CHAPTER X
That freezing into immobility of the Jeannette in so low a latitude, fell like an icy shower on the spirits of our wardroom mess, and from that day sociability vanished. Already Dunbar and Newcomb were not on speaking terms; Collins regarded me sullenly and the rest of the mess hardly less so; and the captain, who on leaving St. Michael’s, had after an unpleasant disagreement with Mr. Collins in the wardroom, decided that he should be more punctilious and less informal in his intercourse with us, now withdrew into his official shell completely. For myself, this worried me not at all, for I well knew the effect that responsibility has on most skippers, and particularly realized (as De Long seemed finally also to have done) that for a captain not much senior in years nor in rank to most of his officers, close comradeship is incompatible with the maintenance of proper respect and authority.
However, if we had no sociability to cheer us up, we soon had plenty of other matters to make us forget the lack. The ice pack which held us was evidently under way, headed northward, and we had not been in the pack a day before the pressure, nipping us on the beam, shoved the Jeannette up on a submerged tongue of ice projecting somewhere below our port bilge, giving us a list to starboard of over 5° and causing some inconvenience in getting about. As if this were not enough, after a few watches to our great uneasiness our list suddenly increased to 9°, and incidentally jammed our rudder hard starboard.
Here was cause enough for real worry. A permanent list of 9° is in itself a great nuisance in getting about on a ship even in the tropics, but now with the temperature below freezing and the decks slippery with ice, we were in a bad way to keep footing. And if the list got worse and carried away our rudder or laid us on our beam ends as it threatened to do, what then?
We promptly bestirred ourselves. Under Lieutenant Chipp’s direction, improvised torpedoes made of kegs full of black powder were planted in the ice under our stern, but with no results. In spite of an all day struggle, not a torpedo could we explode. To Chipp’s intense chagrin, every fuse we had proved defective and would not burn. And an attempt to fire the charges with that newfangled device, electricity, also failed, apparently because our current was so weak it all leaked away through our non-insulated copper wires into the ice, leaving not enough at the terminals to set off our torpedoes.
To aggravate us while we toiled to straighten up our ship, we had an extraordinarily clear day, giving a splendid view across the ice of Herald Island off to the westward, with far beyond it a distinct range of peaks—Wrangel Land which, when we set out on our expedition we had fondly expected to spend the winter exploring. Frozen in, Heaven only knows how far away from it, we gritted our teeth and worked in the freezing weather to explode those torpedoes but to no purpose. Night fell and left us still in that perilous position.
Our fourth day in the ice found us still struggling to right the ship. The torpedoes were abandoned. We resorted to more primitive methods, those used centuries ago on sailing ships to careen for cleaning the hulls.
Jack Cole, bosun, and a gang of seamen swarmed up the icy shrouds, rigged a couple of heavy tackles at the mastheads, one at the fore, the other at the main, and secured their lower ends to ice claws hooked under the thick floes on our port side.
Then to the hoarse cry of the bosun,
“Yo, heave!” our entire crew, stretched out along the falls, lay back and foot by foot hove them well taut, till our port shrouds came slack and the captain signalled to belay hauling lest something carry away. But even under this terrific strain on our masts tending to roll us to port, our vessel, gripped firmly by the ice, righted herself not an inch.
De Long, regarding with keen disappointment our strained cordage and bent masts, had still one more shot in the locker. Torpedoes had failed, careening had failed, but we had yet an ice saw. He motioned to Alfred Sweetman, our tall English carpenter, standing at the base of the mainmast dubiously eyeing the overstrained crosstrees above him.
“Rig that ice saw, Sweetman!”
The carpenter responded hurriedly. While Jack Cole braced back the main yard so that its port end plumbed our quarter, Sweetman and his mates broke out from the hold our ice saw, a huge steel blade twenty feet long and broad in proportion, its cutting edge studded with coarse teeth that would have done credit to any full-grown shark.
Under Nindemann’s direction, the port watch went over the side armed with pick-axes and crowbars and started to break a hole for the saw through the ice on our quarter, while Cole and Sweetman swung the saw from a tackle at the yardarm, weighted its lower end with a small kedge anchor, and then awaited the completion of the hole through the floe. They had several hours to wait, for not till the gang on the pack had dug down fifteen feet did a crowbar go through into the open water below, which, gushing unexpectedly upward into the hole, soaked the diggers with freezing spray and sent them madly scrambling up the rough sides of their excavation.
Fifteen feet of ice! De Long’s mustaches drooped for a full due when Nindemann reported that. Only mid-September, and already fast in ice extending two feet below our keel! A gigantic block of ice to try to cut, but there was nothing for it but to saw away if we were ever to right our ship. Fortunately our saw was at least long enough.
The bosun plumbed the hole with the kedge anchor suspended from the yardarm, hauled everything two-blocks, and then,
“Let go!” he roared.
Down came the kedge with a run, crashed into the thin remaining ice-floor of the hole, broke through, carrying the lower end of the saw with it, and we were ready.
