CHAPTER II
Naturally, as her engineer officer, I scanned with deep interest every detail of the vessel to which I was to trust my life in the Arctic, and I may say that torn wide open as she lay when I first saw her, I had an excellent opportunity to get intimately acquainted with the Jeannette’s scantlings and with her machinery.
Even for that day, 1879, the Jeannette was a small ship, hardly 420 tons in displacement. She was only 142 feet long, 25 feet in the beam, and drew but 13 feet of water when fully loaded. She was a three-master, barque rigged, able in a fair breeze under full sail to make six knots, which, not to hold anything back, was almost two knots better than I was ever able to get her to do with her engines against even an ordinary sea.
Obviously, not having been built for Arctic service, the Jeannette’s hull required strengthening to withstand the ice, and when I first saw her, from stem to stern the ship was a mad-house, with the shipwrights busily tearing her apart as a preliminary to reenforcing her hull and otherwise modifying her for service in the north. Amidships was a huge hole in her deck through which her original boilers, condemned by a survey, had been lifted out to be junked. To make more room for coal (for we were outfitting for a three year cruise) the old boilers were being replaced by two smaller ones of a more efficient and compact design, by which device our coal stowage was increased in capacity nearly fifty per cent—an achievement of no mean value to a ship which, once we left Alaska, would have no opportunity to refuel on her voyage.
But this change in the fireroom, radical as it was, was trifling in comparison with the additions being made to the hull itself. To strengthen her for ramming into the ice-fields and to withstand the ice, the bow below the berth deck for a distance of ten feet abaft the stern was filled in solid with Oregon pine timbers, well bolted through and through. Outside in this vicinity, her stern was sheathed with wrought iron, and from the stern back to the forechains, row on row laid on horizontally, a series of iron straps was bolted to the outer planking to shield it from ice damage.
In way of the boilers and engines, completely covering her side framing, the inside of the ship was sheathed fore and aft with Oregon pine planks six inches thick, extending from the boiler bed timbers up the side to the lower deck shelf; and outside the ship from just above the water line to well below the turn of the bilge, a doubling of five inches of American elm had been added, so that the total thickness of the Jeannette’s side when we finally sailed was over nineteen inches, a thickness which put her in the class with Old Ironsides when it came to resisting local penetration.
But the work did not stop there. The sides might be invulnerable locally but still collapse as a whole like a nut in a nutcracker when gripped between two ice floes. To resist any such contingency, in addition to the two original athwartship bulkheads which supported the sides laterally, an athwartship truss of massive wood beams, 12 by 14 inches in section, braced diagonally against the bilges and the lower side of the main deck, was installed just forward of the new boilers to bolster the sides amidships; while just abaft these boilers there was refitted an old iron truss which the ship had previously carried somewhat further forward. The result of these additions was that so far as human ingenuity could provide, the Jeannette was prepared to resist both penetration and crushing in the ice. Certainly no steamer before her time had set out better braced to withstand the Arctic ice-fields.
My major interest, of course, was with the main machinery. On the Jeannette, this consisted of two back-acting engines, each with a thirty-two inch diameter cylinder and an eighteen inch stroke, developing a total of 200 horsepower at about 60 revolutions, which on our trials in the smooth waters of San Francisco Bay, gave the ship a speed of about five knots. Our shaft led aft through the sternpost to a two-bladed propeller, nine feet in diameter, so arranged under a well in the stern that the propeller could be unshipped and hoisted aboard whenever desired, which clearly enough was a valuable feature on a vessel subjected to ice dangers.
During our fitting-out period all this machinery was carefully overhauled, four extra blades for our propeller were provided; and at my request, two new slide valves for the main engines were fitted, in order to change the cutoff and give the engines a greater expansion, which by increasing the economy of steam consumption would conserve to the utmost our precious coal.
Aside from the above there were many minor items—the addition of another auxiliary pump (a No. 4 Sewell and Cameron); the installation of a complete distillation plant to provide us with fresh water; and the fitting on deck of a hoisting and warping winch made of a pair of steam-launch engines rigged out with the necessary gearing and drums for handling lines.
Not in my department, but of interest to all hands who were going to live aboard, were the changes made to the ship itself to increase its habitability in the north. Material for a portable deck house to cover our main deck over the forecastle was furnished us, and all exposed iron work throughout the vessel was felted over. An entrance porch was built over the forward end of the poop, leading to the officers’ quarters, and given to us in a knocked-down state, while the insides of both the forecastle and the wardroom were thickly covered with felt for insulation.
The thousand and one details in fitting out that we had to go into, I will pass over. De Long was in Washington, smoothing out difficulties, financial and otherwise, with the Navy Department, and obtaining all information on previous polar expeditions, both foreign and domestic, on which he could possibly lay a hand. Consequently all through the spring, on Chipp, on Danenhower, and on myself at Mare Island fell the task of following up the repairs and alterations; of getting the most we could done to the ship at the least expense; and as every naval officer who has ever taken his ship through an overhaul period well knows, of battling through the daily squabbles between ship’s officers and navy yard personnel as to who knew better what ought to be done and how best to do it. We did our utmost to tread on no one’s toes, but from the beginning the officers at the Navy Yard regarded the Jeannette herself as unsuitable for a serious polar voyage, and this hardly led to complete harmony between them and us; an unfortunate situation which I think may have also been aggravated somewhat by doubts on their part about what the Jeannette Expedition was really intended for—a newspaper stunt for the glorification of James Gordon Bennett, or a bona fide attempt to add to the scientific knowledge of the world? But whatever their feelings, they did a thorough job on the ship, even though the cost, about $50,000, must have been something of a shock to Mr. Bennett, who, after paying for the repairs previously made to the Jeannette in England, probably felt the vessel ready to proceed to the Pole with only a perfunctory stop at Mare Island to take aboard stores and crew. And I know, especially in the beginning of this fitting-out period, that De Long himself was on tenter-hooks for fear that the cost of all these unexpected repairs and replacements would cause Bennett to abandon the enterprise. He was constantly in his letters from Washington cautioning us to use our ingenuity and our diplomacy with the Yard’s officers to affect every practicable economy, and whenever possible within the terms of the Act of Congress taking over the Jeannette, to see that costs, especially for materials furnished, were absorbed by the Navy itself and not lodged against the expedition.
So we struggled along through April, May, and June, with my dealings on machinery mainly with Chief Engineer Farmer of the Navy Yard, while Chipp worked with Naval Constructor Much who handled all the hull work at Mare Island, and Danenhower confined himself to disbursing the funds and watching the accounts. The two new boilers (originally intended for the U.S.S. Mohican but diverted to us to expedite completion) were finally dropped into our hold, the beams and decking replaced, and the Jeannette, though life aboard was still a nightmare as the vessel rang from end to end under the blows of shipwrights’ mauls and caulking hammers, once more began to look something like a ship instead of a stranded derelict.