CHAPTER XXI
January dragged away, followed in dreary succession by February, March, and April, and the Jeannette drifting aimlessly with the pack, was still solidly frozen in. Our lives were only a wearing repetition of what had gone before—fierce cold, alarms, the roaring and tumbling of the ice pack, tremendous squeezes and pressures from the floes, and night and day the wheezing of the steam pumps, pumping, forever pumping. It seemed almost a reasonable supposition to conclude that we must have the whole Arctic Ocean nearly pumped dry to judge by the length of time we had been at it and by the huge masses of ice banked up against our bulwarks and spreading out over the floes where the streams of sea water flowing from our scuppers had frozen.
A few minor triumphs and reliefs we had, but not many. In late January the sun came back over the horizon for the first time in seventy-one days, to reveal that we had all bleached strangely white in the long Arctic darkness. On the mechanical side, I had succeeded, after many heartbreaking disappointments, in supplanting the main boiler with the two little ones; and that, aided by the never ending efforts of Nindemann in plugging leaks (which had cut the hourly flow nearly in half), had resulted in gradually reducing our coal consumption to only a quarter of a ton a day. We shot a few bears and a few seals, which gave a welcome variety to our diet of salt beef and tasteless canned meat; we even had hopes of knocking down some birds but there we were disappointed.
“No, Melville,” the captain gravely rebuked me, when empty-handed I returned to the ship after a February tramp over the floes and pushed my shotgun disgustedly into the rack, “birds have more sense than men. No bird with a well-regulated mind would possibly trust himself out in this temperature.”
On the debit side, the temperatures reached unbelievable depths. 57° below zero was recorded by our thermometers (the spirit ones, for the mercurial bulbs froze solidly at around -40°). The pack ice reached thicknesses of thirty-five and forty feet below the water where underrunning floes, freezing together, consolidated into a kind of glacial layer cake. Contemplation of these formations, measurable whenever the floes near us cracked apart, gave a gloomy aspect to the ship’s chances of ever getting free of the pack. And the irregular and formidable surface of the pack also gave us cause for thought, now that in the growing daylight we could see in what state the upheaval of January 19th had left the ice around us. Sledging across the pack was impossible; as soon might one think of getting from the Bronx to Brooklyn by dragging a team of dogs and a sledge over the Manhattan housetops. Here and there, conditions were even worse. Sharvell, with the impressionability of youth, came in from an exploring trip with eyes popping to tell me,
“Say, chief, five miles north o’ ’ere, the ice is standing in mountains ’igher nor our mast’eads!”
“Yes, Sharvell, it’s quite likely.”
“Shall I tell the skipper, sir, or will you?” he asked anxiously.
“Why bother him about it?”
“If ’e knew, it’d save work, sir. ’E’d quit ’aving the bug’unter clean an’ mount that big walrus ’ead with the tusks that ’e’s so busy fixing up. ’Cause when that ice gets to us, sir, we’re through, an’ it’ll be a terrible lot o’ work for us sailors dragging that ’eavy walrus ’ead over the pack. ’E better quit now, an’ ’e will, sir, when I tells ’im abaht them mountains of ice!”
But I told Sharvell to forget it, for I doubted that with all his other worries, the captain would be much exercised over mountains five miles off.
Aside from the aspect of the ice, we had troubles closer home. Especially forward in the deckhouse and crew spaces, the inside of the ship which now we had to keep above the freezing point to save our pumps from damage, was damp and disagreeable beyond expression, with moisture condensing on all cold surfaces and dripping from the beams into the men’s bunks.
Finally to deepen our gloom, Danenhower failed to respond favorably to treatment, and the doctor had to perform several more operations on his eye, coming at last to the conclusion that Dan must, till we escaped from the ice, remain a chronic invalid confined in darkness to his cabin, with no great hope of saving his sight even should he then get back to happier surroundings and decent hospital facilities.
Oddly enough through all this, after the first week’s struggle with the leak, we continued our scientific and meteorological observations. The captain clung to that routine as to a lifeline, which perhaps to him mentally it was, constituting his solitary claim to conducting a scientific expedition. For of explorations and geographical discoveries there were none; on the contrary instead of a steady drift northward which might uncover new lands or at least get us to higher latitudes, we shuffled aimlessly about with the pack, occasionally drifting northward for some weeks to De Long’s obvious delight, only to have the drift then reversed and to his intense depression of spirits, to turn out some clear morning to find himself gazing once again across the pack at the familiar mountainous outline of the north side of distant Wrangel Land. But after March, even this sight of far-off land, depressing as it was from its associations, was denied us, for as the season advanced the pack, still zigzagging over the polar sea as aimlessly as ever, failed to get quite so far south again; from that time on we saw land no more and the world for us became just one vast unbroken field of broken ice.
