CHAPTER XX
Our immediate battle was won, but the war thus opened that 19th of January, 1880, between us and the Arctic Sea for the Jeannette dragged along with varying fortunes till the last day I ever saw her.
Our big steam pump made short work of all the water in the fireroom that was still water. In an hour the room was bare down to ice-coated floors and bilges, with the pump easily keeping ahead of the leakage coming from forward. But the men at the hand pump, optimistically knocked off the minute the steam pump began stroking, were unfortunately not wholly relieved. Despite the fact that we opened wide the gates in the forepeak and the forehold bulkheads to let the water run freely aft to the fireroom pump, the flow through was sluggish, impeded I suppose by having to filter through the coal in the cross bunker. So fifteen minutes out of every hour, the hand pump was manned again to keep down the water level in the forehold, while, sad to contemplate, our weary seamen, between spells at the pump, had to labor in the forehold storerooms breaking out provisions (much of which were already water soaked) and sending them up into the deckhouse to save our food from complete ruin.
It was ten-thirty in the morning when the leak was discovered; it was three p.m. when I finally got steam up and a pump going; but at midnight the whole crew was still at work handling stores. The state we were then in was deplorable beyond description.
Who struck eight bells that night I do not know, for since morning we had had no anchor watch, but someone, Dunbar perhaps, whose seagoing habits were hard to repress, snatched a moment from his task and manned the lanyard. At any rate, as the clear strokes of the bronze bell rang out on that frost-bitten night, De Long, in water up to his knees in the forehold, was recalled to the passage of time. The provisions actually in the water had been broken out; his effort now was to send up all the remainder which rising water might menace. But with the bell echoing in his ears, the captain, looking at the jaded seamen about him, staggering through the water laden with heavy boxes and casks, toiling like mules, came suddenly to the realization that they had only the limited endurance of men and called a halt.
“Knock off, lads,” he said kindly. “If anything more gets wet before morning, it gets wet. Lay up on deck!” And on deck, as the men straggled up the hatch to join the rest of the crew round the hand pump (at the moment unmanned) he ordered Cole to serve out all around two ounces of brandy each. Frozen hands poured it into chilled throats, to be downed eagerly at a gulp—there was not a man who might not have swallowed a whole quart just as eagerly, and probably then still have felt but little warmth in his congealed veins.
At the captain’s order, Cole then piped down—the starboard watch to lay below to their bunks, the port watch for whom there was to be no immediate rest, to man the hand pump as necessary through the remainder of that dreary night, keeping the water in the forehold down below the level of the as yet unshifted stores. The frozen seamen tramped wearily off, some to rest if they could, the others to bend their backs over the bars of the pump, which soon resumed its melancholy clanking.
But neither for me, for the captain, nor for Chipp was there any rest. Immediately I had downed my share of the brandy, I turned to at once, figuring how I might get steam and a steam pump forward to suck directly on the forehold and eliminate altogether the toil over the hand pump which must soon break our men down. I had in my engine room that spare No. 4 Sewell and Cameron pump (which my men and I had so thoughtfully picked up in the dark of the moon at Mare Island before we started). I set to work on a layout for installing it in the deckhouse forward; which task, between designing foundations and sketching out suction and steam lines for it, kept me up the rest of the night. As for Chipp, he was down in the forepeak with Nindemann, endeavoring to stop, or at least to reduce, the leak. The water was pouring in through the innumerable joints in that mass of heavy pine timbers, which stretching from side to side and from keel to berth deck in our bow, filled it for a distance of ten feet abaft the stem. However valuable that pine packing may have been in stiffening our bow for ramming ice, it was now our curse, very effectively preventing us from caulking whatever was sprung in the stem itself. All through the night Nindemann and Chipp labored, stuffing oakum and tallow into the joints of that packing where the jets of water squirted through. It was discouraging work. As fast as their numbed fingers rammed a wad of oakum into a leaking joint and stopped the flow there, water spurted from the joints above. Methodically through the night they worked in that dismal hole with freezing water spraying out over them, following up the leaks, caulking joint after joint, but when at last they got to the top, plugging oakum into the final crack, the water rose still higher and started to pour down their necks from between the ceiling and the deck beams overhead where they could not get to it. They could do no more. At five a.m., each man a mass of ice, they came up, beaten.
Meanwhile, De Long, foreseeing the possibility of such a contingency, had himself put in the rest of the night over the ship’s plans, designing a watertight bulkhead to be built in the forepeak just abaft that packing, so that if we could not stop the leak, we could at least confine the flooding to a small space forward and thus stop all pumping, either by hand or steam.
