CHAPTER XVI
December, 1879, our fourth month in the pack, came in with crisp cold weather; and as the days passed with the ice about us thickening and the pack showing signs of some stability, we began again to breathe without the subconscious dread that each minute was to be our last. After a few days thus, we even settled into the winter routine of the ship, released our dogs, and commenced to take some interest in the wonders of the Arctic night.
For a month, under the shadow of death, personalities had been forgotten, personal idiosyncrasies submerged. Now with the easing of that strain, our likes and dislikes, our personal vanities, and the ordinary problems of existence in the Arctic, popped up once more.
De Long began to worry over scurvy. No Arctic expedition previously of which we had knowledge had been free of it; in many of them, scurvy, even more than ice, had been responsible for their tales of horrible suffering, death, and disaster. Overmuch salt was apparently the cause of scurvy; proper diet, proper water, and proper exercise were the antidotes prescribed by Dr. Ambler, and De Long plunged vigorously into a program designed to protect us from that loathsome disease.
Exercise to fortify our bodies, the easiest of the requisites to provide, received immediate attention. On December 2, after the first night in weeks during which the captain felt secure enough to take off his clothes when turning in, came a new order.
We were lounging round the messroom, hungrily waiting for breakfast while Tong Sing padded about between pantry and table, setting out the oatmeal, the coffee, and the thick slices of bread when the door from the captain’s stateroom swung back, and with a grave,
“Good morning, gentlemen,” in came De Long, holding a paper in his hand.
“Good morning, captain,” we replied in a ragged chorus, and hardly waiting till the skipper had seated himself, slid into our chairs. As usual, I lifted the cover of the oatmeal dish and started to serve.
“Wait a minute with that, Melville; I want to read this order.” The captain adjusted his glasses, stroked his mustaches a moment while scanning what he had written, then in his scholarly manner read,
“Until the return of spring, and on each day without exception when the temperature is above thirty degrees below zero, the ship will be cleared regularly by all hands from eleven a.m. till one p.m. During this period every officer and man will leave the ship for exercise on the ice, which should be as vigorous as possible. No one except the officer entering the noon observations in the log will for any purpose during this period return to the ship.
(Signed) George Washington De Long,
Commanding.”
De Long as he finished, passed the paper to the executive officer on his right, and ordered crisply,
“Chipp, have all the officers initial this now, and then publish it to the crew at quarters.” In a more conversational tone, he added to us, “I suppose, gentlemen, the order’s obvious enough. We’ve got to go and get some exercise or we’ll all stagnate in this darkness and make it easier for scurvy to get us. I’ve chosen the time when at least there’s a little twilight, even though the sun’s gone. Does anybody have any suggestions regarding exercises?”
The paper (together with Chipp’s pencil) passed back and forth across the table as one after another, starting with Chipp, we initialed the order, but no one had any comments to make. Once more I started to dish out the oatmeal. Danenhower, at the foot of the table, signing last, tossed the sheet of paper to Tong Sing, who shuffling across the wardroom, with an Oriental bow laid it down before the captain.
“Here, Chipp, take this to read to the crew,” said the skipper, starting to push it toward the exec, then on second thought, holding it an instant while his eyes glanced perfunctorily down the column of initials below his signature. A deep flush came over his cheeks as he read and he stiffened a little in his chair, but without looking up, he announced sternly,
“Mr. Collins, I see you failed to sign this. What’s the matter?”
There was an instant of tension, then,
“Collins isn’t here yet, captain,” put in Chipp swiftly. “He’s often late for breakfast. Thinks that having to take the observations on the midwatch is such a strain, he’s got to sleep in every morning to recuperate, I guess. I’d tell him later.”
“Oh, yes, I forgot that Mr. Collins is not usually with us for breakfast.” The skipper’s flush faded, he finished pushing the order to Chipp. “Very well, have him sign when he shows up. Now with respect to the exercise for the crew, Chipp, serve out a couple of footballs. They may want to play. And tell them that anyone who wishes can get permission to take a rifle and go hunting.”
“Aye, aye, sir!” Chipp folded the order, shoved it into his jacket. “But I’m not so keen on that hunting business, captain. Skulking around through all these broken hummocks, the men’ll be shooting each other or the dogs, thinking that they’re bears or seals or something. It always happens.”
