CHAPTER XXII
June 21st came, the longest day in the year. Further south, to ordinary people, that meant more daylight; to us, with daylight twenty-four hours every day, it meant only that the sun stood on the Tropic of Cancer, having reached his most northerly declination. Ruefully we considered that. The sun was as far north as possible, as high in our heavens as he would ever get, though even so, at noon he stood not so high, only about 40° above the horizon. We would never receive his rays any more direct; instead, from now on they would become even more slanting, and less hot as he went south. And we were still held in the ice. Our case for release began to look less hopeful, and we went around that day with cheerless faces. Long afterward, picked out of the Siberian snows, I salvaged the captain’s journal and looking through it was particularly impressed by what he put down for June 21, 1880. So aptly did he express the situation and our feelings of desolation that day, that I repeat it here.
“June 21st, 1880. Monday.
“Discouraging, very. And yet my motto is ‘Hope on, hope ever.’ A very good one it is when one’s surroundings are more natural than ours; but situated as we are it is better in the abstract than in realization. There can be no greater wear and tear on a man’s mind and patience than this life in the pack. The absolute monotony; the unchanging round of hours; the awakening to the same things and the same conditions that one saw just before losing one’s self in sleep; the same faces; the same dogs; the same ice; the same conviction that tomorrow will be exactly the same as today, if not more disagreeable; the absolute impotence to do anything, to go anywhere, or to change one’s situation an iota; the realization that food is being consumed and fuel burned with no valuable result, beyond sustaining life; the knowledge that nothing has been accomplished thus far to save this expedition from being denominated an utter failure; all these things crowd in with irresistible force on my reasoning power each night as I sit down to reflect on the events of the day, and but for some still small voice within me that tells me this can hardly be the ending of all my labor and zeal, I should be tempted to despair.
“All our books are read, our stories related; our games of chess, cards, and checkers long since discontinued. When we assemble in the morning at breakfast, we make daily a fresh start. Any dreams, amusing or peculiar, are related and laughed over. Theories as to whether we shall eventually drift northeast or northwest are brought forward and discussed. Seals’ livers as a change of diet are pronounced a success. The temperature of the morning watch is inquired into, the direction and velocity of the wind, and if it is snowing (as it generally is) we call it a ‘fine summer day.’ After breakfast, we smoke. Chipp gets a sounding and announces a drift east-southeast or southeast, as the case may be. We growl thereat. Dunbar and Alexey go off for seals with as many dogs as do not run away from them en route. The doctor examines Danenhower and Iversen, his two chronic patients. Melville draws a little for this journal, sings a little, and stirs everybody up to a realization that it is daytime. Danenhower (from his stateroom) talks incessantly—on any and all subjects, with or without an audience. The doctor moralizes between observations; I smoke; Mr. Newcomb makes his preparations for dredging specimens; Mr. Collins has not appeared, his usual hour being 12:30 in the afternoon. Meanwhile the men have been set at work; a sled and dogs are dispatched for the day’s snow for washing purposes. The day’s rations are served out to the cook, and then we commence to drift out on the ice to dig ditches, to look at the dogs, calculate the waste in the ice since yesterday, and the probable amount by tomorrow. The dredge is lowered and hauled. I get the sun at meridian, and we go to dinner. After dinner, more smoke, more drawing, more singing, more talk, more ditch and canal-making, more hunting, more dog inspection, and some attempts at napping until four p.m., when we are all around for anything that may turn up. At 5:30 time and azimuth sight, post position in cabin, make chart, go to supper at six, and discuss our drift, and then smoke, talk and general kill-time occupations till ten p.m., when the day is ended. The noise subsides; those who can, go to bed; I write the log and my journal, make the observations for meteorology till midnight. Mr. Collins succeeds me four hours, Chipp him four hours, the doctor next four hours, Mr. Collins next six hours, I next two hours, Melville next two hours, and I end the day again, and so it goes.
“Our meals necessarily have a sameness. Canned meat, salt beef, salt pork, and bear meat have the same taste at one time as another. Each day has its bill of fare, but after varying it for a week we have, of course, to commence over again. Consequently we have it by heart, and know what we are going to get before we sit down at table. Sometimes the steward startles us with a potato salad (potatoes now rotting too fast for our consumption), or a seal’s liver, or a bear’s tongue; but we generally are not disturbed in that way. Our bill of fare is ample and good, our water is absolutely pure, and our fresh bread is something marvelous. Though disappointed day after day we are cheerful and healthy, and—here we are.”
And to all that I can fervently say “Amen!”
June on the whole was chilly and disagreeable. The temperature rarely got above 32° F., and yet in spite of that the ice did keep on wasting, from direct absorption of sunlight, of course. The ship came up somewhat through the softening ice to a lighter draft, owing to our considerable consumption of coal and stores since late November when we were frozen in after our transit of the ice-canal. But as an offset to this cheering rise, she heeled gradually more to starboard, adding to our discomfort.
Meanwhile, De Long kept Dunbar, who naturally was a good walker, scouting far and wide over the pack looking for open leads, which might promise a break-up of the pack and a chance of escape through one of them. June 28th, Dunbar, duck-hunting in the dinghy in a little lead about a mile from the ship, came back in the late afternoon with thirteen ducks, but with what was far more exciting, the news that the lead had suddenly opened up, that he had followed it (open here and there to a width of half a mile) at least fifteen miles before turning round. And from there it still stretched northward as far as he could see!
