Atop a rocky promontory looking to the north, towering four hundred
feet above the great bay of the Lena Delta and far beyond the reach of
any possible flood, I prepared for my captain and his crew their final
resting place. Excavating from the solid rock a foundation, I built
in the form of a huge cairn, a monumental rectangular stone structure
visible easily twenty miles in all directions, making its sides of the
thick planking torn from that wrecked flatboat near the last fatal
camp, and covering the stout planking with rough stone quarried on
the mountain top. Above that rocky cairn, I raised a massive cross
twenty-five feet high, hewn from a driftwood spar salvaged from the bay
below, and upon the spreading arms of that cross, I cut the names of
those who were to rest beneath it.
When all was ready, on April 6, 1882, on that gale-swept mountain top
overlooking the Lena, we buried them. Composed wholly of sledges,
the long funeral procession of straining dog teams wound across the
snow-covered tundra and up the ice-coated slopes of that mountain, the
dark sledges bearing the silent seamen standing starkly out against
the whiteness of the driven snow, with the one bit of color there the
_Jeannette’s_ silken ensign draping the cold figure of her captain. On
foot the three survivors present, Bartlett, Nindemann, and I, trudged
sadly along. Arrived at the cairn, we three lifted the thin bodies from
the sledges, tenderly laid them out on a bed of snow inside the tomb,
Captain De Long at one end, then the others in order of rank: Surgeon
Ambler, Mr. Collins, Lee, Kaack, Görtz, Boyd, Iversen, Dressier, and
last at the other end, Ah Sam. Then reverently removing the ensign
from the captain’s body that I might return it to her hands who
fashioned it, we took our long last look at our dead comrades.
In that deep Arctic solitude with no unhallowed lips droning out unfelt
phrases, we who had lived with them in toil and peril and nearly died
with them in anguish, stood with bowed shoulders and bared heads in the
freezing wind before our dead, and with choking voices murmured our
heartfelt farewell,
“Good-by! Sleep well, shipmates!”
And then sorrowfully sealing up the cairn, we left them to their rest.
Never had heroic explorers a more fitting tomb. Amidst the Siberian
snows, looking out over the Lena’s great bay at the desolate cape below
which had witnessed their last agony, and northward across that Polar
Sea which he had valiantly given his life to conquer, De Long and his
men of the Jeannette lay at last beneath the huge cross on that rocky
cairn, with the fierce Arctic gales they had so often bravely faced
mournfully wailing their eternal dirge.
[Illustration: Cross on mountain]
EPILOGUE
EPILOGUE
I am an old man now, looking forward soon to joining those shipmates
of long ago. Many honors have come my way, and for sixteen years as
an admiral in the Navy, I have had charge of designing and building
the throbbing engines which drive our every warship. That mighty fleet
which so proudly showed the American flag in every ocean on the globe
and has just returned to confound the doubters at home and abroad who
foresaw those ships with broken-down machinery cluttering every port
from Rio to Yokohama, was my design. The engines and the boilers which
so sturdily drove the _Oregon_ twelve thousand miles around South
America under forced draft in time to take her place in the forefront
of the battle-line at Santiago and deal the death blows to Spanish sea
power, were my creation.
From that day in 1861 when as a young engineer officer I joined the
Navy, until the day forty-two years later when I retired full of honors
as its Engineer-in-Chief, machinery had been my life and I had hoped
that my name might as a result find its place with that of Ericsson
as one who had done much to advance the application of power to our
warships. But as the years since my retirement weigh me down, and I
see my proud _Oregon_ already vanished from the fleet, and that fleet
itself ere long destined to disappear before the creations of newer
and better engineers than I, more and more do I realize that it is the
men themselves and how they lived and died, rather than their puny
handiwork, which those who come after us will ever have reason to
cherish as the true measure of any man.
And so that huge cross I reared in the Lena Delta amidst the polar
snows looms larger and larger in my mind and now I only humbly hope,
as approaching the end of my long days I look back over my life, that
the name of George Wallace Melville may be a little remembered as one
of those who served on that far-off cruise in the _Jeannette_, when
my science and machinery faded from all importance, engineering went
wholly by the board, when first with only our stout ship to shield us
and then without her, face to face with Nature in her fiercest mood for
endless months we battled the Arctic ice beneath the banner of George
Washington De Long, and in his life and death I learned what truly
makes the man.