“I won’t shed any tears over the dogs, anyway,” growled Dunbar. “I think shooting a couple of dozen of ’em ‘by mistake’ would be a good thing!”
“Belay that, Dunbar, you wouldn’t be so heartless,” piped up Danenhower. “Don’t destroy my last boyhood illusion. What would life in the Arctic be without our dogs, anyway?”
“Still hell, Dan, if you ask me, either with or without ’em,” replied the ice-pilot grimly, passing his plate to me for oatmeal. “But getting back to the question of exercise, cap’n, I think letting the men hunt’s a fine idea. Surprising how far a man goes thinking that at the next waterhole he’ll surely get a seal!”
The surgeon laughed softly.
“He’ll be surprised all right if he goes with you, Dunbar,” drawled Ambler. “I’ve done it and I know. Every time you say a thing’s a mile away across this ice, the only reason it isn’t two miles off is because it’s three. The men’ll be surprised all right if you take them hunting.”
Virginian and Yankee, the doctor and the ice-pilot were off again on their favorite argument, Dunbar’s gross underestimation of the distances he covered on his many scouting trips over the ice. But I had another problem on my mind, and as soon as I had washed down my oatmeal with the hot coffee (which by now Danenhower had managed to get Ah Sam to turn out as a strong black concoction) I went on deck to struggle with my distilling apparatus.
Historically, there is no doubt that scurvy, the seaman’s curse since the days of Noah’s voyage in the Ark, has always resulted on long cruises from the absence of fresh vegetables, the over-abundance of salt beef, and the impure water (contaminated from the bilges) which marked the sailor’s diet. And no one who has ever seen the swollen joints, the rotting teeth, the hemorrhages under the skin, and the bloated faces of the victims, but strains to fight shy of scurvy as a shipmate.
Fresh vegetables, the first defense against this scourge, we could only carry in limited degree when we left San Francisco, and they had long since been exhausted. Of canned vegetables, especially tomatoes, we had a considerable supply and on these we leaned heavily as an antidote. Then of course we had three barrels of lime-juice, the specific remedy introduced in 1795 by Sir Gilbert Blake with such good results in the British Navy that ever since then the British tars, forced to drink the stuff regularly, have been called in derision “limeys” by their Yankee cousins. But in spite of all this we did not feel safe. Other Arctic expeditions within the last fifty years, as strongly fortified as we with lime-juice and in some cases as well supplied with canned vegetables, had before the end of a winter in the ice found scurvy decimating them in spite of their precautions.
We were fitted out with copies of every printed record of polar exploration that either in the United States or in Europe, Bennett or his satellites on the New York Herald could lay hands on. And De Long, a good student if the Navy ever produced one, spent hours in his cabin poring over the accounts of his contemporaries and his predecessors in the ice puzzling out that riddle. Why in spite of lime-juice and canned vegetables, in spite of pure fresh water daily replenished from melting ice, had even our immediate rivals in the race to the Pole still fallen prey to scurvy?
Their books gave no answer, but our experiences in getting water by melting ice from the floebergs round us soon gave us a clue. We had been led to believe that when sea water froze under very low temperatures, the salt in it crystallized out, rose to the freezing surface as an efflorescence, and was washed or blown away, leaving the ice free of salt and fit to be melted into good drinking water. Indeed Dr. Kane, whose words at that time were accepted as gospel truth on all matters Arctic, had written,
“Ice formed at a temperature of -30° Fahrenheit will yield a perfectly pure and potable element.”
And confirming this, Lieutenant Weyprecht, of the Austrian expedition which in latitude 81° N. had discovered Franz Josef Land only a few years ago, said that they found that ice over “a certain thickness” yielded a pure water.
We were confident therefore when we entered the pack that we needed only to send out a party with pick-axes to obtain from the nearest convenient spot on the floe an abundant supply of fresh water for drinking, cooking, and washing purposes. But we were unpleasantly surprised to discover that we could find not a particle of ice anywhere, whether cut from the top, the bottom, or the middle of the floe, whether taken from old floes fifteen feet thick or young ice a foot thick, that did not contain from twenty to thirty times as much salt per gallon as even the poorest water Dr. Ambler felt he could safely allow our men to drink continuously.
