CHAPTER XIV
Nothing else happened that day. Our dogs, which in the face of disaster we had rounded up and penned inside the bulwarks, where they relieved themselves by staging a continuous battle, we now let loose and they joyously celebrated their freedom in chasing each other over the broken ice. Watching their antics was some relief, little though it might be, to frayed nerves and helped take our imaginations off what that broken ice threatened to our ship.
As a further distraction, we had a clear day and far to the southward sighted mountains, which we made out to be the familiar north coast of Wrangel Land, some sixty miles away.
And that was all. The day which for us had dawned in imminent peril, ended quietly with the Jeannette still frozen in that two months old cradle of ice, still uncomfortably heeled well over to starboard. We began to breathe more freely.
We took no more meteorological observations, but so far as I was concerned, I had more to do than before. Though the fires were out in my boilers and all the machinery laid up, at De Long’s direction I spent a great part of my time below during this period continually scanning the sides and the trusses for any signs of giving way, and inspecting the bilges to see if the ship was making any water. Of such troubles there were no indications, but I had constantly while below to be wary of my head, for I found that the banging of the ice shook down a good deal of loose matter in the holds, and particularly in the bunkers.
November 13, one week from the day the pack first opened up on us and inaugurated our reign of terror, brought new excitement. Sleeping as before in my clothes, I was wakened at 2 A.M. by a loud crack which seemed to come directly from our keel. I slid from my bunk, in the passage outside bumped into the captain, and together we ran on deck, there to meet Collins who, on the midwatch taking the hourly temperature readings, had rushed over the side and now was coming back aboard. He reported that there was nothing new except a crack in the ice not over an inch wide running out from our stem. This was disquieting, but nothing else happened during the night and the daylight hours passed quietly enough without further disturbance; so much so that by afternoon the skipper (full of scientific zeal and expecting apparently some days of peace) ordered our meteorological instruments reinstalled in a temporary observatory. This we accordingly erected on one of the newly-formed hills of ice as far from the ship as we dared but still, fairly close aboard our starboard side.
From the grumbling of the seamen at this task as they dug into the flintlike ice for anchorage for the guys holding down the canvas tent over the instruments, I would say that the captain’s optimism was hardly shared by his crew, but that was neither here nor there and by 5 P.M. when the twilight faded and night fell, the job was done.
Chipp took the first sets of readings. At eight o’clock, after supper, I relieved him, to trek over the broken ice and by the dim light of an oil lantern inside that flapping tent, read the dip circle, the barometer, the anemometer, and a varied assortment of thermometers. All the time as I struggled for footing on the rough ice pinnacle I wondered what earthly good it all was, considering the negligible chances of any of this data ever being returned home for scientific minds to study.
At 10 P.M., I turned the job over to the captain (who, staying up anyway the while he wrote in his journal, ordinarily took the readings till midnight when Collins relieved him), and as was now my habit after a week of alarms, I turned in with my fur boots on, earnestly hoping to get some sleep to make up for the past week’s wear and tear.
Till 11 P.M., De Long in his cabin scratched away industriously at his journal. Then six bells struck, he dropped his pen, drew on his parka, and went over the side to take the hourly observations.
Being the commanding officer, and not one of his subordinates (in whom such an appreciation of the beauties of nature at the expense of punctuality in observations might have seemed a fault), De Long on his way to the observatory paused a few moments to stand on an ice hummock and admire a splendid auroral exhibition, a magnificent prismatic arch to the northward, filling the sky from east to west and reaching almost to the zenith. The beauty of this phenomenon was no longer a novelty to any of us, but still he stood awestruck in the silent night drinking in that soundless electrical play of colored light, when he heard behind him a crisp crackling as one of our dogs walking on the snow. Turning, he saw to his surprise no dog but instead two men, our so-called “anchor watch,” racing down the starboard gangway and over the ice to our stern.
Both the aurora and the still unread instruments were forgotten as the captain ran immediately for the bow. To his astonishment, there he found the ice pack peaceably floating away from our port side, leaving it completely exposed with open water lapping our hull for the first time in months!