Then commenced four hours of strenuous labor. Sweetman and Nindemann, armed with crowbars, down on the pack guided the sides of the saw blade for a fore and aft cut, while on deck the starboard watch stretched out along the fall, alternately heaved and slacked away, on the upstroke lifting the weight of both saw and kedge anchor, on the downstroke depending on the weight of the kedge only to drag the blade down again, while on both strokes the steel teeth rasped and shrieked and tortured our ears as they tore into the solid ice.
But it was useless. In spite of Sweetman’s skilled guidance and Nindemann’s brawny shoulders, it was next to impossible to keep that blade going straight against such thick ice, for the bottom of the saw being so far below them, actually guiding it was wholly out of question, with the result that on nearly every stroke the saw jammed in the cut. After half a day’s arduous labor the net results were a badly bent saw, hardly a fathom of cut ice, and such a flow of sulphurous language both on deck and on the ice pack from those handling the saw that I doubt not it may well have melted more ice than we cut.
So at eight bells, when the gang over the side knocked off for mess, De Long, ruefully contemplating the twisted saw temporarily hanging in the clear at the yardarm, and the insignificant length of the cut compared with the stretch of ice along our hull which had yet to be severed, gave up and silently motioned Cole to unrig everything. With alacrity, all hands as soon as this was done, scrambled below to the forecastle.
A few minutes later, in the comparative warmth of the wardroom (50° instead of the 16° out on deck) with some difficulty on account of the slope, I eased myself into my chair near the head of the table on the captain’s left, silently bracing my plate with my knife to keep it from sliding away to starboard while Tong Sing ladled out the soup, hardly more than half filling my plate lest the steaming liquid overflow the low side.
“Well, mates,” observed Danenhower, at the low end of the table, contemplating his scanty portion, “such is life in the Arctic! We’re in for this list all winter. I’m glad I don’t like soup anyway. Stew’s more in my line.”
“Better see Ah Sam, then, Dan,” I advised, “and make sure he thickens that stew enough to insure a safe angle of repose, or your stew’ll flow away like the soup.”
“Don’t worry, boys; I’ll fix it,” broke in our executive officer, Mr. Chipp. “If we can’t right our ship, I can right this mess table anyhow. I’ll have the carpenter saw a foot off each of the legs on the high end and that’ll about compensate for the heel and level it off for us.”
“Chipp, I’m ashamed of you,” I objected. “Your cure’s worse’n the disease. That’ll fix the slope, true enough, but what’ll the skipper and you and I do? Shortening these legs a foot will put this end of the table in our laps. How’ll we eat then; cross-legged on the deck like a lot of Japs? Maybe you can, you must be used to it, being just back from there! But I’m afraid I’m too stiff in the joints to flemish down my legs properly!”
Chipp, who had just come back from the Orient to join the Jeannette, saw the point, considered a moment, then looked speculatively down the table to the low end where sat the mess treasurer and the juniors in the mess.
“You’re right, chief. That’ll never do; there’s too much rank up here to monkey with this end of the table. Instead, I’ll have Sweetman level off by adding a foot to those table legs on the starboard end.”
Immediately Danenhower, facing the captain from the low end of the table, flared up.
“And what do you expect me to do then, Mr. Chipp? Get myself a high chair like a damned infant so I can reach the table while I eat? And wear a bib too, maybe? Forget it!”
Chipp, squelched from both ends of the table, shrugged his shoulders.
“Well, I give up, mates! Anchor your soup plates anyway you can then. But don’t be blaming me if your chow finishes in the scuppers instead of down your gullets.” He relapsed into silence.
The meal proceeded with difficulty. Tong Sing, bending low over each man’s shoulder in succession, sought to maintain his grip on the sloping deck the while he tried to level off the platter of salt pork long enough for each to help himself, but it was evident that it was only a matter of time till one of us got the contents of that platter in his lap. After two near accidents, avoided only by skillful juggling of the platter by the impassive Tong Sing, the captain motioned the steward to quit serving and put the dish down before him.
“Enough, Charley. Set that platter down right here. Lend a hand, Melville, at passing those plates, and I’ll serve out myself. We’ll have to let formality in serving go by the board till spring’s here and we’re on an even keel again. Let’s have your plate now, Dan,” he called, as the relieved steward deposited the heaping dish of pork before the captain and padded off to the galley for the potatoes.
“Spring? When does spring arrive around these parts?” asked Danenhower irrelevantly, passing his plate.
“God knows, I don’t!” replied Chipp. “By June, I hope though. Why, Dan?”
“By June, eh?” The navigator counted on his fingers. “Nine months yet. And nine months more of having to navigate these careened decks is going to be tough on the legs. I’ll have a permanent limp in my left leg long before that, trying to keep erect.”
