, the
smokestack broke off at its base, hanging only by the guys; and then
the ship, given another squeeze by the crowding ice, collapsed finally,
with her crumpled deck bulging slowly upward, her timbers snapping, and
the men in the port watch who were trying to snatch a last meal forward
from scraps in the galley, finding their escape up the companionway
ladder cut off by suddenly rising water, pouring like flies out through
the forecastle ventilator to slide immediately overboard onto the ice.
It was no longer possible, even on hands and knees, to stay on that
fearfully listed deck. Clinging to the shrouds, De Long ordered Cole to
hoist a service ensign to the mizzen truck, and then with a last look
upward over the almost vertical deck to see that all had cleared her,
he waved his cap to the flag aloft, cried chokingly,
“Good-by, old ship!” and leaped from the rigging to the ice.
Flooded, stove in, and buckled up, the _Jeannette_ was a wreck. The
pack had conquered her at last. Only that death grip with which the
floes still clung tenaciously to her kept her afloat. With heavy hearts
we turned our backs on the remains of that valiant ship, our home and
our shield from peril for two long years, and looked instead southward
where five hundred miles away across that terrible pack and the Arctic
Sea lay the north coast of Siberia and possible safety—if we could ever
get there.