And as he watched in dazed amazement, the gap opened so that in a few minutes we had alongside the Jeannette thirty fathoms of rippling water in which was gorgeously reflected the northern lights (a detail the beauty of which I think our captain now took little note). The split in the pack was as clean and as straight along our fore and aft centerline as if a giant hand had cut the ice with our keel, leaving the ship still imbedded in the starboard floe toward which she heeled. Meanwhile the port side pack, intact even to the bank of snow which had built up above our gunwales, was sliding noiselessly away to the northward, carrying with it, still asleep, three of our dogs who had bedded themselves down in its white crust!
A glimpse at our heeled over clipper bow and at our bowsprit thrusting forward over his head, quickened De Long into action. Nothing visible now remained to hold that tilted ship from sliding any second out of her bed and into open water! Back aboard he rushed, and once more the quiet of the night was torn by the whistling of the bosun’s pipe and Cole’s hoarse cry,
“All hands! Shake a leg! On deck wid yez!”
And again no sleep, as hastily in the darkness we hurried our meteorological instruments back aboard, struck the observatory we had so laboriously rigged only a few hours before, chased on board all the dogs we could catch, rigged out our dinghies and our other boats for immediate lowering, dug our steam-cutter out of the ice alongside and hoisted it aboard, ran in our gangway, and lastly rigged out a fall for lowering provisions over the side and into the boats.
That all this, on the sloping deck of the Jeannette, was done in the darkness at fifteen below zero and completed by midnight in less than an hour, indicates what speed and strength fear gave to our fingers and our feet. For the men tumbling up from below had to look but once at the precarious perch to which the Jeannette clung to send them flying to their tasks.
Midnight came.
Our work done, we stood by in the inhuman cold momentarily expecting to feel the ship lurch under our feet, slide suddenly off into the water, and without rudder, without steam, and without sails go adrift in the darkness in that ever widening rift in the parted pack.
After an hour of this, with nothing happening to relieve the strain, the tension became almost unbearable. De Long, looking over the silent groups of fur-clad seamen clustered there on deck alongside the boats, ordered Ah Sam to fire up the galley range and serve out hot coffee to the men, hot tea to the officers. He then told Cole to pipe down, but with all hands to stay in their clothes, ready for any call. So we lay below, but I doubt if anyone had much better luck than I getting to sleep again.
There was no need for reveille in the morning. The first streaks of light found the whole crew from Irish bosun to Chinese cook lining the bulwark, staring off to port. I climbed the bridge to get clear of the snarling dogs. There before me, already ensconced in the port wing was the skipper, rubbing his glasses to clear them of frost for a better view.
“What do you make of it, chief?” asked De Long, nodding in the direction of the distant pack.
I squinted off to port. A thin skin of young ice, possibly four inches thick, had formed over the exposed water. Across that, perhaps five hundred to a thousand yards away, was the bank of snow which the day before had been piled up against our bulwark.
“Well, captain, it’s a quarter of a mile off anyway,” I answered. “Maybe more.” From the overhanging wing of the bridge I glanced curiously down on our inclined side, exposed now for the first time in months. Near the waterline, still looking fresh and bright, were those gouges in our elm doubling we had received in early September while butting and ramming a way through that twisting lead into the pack. Looking at those battle scars, I wished fervently that we had had less luck that day in battering our way in. But that was a subject the rights and wrongs of which were now never discussed among the officers. Instead, scanning our listed masts and our unsupported port side, I asked,
“What in the name of all that’s holy is keeping us from sliding clear?”
“God knows, I don’t,” replied De Long solemnly. “I just can’t figure it out. When one side of our ice cradle slides away from us without so much as taking with it any splinters from our hull, it makes my theory that our planking’s solidly frozen to the ice on our starboard side seem crazy. For why should the ice attach itself so firmly to the planking on one side, and to the other side not at all? It’s beyond me, Melville, why we don’t slide off.” He adjusted the furry edge of the hood of his parka around his eyeglasses, peered down a second at the scarred side below him, then while his glasses were still bright and clear, stared off toward the wall of snow topping the edge of the departed pack and finally nodded his head as if agreeing with my estimate of its distance.
