CHAPTER V
Of our passage to the Alaskan Peninsula, there is not much to record. It was a shakedown cruise literally enough. The Jeannette, between the newly added weight of her hull reenforcements and the excessive amount of stores and coal aboard, was so grossly overloaded she had hardly two feet freeboard left amidships, and she labored so heavily in the seas as a consequence that for seagoing qualities, I do her no injustice when I say that as a ship she was little superior to various of Ericsson’s ironclad monitors with which I fell in on blockade duty during the late war. Indeed, had it not been for our masts and spars, our nearly submerged hull would no doubt have pleased even John Ericsson himself as affording a properly insignificant target for enemy gunfire.
From our second day out, when the breeze freshened a bit from the northwest and De Long, easing her off a few points to the southward, spread all our canvas to take advantage of it, we were under both sail and steam, but with the seas breaking continuously over our rail and our decks awash most of the time. With our negligible freeboard, we lifted to nothing but took all the seas aboard as they came, rolling heavily and wallowing amongst the waves about as gracefully as a pig in a pen.
In this wise, we discovered a few things, among them the fact that we were burning five tons of coal a day and making only four knots with our engines, which gave us hardly a hundred miles for a day’s run. Lieutenant Chipp, an excellent seaman if there ever was one but who had not before been out in the Jeannette, was certain he could do as well under sail alone as I was doing under steam, with a consequent saving of our coal, and persuaded the captain to let him try. So below we banked our fires, while the sailors racing through the rigging loosed all our square sails in addition to the fore and aft rig we already had set.
It was interesting to watch Chipp’s disillusionment. With all canvas spread up to the fore and main topgallant sails (the Jeannette carried nothing above these) Chipp started bravely out on the starboard tack, but in the face of a northwest breeze, he soon found that like most square riggers, she sailed so poorly by the wind, he had to pay her off and head directly for Hawaii before we began to log even four knots. That was bad enough but worse was to come. Having spent most of the afternoon watch experimenting with the trim of the sails, Chipp finally arrived at a combination to which we logged about four and a half knots, though in the direction of our destination, Unalaska Island, we were making good hardly three. Thus trimmed we ran an hour while the seagoing Chipp in oil skins and boots sloshed over our awash deck from bowsprit to propeller well, his beard dripping water, his eyes constantly aloft, studying the set of every sail from flying jib to spanker in the hope of improving matters.
In this apparently his inspection gave him no cause for optimism, for after a final shake of the head, he decided to come about and try her on the port tack, to see if by any chance she sailed better there, as is occasionally the case with some ships owing to the unsymmetrical effect of the drag of the screw. Stationing himself amidships, Chipp gave the orders.
Down went the wheel. Then came the final shock. To his great discomfiture, Chipp was wholly unable to bring the lumbering Jeannette into the wind and come about! Twice he tried, only to have the ship each time hang “in irons” with yards banging and sails flapping crazily till she fell off again and picked up headway on her old tack. After two failures, De Long tried his hand at it, then Danenhower made an attempt, but in spite of the nautical skill of all her deck officers and the smart seamanship of her crew, the Jeannette simply could not be made to tack. For all they could do under sail, the Jeannette might still be on that starboard tack headed for Honolulu, if the captain had not finally given up in disgust and roared out to his executive officer in the waist of the ship struggling with the sheets to square away for another attempt,
“Belay that! Leave her to me, Chipp! I’ll tack this tub!” and reaching for the bell pull, he rang the engine room,
“Full speed ahead!”
Knowing De Long’s impetuous nature, I had for some time been suspecting such a result and in the engine room, I had both coalheavers and engineers standing by, so I was ready with both boilers and machinery. I yanked open the throttle myself, and our back-acting connecting rods began to shuttle athwartships. Quickly our shaft came up to fifty revolutions. Above I heard the captain bellow,
“Hard a’ lee!”
This time, driven by her screw, the Jeannette maintained her headway, came obediently up into the wind, fell off to starboard, and quickly filled away on the port tack. When I poked my head above the machinery hatch coaming to observe results, there was the crestfallen Chipp just outboard of me, busily engaged in securing all on his new course, and I could not resist, a little maliciously, suggesting to him,
“Hey, brother! You want to stay at sea? Well, while you’re still young enough to learn, take my advice and study engineering. Sailing ships? In a few years, they’ll all be as dead as triremes! Better start now. Let me lend you a good book on boilers!”
