CHAPTER VII
Through a light breeze and a smooth sea we steamed out in the darkness. The Fanny A. Hyde, ordered to follow us at dawn, we expected to reach port in Siberia even ahead of our own arrival since she was now very light while we, heavily laden once more, were nearly awash.
A new note in seagoing came into our lives upon departing from St. Michael’s—our forty dogs. They quickly proved to be the damnedest nuisances ever seen aboard ship, roaming the deck in carefree fashion, snarling and fighting among themselves every five minutes, and unless one was armed with a belaying pin in each hand, it was nearly suicide to enter a pack of the howling brutes to stop them. They fought for pure enjoyment so it seemed to me, immune almost from any harm, for their fur was so thick and tangled, they got nothing but mouthfuls of hair from snapping at each other. In spite of fairly continual fighting, we got the ship along for after all my engines drove her on, but how we should ever fare under sail alone I wondered, unless each seaman soon got the knack of disregarding half a dozen pseudo-wolves leaping at him each time he rushed to ease a sheet or to belay a halliard or a brace. Meanwhile we let the dogs severely alone, it being the duty of Aneguin and Alexey to feed and water them, and apparently also to beat them well so that their fighting was not one continuous performance.
We had expected to make the three hundred miles across Behring Sea to St. Lawrence Bay in Siberia in two and a half days, but we did not. Our second day out, the wind freshened, there was a decided swell from the northward, and all in all the weather had a very unsettled look. With most of our sail set, we logged five knots during the morning, but as the seas picked up, the ship began to pitch heavily, and in the early afternoon a green sea came aboard that carried away both our forward water-closets, fortunately empty at the time. At this mishap, we furled most of our canvas and slowed the engines to thirty revolutions, greatly easing the motion.
But as the night drew on it became evident we were in for it. The ocean hereabouts is so shallow that an ugly sea quickly kicks up under even a fresh breeze, and we were soon up against a full gale, not a pleasing prospect for a grossly overloaded ship. There was nothing for it, however, except to heave to, head to the wind, and ride it out under stormsails only. Accordingly in the first dog watch, I banked fires, stopped the engines, and the Jeannette lay to on the starboard tack under the scantiest canvas we dared carry—stormsail, fore and aft sail, and spanker only, all reefed down to the very last row of reef-points.
For thirty hours while the gale howled, we rode it out thus, the overloaded Jeannette groaning and creaking, submerged half the time, with confused seas coming aboard in all directions. Every hatch on deck was tightly battened down; otherwise solid water, often standing two and three feet deep on our decks, would have quickly poured below to destroy our slight buoyancy and sink us like a rock.
But even so, in spite of lying to, we took a terrific battering, and time after time as we plunged into a green sea, it seemed beyond belief that our overloaded hull should still remain afloat.
In the middle of this storm, worn from a night of watchfulness, with Chipp on the bridge temporarily as his relief, Captain De Long sat dozing in his cabin chair, not daring even to crawl into his bunk lest he lose a second in responding to any call. Suddenly a solid sea came over the side, with a wild roar broke on board, and in a rushing wall of water carrying all before it, hit the poop bulkhead, smashed in the windows to the captain’s stateroom, and in an instant flooded the room. Our startled skipper coming out of his doze found himself swimming for his life in his own cabin, all his belongings afloat in a tangle about him!
For the first hour of that gale, the howling of our forty Eskimo dogs was a fair rival to the howling of the wind through the rigging, but as the waves began to break aboard, the poor dogs, half-drowned, quieted to a piteous whimper, and with their tails between their legs, sought shelter from the rushing seas in the lee of the galley, the bulwarks, the hatch coamings even—anything that would save them from the impact of those swirling waves. For once there was no fighting, each dog being solely absorbed in keeping his nose above water, and when possible on that heaving deck, in keeping his claws dug into the planking to save himself from being flung headlong into the lee scuppers.
But the gale finally blew itself out, and thankfully spreading our reefed canvas, we arrived four days out of St. Michael’s in lonely St. Lawrence Bay, to find the little Jeannette, a tiny symbol of civilization, dwarfed in that vast solitude by snow-capped mountains rising precipitously from the water, a magnificent spectacle of nature in her grandest mood.