In the early morning, after twenty-four hours of continuous strain and toil, the three of us met again in the deckhouse, I with my sketches for the pump installation, De Long with his bulkhead plans, and Chipp with the bad news that we had better get both jobs underway at once for he had failed utterly to stop the leak. So we turned to.
I will not go into what we went through the week following—my struggles with frozen lines, improper equipment, and lack of men and tools for such a job. Suffice it to say that after three days I got that auxiliary Sewell pump running forward so that to the intense relief of the deck force, their torture at the hand pumps ended altogether, and I was able to keep the water in the forepeak so low that Sweetman and Nindemann were enabled to start building the bulkhead.
From then on, Nindemann and Sweetman bore the brunt. On these two petty officers, Sweetman, our regular carpenter, and Nindemann, our quartermaster (but almost as good as a carpenter) fell the entire labor of building that bulkhead. In the narrow triangular space in the peak, they toiled hour after hour, day after day, cutting, fitting, and erecting the planking. William Nindemann, a stocky, thickset German, was a perfect horse for work, apparently able to stand anything; but Alfred Sweetman, a tall, spare Englishman, had so little flesh on his ribs that he froze through rather rapidly, and in spite of his objections, had to be dragged up frequently to be thawed out or he would soon have broken down completely. As it was, every four hours both men got a stiff drink of whiskey to keep them limbered up, and as much hot coffee and food in between as they could swallow, which was considerable.
Meanwhile, during all this turmoil and anxiety, the captain was weighed down with the problem of what to do with the blinded Danenhower should the water get away from us, either then or later. To add to his worries, Dunbar, who was also still under the weather from his illness, seemed between that and his efforts to assist, to have aged overnight at least twenty years. It was pathetic to see the old man, looking now positively decrepit, struggling in spite of the captain’s orders to hold up his end alongside husky seamen, fighting with them to help save the ship. And as if to make a complete job of De Long’s mental anguish during that agonizing first day of the leak, Surgeon Ambler was suddenly taken violently ill, and to the captain’s great alarm had to be left in his cabin, practically unattended. Aside from De Long’s natural concern over what might happen to Ambler himself, the effect on the captain’s mind of this prospect of being left without a doctor to look after Danenhower and any others who might collapse in our desperate predicament, can well be imagined. It amazed me that the captain under the combined impact of all these worries and disasters, instead of caving in himself, maintained at least before the men an indomitable appearance, by his actions encouraging them, and with never a word of profanity, urging and cheering them on.
By the end of the ensuing week things showed signs of improvement—I had both steam pumps going, hand pumping was discontinued, Nindemann and Sweetman against terrible odds were making progress on the bulkhead, Dunbar was no worse, and Ambler (whose trouble turned out to be his liver) was under his own care, sufficiently on the mend to be no longer in danger.
Only Danenhower, aside from our leak, remained as a problem. He, instead of getting better, got worse.
The third day of our troubles, while I was still struggling with a frozen steam whistle line through which I was trying to get steam forward to start my Sewell pump, there into the glacial deckhouse beside me came our surgeon, wan and pinched and hardly able to drag one foot after another. I gazed at him startled. He had not been out of his bunk since his illness.
“What’s the matter, brother?” I queried anxiously. “Why aren’t you aft in your berth where you belong? We don’t need help; we’re getting along here beautifully.”
“Where’s the captain?” he asked, ignoring my questions. “I want him right away.”
“Below there,” I replied, pointing down the forepeak hatch. “He’s inspecting the work on the bulkhead. Shall I call him for you, doc?”
Apparently too weak to speak a word more than he had to, Ambler only nodded. A little alarmed, I poked my head down the hatch into the dark peak tank and called out to De Long standing far below on the keelson. He looked up, I beckoned him, and he started cautiously to climb the icy ladder, shortly to be blinking incredulously through his frosty glasses at Ambler, even more astonished than I at seeing him out of bed. Ambler wasted no words in explanations regarding his presence.
“It’s Danenhower, captain. I got up as soon as I could to examine him. His eye’s so much worse today that if I don’t operate, he’ll lose it! So I came looking for you to get your permission first. You know how things stand with us all.”
The captain knew, all right. It was easy to guess, looking into his harassed eyes as Ambler talked, what was going through De Long’s mind—a sick surgeon, poor medical facilities, a leaking ship, and the possibility of having the patient unexpectedly thrust out on that terrible pack to face the rigors of the Arctic, where with even good eyes in imminent peril of freezing in their sockets at 50° below zero, what chance for an eyeball recently sliced open? All this and more besides was plainly enough reflected in the skipper’s woebegone eyes and wrinkling brows. De Long thought it over slowly, then wearily shook his head.
