CHAPTER XVIII
Monotonously the dreary days drifted by. In darkness we ate our food, took our exercise, thawed out our frozen noses afterward, and vaguely wished we could “go somewheres.” December 22, the shortest day of the year came, bringing with it, aside from the most brilliant display of auroras we had yet witnessed, only the knowledge that with the sun at its extreme southern declination, half of our seventy-one day long night was gone. But the day itself was further marked by the fact that Mr. Dunbar, that veteran whaler and the only member of our mess who had ever before wintered inside either the Arctic or the Antarctic Circles, came down with a bad cold. His tough hide had according to his own claim always before resisted illness, so this made him doubly miserable, and he moped around the wardroom very low in spirit. Finally, as if to make sure that we remembered the day, Danenhower also complained that his left eye pained him, and after a session with the doctor, big Dan completed our picture of wardroom woe by coming in with a black patch over the ailing optic, explaining that Ambler had found it somewhat inflamed and had advised him to give it a rest by shielding it even from the poor glow of our oil lamps for several days.
Two days later we came to Christmas Eve, which for us, except for plenty of ice around, was everything that traditionally Christmas Eve is not. No children about, eagerly excited over hanging up their stockings; no friends dropping in; no families, no wives, no sweethearts—nothing of these for any of us, but instead only the memories of bygone Christmases under happier circumstances, and the hope (clouded by gnawing doubts) that another Christmas might see us out of the ice and restored home.
We gathered in the wardroom, a glum group—Dunbar nursing his cold, Danenhower with his black patch looking like a pirate in distress, Ambler, De Long, Chipp, Newcomb, and myself. Only Collins was missing. That his presence would have added any gaiety was questionable, but that he saw fit to stay locked in his stateroom keeping the wardroom bulkhead between himself and us, certainly added to the general gloom. And gloomy it certainly was in that room—a smoky oil lamp the only illumination, the warped wood panels of the bulkheads the only decoration, overhead the deck beams heavily covered with insulating layers of felt and canvas, dismally sagging under the weight of the combination of frost and moisture with which they were saturated, and beneath our feet the sloping wood deck, wet from the condensate dripping off the cold forward bulkhead.
I did the best I could to lighten matters up. Back at the Mare Island Navy Yard before we left, Paymaster Cochran had thoughtfully presented me with a bottle of fine old Irish whiskey which I had so far carefully hoarded. Now I broke it out from beneath my berth, scraped together some other ingredients, and with all hands watching, mixed a punch in the soup tureen. In the damp chill of the barren wardroom, we filled our glasses, lifted them.
“To Cochran!” I proposed. “May he yet be Paymaster General!”
With no disagreement to this, we all downed Cochran’s whiskey, and warmed a little by the fiery Irish spirits, promptly refilled our glasses. There was just enough for a second round. I looked questioningly at De Long for him to propose the second and (of necessity) last toast. Whom would he choose, James Gordon Bennett, the sponsor of our venture; the President; someone more personal, perhaps?
But Danenhower gave him no chance. Lifting his glass, he waved it over the empty bowl, swept us all with his one uncovered eye, and sang out,
“To our old shipmates, Emma De Long and Sylvie—may they never have cause to worry over us!”
That also I could heartily endorse, so wasting no regrets over the amenities due Bennett or the President, I raised my glass to drink as did the others, when Dunbar alongside me poked me in the ribs. I leaned over toward him.
“Mrs. De Long’s all right with me,” he whispered, his voice hoarse from his cold, “but who’s this Sylvie?”
“Captain De Long’s daughter,” I hissed. “You old fool! Drink it down before he knocks you down!”
“Oh, all right,” mumbled Dunbar. “I thought maybe she might be Newcomb’s sweetheart.” He drank his whiskey at a gulp.