But our isolation was broken soon enough by two large baideras which pushed out to meet us, crowded with natives who without leave clambered over our rails, eagerly offering in broken English to engage themselves as whalers, which naturally enough they assumed was the purpose of our cruise.
But we welcomed them gladly enough for another reason. What did they know of Nordenskjöld?
From their chief, a tall, brawny fellow calling himself “George,” after much cross-examination De Long elicited the information that a steamer, smaller even than the Jeannette, had been there apparently three months before, and that during the previous winter he, Chief George, had on a journey across East Cape to Koliutchin Bay on the north coast of Siberia, seen the same ship frozen in the ice there. This seemed to check with our last news on Nordenskjöld’s Vega. If indeed she had reached St. Lawrence Bay and passed south, she was of course safe now and we need no longer concern ourselves. But was it really the Vega?
Patiently, like a skilled lawyer examining an ignorant witness, De Long worked on George to find that out. Who was the Vega’s captain? An old man with a white beard who spoke no English. Who then had George conversed with? Another officer, a Russian, who spoke their tongue, the Tchuchee dialect, like a native. Who was he? On this point, George, uncertain over nearly everything else, was absolutely positive, and answered proudly,
“He name Horpish.”
But to De Long’s great disappointment, on consulting the muster roll of the Vega with which we had been furnished, no “Horpish” appeared thereon. Again and again, Chipp, De Long, and I pored over that list of the Swedish, Danish, and Russian names of the men and officers accompanying Nordenskjöld, while George, leaning over our shoulders, repeated over and over, “Horpish, he Horpish,” obviously disgusted at our inability to understand our own language.
Finally De Long put his finger on the answer. There, a few lines down from Nordenskjöld on that list was the man we were looking for—
“Lieutenant Nordquist, Imperial Russian Navy.”
I pronounced it a few times—Nordquist, Horpish—yes, it must be he. Phonetically in Tchuchee that was a good match for Nordquist.
And this was all we learned. The steamer, whatever her name, had stayed only one day, then departed to the southward, loaded according to George with “plenty coals.”
With some bread and canned meat in return for this sketchy information, we eased George and his followers, greatly disappointed at not being signed on as whalers, over the side before we lost anything. For while these Tchuchees appeared dirty, lazy, and utterly worthless, their unusual size made them potentially dangerous enemies when in force, and we posted an armed watch on deck as a precaution.
Our schooner arrived soon after we did, and we finished hoisting out of her all the coal down to the last lump, ending up with 132 tons stowed in our bunkers, which was their total capacity, and with 28 tons more as a deckload, giving us a total of 160 tons with which to start into the Arctic, nearly twice the amount of coal the Jeannette was originally designed to carry.
On August 27 we finished coaling and steamed out towing the schooner astern of us, for it seemed unsafe with her little crew of only six to leave her to get underway in desolate St. Lawrence Bay amidst that ugly-looking crowd of brawny Tchuchees, all experts at handling harpoons and looking none too scrupulous over what they chose to hurl them at.
Once clear of the harbor, we headed north for Cape East, while the lightened Fanny A. Hyde, carrying now as cargo only the last mail we ever sent back, spread her sails and with (for her but not for us) a fair wind was soon hull down to the southward, our last link with home finally severed.
Steaming steadily into a strong head wind, we stood on through Behring Strait and during the night passed between East Cape and the Diomede Islands, three barren rocks jutting from the sea, forming stepping stones almost between the continents of Asia and America, over which may very well have passed ages ago that immigration at the time of the dispersion of the human race which brought man first to North and then to South America.
But this human migration of former ages, even if so, interested us little in comparison with what the migratory waters of the ocean might be doing now. At the captain’s orders, Collins prepared a set of thermometers and dropped them overboard strung out on a line. If the Kuro-Si-Wo Current actually flowed northward into the Arctic Sea as we hoped, through this narrow funnel it must pass, and as we steamed slowly northward through the strait, Collins periodically read the thermometers to get the temperatures at varying depths, while Newcomb tended a dredge towed astern to obtain samples of the marine life at the bottom.
