CHAPTER XII
September passed, and the hoped-for gales which might break up the pack and allow us to escape, or at least to work into a winter harbor in distant Wrangel Land, failed to materialize. October came and went in the same manner, no real gales, no winds strong enough to have any effect on the ice, nothing but daily gusts of fine snow which cut our faces and spoiled our footing for exercise. Frozen in, we went with the ice drift, in a general northwesterly direction, till the rocky outline of Herald Island faded into the hummocky horizon to the south, while our continued failure to sight land to the westward made it less and less likely every day that Wrangel Land stretched northward as we had been led to expect. But we were not idle. After all, our expedition was a scientific one. Aside from attempting to reach the Pole, aside from discovering new lands in this unexplored ocean, our major aim was to add to the world’s knowledge of the Arctic seas, of the Arctic skies, of magnetic phenomena, of meteorological information and of animal life in the unknown north. For these purposes we were the most elaborately equipped expedition which had ever gone north. We carried two scientists and God only knew what varieties of scientific instruments gathered from the Smithsonian Institution and the Naval Hydrographic Office.
Since exploration and discovery were for the present out of question, De Long turned to all hands intensively on these scientific phases. On the ice a hundred yards from the ship so as to be unaffected by the iron in her, we set up a canvas observatory, with compass, dip circle, anemometer, rain-gauge, barometer, pendulum, and a variety of thermometers. Over the side, through a hole chopped in the thick ice, we provided an opening for our dredge and our drift lead. Hourly we took observations (and carefully recorded them) of every type of phenomenon for which we were equipped to measure—magnetic variation and dip, wind velocity and direction, humidity, air pressure and temperature, gravity readings, temperature of the sea at top, bottom, and points in between, salinity of the sea water, speed and direction of drift—all this data laboriously read night and day in the Arctic chill went into our logs. And for the zoological and botanical side of our expedition, all hands were directed to bring in for Newcomb’s inspection specimens of anything found on the ice, under, or above it, which meant that whatever our guns could knock down in the form of birds or beasts, or our hooks could catch in the way of fish, passed under Newcomb’s scrutiny before (in most cases) they went to Ah Sam and were popped into the galley kettles.
And to top off all in completing our polar records, we brought along an extensive and expensive photograph outfit, intending to get a continuous record of our life in the Arctic and particularly some authentic views of Aurora Borealis.
So there being nothing else to compete with it for our time, science received a double dose of attention, too much in fact. Taking the multitude of readings every hour (there were sixteen thermometers alone to be read) kept the watch officer hopping, and as each of us, except Collins and Newcomb, had ship and personnel matters to look after, it became to a high degree a nuisance. Most of this scientific work naturally should have fallen to Collins and Newcomb, but unfortunately matters in their departments went none too smoothly. The captain received a severe jolt when he learned that the photographic outfit, entrusted to Collins’ care, was practically useless because our meteorologist had neglected when buying his photographic plates in San Francisco to get any developer for them and that not a picture he took could be developed till we got back to civilization. When on top of this, one of our barometers and some of our precious thermometers entrusted also to Collins were carelessly broken, the captain began to mistrust Collins as a scientist and loaded a considerable part of the observation work on Chipp, on Ambler, and on me—a development which did not help to make any more amicable the attitude of Collins towards his shipmates.
Speaking frankly, after two months’ close association in the cabin of the Jeannette, we were beginning to get tired of each other’s company. Life on shipboard is difficult at best with the same faces at every meal, the same idiosyncrasies constantly rubbing your nerves, the same shortcomings of your messmates to irritate you; but ordinarily there are compensations. Shore leave gets you away from your shipmates, while foreign ports, foreign customs, foreign scenes, and foreigners give flavor to a cruise that makes life not only livable but to my mind rich in variety, and to a person like myself, completely satisfying. But in the polar ice, we came quickly to the realization that life on the Jeannette was life on shipboard at its worst—a small cramped ship, a captain who socially had retired into himself, only a few officers, and not a solitary compensation. No possibility of shore leave, no foreign ports—nothing but the limitless ice pack holding us helpless and no hope of any change (except for the worse) till summer came and released us. And, impossible to conceal, a mental despondency, as ponderable and as easily sensed as the cold pervading the ship gripped our captain as we drifted impotently with the pack between Herald Island and Wrangel Land, a thousand miles from that Pole which in a blare of publicity from the Herald, he had set out in such confidence to conquer.
Gone now were all the fine theories about the Kuro-Si-Wo Current and the open path to the northward through the Arctic Ocean that its warm waters would provide. We had only to look over the side at the ice floes fifteen feet thick gripping our hull to know that the “black tide” of Japan had no more contact with these frozen seas than had the green waters of the Nile. And just as thoroughly exploded was that other delusion on which we had based our choice of route—the Herr Doktor Petermann’s thesis that Wrangel Land was a continent stretching northward toward the Pole along the coasts of which with our dog teams we could sledge our way over firm ground to the Pole. Every glimpse we got of it as we drifted northwest with the pack for our first eight weeks showed conclusively enough that Wrangel Land was nothing more than a mountainous island to the southward and not a very large island at that. As for Dr. Petermann and his idea that Greenland stretched upward across the Pole to reappear on the Siberian side as Wrangel Land, if that ponderous German scientist who so dominated current European opinion on polar matters could have been forced to spend a week in our crow’s-nest observing how insignificant a speck his much publicized Wrangel Land formed of the Arctic scene, I am sure the result would have been such a deflation of his ego and his reputation as might be of great benefit at least to future explorers even if too late to be of service to us in the Jeannette, already led astray by the good doctor’s teachings.
How much the general knowledge amongst our officers that every theory on which the expedition had been based was false had to do with the lack of sociability and of harmony among us, and how much of it may have been owing simply to our physical imprisonment in the ice, I will not venture to say. But in my mind, the belief of all that as a polar exploring expedition we were already a failure, doomed never to get anywhere near the Pole, had a decided, if an unconscious, bearing on the reactions of all of us, and most of all on the captain and on Collins, both of whom had brought along massive blank journals whose pages they had confidently expected to fill with the records of their discoveries.
The captain’s journal I sometimes saw, as each evening around midnight he toiled over his entries. Instead of records of new lands discovered, of the attainment of ever-increasing latitudes exceeding those around 83° North reached by the English through Baffin Bay and Smith Sound, how it must have gnawed the captain’s heart that his entries had to be confined to such items as my struggles with our distilling apparatus, our difficulties with such newfangled gadgets as telephones and electric generators, or the momentous facts that Aneguin, Alexey, or Captain Dunbar (as the case might be) had chased a polar bear (or perhaps a walrus) which had been shot (or had escaped). All of these happenings to De Long’s chagrin must be recorded as having occurred in the low seventies, latitudes far to the south of those reached even by the insignificant and ill-equipped caravels of Dutch seamen three hundred years ago in their explorations of Spitzbergen.
What Collins put in his journal, I never knew. But I can well imagine how much it must have irked him, a newspaper man accustomed to live in an atmosphere of printing presses rumbling away over their grist of momentous world events to be spread daily before the eager eyes of Herald readers, to have nothing to record except perhaps his personal sense of injustice. Yet put down something every day he did, for I can still see him, his long drooping mustaches almost sweeping the pages, religiously bending over the leather-bound ledger every afternoon in his chilly cabin in the Jeannette’s poop, pouring the bitterness of his soul onto those pages, building up a record with which I doubt not he hoped when we returned to civilization to blast De Long out of the Service in disgrace.