During our initial few weeks in the pack we regarded this situation with incredulity, the same incredulity I have no doubt that the medieval alchemist displayed when his dabbling revealed a fact failing to conform to the principles of matter set forth by the master, Aristotle—it simply could not be so! We concluded at first that perhaps the ice immediately around us had not been formed at low enough temperatures, or that it had not yet had time to reach that “certain thickness.” But having nevertheless to get drinking water the while we waited for temperature and time to form round us the pure ice for our permanent supply, we were reduced to scouting far and wide over the floes, scraping together from drifts here and there enough snow to melt up for our minimum needs.
But as 1879 faded into 1880, we drifted to the northward, and the Arctic winter struck us in all its cold fury, we were given a choice opportunity to try to our hearts’ content ice of every thickness, formed under every temperature from barely freezing down to -60° F., and we could no longer blink the facts. On this matter, the masters from Dr. Kane to Lieutenant Weyprecht were about as reliable as a lot of gabbling old witches—what they said simply was not so!
In the absence of any startling geographical discoveries or of any marked progress toward the Pole, that we had exploded a third Arctic fallacy (those respecting the Kuro-Si-Wo Current and Wrangel Land being the first two) gave to Captain De Long and Dr. Ambler a sense of having accomplished something at last. For Dr. Ambler deduced from the observed fact that all floe ice retained some salt, the mystery of the scurvy problem in previous expeditions. These, using floe ice more or less mixed either with pure snow or ice formed from melting snow, had obtained water passably potable but actually (though their fixed misconceptions kept them ignorant of it) containing so much salt that in spite of lime-juice rations and what-have-you in the way of canned vegetables, the scurvy had struck them down.
That deduction made it simple for us. All we had to do was to avoid the use of tainted floe ice and we would be the first Arctic expedition in history to dodge the scurvy. And in case the Jeannette Expedition discovered nothing else, to bring that discovery back home would at least salve in some measure our pride as explorers.
But if we were not to use the floes, where then was our water to come from? The obvious answer seemed to be from carefully selected snowdrifts, but as we floated north with the pack, we learned the futility of that. The drifts we relied on for the first weeks after we entered the pack were soon used up and Nature never replenished them. Apparently off the north coast of Siberia in the early fall it snowed, but as we drifted to the north of Wrangel Land and the temperature, falling far below zero, stayed there, to our dismayed astonishment we learned that in the ordinary sense it never snowed where we were! Apparently the intense cold froze all the vapor out of the atmosphere, leaving such a trifling percentage in the dry air that regardless of other favorable conditions for a fine snowfall, there just wasn’t enough moisture to provide the makings. The result was that in a gale when a temperature change brought snow, all that fell was a fine powdery deposit, ice mainly, which driven by the wind cut into our faces like needles. What was worse for us however (for in most cases we could stay inboard during a blow) was that the gale drove these particles over the pack with such force that they acted like a sand blast on the surface of the floes, with the net result that when the wind died, such drifts as we could find were so complete a mixture of powdered floe and driven snow as to be heavily salted and wholly unfit for human needs.
Now, while we could find no newly formed safe drifts, it had not been wholly impossible for us to get sufficient good snow from the old ones by going further and further afield in the pack until the last gale in November. This after making us “shoot the rapids” so to speak in that canal, had left us stranded miles from our original refuge in a pack of what was mostly relatively young ice. Naturally there were no old drifts in that vicinity and the captain, at first fearful of being torn away at any minute, was reluctant to permit anyone to get out of sight of the ship in searching for snow. Willy-nilly, therefore, we got our water by scraping the tops of nearby drifts formed in the last storm. This was so salty, however, that within two days Dr. Ambler had several of the officers and most of the crew under treatment for diarrhoea. Aside from the ordinary effects of this disorder in reducing the vitality of those afflicted, to us it was especially disastrous, for since the “heads” on the ship were for obvious reasons shut up, we had for months been using portable “heads” made of tenting, set up on the ice some little distance from the ship. It needs little imagination therefore to understand what diarrhoea meant to a man under the frequent necessity of hastily rushing off through the Arctic night to a flimsy canvas tent to sit there in the bitter cold of a temperature some thirty degrees or more below zero.
Given a few weeks of such excessive salinity in our water and it was obvious that scurvy would get us, but that at least would take several weeks. De Long was faced with the imperative necessity of rectifying the situation within a few days or of risking the loss of his crew as a result of the unavoidable physical exposure which diarrhoea entailed under our peculiar circumstances.