But Chipp, still hardly willing to believe that he was beaten, seized a belaying pin, waved it in my direction, retorted hotly,
“Get below with your greasy machinery and sooty boilers! They’re the ruination of any vessel! Sails dead, eh? Unship that damned propeller of yours and I’ll tack her!” He jammed his sou’wester viciously down over his ears and ignoring my offer strode forward to check the set of the jibs.
De Long, leaning over the bridge, peering down at me over his dripping glasses, took my gibe at sails more philosophically.
“Well, chief,” he observed, “she handles now like nothing I ever sailed in before, but I suppose it’s my fault, not hers, she’s so low in the water. When we’ve burned some of this coal and lightened up, perhaps she’ll do better.” He puffed meditatively at his pipe while he turned to examine the compass. We were hardly within six points of the wind. In dismay De Long muttered, “Heading north! This course will never do if we want to get to Alaska this season. I guess we’ll have to douse sail, stick to the engines, and lay her dead into the wind, west nor’west for Unalaska, till the breeze shifts anyway.” He cupped his hands, shouted after his first officer,
“Mr. Chipp!”
Chipp, just passing the fore shrouds, turned, looked inquisitively up at the bridge.
“Mr. Chipp, furl all sail! We’ll proceed under steam alone till further orders!”
For three days we kicked along with unfavorable weather through rain, mist, and head seas. The Jeannette labored, groaned, and with no canvas to steady her, rolled and pitched abominably. Our two scientists, Newcomb and Collins, at the first roll went under with seasickness, and as the weather grew worse their misery passed description, though as is usual in such cases, they got scant comfort from the rest of us. What queer quirk of the seagoing character it is that makes the sailor, ordinarily the most open-hearted and sympathetic of human beings, openly derisive of such sufferings, I know not, but we were no exceptions, and towards Collins in particular, whose puns had occasionally made some of us in the wardroom self-conscious, we were especially barbed in our expressions of mock solicitude.
But if the seasickness of our men of science excited only our mirth, no such merry reaction greeted our discovery that Ah Sam, our Chinese cook, was also similarly indisposed. At first that Ah Sam was seasick was solely a deduction on our part to account for his complete disappearance from the galley, and the fact that for meal after meal we had to make out in the messroom with only such cold scraps as Charley Tong Sing, the steward, dished out. But when two days went by thus, Ah Sam’s whereabouts became a matter of concern to all of us and especially to the doctor. Still where he had stowed himself, even the bosun could not discover, and to all our inquiries about Ah Sam and to all our complaints about the food, we got from Charley only a shake of the head and in a high singsong the unvaried reply,
“Ah Sam, he velly sick man now. Cholly Tong Sing, he no feel so good too.”
With this unsatisfactory state of affairs in our supply department we had perforce to remain content, until after three days of total eclipse, Ah Sam rose again, one might say, almost from the dead.
I had just come up from the humid engine room to the main deck, and still bathed in perspiration, had paused to get my lungs full of fresh salt air before diving aft into the shelter of the poop. For a moment, with the wind blowing through my whiskers, I clung to the main shrouds. With both feet braced wide apart on the heaving deck, I stood there cooling off, when from the open passage to the port chartroom, which was the as yet unused workroom for Newcomb’s taxidermy, I heard in the doctor’s unmistakable Virginian accent,
“Well, I’ll be damned! Lend a hand here, Melville!”
I poked my head through the door. Ambler, who I afterwards learned had been tracking down the source of some mysterious groans, had pulled open a locker beneath the chart table, and there, neatly fitted into that confined space, was the lost Ah Sam!
I gasped. Have you ever seen a seasick Chinaman? The combination of Ah Sam’s natural yellow complexion with the sickly green pallor induced beneath his skin by mal de mer, gave him a ghastly appearance the like of which no ordinary corpse could duplicate. To this weird effect his shrunken body contributed greatly, for he had certainly disgorged everything he had ever assimilated since emigrating from China. (The evidence for this apparently exaggerated statement was such as to convince the most incredulous, but I will not go into details.)
Surgeon Ambler, holding his nose with one hand, grabbed Ah Sam by the pigtail and unceremoniously jerked him forth. Immediately Ah Sam sagged to the deck, his eyes rolling piteously.