“I can’t give permission, doctor. It’s not Dan’s eye alone; it means his very life if we have to leave the ship soon. And since it’s his life against his eye we’re risking, he ought to have a voice in it. I can’t say yes; I won’t say no. Put it up to Dan; let him decide himself.”
“Aye, aye, sir; I’ll explain it to him.” Dr. Ambler swung about, went feebly aft, leaving the captain and me soberly regarding each other.
“You’re dead right, captain; nobody but Dan should decide. It’s too much of a load for another man to have on his conscience if things go wrong.”
De Long, abstractedly watching Ambler hobbling aft, hardly heard me. Without a word in reply, he turned to the ladder behind him, and with his tall frame sagging inside his parka as if the whole world bore on his bent shoulders, haltingly descended it. I looked after him pityingly. He had brought Dan, a husky, vital young man into the Arctic; now of all times, what a weight to have on his mind as Dan’s life hung in the balance! Unconsciously I groaned as I turned back to thawing out my steam line and I am afraid that my mind wandered considerably for the next hour as I played a steam hose back and forth along that frozen length of iron pipe.
I was still at it, and still not concentrating very well, when Tong Sing’s slant eyes peered at me through the cloud of vapor enveloping my head and he pulled my arm to make sure he had my attention.
“Mister Danenhower likee maybe you see him, chief.”
I shut off my steam hose, nodded to the steward, started aft. If I could help to lighten poor Dan’s burden any, I was glad to try. But what, I wondered, did he want of me—advice or information?
I entered Dan’s room, sidling cautiously between the double set of blankets draping the door to shut out stray light. It was pitch-black inside.
“That you, chief?” came a strained voice through the darkness the minute my foot echoed on the stateroom deck.
“Yes, Dan. What is it?”
“My eye’s in horrible shape, the doctor tells me, chief. If it’s anything like the way it hurts, I guess he understates it. What’s happened to make it worse the last couple of days I don’t know,” he moaned, then added bitterly, “Most likely it’s just worry. How do you think I feel lying here useless, not lending a hand, while the rest of you are killing yourselves trying to stop that leak and save the ship?”
I felt through the blackness for his bunk, then slid my fingers over the blankets till I found his hand.
“Don’t let that get you, Dan,” I begged, giving his huge paw a reassuring squeeze. “We’re making out fine with that leak. As a fact, we got it practically licked already. It wasn’t much trouble.”
“Quit trying to fool me, chief,” pleaded Dan. “It’s no use. Maybe I can’t see, but I can hear! So I know what’s going on around me. As long as I hear that hand pump clanking, things are bad! And with the skipper’s cabin right over my head and yours just across the wardroom and me lying here twenty-four hours a day with nothing to do but listen, don’t you think I know when you turn in? And neither of you’ve turned in for a total of ten minutes in two nights now! Don’t try to explain that away!”
I winced. Dan, in spite of the Stygian darkness in which he lived, had the facts. No use glossing matters over.
“Listen, Dan, I’m not fooling you,” I answered with all the earnestness I could muster. “It’s true we haven’t slept much, but we’re both all right. And while things looked pretty bad at first, for a fact, we got that leak practically licked. Before the day’s over, that hand pump will shut down for good. Now forget us and the ship; let’s get back to Danenhower. What can I do for you, brother?” I gave his palm a friendly caress.
I felt Dan’s invisible hand twitch in mine, then close convulsively on my fingers.
“I’m in a tough spot, Melville. The doctor tells me if he doesn’t operate, I’ll go blind. And if he does, and I have to leave the ship before my eye’s healed and he can strip the bandages, I’ll probably die! And it’s up to me to decide which. Simple, isn’t it, chief?” Danenhower groaned. Had I not kept my lips tightly sealed, I should have groaned also at his pathetic question. With a lump in his throat, he added, “I don’t want to go back blind to my f—,” he choked the merest fraction of a second over the word, then substituting another, I think, hastily finished—“friends, but as much as anybody here I want to get back alive if I can. Honestly, chief, you won’t fool a blind shipmate just to spare his feelings, will you?” He gripped my hand fiercely. “What’re our chances with the ship? I’ve got to know!”
“The leak’s licked, Dan,” I assured him earnestly. “We won’t sink because of that. But about what the ice is going to do to us, your guess is as good as mine. Seeing what she’s fought off so far, I’d back the old Jeannette’s ribs to hold out against the pack for a while yet.”