De Long, Ambler, Chipp, and I held an ambulant council of war. Muffled in our parkas, we first searched the pack around us for suitable snowdrifts in the forlorn hope that perhaps the men had missed a good one. We found a few that to the taste seemed passable, but in each case the hope faded when the surgeon squeezed a drop of silver nitrate into a melted sample, and inevitably the milky white reaction showed excessive salt.
Not very hopefully we scanned the “head” situation. No chance of improvement there. Since the ship was immovably frozen into the ice, we dared neither to reopen the “heads” on the ship nor bring the ones on the floe any closer to the gangway without risking an outbreak of contagion.
So there being no safe water available from the pack ice, no hope of getting any from snowfalls, and the absolute need of providing some quickly lest the next movement of the ice find us with a helpless crew unable even to abandon ship, it was the conclusion of the council that, regardless of cost, we must make our own from sea water. Naturally enough since I was engineer officer, De Long turned that problem over to me.
Ordinarily it would not have been much of a problem technically. On the ship steaming normally, and feeding her boilers from the sea, I might have bled some steam off the auxiliary line, put it through a distilling coil or worm we had fitted in our engine room, and collected the resulting fresh water. But we were not only not steaming normally, we were not steaming at all, because for the reasons I have given previously our fires were out, our firerooms were cold, and our boilers were emptied.
Aside from that, there was another angle to it that griped the captain. To take sea water and distill it over into fresh water you’ve got to boil it. That takes heat, and heat takes coal, and coal was of all things we had aboard the most precious, more so even than food, for in a pinch with our food exhausted we might go out on the pack with rifles and knock down bears, seals, and walruses enough to exist on, but where in those icy wastes could we go to knock down even one ton of coal to feed our boilers when our bunkers were emptied? For we had left only ninety tons, which (save for the scanty supply I doled out to Ah Sam daily for cooking, and to Bosun Cole for stoking the two stoves forward and aft to keep men and officers from freezing to death) under the captain’s orders I was religiously husbanding, so that if ever we were released by the pack, we might be able again to fire up our boilers and do some of that exploring for which we had come north.
Up to now, to live at all, we had had to burn coal enough to run the galley and our heating stoves; from now on, if we were to live without scurvy, we would have in addition to burn coal enough to run some kind of an evaporator. What kind it might be, to give us safe water and still consume the least possible quantity of “black diamonds,” the captain left to me.
The problem started not with “How much water do we need?” but with “How little water can we get by on?” I canvassed this question with the doctor, the captain, the exec, Ah Sam and finally Jack Cole—all of whom had something to contribute on what was the least possible quantity needed for drinking, for cooking, for tea, and for washing—and I came out with the answer that 40 gallons of water a day, about a gallon and a quarter for each one of our thirty-three men, was the irreducible minimum.
Naturally for this quantity, which was more or less in line with the daily capacity of any really ambitious Kentucky moonshiner’s still, it was foolishness to think of firing up so large a kettle as one of our main boilers. Thinking over what else we had, my recollection lighted on a small Baxter boiler which we had brought along to furnish steam for driving an Edison electro-magnetic generator and illuminating the ship with his newfangled carbon lamps. Edison’s generator having proved a flat failure (probably because it got soaked in salt water on our stormy crossing of Behring Sea) the captain had ordered the whole works dismantled and struck below into the hold. Without further delay, I had Lee and Bartlett resurrect the Baxter boiler (leaving the rest of the outfit below) and this little boiler with the help of my machinist and fireman, I soon had rigged up inside the deckhouse, with its steam outlet hooked to a small coil set outside in the open air on top of the deckhouse, where the cold air would act as a very effective condenser on the vapor passing through the worm.
Meanwhile, not waiting for this contraption to get into action, at the surgeon’s suggestion the skipper ordered Cole to break out from the hold a couple of barrels of lime-juice, which on December 2 for the first time on the cruise, he started to issue. In our mess, a pitcher of this stuff was placed on the table at dinner, where under the watchful eye of the surgeon, each one of us, sweetening it to taste, had to drink an ounce. For the crew, Alfred Sweetman, carpenter, was given the responsibility of seeing that the men took theirs, and as each watch laid below for dinner, under Sweetman’s observation, each man was handed a tin cup with his ration of lime-juice and an ounce of sugar to sweeten the unsavory mess, and compelled to drink it before he could draw his food ration. Months of storage in casks had not improved its flavor any, so in spite of Ambler’s gaze and Sweetman’s vigilance, had it not been for the sugar generously served out to sweeten the dose, I have little doubt that, scurvy or no scurvy, all sorts of ingenious dodges would shortly have been developed to avoid swallowing that tart medicine.