Also holding my nose, I seized our cook by one shoulder and dragged him out on deck, where the surgeon gave him a dose of chloroform, which composed him somewhat. Why he had not already died, shut up in that locker, I cannot comprehend except on the assumption that he grew up in one of those stinkpot factories which Chipp, who was an authority on that country, claimed Chinese pirates maintain. But fearful lest he die yet unless kept out in the air, the captain planked him down at the lee wheel, where under the constant eye of the helmsman, he could not again crawl off to hide in some glory hole. There, clutching with a death grip at the spokes as the wheel spun beneath his fingers, Ah Sam stayed till next day, a fearful sight with pigtail flying in the breeze and eyes almost popping from their sockets each time a green sea came aboard; and whenever she took a heavy roll, poor Ah Sam’s lower jaw sagged open and his tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. Such a picture of abject despair and utter anguish as that Chinaman, I never saw.
The fourth day out the weather cleared, moderated somewhat, and the wind shifted to the northeast, so that assisted again by our sails, running on the starboard tack and keeping our desired course, we made a little over five knots for a day’s run of one hundred and thirty miles.
As we steamed toward Alaska, we gradually settled down with Chipp laboring continuously to get everything properly stowed. On deck, Ice Pilot Dunbar, Bosun Cole, and Ice Quartermaster Nindemann were designated as watch officers, with the seamen under them divided into two watches of four hours each. Below in the black gang, I divided my little force of six men into two watches of six hours each with Machinist Lee and Fireman, 1st Class, Bartlett in charge of the other two men comprising each watch.
For twenty-three days we stood on toward Unalaska Island in the Aleutian chain, a run of about two thousand miles from San Francisco. With better weather, our various landsmen began to show on deck, having acquired sealegs of a sort. Newcomb, first up, fitted out the port chartroom as his taxidermy shop, spread his tools, and went fishing over the side for albatross almost as soon as he was able to drag himself out of his bunk. With a hook and a line baited with a chunk of salt pork towing astern in the broken water of our wake, he waited patiently but without results while an occasional bird wheeled overhead, till at last, still wan from retching, he turned in, leaving his hook overboard. But Newcomb, whom the doctor and I (chaffing him on his Yankee accent) had nicknamed “Ninkum,” was decidedly game. It needed no more than a call from Ambler or me on sighting a new albatross eyeing from aloft that bit of salt pork, of
“Hey, Ninky, quick! Come and catch your goose!” to bring little Newcomb, aflame with scientific ardor, tumbling up from the poop to man his line hopefully.
At last an albatross measuring some seven feet in wing spread, which for this ocean is good-sized, swooped down and swallowed the bait, and a bedlam of cries from the anguished bird ensued which attracted the notice of all hands. Then came a battle, in which for a while it seemed debatable whether the albatross, flapping its huge wings frantically at one end of the line would come inboard, or whether little Newcomb, not yet wholly up to par, tugging on the other end, would go overboard to join it amongst the waves. But Newcomb won at last, landed his bird, promptly skinned it, and prepared it for mounting. And so much has the prosaic power of steam already done to kill the ancient superstitions of the sea, that this albatross, ingloriously hooked, came to its death at the hands of a bird-stuffer without objection or visible foreboding from any mariner aboard.
At last, twenty-three days out of San Francisco, with our bunkers nearly empty from fighting head winds, and anxious to make port before the coal gave out completely and forced us to rely on our sails alone, we made the Aleutian Islands, only to find them shrouded in thick fog. For Danenhower, our navigator, trouble started immediately. The only chart he had covering that coast was one issued thirty years before by the Imperial Russian Hydrographic Office, and it was quickly apparent that numberless small islands looming up through rifts in the fog were not down on the chart at all, while others he was looking for, were evidently incorrectly located.
Worst of all, Danenhower could not even accurately determine our own position, for when the sun momentarily broke through the clouds, the horizon was obscured in mist, and when the fog lifted enough to show the horizon, the sun was always invisible beneath an overcast sky. For hours on end, Danenhower haunted the bridge, clutching his sextant whenever the horizon showed, poised like a cat before a rat-hole, if the sun peeped out even momentarily, to pounce upon it. But he never got his sight.