Only one hope kept us going. No one really knew what happened to that moving pack in summer time—no one before us had ever wintered in it, involuntarily or otherwise. So we lived on in the expectation that as the days lengthened and the thermometer rose above zero, summer weather and the long days under the midnight sun would sufficiently melt the ice to break up the pack, and if by then we still had any coal left, permit us to do some little exploring northward before with bare bunkers we loosed our sails and in the early fall laid our course homeward.
In that spirit then, we cheerfully greeted the advent of May, and as if to justify our confidence, May Day burst upon us with gorgeous weather—no clouds, and glistening at us across the ice a brilliant sun which even at midnight still peeped pleasantly over the horizon, and a temperature which in mid-afternoon reached the unbelievable height of 30° F., only two degrees below freezing. We were positively hot. All hands (except of course Danenhower) turned out on the ice to bask in the sunshine, with the queer result that many of us came back aboard with our complexions sunburned to a fiery red and unable at first to believe it. Our hopes started to mount; if the sun could do that to such weather-beaten frost-bitten hides as ours, what would it not do to the ice imprisoning us? Release was seemingly just around the corner of the calendar—by June 1 at the outside, say.
But meanwhile, awaiting that happy event, the captain prudently ordered (lest more casualties go to join the luckless Danenhower) that snow goggles be worn on all occasions by all hands except when actually below on the ship.
So May moved along, made notable mainly by a positive flood of bears, which daily kept us on the jump. The bears, ravenous with hunger after a long winter, were attracted to the Jeannette by mingled scents, mainly canine, which to their untutored nostrils probably meant food. But we had long since lost any fear of ice bears and the dogs apparently never had any, so the cry of—
“Bear ho!”
was the immediate signal for whoever had the captain’s permission (which now meant practically anyone off watch) to seize a rifle from the rack placed conveniently at the gangway, and be off. We became so contemptuous of the bears, that we chased them even with revolvers, and if necessity had arisen, would no doubt have done so barehanded, for I have never seen a bear which would rush a man. Except when brought to by the dogs, with a man in sight all that ever interested the bear was to get behind the nearest hummock or into an open lead, where swimming with only his nose above water, he could escape the rain of bullets from our Remingtons and Winchesters. The vitality of the bears was amazing. Unless filled so full of lead that the mere weight of the bullets as ballast slowed them down enough for the dogs to bring them to a stand where a close range shot into the brain finished them off, they usually got away.
We had queer experiences with the bears. On one occasion, exploring one of the narrow leads in the pack about a quarter of a mile from the ship, the captain was sculling unconcernedly along in the dinghy when he found himself facing an ice bear not a hundred feet off. Wholly unarmed, De Long regarded the bear with dismay. He could not run, for over broken ice he was no match in speed for Ursus; besides he was in a boat, which prevented running away, for while the water was an obstacle to him, to the bear it was merely the most convenient means of transportation. Inquisitively the bear advanced; De Long, unable to do anything else, sat and stared, trying out the power of the human eye as a defence. The bear, only fifty feet off, still approached, sniffing curiously and De Long, short-sighted though he was, said he could clearly make out where the short hairs ended at the edge of the bear’s beautiful black nose. The captain quickly concluded there was nothing in hypnosis as applied to polar bears. So gripping his oar, prepared to fend off the bear should he approach closer to the boat, he sang out lustily,
“Ship there! A bear! A bear!”
At this, the bear, more puzzled than ever, sat down on the ice to contemplate De Long and was still seriously thinking him over, trying to make him out, when a pack of dogs hove into sight from under the Jeannette’s stern, followed by several seamen, and off lumbered the bear.
So long as we had the Jeannette under us, the plethora of bears meant at most only a break in the monotony of our existence and a welcome change in our salt beef diet. Should we have to abandon ship, however, they offered a ray of hope. For convinced now that we could never drag across the upheaved pack pemmican enough to keep us from starvation till we reached Siberia, we looked on the bears as a possible source of fresh meat on the hoof which we might with a little luck knock over as we went along and thus keep life in our bodies.
The only other springtime event to compare with the bears was a brilliant idea which struck De Long.