When the last pipe joint was tightened up, Bartlett fired the Baxter boiler and we commenced distilling. Our first few days at it were to my surprise pretty much a failure, for the distilled water which we collected up on deck in a barrel set underneath the outlet of the condensing worm, while better than the melted snow, still tested far too high in salt for safe use, and our diarrhoea continued unabated. This puzzled me (not to mention severely disappointing the captain) and it took some hours of sleuthing about to discover the trouble. I then found that we were feeding the boiler from a tank atop the deckhouse. This tank was filled by the seaman on watch who hauled water to the topside in a bucket from a hole chopped in the floe alongside. Unless the man was careful (and a sailor working outside in a temperature of 30° below zero is interested only in speed and not in care) he would slop the sea water over both coil and deckhouse, from which places enough trickled down into the fresh water barrel to ruin completely our day’s output. Having discovered this, I promptly rigged a pan over the barrel to catch the drip and looked hopefully for better water. But my hopes were dashed once again when, watching Surgeon Ambler test a sample from our next barrel of water (the result of a whole day’s distilling), I saw to my disgust the sample turn as milky as ever immediately he dropped a little silver nitrate into it.
By now, we had been suffering four days from diarrhoea and the situation was serious. I dropped everything else to devote my whole time to watching the operation of our evaporator, endeavoring by an analysis of what I could see done and what theoretically must be going on inside the apparatus from firebox to receiving barrel, to locate the reason or reasons why from our sea water feed, we failed to get over and condense a pure steam, leaving all the salt behind as a brine in the boiler. Thinking at first we might be boiling off the water too fast, I had Bartlett damp his fire somewhat to make less steam, but I soon found that that solved nothing. For with too little steam going up through our condensing coil in the frigid atmosphere outside, the condenser promptly froze up and burst a pipe, putting a stop to distilling altogether till Lee thawed out the coil and repaired the leak.
But hardly had we resumed operation again when what I saw gave me the answer. Bartlett started up his little feed pump, and began vigorously to pump cold water into the hot boiler to bring up the level in the glass. Promptly, as shown by the needle on the gauge, the pressure in the boiler tumbled and the water in the sight glass started to bubble vigorously. And that had been our difficulty. The sudden injection of cold feed water evidently created a vacuum in the steam space. Under the reduced pressure the hot water in the boiler had boiled off so violently that it carried salt spray up with the steam and over into the distiller, where it ruined our make.
Now I had it.
“Enough, brother!” I sang out to Bartlett. “Stop that pump, haul fires and secure everything!”
And from then on, alternating between sweating over that hot boiler and freezing on our enforced trips to the “head,” Bartlett, Lee, and I struggled all through the night. We shifted the location of the feed water line inside the little boiler to a point as far away from the steam space as we could get it, and inserted a constriction in the steam line to the feed pump so that no one could, even by accident, start the pump suddenly or make it stroke at anything more than dead slow speed.
In the early morning, we finished, refilled the boiler, fired up, and again started distilling. When we had to feed the boiler, we fed slowly (which was the only way the pump would now run), and I felt sure from the slight fluctuation of the pressure gauge that I had at last ensured operation steady enough to eliminate priming. And when at noon with the barrel half full of distilled water, Bartlett, Lee, and I, in the front row of a cluster of fellow sufferers, gathered wearily round the surgeon as he poised his silver nitrate solution over the test cup, I felt there was some warrant for the hearty cheer which echoed down the deck when Ambler announced,
“Very pure, chief!”
So ended our struggle to get fresh water. And in a few days our intestinal troubles ended too, a result for which all hands were devoutly thankful. But when I reported our success to the captain, while he was even more laudatory in congratulating me than anyone else had been, still for him there was a fly in the ointment which completely took the edge off his enthusiasm.
“How much coal does that distiller use up, Melville?” he queried.
“About two pounds of coal per gallon of water made, sir,” I answered.
He figured mentally a moment, blinked sadly at me through his glasses, then muttered,
“Two pounds per gallon, chief? Why, it’s nearly a hundred pounds of coal a day just for distilling! That expenditure will ruin us if we have to keep it up. Snow, snow! That’s what we need!”