CHAPTER XXIV
December was notable mainly for continued low temperatures, down around -50° F. We thankfully saw it slip away with nothing to remember it by save a minstrel show given by the crew to mark our second Christmas Eve in the ice. That this show was in any way memorable was mainly owing to my coalheaver, comical little Sharvell, who rigged himself out as an attractive English miss in a sailor-made calico dress, a blond wig (originally the fibers of a manila hawser), white stockings, and low shoes. He provided so fair and alluring an imitation of something no sailor on the Jeannette had for a year and a half been within hail of, that the show was immediately a howling success, hardly needing the double ration of rum served out beforehand to make the audience not too critical of the performance.
Of Christmas Day itself, the less said the better. Our mince pies were made of pemmican this time, the canned mince meat having been all used up our first year’s holiday. In spite of the brandy flavoring, there was probably not one of us who was not wondering with gloomy foreboding as he bit into his pemmican pie what, if anything, that crafty Chinaman, Ah Sam, would have left to substitute for the mince meat for our third Christmas in the pack.
And soon another New Year’s Eve, with more minstrels; a little more rum; a fine speech to the crew by the captain ending with the cheerily-expressed hope that before another New Year’s Eve, we would all be back in our homes, saying to our friends with pardonable pride,
“I, too, was a member of the Jeannette Expedition.”
The only trouble with the speech was that no one, including the captain himself, in his heart really believed it. Then came midnight, with eight bells for the old year, eight bells more for the new one; and we soberly faced the year 1881. 1879 and 1880 had been heartbreakers for us. What had 1881 in store for the Jeannette, there in the Arctic?
To start with, it had January gales, bitter cold, and the usual thunderous uproar of the pack in motion, but fortunately never close enough to endanger us. And wonder of wonders, the discovery that the gales were mostly easterly, so that both by observation and by drift lead, we found that at last we were going (when we went at all) steadily in one direction, northwest, and no longer endlessly zigzagging to and fro like a Flying Dutchman to the northward of Wrangel Land. And to lend a little further zest to this pleasing state of affairs, the month of January closed with the ship in latitude 74° 41′ N., longitude 173° 10′ E., a little farther west and three miles farther north than any of our previous peregrinations with the pack had ever got us. We began to take notice. Perhaps we were at last “going somewhere,” although since the pack was moving with us, our scenery was changing not the slightest.
February arrived, and with it on February 5 came the SUN—a glorious sight to us after ninety-one long days of night! And never was he hailed by sun worshipers in ancient Persian temples with such sincere joy and enthusiasm as by the sadly bleached and frozen array of careworn, fur-clad seamen on the Jeannette. We streamed out on the ice with the temperature at 40° below zero to bask in the light, real daylight! of part of the sun’s disk peeping over the horizon at us at noon. We thanked God for the sun’s return, bringing to us once more the light to shine on our ship, still pumping away at our leak but no more damaged than when he left us in early November.
The rest of February and all of March went by with no signs of letup in our winter cold. A few more gales, seemingly worse than ever, buried the ship in fine snow, leaving only the three masts sticking up out of the white wastes to mark our position, but the winds continued easterly and we continued our northwest drift with our soundings steadily increasing also. Were we at last getting off the Siberian continental shelf into the deeper water of the open Arctic Sea? We hoped so, for deeper water meant greater opportunity for the ocean to break up the pack.
We drifted across the 75th parallel of latitude, for us a red letter event. 75° North! It sounded much better. While not to be compared with the 83° North already attained along the Greenland coasts by other explorers, still it looked promising, and what a change from forever shuttling back and forth between parallels 72° and 74° for twenty weary months!
In other ways, matters in March were worse. Several times, from the screeching of the pack, the cracking of the ice, and the severe shocks to the ship, we feared we were in for a repetition of some of our hair-raising experiences of the first winter, but each time the tumbling floes failed to come near us, and we thankfully heard the distant roarings subside. On top of that, the doctor, who all through the year had hopefully lanced and probed the abscess in Danenhower’s left eye, found himself searching his soul as to whether he should undertake a major operation, but finally in view of all conditions, concluded he dared not. Dan, wan and emaciated from his long confinement, could at least see with one eye, his right, and that eye while weak from sympathetic suffering with its mate, seemed now in less danger of becoming permanently affected. As a result, Dan with his left eye blindfolded and his right heavily shielded by a colored lens, was occasionally allowed to walk over the ship, and even, when the weather was unusually favorable, permitted to grope his way round the ice alongside.
Aside from these matters, March brought us two other unusual episodes to break the monotony of our lives. The first was a bear, a she-bear as it turned out and recently a mother, which facts may have explained matters, for this bear, cornered by the dogs on top of a hummock near the ship, put up such a tremendous fight as we never saw before. The top of that hummock was a mass of flying fur and snarling dogs, the heavens resounding with howls, screeches, and roars, dogs leaping in to attack only to be sent sailing right and left on their backs. Bear and dogs were out for a finish fight—savage teeth and lunging claws made a shambles of the ice on that hummock—how it might have ended was a question, for finally Nindemann, coming up, settled the battle with his rifle.
For us she turned out to be a very expensive bear; when we took stock of casualties, we found one dog, Plug Ugly, dead; another, Prince, ripped open from back to shoulder; three more, Wolf, Tom, and Bingo, with gashed sides and stomachs; while Snoozer (the captain’s favorite) had his mouth considerably lengthened as by a razor, and Smike was badly chewed in two places, not to mention half a dozen other dogs licking minor injuries. Dr. Ambler put in a busy day with thread and needle sewing up the wounded. When it was all over, we had a badly battered pack of dogs who were quite agreeable to crawling quietly off into the snow, by unanimous consent suspending all hostilities among themselves.