And that just about ended our party. With no more punch to serve as an excuse for conviviality, the conversation soon faded into the general murk gripping the room, and with everyone seemingly immersed in memories of happier Christmas Eves, one by one all hands drifted away to warm over their recollections in the solitude of their staterooms.
Christmas Day, mainly because it lasted longer, was even more dreary than Christmas Eve. A high wind and biting clouds of fine snow made going on deck or on the ice wholly uninviting. Confined again to the wardroom or to our staterooms, we moped over our memories, tried to imagine how friends, relatives, or families were spending the day, and thought a little enviously of Navy shipmates in port the world over with vessels decorated from deck to trucks with wreaths and garlands of greenery, and wardrooms echoing with the alluring laughter of women troubled with no deeper problem than how after dinner to get a husband or a sweetheart excused from watch and off the ship.
We did have a grand dinner, to provide which Ah Sam performed miracles with the humdrum materials available in the storeroom, topping off all with mince pies soaked in brandy. The eating of this unexpected banquet almost made us forget our surroundings and our situation. But not quite, for we ate our dinner to the constant rumbling of the unseen pack, the occasional explosive snapping of timber fastenings, and even a few sharp shocks from underrunning floes. And like a death’s head at the feast, to show that all was not joy and brotherly love on the Jeannette on this Christmas Day, there next to Danenhower at the foot of the table was Collins’ chair—empty, while Collins, sulking in his stateroom, dined alone.
I think I misstate nothing when I say that in the wardroom of the Jeannette we were all thoroughly grateful to see the last of that Christmas Day, and I have little doubt that each of us fervently prayed ever to be spared another like it.
December dragged away. We came to the end of the year 1879. To help the crew in welcoming in the year 1880 on which now he banked heavily for success, the captain sent forward four quarts of brandy, while I did what I could with a fifth quart to provide good cheer for the wardroom mess. As a result, when the rapid ringing of the ship’s bell at midnight marked the birth of 1880, the whole crew (despite a temperature nearly 40° below zero) gathered on the quarterdeck just outside De Long’s cabin, gave three cheers for the Jeannette, sent an embassy of two into the wardroom to wish us all a Happy New Year, and then hastily beat a retreat to the berth deck to warm up on those four bottles.
This evidently so heartened the crew that after their New Year’s dinner (mince pie and brandy once more) they staged an entertainment, the high lights of which were Aneguin imitating Ah Sam singing over his kettles, and a prompt and contemptuous imitation by Ah Sam of an Indian attempting to imitate a Chinaman, which performance brought down the house.
This comic relief for a brief while took our thoughts off what our more sober senses looked forward to with misgivings in contemplating 1880. Under our noses, so to speak, as we emerged from the crew’s entertainment to the deck, was the unpleasant discovery that the mercury in our thermometers had frozen at -40° F., unobtrusively suggesting thereby that what we had so far seen of Arctic temperatures was merely an introduction to what was yet to come.
A second more disquieting situation was that Danenhower’s eye inflammation had grown worse. The doctor had that day been forced to put him on the sicklist, confining him to his room in absolute darkness because the slightest light falling on his eye caused severe pain. Aside from the fact that the loss of his services threw an added load on the remaining officers—the captain, Chipp, and myself—in carrying on the ship’s work, his condition gave us real cause for worry. In case the ship went out from under us, leaving us stranded on the ice, there was a blinded and a helpless officer on our hands to care for, probably requiring to be dragged every inch on a sled, for it was as much as even a man with two perfectly good eyes could do to get over that rough pack without breaking his neck every few steps.