Dr. Ambler seated in the middle of the table looked at Danenhower, nodded seriously, and in his quiet Virginian drawl observed,
“You’re right, Dan. And since we can’t right the ship, we’ll have to level off the crew. What Chipp just said gave me an idea. How about my amputating a couple of inches from everybody’s left leg, just enough to counteract the list? That’ll keep you all on an even keel.”
“Hah, hah!” roared Chipp, looking at the doctor in mock amazement. “For a naval surgeon, my dear Ambler, your lack of seamanship pains me! Shorten our left legs, indeed? That’s all very well for a starboard list when a man’s going forward, but where’ll he be when he comes about and wants to go aft? Worse than ever, with his short flipper on the wrong side! Not for me, doctor. I’ll reef my legs myself on whichever side’s necessary. Your idea’s worse than mine!”
“I’m sunk,” admitted Ambler with a grin. “So that won’t work after all! And it looked such a grand scheme with a little easy surgery on the crew to avoid having to operate on all that ice!”
“If we stay here long enough,” observed Newcomb, “according to that new theory which my fellow naturalist, that great English scientist Darwin, recently advanced, Nature will accommodate us to our environment. The survival of the fittest, you know.”
“Well, ‘Bugs,’ that means we’ll all ultimately become polar bears or perish,” commented Ambler. “And since I don’t look with pleasure to doing either, let’s hope you and your biology are both wrong.”
By this time, fortunately all were served, and in the ensuing attack on the salt pork, conversation languished. But in spite of the badinage about our situation and the half-humorous remedies proposed to alleviate the nuisance of forever battling the sloping decks in working, the sloping tables in eating, and even the sloping bunks when we tried to sleep, it was evident that in the back of everyone’s mind was a lurking fear of what next the ice had in store for us. And the futility of our efforts in combating the ice pack were now too plain to all of us to sustain any further hope of effecting in the slightest degree any position our ship might assume, let alone her movements.
For some days we drifted impotently with the pack toward the northwest. With broken ice under pressure piling up along our high side and jamming our rudder hard against the pintles, the captain (who inwardly had been hoping for a series of September gales to come along and break up the pack and free us) at last reluctantly gave the order to unship it, which task with great difficulty on account of the thick ice, Cole and Sweetman finally succeeded in accomplishing, tricing the rudder up to the davits across the stern. So the end of the first week found us a rudderless ship moving at the whim of the ice pack, all chance of exploration gone, stopped at latitude 71° North, a latitude which had easily been reached in these same waters twenty years before by a sailing ship. And gnawing bitterly at our captain’s soul was the knowledge that till summer came to free us, in spite of steam or sail, the Jeannette Polar Expedition must drift idly with the pack, so far from the Pole as to be the laughing stock of the world when it became known, the while we consumed our supplies, burned up our coal, and wore out our bodies to no purpose.
Where was the pack taking us? Anxiously we daily watched the trend of the driftlead dropped to the bottom through a hole in the ice under our stern, then checked against occasional bearings of distant Herald Island and the few astronomical observations Danenhower got through the fogs. The navigator announced finally that we were drifting northwest with the pack, at a rate of about two miles per day. Where would that lead us? And when? By spring, to the shores of Wrangel Land perhaps, the captain hoped, not overly optimistic apparently even for actual realization of that prospect.
Meanwhile, I prepared for the worst below. To save coal, fires had on the day the ice caught us, been allowed to die out under the boilers. Now with our underwater hull practically sheathed in ice, the cold below was increasing, and to avoid freezing boilers and pipelines and bursting them as a result, it was necessary to free everything of water, leaving boilers, pumps, and engines empty, dry, and unfortunately as a consequence, unavailable for immediate service if required. Not to have some steam up and his auxiliaries, at least, ready for service, would irk any engineer. But to be even more helpless below, not even to have boilers filled and ready to light off in an emergency, gave me serious cause for worry. However, there was no way out. Keeping the water warm in the boilers and lines meant keeping fires alight which would consume precious fuel and leave us with empty bunkers when the ice at last released us and we could steam again. Keeping water in the boilers and lines without the fires, meant freezing and bursting our lines and perhaps our boilers, leaving us helpless to utilize the coal we had saved. One horn of that dilemma was as bad as the other; was ever an engineer faced with a worse choice of evils? The only way out was to be even more reckless, to empty everything, save coal, avoid freezing, and trust to luck that in a pinch somehow the boilers could be filled again with water, fired up, and steam raised once more before it was too late.
And that I did. Lee, machinist, and Bartlett, fireman, who were acting as my assistant engineers, turned to with their wrenches. Aided by the rest of the black gang, Boyd, Lauterbach, Iversen, and Sharvell, serving as a bucket brigade, they were soon busy breaking pipe joints, draining out water, drying out the boilers, and finally assembling everything as free of moisture as it was humanly possible to get it.
And that completed the job of reducing the Jeannette to a helpless hulk. No rudder with which to steer, no steam with which to move her engines, she was more helpless even than Noah’s Ark, which indeed she soon came to resemble when the portable deck house we brought with us from San Francisco was finally erected.