While he never discussed his family with me or with anyone, De Long, alone among the ship’s company which had sailed from San Francisco, had a wife and a child to occupy his thoughts. I have no doubt that frequently in the dreary months when I saw him, as I did one morning, abstractedly gazing out over the pack, his mind was far away from us, perhaps dwelling on that moment in the tossing whaleboat off the Golden Gate when Emma De Long had to the last possible instant clung round his neck in her farewell kiss. Drifting backward down the years from that, his thoughts on this morning evidently got to the days of his youth as an ensign aboard the U.S.S. Canandaigua. While cruising through the Channel ports, he had amongst the dikes and mills of northern France and Holland courted Emma Wotton, and as he thought of that landscape, so different from the ice-fields round the Jeannette, his keen mind saw a connection. He waved me to join him.
“Melville,” he asked, obviously off again on the one ever-present topic, coal, “what’ll you do to keep your pumps going when the coal’s all gone?”
I pointed aloft.
“Cut down our masts and spars and burn them,” I replied. “They’re useless anyway.”
“And when they’ve gone too, what then?” De Long’s clear blue eyes gazed at me fixedly, as if he had me there.
“Break up our bulwarks, the deckhouses, and the main deck, and shove those into the fires too. They’ll all burn fine.”
“And after that, what?” he asked relentlessly, puffing away on his ever-present pipe.
“I guess then we abandon what’s left of the Jeannette and take to the ice, captain. I’ll admit I can’t keep any boilers going while I’m cutting the foundations out from under them for firewood. When the main deck’s gone, I guess we’re through.”
De Long looked gravely at me through his glasses, bent his head a little to shield his pipe from the cold wind sweeping the deck, and irrelevantly asked me,
“Melville, have you ever been in Holland?”
“Why—yes,” I mumbled, taken aback at his sudden change of front. “I guess it’s tulip time there now, captain. And quite a different scene from all this ice that’s sprouting round us in the merry springtime here. Why?”
“I was there in the springtime once also,” parried the captain. “Lovely scene. I just wonder if we couldn’t make the scenery round here resemble Holland in the springtime a little better. You remember the tulips, eh, chief? Do you by any chance remember anything else in the Dutch landscape—some windmills, for instance?”
And then a great light dawned on me. I looked at my captain with added respect. What did the Dutch have all those thousands of windmills for except to meet the same problem we faced—to pump water!
“Ah, you see it, do you?” asked the captain, gratified. “Melville, can you rig up a windmill here to run our pumps?”
“Can do, brother!” I exclaimed enthusiastically. “I’ll turn to on it right away; before long you’ll see a windmill going round here in the Arctic to beat the Dutch!”
This job was rather intricate for our facilities, windmills not being exactly in a sailor’s line, but aided by Lee, machinist, and Dressler, blacksmith, we contrived it. Lee especially was a great help, which might seem somewhat surprising, for having been shot through both hips in the second day’s fighting while helping Grant drive back Beauregard at Shiloh, Lee was rather slow and unsteady on his feet. But there was nothing the matter with his hands and he soon had Dressler’s crude forgings turned up in our lathe into a crankshaft and connecting rods, so that by the time Sweetman had made the wooden arms of the windmill, we were ready to go. Paradoxically, the one thing which on a ship we were best prepared to furnish, the sails themselves, failed to work well on our first trial. The mill occasionally hung on the center because the heavy canvas sails sagged too much to hold the wind. Chipp, responsible for making the sails, watched them in pained silence, but having no canvas more suitable, soon rectified the matter in a novel manner. Sending Noros and Erichsen down on the ice, he had them collect some dozens of the empty meat cans littering the ice floes, and beating these out flat, he laced them together with wire, and soon had our mill-arms covered with fine metal sails! Impelled by these, our windmill, mounted on the starboard wing of the bridge, was soon rotating merrily and, connected by a special rig to a bilge pump in the fireroom, was pushing overboard in grand style all our leakage. So well did it work, that we quickly were enabled to shut down the steam cutter’s boiler, leaving only the little Baxter boiler going for distilling and in case the wind died down (which in the pack it rarely did) for unavoidable steam pumping.
So to our intense relief as spring drew on to its close, we got our coal consumption down again to 300 pounds a day, as it had been before that leak started to chew into our bunkers in such ravenous fashion. Which was a very fortunate thing for us, for with only sixty tons of coal left to go on, our days on the Jeannette would indeed otherwise have been numbered. Not least among the blessings which resulted was the improved cheerfulness of De Long at this success. He once more began to have some hope that when the ice broke up, we would have coal enough to do some exploring, so that he might again without too much shame on his return face our sponsor’s sister, Miss Bennett, the ship’s godmother, the “Jeannette” whose name we bore.