To our keen chagrin, the most that could be said for the results of our observations was that they were neutral—they proved or disproved nothing. The water was about the same in temperature from top to bottom and did not differ appreciably from the temperature of the air, a result which certainly did not indicate the presence of any marked warm current thereabouts. But then on the other hand, as we passed through, the fresh breeze we encountered from the northwest, blowing down through the strait, might well on that day have upset or even reversed the normal flow of water in a channel only twenty-eight fathoms deep. The thermometers proved nothing. How about the dredge? Eagerly we awaited a report from Newcomb with respect to his examination of its contents. Were the specimens in any degree symptomatic of the tropical waters of the Kuro-Si-Wo Current?
But there also we got scant comfort. The catch in the dredge was nondescript, and no deductions could safely be drawn. If the Kuro-Si-Wo Current on which we were banking so heavily for the success of our expedition flowed into the polar seas, at least we found no evidence of it.
As the day dawned with the empty horizon widening out before us to the north, we found ourselves at last in the Arctic Ocean, our gateway to the Pole. We stood to the northwest with somewhat overcast skies, coasting along the northern shores of Siberia before striking off for Wrangel Land, our thorough-going captain determined to steam a little out of his way to make one more stop at Cape Serdze Kamen to check Chief George’s story of the Vega’s actually having been there and left.
In the late afternoon, we made out a headland on our port hand, which the vigilant Danenhower, fortunately able just then to catch a sight of the sun to establish our position, pronounced as the desired cape. We stood in and anchored, but with steam up ready for getting underway instantly, since we were on a lee shore with none too good a holding ground.
After supper, the starboard whaleboat was cleared away and lowered, and the captain, backed up by Chipp, Dunbar, Collins and Alexey, started in for a collection of native houses on the beach to investigate about the Vega. But when they approached the shore, they found such a heavy sea rolling over a rapidly moving fringe of pack ice that the whaleboat’s efforts to get through were wholly ineffectual and after half an hour were abandoned when it was observed that the natives were getting ready to come out themselves in a skin boat.
Led by their chief in a bright red tunic, these latter, better acquainted with the coast than we, managed to make passage through the ice into the open water off shore, where they followed the whaleboat back to our ship and then over the side into the Jeannette’s cabin.
But there, in spite of Alexey’s best efforts with native dialects on the chief, who had all the dignity of a king, we were unable to make our questions about Nordenskjöld understood, or get anything understandable out of him except the one word,
“Schnapps?”
But to this De Long shook his head. He was too well acquainted with the results to pass fire-water out to natives. So with this we were stalled till the natives pushed forth a decrepit old squaw, who once an inhabitant of Kings Island, apparently had recognized Alexey’s dialect. But even on her, neither the name of Nordenskjöld nor of the Vega made any impression till Alexey, remembering Chief George’s reference to the Russian officer who spoke Tchuchee, mentioned Lieutenant Nordquist.
Immediately the squaw became all animation and her face lighted with understanding.
“Horpish?” She nodded her head vigorously and from then on, all was plain sailing. Alexey had difficulty in getting in a word sideways, “Horpish” had made such an impression. “Horpish’s” ship had been there a day, coming from a little further west in Koliutchin Bay, where she had wintered, a fact very soon verified by Chipp, who going ashore to visit that spot, came back with a miscellaneous collection of articles—Swedish coins, buttons from Russian, Danish, and Swedish uniforms, and prized most of all by the natives and hardest to get from them, a number of empty tin cans!
This evidence settled conclusively our search for Nordenskjöld and the Vega. Undoubtedly she had been at Cape Serdze Kamen as rumored; she had passed undamaged through Behring Strait, and must now be on her way southward through the Pacific to Japan, if indeed she had not already arrived there. We need no longer concern ourselves over Nordenskjöld and his crew, their safety was assured.
So on the last day of August, we hoisted in our whaleboat and stood out to the northward. It being Sunday, at 2 P.M. we rigged ship for church in the cabin, and our captain, a devoutly religious man, held Divine Service, attended by all the crew save those on watch.
With heads bowed, we stood while our ship steamed away from that bleak coast, our anchor hoisted in for the last time, with our thoughts divided between Nordenskjöld safely homeward bound and ourselves headed at last into the unknown polar seas.
As Collins rolled the notes solemnly out from the little organ and the rough voices of our sailors echoed the words, never before had I seen men at sea so deeply stirred by that heartfelt appeal,
“Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea!”