Looking worn and haggard, for if possible our captain had had even less sleep than any of us during the past week, De Long finished his examination, eyed for a long time his crew stretched out below us along the rail, then turned to me,
“Melville, you’re older than I. In the late war you were at sea fighting the rebels when I was still a midshipman, and you’ve been through lots besides. So I feel I can talk to you, and lean on you as on no one else on this ship, and God above us knows, I need someone here to lean on! Every morning I pray to Him for our safety, every night I give thanks to Him for our escapes during the day. But here in the Arctic, God seems so distant, and this steady strain on my mind is fearful! Look at my men below there, look at my ship! Neither my men nor my ship are secure for a second, and yet I can’t take a single step for their security. A crisis may come any moment to bring us face to face with death—and all I can do is to be thankful in the morning that it has not come during the night, and at night that it has not come since the morning! And that’s the Arctic exploration I’ve brought them on! Living over a powder keg with the fuse lighted, waiting for the explosion, would be a similar mode of existence! Melville, it’s hardly bearable!” And then looking down again at the crew, he muttered wearily,
“But I’ve got to keep on bearing it. Call me if anything happens, chief. So long as we’re still hanging on here, I’ll try to get some sleep now.” With sagging shoulders eloquently proclaiming his utter exhaustion, he slumped down the ladder and off the bridge, leaving me alone, figuratively to add an “Amen” to his estimate of our situation.
For over a week, the listing Jeannette, which looked as if the pressure of a little finger would send her tumbling out of her inclined bed, nevertheless clung to her half cradle in the pack, defying apparently all the principles of physical force so far as I as an engineer understood them.
On the third day after the pack separated, we had a bad southeast gale blowing all night and all day, with terrific squalls at times reaching a velocity of fifty miles an hour. Although that wind hit us squarely on the starboard bow, its most favorable angle for casting us adrift, the Jeannette held grimly to her berth and nothing happened. Then on the fifth day, urged on by a northerly blow, the floebergs again got underway, broke up the young ice to port of us, and jammed themselves under our bows with heavy masses of ice pressing directly on the stem. We confidently looked to see the ship knocked clear this time, but evidently other floebergs jammed against our exposed side exerted such a heavy beam pressure that we stayed in place, though the poor Jeannette, squeezed both ahead and abeam, groaned and creaked continuously under the stresses on her strained timbers. The sixth day, the seventh day, and the eighth day, we had more of the same, with streams of floebergs bombarding our exposed port side, and on the starboard side our floe steadily dwindling under the impact of the bergs hurtling through the canal there.
Life on the Jeannette became almost impossible. Sleeping with our clothes on, jumping nervously from our bunks at every sudden crackling in the ship’s timbers, at each unexpected crash of the bergs outside, we got slight rest for our bodies and none at all for our nerves. And in the middle of all this, the sun disappeared below the horizon for good, leaving us to face what might come in the continuous gloom of the long Arctic night. According to Danenhower’s calculations, we could expect the sun to rise again in seventy-one days, unless meanwhile we drifted farther to the northward, in which case of course our night would be still further prolonged.
On the ninth day since the separation of the pack, the wind rose once more, blowing directly on our starboard beam, and the never-ceasing stream of bergs began again to pile up across our stem, for us an ominous combination.
On the tenth day, fearing the worst, we rounded up all our dogs, and waited. The pressure ahead increased, with floating ice piling up along the port side higher than our rail, finally starting the planking in our bulging bulwarks. Under the bowsprit, the rising ice blotted from sight our figurehead. Then an upended floeberg crashed violently into the pack under our starboard bow and wedged its way relentlessly toward our side. The pressure became tremendous. Beneath our feet the Jeannette’s tortured ribs groaned dismally. On deck we looked silently at one another, waiting. Something was going to collapse this time. Which would give way first, ship or ice?
Suddenly the Jeannette lifted by the stern, shifted a little in her cradle. Instantly the floeberg under our starboard bow drove forward, split our floe, and with a lurch and a heavy roll to port we slid into open water, afloat and undamaged, on an even keel once more!
Intensely relieved at having got clear without being crushed, we nevertheless looked back sadly, as we drifted off among the floebergs, at the shattered remnants of the ice cradle which for two and a half months had sheltered us, to see it now tumbling about in elephantine masses, no longer a haven of refuge in our trials.
Well, we were afloat. It was at least some consolation to have a level deck beneath our feet while we waited, sailors with no control whatever over our ship, for what next the ice pack had in store for us.
But the pack gave us a respite. Idly we drifted about in a wide bay of broken ice, stopping for a brief time alongside one floe, then drifting off till stopped by another. The wind moderated, the temperature rose somewhat till it stood near zero, and finally it began to snow. There being no signs of imminent danger, the captain ordered the bosun to pipe down and we went below, permitted at last to eat a meal without having the plates threaten to slide each instant off the table.