The other deviation from monotony was the sudden interest taken by our two Chinamen, Tong Sing and Ah Sam, in flying kites. The steady and continuous east winds no doubt brought to mind their opportunity, and soon Chinese kites in all shapes, fashions, and colors—birds, flies, and dragons—were fluttering in the breeze as tranquilly as if they were on the green banks of the Yang-Tse-Kiang, instead of in the Arctic ice at 40° below. The antics of our cook and steward with their playthings kept the crew, lining the Jeannette’s rail watching them, in an uproar. But so seriously did Sing and Sam take their pastime that when imperative routine sent them back to cabin and galley, instead of winding in their lines, they would tie their kite-strings to whatever was handiest on the lee side, the shrouds, the davits, or the belaying pins, till they could emerge again and cast loose; and the captain believed that had it been necessary, they would cheerfully have torn up their shirts for kite-tails!
April 1 came, bringing with it by the calendar our spring and summer routine, but no particular break in the weather, which on April 16 was still -26° F., much worse than comparable temperatures of the year before; for us, certainly not a hopeful sign.
We soon had another bit of excitement; a few days later for a while we feared that we had lost our entire commissary department. Both Ah Sam and Tong Sing, armed with rifles, in the early afternoon went off hunting on the pack. When by seven at night they had not returned, we became not only hungry but alarmed, and sent out a searching party. At nine o’clock, they met the steward, Charley Tong Sing, coming in alone, to tell a very involved story. A few miles from the ship, as he related it, he and the cook had picked up a bear track and with visions of more fresh bear to work on for dinner, they started eagerly in pursuit, after some miles coming in sight of the bear, which to their joy they found was being worried along by two of our best dogs, Wolf and Prince.
The dogs seeing reenforcements at last coming up in the form of our two Chinamen, and all hunters looking alike to them, promptly brought the bear to a stand by heading him off and snapping at his nose.
Running forward to get in a shot, Charley unfortunately slipped amongst some broken ice, and a piece of it fell on his back, holding him down, or he positively asserted, he would have killed the bear. Thus hors de combat, he lay while the dogs, no doubt thoroughly disgusted at such inexpert support, let the bear get underway again. By the time Ah Sam had managed to pry the ice off Charley and release him, neither bear nor dogs was in sight.
It being now at least six o’clock, both cook and steward came suddenly to the realization that aboard ship, chow was way past due and held a council of war, the upshot of which was that the cook as senior officer present, ordered the steward to return to both cook and serve dinner while he, the cook, kept on to bag the bear. So there, safely back, was Charley Tong Sing, but where was our cook and where were our two best dogs?
De Long, having finally digested (instead of his dinner) this story in excited pidgin English of ice, bears, dogs, and Chinamen, looked at his executive officer in dismay. It was now dark, with considerable wind and drifting snow.
“Shall I send the searching party out again, sir?” asked Chipp.
“What the use?” queried the harassed skipper. “A bear chased by dogs chased by a cook is too pressed for time to steer a proper compass course, so where should we look?”
We waited and worried till midnight, when that fear at least was allayed as Ah Sam, thoroughly exhausted, came stumbling up the gangway, and a more completely demoralized Chinaman you could never find. De Long personally made him drink half a tumblerful of whiskey to bring him round, but he was completely incoherent and began to cry. When at last he was calmed a little, he related how he had continued to chase the bear, which the two dogs to give him a chance, by fierce attacks managed occasionally to stop for a minute or two but never for long enough for him to get within range. The dogs, Prince and Wolf, fighting desperately this way as the bear retreated, were both bleeding. Ah Sam says he followed the bear on a southerly course fifteen miles, determined to get him if he had to chase him all the way to China. Then by a particularly vicious onslaught, the dogs finally succeeded in holding the bear till Ah Sam could run up close enough for a fine shot. Raising his rifle, our cook took careful aim on the bear’s head, and pressed the trigger, when horror of horrors, instead of hurting the bear, the rifle exploded in his hands! His morale completely shattered, poor Ah Sam sat down in the snow and wept, while the bear, still accompanied by Wolf and Prince, amazed no doubt by such weird hunting, but unwilling to give up, moved on over the pack and that was the last he saw of any of them. Still weeping, Ah Sam picked up the remains of his rifle and started home. How he ever found the ship again, he didn’t know; it had taken him, walking continuously, until midnight. And there, indicating it with a hysterical wave of his hand, as proof of this wild story was the treacherous rifle!
We examined it curiously. Ah Sam had not exaggerated—the gun barrel was torn to pieces; only a half length, cracked open, being left still attached to the stock. But to anyone used to firearms, the answer was simple. Ah Sam, in his long chase, must have let the muzzle slip into a snowdrift; the snow freezing solidly in the bore, had plugged it off, with the natural result that when he fired, there being no proper release for the exploding powder, it had promptly blown off the muzzle.
Dr. Ambler examined Ah Sam carefully for wounds; it seemed a miracle one of those flying rifle fragments had not cut his head off. But physically he had escaped unscathed; his demoralization was wholly mental, owing to the way, in his efforts to provide roast bear for dinner, an unkind fate had treated him. Still weeping, poor Ah Sam was led off to his bunk.