As the long days dragged out under the May sun, we eagerly watched the floes, noting with satisfaction the increasing number of rivulets coursing toward every crack and hole in the pack, and how under the intense sunlight, the cinders and ashes about the ship fairly seemed to burrow their way down into the snow. (Watching the striking manner in which everything dark soaked up the sunshine and settled, De Long half-humorously suggested that we all take a day off and pray for some miracle which might make all the snow and ice about us black and thus hasten its disappearance.)
And so we came to May 31, to our discouragement still held in the unbroken pack which, as measurements close about us showed, was still four feet thick. We decided to defer the day of our liberation to July 1, giving the sun another month to work on the ice. But to damp our spirits, June 1, the first day of summer as we reckoned it, opened in a snow storm which continued through June 2 also, accompanied by a heavy gale which drove the snow, soft and mushy now, along in horizontal sheets.
When the snow finally ceased, the captain, optimistic again, began to prepare for the day of our release. First of all, fires were discontinued in the stoves fore and aft, thus saving a little coal. Next, all hands and the cook were turned to on knocking down our portable deckhouse and clearing the main deck, so that looking like a ship once more, we might be able to spread sails and get underway when the wind served (provided, of course, the ice let go of us first). Several days’ hard work accomplished this task, and with the topside shipshape again, we needed only to hang our rudder to be fully ready to go, but here again we had to wait on the ice which still clung solidly to our rudder post.
Below, I got my machinery and boilers in shape to move. With no fear of dangerous temperatures any more, I connected up all piping, moved the engines by hand, secured all cylinder heads, and filled both boilers to the steaming level (through the sea cocks this time), and started generally to clean up the machinery spaces. For a small black gang, only six all told, this was slow work, so to avoid being caught with the pack suddenly parting and my machinery not ready to turn over, I pushed my gang hard. Consequently I was doubly annoyed when I noted several times that Nelse Iversen, one of my coalheavers and ordinarily a willing enough worker, showed decided signs of soldiering whenever my back was turned. I cautioned Bartlett who had charge of his watch, to get Iversen started, but after another hour, seeing he still tended to hide in the bunkers rather than scale rusty floorplates, I yanked Iversen up sharply for it.
“Come to now, Nelse, and get behind that scaling hammer! Or will it take a little extra duty to keep you out of that bunker and on the job?”
Iversen, now that I got a closer look at him, looked queer in the eyes, so when, his slow mind having digested my statement, he finally answered, I was quite ready to believe him.
“Ay tank, chief, Ay work so hard Ay can. Ay ban sick man. My belly, she ache bad!”
“So, eh?” I said sympathetically. “Why didn’t you tell Bartlett that an hour ago? Go up and see the doctor right away. What ails you, diarrhoea again?”
“No; de odder way.”
“Constipation, huh? Well, you’re lucky. On this bucket, that’s a better thing to have than diarrhoea any day. Go up to the doctor and get some castor oil. And don’t come back till it’s quit working.” I eased him over toward the fireroom ladder, and started him on his way toward Ambler.
But after a day had elapsed, I began to wonder whether the doctor’s castor oil had somehow been affected by the cold or whether my coalheaver had evaded swallowing his dose, for Iversen still showed the same tendency to shirk work and hide in the bunkers in spite of Bartlett’s frequently breaking him out of there. So taking Iversen in hand myself, I escorted him up to the dispensary to see personally that there was no foolishness about his taking his medicine, and calling Tong Sing, I sent him off to find the doctor who was out on the ice.
The minute Tong Sing disappeared, Iversen poked his head out the door, looked both ways quickly, then as if satisfied, hastily shut the door and to my complete bewilderment, stealthily approached me, cupped his hands over my ear and whispered,
“Chief, Ay no ban sick, Ay ban vatched! Dere ban mutiny on foot here!”
Mutiny? I stared at Iversen incredulously. The men were having a veritable hell in their life there in the Arctic, but what could they gain by mutiny? And who would lead it? For an instant I had a vague suspicion, but I resolutely put that out of my mind. Preposterous! I looked at Iversen intently. But there could be no doubt as to his sincerity. He was serious, all right.
I pushed him down into a chair, ordered sharply,
“Wait there, Nelse! I’ll get the captain!” and closing the door behind me, I shot out of the dispensary and across the cabin to the captain’s stateroom forward in the poop. Fortunately De Long was there, writing in his journal.