What had caused Danenhower’s eye troubles? All of us, from the first day we were caught in the pack until the sun in November vanished for good, had religiously worn snow goggles, for the glare off the ice was intolerable to face. Why had Danenhower, the youngest regular officer we had and physically by far the most powerful member of the wardroom mess, been knocked out by eye failure when neither forward nor aft had anybody else in the ship’s company been so much affected? Puzzling over that, I could conclude only that it was an unfortunate combination of his job and his personal characteristics functioning under very unfavorable circumstances. Dan was navigator. Innumerable times he stood under terrible conditions of cold, straining his eyes through his sextant, trying to get with poor horizons (or with an artificial mercury horizon) shots at the sun, the moon, or the stars to establish our position as we drifted with the pack. That was bad enough, but what apparently was worse was that Dan was the most painstaking and the most indefatigable worker over account books I ever saw aboard ship. In addition to being navigator, he was our supply officer, and hour after hour he had pored over coal reports and storeroom records, figuring and refiguring, trying to keep track of and account for each pound of coal used, almost each ounce of flour expended. Under the poor lamplight by which since early November he had worked continuously, the load on his eyes, already overstrained by constant squinting through sextant telescopes, proved too much and an inflammation enveloped his left eye, shortly developing into an abscess which threatened to blind that eye completely and even involve the other one. The result was that in a desperate effort to save his sight, the doctor was forced to make Dan a prisoner, forbidden (except when completely blindfolded, he was led out for meals) to leave the darkness of his room. And few prisoners in history, regardless of the horrors of their medieval dungeons, ever had a worse outlook to face than Danenhower in his pitch-black cell—small, damp, chilly, and with always the rumbling and screeching of the pack to remind him that any day the unseen walls of his prison might collapse and the prison itself sink from under him, leaving him helpless on the ice.
Over all of us, his shipmates, Danenhower’s disaster threw a pall of gloom that New Year’s Day. Over De Long, who felt a special responsibility for each man in the ship’s company, it fell like a blight, evoking apparitions for 1880 of calamities yet undreamed of.
So ended our holiday season—a dismal Christmas and a worse New Year’s, leaving us with the temperature starting downward from -40° F. to face whatever new the pack had to offer.
January drew along, bringing gales, biting clouds of flying ice particles, and deeper cold. The ice, getting denser and denser as it grew colder, shrank, and about the middle of the month cracked open, forming little canals on both sides, leaving us in a small island of ice hardly a shiplength across. We contemplated that dubiously, for if any pressure came from the pack about us, now forty inches thick, we would receive almost directly the thrust of the pressing floes with no protection at all. But luckily no pressure came before the extraordinary cold rushed to our rescue by freezing the water which welled up in the fissures. The first half of the month, therefore, went by with only the usual monotonous groaning and rumbling of the pack and occasional nips on our hull to keep us in mind of our position.
January 19, 1880, was on the other hand a red letter day for us. In the silence following the subsidence of a gale which was in no way worse than many another we had experienced, for no reason apparent to us the floe into which we were frozen began early in the morning to crack and split in every direction. Promptly the anchor watch sent word below, and as usual, we all came tumbling up on deck, there to remain stockstill in our tracks as awestruck we watched in the unearthly half twilight of the Arctic a sight entirely new to us.
North, south, east, or west, it was the same. In a large circle surrounding the ship, the surface of the pack was everywhere heaving up into a ring of rugged mountains high above the level of the sea! Huge masses of ice, large as ocean liners, pitched and rolled on the crests, while reverberating from all about came a shrieking and a screeching from the tumbling ice that froze the very marrow in our bones. Like the jaws of a slowly closing vise, that circle drew in on us—ahead, astern, on either beam—whichever way we looked there was an approaching mountain of ice steadily, relentlessly advancing on the Jeannette across the small expanse of yet unbroken pack, while on that undulating ring with cracks streaking across it like forked lightning, the floes parted with roars like thunder, forming a deep bass background for the “high scream” of the flintlike ice of grating floebergs, the whole echoing across the pack to us in a veritable devil’s symphony of hideous sounds.
The ring was still a quarter of a mile away.
On the bridge, Captain De Long, eyeing it, cupped his hands to try to make himself heard above the din, bellowed to those on the spar deck below,
“All hands! Stations for abandon ship!”
