CHAPTER XLI
Atop a rocky promontory looking to the north, towering four hundred feet above the great bay of the Lena Delta and far beyond the reach of any possible flood, I prepared for my captain and his crew their final resting place. Excavating from the solid rock a foundation, I built in the form of a huge cairn, a monumental rectangular stone structure visible easily twenty miles in all directions, making its sides of the thick planking torn from that wrecked flatboat near the last fatal camp, and covering the stout planking with rough stone quarried on the mountain top. Above that rocky cairn, I raised a massive cross twenty-five feet high, hewn from a driftwood spar salvaged from the bay below, and upon the spreading arms of that cross, I cut the names of those who were to rest beneath it.
When all was ready, on April 6, 1882, on that gale-swept mountain top overlooking the Lena, we buried them. Composed wholly of sledges, the long funeral procession of straining dog teams wound across the snow-covered tundra and up the ice-coated slopes of that mountain, the dark sledges bearing the silent seamen standing starkly out against the whiteness of the driven snow, with the one bit of color there the Jeannette’s silken ensign draping the cold figure of her captain. On foot the three survivors present, Bartlett, Nindemann, and I, trudged sadly along. Arrived at the cairn, we three lifted the thin bodies from the sledges, tenderly laid them out on a bed of snow inside the tomb, Captain De Long at one end, then the others in order of rank: Surgeon Ambler, Mr. Collins, Lee, Kaack, Görtz, Boyd, Iversen, Dressier, and last at the other end, Ah Sam. Then reverently removing the ensign from the captain’s body that I might return it to her hands who fashioned it, we took our long last look at our dead comrades.
In that deep Arctic solitude with no unhallowed lips droning out unfelt phrases, we who had lived with them in toil and peril and nearly died with them in anguish, stood with bowed shoulders and bared heads in the freezing wind before our dead, and with choking voices murmured our heartfelt farewell,
“Good-by! Sleep well, shipmates!”
And then sorrowfully sealing up the cairn, we left them to their rest. Never had heroic explorers a more fitting tomb. Amidst the Siberian snows, looking out over the Lena’s great bay at the desolate cape below which had witnessed their last agony, and northward across that Polar Sea which he had valiantly given his life to conquer, De Long and his men of the Jeannette lay at last beneath the huge cross on that rocky cairn, with the fierce Arctic gales they had so often bravely faced mournfully wailing their eternal dirge.
