“And that was on October 9th, Mr. Melville,” sobbed Nindemann. “But Ku
Mark Surk wasn’t twelve miles away like the captain thought; it was
over seventy miles! His chart was bad, and besides before, every day he
hadn’t traveled so far as he guessed maybe. For ten whole days after
that, Noros and me went south over terrible country, and we found to
eat only one ptarmigan I shot with the rifle, and we ate up first our
boot soles and then most of our sealskin pants and we froze and kept
on going till even the sealskin pants was all gone and we had traveled
over forty miles and still we had not come to Ku Mark Surk. And all the
while we dragged ourselves along because we knew our shipmates could
get no food in that country we had gone over and they were starving and
the captain trusted Noros and me to get help for them.
“But after ten days we were freezing in only our underwear for clothes
and we were so weak without food that we could not go on and when we
saw at last an empty hut, we crawled inside there to die but we found
in it a little rotten dried fish that looked like sawdust and tasted
like it too and we ate that, thinking maybe then we could keep on
again but the mouldy fish made us so sick with dysentery we could not
even any more crawl, and we lay there three days expecting only to die
soon, when at last some natives looked in that hut and found us! We
would be dead there in that hut long ago if not for them!” Nindemann
choked back a bitter sob and gripped my hand feebly. “We couldn’t make
them natives understand they had to go back north for the captain and
they brought us first to Ku Mark Surk and then here to Bulun. And now
it is November 2nd, eleven more days even since they found us, and
there is no hope for anybody any more! The captain and our shipmates
must now all be dead in that snow!” And racked with sobs at the idea
that somehow he had failed in the captain’s trust, Nindemann wept
hysterically.
“Perhaps they found shelter in a hut,” I suggested, trying to calm him.
“I’ll start back right now to look anyway.”
“No use,” repeated the quartermaster hopelessly. “For a long ways
from where we left them, there ain’t no huts, only a hundred rivers
going every way and for a man twice to find the same spot there is
impossible. You ain’t so strong no more. You’ll only die yourself!”
I laid the weeping seaman back on his couch. Probably he was right. But
so long as the faintest shred of hope existed for Captain De Long and
his comrades, I must look for them.
I got the best directions I could from Noros and from Nindemann as to
the route south they had traveled, where they had stopped each night,
the rivers they had crossed. Taking either man with me as a guide was
impossible; they could not travel. So leaving instructions for my
whaleboat party that, except for Bartlett (who was to stay in Bulun
to search for me if in a month I did not return), all the others on
arrival there were to proceed under Lieutenant Danenhower’s charge
south to Yakutsk, I got a dog sled and immediately started north. At
Ku Mark Surk I met the Russian Commandant next day; he helped me with
another dog team and a ten day supply of fish. With that I proceeded
northward along Nindemann’s trail from Ku Mark Surk, having two native
drivers and twenty-two dogs.
Through fierce November storms we pushed on down the delta, sometimes
finding Nindemann’s trail, often losing it. The going was slow, the
cold was intense, we were frequently stopped by gales which completely
blinded us and against which the dogs refused to travel, instead lying
down in the snow and howling dolefully. The river began to divide as
it spread out over the flat and treeless delta. One after another I
searched along innumerable streams for Nindemann’s trail but in the
deepening snows found no sign as we went north. Wrapped in thick furs,
I nevertheless nearly froze to death on my sledge. It was inconceivable
that De Long and his companions, long without food, clothed only in
scanty rags, could live through such weather. But still I searched,
hopeful now at least of recovering their bodies.
Our food gave out, the Yakut drivers wanted to return to Ku Mark Surk.
I enquired if there were any village on the delta itself from which
we might continue our search. They said there was one. On the far
northwestern corner of the delta on the Arctic shore, some thirty miles
due west of where from Nindemann’s account De Long had landed on the
coast, was a small village called Tomat. I looked at my chart, a copy
I had long ago made at Semenovski Island of De Long’s. There was no
village marked there on that chart, but knowing now the chart to be
wholly unreliable, I accepted my drivers’ statements as being true and
ordered them to head for Tomat to replenish our food supply, intending
then to pick up De Long’s trail at the abandoned boat, and follow him
southward from there till I came upon his party, whether alive or dead.
But my drivers protested; we must turn about and return to Ku Mark
Surk; without food, we would all perish on the desolate road to Tomat.
Fiercely I turned on them in their native tongue.
“Head north!” I ordered savagely. “And when we have to, we’ll eat the
dogs! And when they’re gone, by God, I’ll eat you if necessary to get
north to Tomat! Keep on north!”
Cowed by my threats, and thoroughly believing that this wild stranger
from the sea might well turn cannibal, the dog drivers headed northwest
toward Tomat, the solitary village on that northern Arctic coast. For
three days our laboring dogs dragged us through the drifts along the
road to Tomat, fortunately for us following a chain of deserted huts
in each of which we found refuse scraps of fish heads, entrails of
reindeer, and such similar offal, the which we (both men and dogs) ate
greedily to save us from starvation, and on the fourth day, so frozen
that I had to be carried from my sledge into a hut, we arrived at Tomat.
Staying there only a day to thaw out, to change my dogs for fresh ones,
and to replenish my food supply (in that poor village, itself facing
the winter with scanty food, getting each solitary fish was harder
indeed than extracting from the villagers their teeth), I started east
along the Arctic coast, with my feet so badly frozen I could not walk.
By evening, marked by a pole, I found the cache De Long had left
on the beach but so thick was the falling snow I could not see the
first cutter offshore. Salvaging the log books and the _Jeannette’s_
navigating outfit, I loaded them on my sledges and turned south till I
came on the first hut where De Long had stopped. For a week after, amid
frigid Arctic gales with the temperature far below zero, I searched
along the solidly frozen Lena, visiting every hut, finishing finally
in that hut on the promontory where for three days De Long had waited
for the rivers to freeze so he might cross, and where Dr. Ambler had
sliced off Erichsen’s toes. There beyond the frozen river, on the
wind-swept further shore, for a short distance I could follow where his
toiling shipmates had dragged Erichsen along on his sledge, for the
deep grooves left in the soft slush a month and a half before now stood
clearly out in solid ice.
But there finally I lost the trail. The deep drifts of many snows
buried all tracks. Facing a myriad of wandering streams, any one
of which De Long might have followed south, I searched in vain for
further tracks, for the hut in which Erichsen had finally died, for
the epitaph board which Nindemann told me he had left there to mark
it, but not another trace of De Long or of his party could I find in
the ever-thickening snow as storm succeeded storm and buried the Lena
Delta in drifts so deep that my floundering dogs could scarcely drag me
through them.
It was now late November, six wintry weeks since without food and
without shelter, De Long had parted somewhere thereabouts in that
ghastly wilderness from his two messengers. Only one of two things now
was possible—either De Long and his party had somehow been found by
natives who were sheltering him, quite as safe as I myself; or he had
long since perished and was somewhere buried beneath the snowdrifts on
the open tundra, where in the dead of winter it was hopeless to search
for him. Weak and frozen myself from my desperate search, coming on top
of my long exposure in the open whaleboat, it was now imperative that
I get out of the delta before my frozen corpse found an unmarked grave
beneath the snows alongside my missing shipmates. So sadly I ordered
my worn dogs south. It took us a week to fight our way back to Ku Mark
Surk at the delta head, and two days more to cover the final fearful
miles along the Lena through the mountain gorges up to Bulun, where
at last at the end of November I arrived, sick at heart at my failure
to find my comrades, terribly sick physically from rotten food, from
hunger, and with numbed limbs from which the Arctic cold had drained
away every vestige of life.