Listlessly we moved to our stations abreast the loaded sledges on the poop, but what could we do? Enclosed on all sides by that shrinking circle of tumbling ice, where could we go for safety when we abandoned ship? Even unincumbered by sledges or knapsacks there was not a chance in the world of scaling the slopes of those moving mountains of ice against the stream of floebergs cascading down their sides. Flight was impossible, annihilation certain!
Dunbar was by my side. With a seagoing eye he scanned the little plain of unbroken pack still surrounding us, then muttered,
“That ice is approaching us at the rate of a fathom a minute. It’s still sixty fathoms off. In sixty minutes, chief, we’ll all pass over to the Great Beyond!”
Apparently he was right. Motionless, silent for the most part, we stood, clinging to our useless sledgeloads of pemmican. That terrifying ring, irresistible, inexorable, shrank in on us. Numbly we waited for that avalanche of ice to come tumbling aboard, crushing us like flies, crushing our ship.
On it came. Fifty fathoms, forty fathoms, thirty fathoms. Then as inexplicably as the motion had started, it stopped, a shiplength or so away, leaving us after an hour of looking death squarely in the face, limp, completely drained of emotions, and incredulous almost of being still alive. Slowly the hills of ice flattened out, there remaining around us an indescribable “Bad Lands” of broken floes; and the shrieking died away into a strange quiet except for the rumble of underrunning floes bumping along in the current beneath our pack. It was over, we were safe, our vessel undamaged. Yet had the ship been a few hundred feet in any direction from the exact spot in which she lay, she would inevitably have been lost, and we with her.
Feeling like men reprieved when the noose had been tightened about our throats and the trap all but sprung, we left the poop slowly, noticing for the first time how cold we were. But in spite of that, curious to examine at still closer range the danger we had so narrowly escaped, all hands except those on watch clambered down the starboard gangway to the ice and were soon dispersed among the nearest slopes, climbing the pinnacles, gazing in awe at some of the nearer floebergs standing upended from the pack, and speculating on the results had this or that colossal berg capsized on our vessel.
On the Jeannette, five bells struck. It was 10:30 A.M., the time for serving out the daily allotment of coal for the galley, the heating stoves fore and aft, and the distillers. Regretfully I turned my back on the marvelous vista of ice peaks and canyons stretching before me, and with a frozen nose, bleary eyes, and a beard white with frost from my heavy breathing, started stiffly back to the ship. I wanted to make sure that young Sharvell, the most inexperienced of my four coalheavers, whose turn it was to break out the coal from the bunkers, was not imposed upon either by the guile of that Chinaman, Ah Sam, or the bullying of the bosun into passing out a pound more of our precious fuel than was allotted them by my orders.
I climbed the gangway, crossed the deck to the machinery hatch, and was halfway down the ice-covered iron ladder, just turning on the middle grating to descend into the fireroom, when in that darkness, as if the devil were after him, a man came bounding up the ladder, rammed me in the stomach, and nearly ricocheted me off the grating to the fireroom floor below. I saved myself only by grabbing his arm as he shot by. But to my surprise, instead of stopping, he struggled to tear loose and continue on his way. In the gloom, I peered at him. It was little Sharvell, my coalheaver, apparently badly frightened, his rolling eyeballs and pallid face startlingly white against the smudges of coal dust on his forehead. Well, I was no doubt as white, having just had my wind completely knocked out by his carelessness, and I was mad besides. I tightened my grip on him.
“You clumsy cow,” I gasped, “wait a minute there! What d’ye mean by—”
The next I knew, I was talking to myself. Sharvell, twisting free, was racing up the ladder.
Thoroughly enraged now, I shouted after him,
“Damn you! Come back here!”
But Sharvell did not come back, he kept on climbing. The thought, however, of coming back penetrated his fright enough to loosen his tongue, for he yelled down to me,
“On deck, quick, chief, while you got a chance! The ship’s sinking! The fireroom’s flooded already!”