“Thanks, chief, for your opinion.” Dan pressed my hand once more, then slowly relaxed his grip. “I guess I’ll have to think it over some more before I decide. You’d better go now; sorry to have dragged you so long from your work to worry you over my poor carcass.”
I said nothing, I dared not, fearing that my voice would break. With big Dan stretched out blind and helpless on his bunk, invisible there, to me only a voice and a groping hand in the darkness, I slipped away silently, leaving him to grapple with the choice—to operate or not to operate—possible death in the first case, certain blindness in the second. And with the knowledge that however he chose, the final answer lay, not with him, but with the Arctic ice pack. He must guess what it had in store for the Jeannette with his sight or his life the forfeit if he guessed wrong. I went back to my own trifling problem, thawing out the steam line.
Shortly afterward, Tong Sing came forward again, calling the captain this time, who immediately went aft. Whether Danenhower had decided or whether he was seeking further information, the steward did not know. I worked in suspense for the next hour till De Long returned. One look at his face informed me how Dan had decided.
“Well, brother, when’s the operation?”
“It’s over already, Melville! Successful too, the doctor says. I watched it and helped a bit. And, chief, I hardly know which to admire most—the skill and speed with which Ambler, weak as he was, worked, or the nerve and heroic endurance with which Dan stood it. He’s back in his stateroom now, all bandaged again. God grant the ship doesn’t go out from under us before those bandages are ready to come off!”
Well, that was that. With a somewhat lighter heart, I resumed blowing steam on my frozen line. De Long crawled back into the forepeak to resume his study of the leak.
But my happier frame of mind did not last. If it was not one thing on the Jeannette to drive us to distraction, it was a couple of others. The captain soon squirmed back through the hatch with a long face to join me again beside the deck pump.
“How much coal have we got in our bunkers, now, chief?” he asked.
“Eighty-three tons and a fraction,” I answered promptly. I felt that I knew almost every lump of coal in our bunkers by name, so to speak.
“And what are we burning now?” he continued.
“A ton a day, captain, to run our pumps and for all other purposes, but as soon as that bulkhead’s finished and the leak’s stopped, we ought to get down to 300 pounds again, our old allowance.”
De Long shook his head sadly.
“No, chief, we never will. The way the ship’s built, I see now we’ll never get that bulkhead really tight; she’s going to keep on leaking and we’re going to keep on pumping. But a ton of coal a day’ll ruin us! By April, at that rate, the bunkers’ll be bare. Can’t you do something, anything, to cut down that coal consumption?”
I thought hastily. Our main boiler, designed of course for furnishing steam to propel the ship, was far bigger than necessary just to run a couple of pumps, and consequently it was wasteful of fuel. If pumping, instead of lasting only a few days more, was to be our steady occupation, I ought to get some setup more nearly suited to the job. Before me in the deckhouse was the little Baxter boiler I had rigged for an evaporator. That might run the forward pump. And looking speculatively aft through the deckhouse door, my eye fell on our useless steam cutter, half buried in a mound of snow and ice covering its cradle on the poop. There was a small boiler in that cutter. Perhaps I could remove it, rig it somehow to run a pump in the engine room. And then I might let fires die out under the main boiler again and do the job with less coal.
Briefly I outlined my ideas to the captain, who, willing to clutch at any straw, gave blanket approval to my making anything on the ship over into what I would, so long as it promised to save some coal.
“Good, brother,” I promised. “As soon as I get this pump running and knock off the hand pump, I’ll turn to with the black gang and try to rig up those small boilers so we can shut down that big coal hog. And even if we have to hook up Ah Sam’s teakettle to help out on the steam, we’ll get her shut down; you can lay to that!”
“I’m sure you will, chief,” answered De Long gratefully. “Now is there any way we can help you out with the deck force?”
“Only by plugging away on those leaks, captain. We’re making 3300 gallons of salt water an hour in leakage; every gallon of that you plug off means so much more coal left in the bunkers.”
“I well appreciate that, Melville. Nindemann and his mate are doing what they can with the bulkhead; I’m starting Cole and the deck watch to shoving down ashes and picked felt between the frames and the ceilings in the forepeak to stop the flow of water there. We’ll get something on that leak, I don’t know yet how much, but we’ll never get her tight. I see that now.”
And De Long, looking (though he tried to conceal it) as if that sight were breaking his heart, crawled back again to the freezing forepeak. I felt strongly tempted to seize him by the arm and start him instead for his bunk, but I was afraid he would urge the same on me and I had to get that line thawed and the Sewell pump going forward before I knocked off, so I let him go.