“Come with me, skipper. I want you to hear something. Right away!”
Puzzled unquestionably at my haste, De Long dropped his pen, put down his meerschaum pipe, stretched his six-foot frame up out of his chair, and reached for his parka.
“No, you don’t need that, captain; just as you are. We’re only going to the dispensary.”
“Oh, all right. Who’s hurt now?”
“Nobody, but come along!” I started back for the dispensary with De Long following, puffing leisurely at the retrieved meerschaum which was his greatest comfort and his inseparable companion.
Iversen started up from his chair as we entered, saluted the captain, and again swiftly scanned the cabin outside before he closed the door.
“Now, Nelse, tell the captain,” I said briefly.
Once more Iversen cupped his hands, whispered into the captain’s ear. De Long’s jaw dropped abruptly. His pipe fell from his mouth and only by a quick lunge did I save it from hitting the deck. But insensible to that, De Long, immovable, only stared at Iversen, searching his face as I had done. Finally he shook his head, muttered,
“It just can’t be! Where’d you get this, Iversen?”
“Yah, cap’n. Ay tal you it ban yust lak Ay say! Ay ban asked to yoin. Ay no say, Yah; Ay no say, No; so Ay ban vatched clost. Dey kill me for’ard if Ay tal!”
De Long looked at me. I handed him back his pipe, which, wholly unconscious of his action, he took.
“What do you make of this, chief? It looks serious if Iversen’s right!”
“Sounds crazy to me, but it might be so. Depends on who’s in it and how many. The men are all armed, you know. The rifle rack’s right at the gangway. Anybody can help himself, and lots of ’em are out on the ice, guns in hand this minute. But why they should want to mutiny, I can’t see, unless the ice has affected their minds.”
Shocked at Iversen’s report; impressed by the gravity of the situation if Iversen were right, for there already with weapons in their hands were the mutineers, the captain still looked skeptically at my grimy coalheaver. Why should his crew mutiny? But on the other hand, what had Iversen to gain by lying about it? And Iversen, a steady man, always carefully attentive to his duty, was just the type of seaman who might be trusted to stand with his captain at all hazards.
“Well,” said De Long grimly, “let’s get into this! Now, Iversen, who’s behind it?”
But there the captain ran into a stone wall. Iversen, very nervous now, became evasive, dodged the questions, and apparently in mortal fear of his life, refused to name the mutineers, repeating only over and over again how, for two days, he had been closely watched. Threats, promises, got nothing more out of him. Finally the captain, baffled, took a new tack.
“See here, Iversen, they can’t hurt you, and nobody else’ll get hurt either if you tell. I can manage it then. There are eight officers here; surely there are some of the crew will join us! I’ll get all the mutineers, if you’ll name them, out on the ice on some pretext. I don’t care if they do go armed. Then we’ll haul in the gangway and from behind the bulwarks we can hold the ship! A couple of nights freezing on that ice will bring them round, all right! They’ll come cringing back, hands in the air, begging to be taken aboard. Out with it now! Who’s the leader?”
Iversen, more nervous than ever, shuffled to the door, opened it a crack to assure himself no one was eavesdropping outside, then faced us, and tremblingly blurted out,
“Sharvell!”
An amazing change came over the captain. He dropped into a chair, roared with laughter.
“Sharvell? That’s rich! That lad? He’s not even a man yet! Nobody’d follow him in a mutiny any more than a child! Hah, hah!” But abruptly he stopped laughing, for Iversen was now weeping hysterically, tears running down his coal-stained cheeks. Soberly De Long looked at him, then took me by the sleeve, pulled me aside a little, and whispered,
“I guess the mutiny on the Jeannette’s over, chief. I thought there was somebody crazy in it, and now I know who. Send for the doctor, quick! I’ll stay here with Iversen.” He started to light his pipe again.
“I’ve already got the steward out looking for him, captain,” I replied. “Ambler ought to be here any minute. And I guess you’re dead right, brother! Poor Iversen!”
It was so. Immediately Surgeon Ambler came aboard, we turned the weeping coalheaver over to him. An hour later, when, after a careful examination, Iversen under Cole’s surveillance had been led forward, he confirmed our fears. Iversen, if not already insane, was trembling on the border of it. Only observation over several days could prove which. De Long, much relieved at first by freedom from dread of any mutiny, was nevertheless badly enough depressed by the doctor’s report.
“First a blinded officer,” he muttered, “now a crazy seaman! What’ll this ice do to us next?”