Between thick fogs and racing tides, with our little coal pile getting lower and lower, we had a nerve-racking time for two days trying to get through Aqueton Pass into Behring Sea, the Jeannette anchored part of the time, underway dead slow the remainder, nosing among the islands, often with only the roar of breakers and the cawing of sea birds on the rocks to give warning through the mists of the presence of uncharted islets. Finally we slipped safely through, and to the very evident relief of both captain and navigator, on Saturday, August 2, dropped anchor in the harbor of Unalaska.
Naturally our first concern on entering port was coal. A brief glimpse around the land-locked harbor showed the Alaska Fur Company’s steamer St. Paul, the schooner St. George, owned by the same firm, and the Revenue Cutter Rush, but not a sign of our coal-laden schooner, the Fanny A. Hyde, nor any report of her having already passed northward on her way to our rendezvous at St. Michael’s. So I went ashore with Captain De Long to canvass the local fuel situation. We found eighty tons of coal belonging to the Navy, the remnant of a much larger lot sent north some years before, but so deteriorated by now from long weathering and spontaneous combustion as to be in my opinion nearly worthless. Even so, that being all the coal there was I was investigating the problem of getting it aboard when the commander of the Revenue Cutter requested we leave it for his use, because it would be his sole supply in getting back to San Francisco in the fall. Naturally we in the Jeannette, anxious to get as far north as possible before dipping into what our consort was carrying for us, were not wholly agreeable to waiving our claim as a naval vessel to that coal in favor of the Revenue Service, but this difficulty was soon adjusted by the offer of the Alaska Company’s agent to refill our bunkers with some bituminous coal he had on hand, his company to be reimbursed for it in New York by Mr. Bennett. This happy solution settled our fuel question for the moment, so while the natives took over the job of coaling ship, I turned my attention for a few hours to making myself acquainted with the island.
After nearly a month at sea, I found Unalaska pleasant enough, with its green hills surrounding the harbor and its small settlement, comprising mainly the houses of the Fur Company’s agents and employees, their warehouses, and last and perhaps most important just at this time, a Greek church. It seems that the steamer St. Paul, which we found in the harbor on our arrival Saturday, had just come down two days before from the Pribilof Islands loaded with sealskins, and carrying as passengers from those tiny rocks practically all the bachelor sealers of Pribilof in search of what civilization (in the form of metropolitan Unalaska) had to offer. All Thursday and Friday there was great excitement here as the native belles paraded before the eager eyes of these none too critical prospective bridegrooms. By Saturday, most choices were made and the Greek Catholic Church had a busy day as the couples passed in a continuous procession before the altar and the Russian priest tied the knots. There being no inns or dwellings to accommodate the multitude of honeymooners, the problem was simply enough solved by each newly-wedded couple going directly from the church door for a stroll among the nearby hills. By afternoon, only some few of the sealers, idealists undoubtedly, who were unable to discover among the native women anyone to suit them, were still left wandering disconsolately about the town, peering into every female face, in a queer state of indecision which the smiles of Unalaska’s beauties seemed unable to resolve.
Between coaling ship, taking aboard furs for winter clothing, and receiving some six tons of dried fish for dog food, we on the Jeannette were kept busy for the three days of our stay, while our nights were enlivened by the most vicious swarms of mosquitoes it has ever been my misfortune to encounter, and all attempts to keep them out of my bunk with the ill-fitting bed curtains were wholly futile. My bald spot was an especial attraction for them; in desperation I was at last forced to sleep in my uniform cap.
On August 6, we hoisted anchor and got underway, with the whole town on the waterfront to see us off amidst the dipping of colors and a salute from three small guns in front of the Fur Company’s office. I made out plainly enough in the crowd the Russian priest with his immense beard, but De Long and I differed sharply over the presence of any of the brides amongst the throng. So far as I could judge, there were no women there, merely a large crowd of men waving enviously after us as we circled the harbor on our way toward Arctic solitude.
With our usual luck, we bucked a head wind for all the first day out, but to our great gratification, on the second day the wind shifted to the southward and freshened so that we logged the almost unbelievable day’s run of a hundred and seventy-three miles for an hourly average of seven and a quarter knots—for the Jeannette almost race horse speed! But it was too good to last. Next day we had dropped down to a little under six knots, and then the breeze failed us altogether and we finished the last three days of our run to St. Michael’s with our useless sails furled, under steam alone at our usual speed of four knots.