De Long was immediately all excitement. If only we could get the Jeannette across that single mile of solid ice between, there was no telling how far north we might go along that lead! He dragged Chipp into his cabin and went over with him the possibilities of blasting out the intermediate ice. While Chipp was calculating how far our supply of gunpowder would take us, De Long, eager to size up the situation on the spot, hastily departed to examine the lead for himself.
About midnight, he came back into the cabin, tossed his parka onto the table. Chipp, surrounded by a sea of papers containing his computations on the explosive powers of gunpowder, handed the captain a sheet containing his conclusions. De Long pushed it aside without even a glance.
“Never mind, Chipp, we won’t need it. I got there just in time to watch that lead close up so tight you can’t get a toothpick into it now! At least I had the melancholy satisfaction of realizing that if the Jeannette had been there, she would in all probability have been in for a very fine squeezing!”
And so June ended. We were still in the ice. Danenhower, thin and bleached, was worse. Iversen seemed to be improved; while still occasionally hysterical, his delusions of mutiny were no longer obvious.
July came and went. We dressed ship on July 4 in a thick fog and a chilling mist. The flags came down at midnight (there was no sunset) all covered with frost. Rain, mist, and fog were general. Our hopes for what the summer sun would do for us began to fade. And even the few glimpses we got of the sun, instead of cheering the captain up, further irritated him. For De Long being now navigator and having finally after days of delay got a shot at the sun on meridian for latitude, hopeful that the drift had carried us north, glanced at his sextant only to exclaim in anguish,
“Look at that altitude! All the sun shows me is how much closer I’m getting to the South instead of to the North Pole! If ever a man had justification for profanity, this southerly drift is it! The Bible says that Job had many trials and tribulations which he bore with wonderful patience, but I’ll bet he was never caught in pack ice! Nor drifted south when the wind was blowing north! But then Job’s may have been an ante-glacial period!” De Long picked up his pipe and nearly bit the stem in half. But a puff or two of tobacco partly, at least, restored his equanimity. Putting his sextant back in its case, he remarked to Chipp, also engaged in shooting the sun,
“I suppose we might as well look at it philosophically. As Jack says, ‘It’s all in a cruise, boys; the more days, the more dollars!’”
July ended, and we were still in the ice. Such a miserable month we were glad to be rid of.
August opened. Looking back over two thirds of the spent summer, with the highest temperature only 38° F. on the hottest day, all hands began to despair. So also, I think, did the captain, for he changed the schedule for taking meteorological observations, requiring them only once every three hours instead of hourly.
We came to the middle of the month, with the only change in our condition an increase in our heel to 7-1/2°, a change indeed in something, but not an improvement. We began to get morose—summer was fast fading, we were not released, and our hopes of doing anything in 1880 or in any succeeding year were vanishing into space. I tried to cheer the mess up by singing (if I say it myself, for an engineer I have a very good voice), Irish songs and ditties having been my specialty since early in my Civil War days on blockade. Whether I cheered up anyone except myself with the sound of my voice, I do not know, but I did get some sullen looks for my efforts from Collins, who being Irish himself may have thought I failed to do justice to the songs of his native land. Collins (who also imagined he could sing) reciprocated by regaling us with melodies from Pinafore, then only two years old, but I thought he did the English far more violence than I did the Irish. In this conclusion, I have as independent evidence the reactions of Newcomb, who, whenever I sang in the cabin, continued reading wholly oblivious of me, but whenever Collins opened up on Pinafore, immediately closed his book and remembered that he had a gull or a seal that required stuffing.
As August dragged along, the little pools of water covering the floes round about the ship now began to give us real cause for depression by freezing over at night with a skin of ice which failed to melt until the next noon. When that commenced, what chance was left for the sun to have any effect on floes still thirty and more feet in thickness?
And to add to our woes, we found that as a result of our southerly and easterly drifting, we had been steadily going backward. We were much closer to our starting point, Herald Island, in late August than we had been in early May. A whole summer’s drifting in the pack, and for a Polar Expedition, we had got worse than nowhere!
Meanwhile, the wearing days crawled by and we chafed at our impotence—well, well-equipped and eager to do something, we lay idle. I could have chewed nails for a change; our captain was even more ambitious—entering his cabin one evening with a sketch for his journal, he looked at me and asked abruptly,
“Know Hamlet, chief? No? Well, for something to do, like Hamlet I can say,
“‘Wouldst drink up eisel? Eat a crocodile? I’ll do it!’
“And so I would, chief, if there were any eisel and a few crocodiles in our stores, and by so doing I could change our position to one of usefulness. Well, what have you got there for my journal? Another sketch of this eternal ice?”
August 31st, the last day of summer, came and went. We were still fast in the pack. As a confirmation that summer was gone, we saw again that evening for the first time in months a faint aurora in the sky. De Long climbed to the crow’s-nest with a telescope, took a look around. A desert of ice in all directions, nothing but ice, ice, ice! He came down from aloft, all hope of release gone. Calling the carpenter, he ordered him to commence preparing our portable deckhouse for re-erection. Sending for me, he asked me to accompany him on a tour of the bunkers, to reassure himself, no doubt, on the coal question. Together, lighting our way with oil torches, we clambered through the dusty bunkers, the captain checking by eye my statements of the quantity in each one. Coming out, De Long musing over the figures, declared feelingly,
“God forbid anything happens to make us go back to steam pumping. Only fifty-three tons of coal—an equal weight in diamonds would not tempt me to exchange! For that coal, chief, has got to last us through another winter in the pack!”
Only another winter? What reason, I wondered, had he for supposing the end of a second winter would find us any closer to release? But the pack had far from exhausted its versatility, as I soon enough found out.