CHAPTER XXIX
When we got underway that night on June 25th, we headed southwest instead of south. Burning in my breast were De Long’s words Nil desperandum! and my faith in him from his faith in me, rose. The ice to the southwest, thank God, Dunbar reported as not so bad as he had found it to the south, though Heaven knows how that could have been for we had to bridge and ferry five times in one mile, and in many places to get our sledges over inescapable hummocks blocking our path, we had to build inclined planes of snow to their crests and other inclines down the lee slopes, then heave our sledges up one slope like Egyptian slaves building the Pyramids, and brace ourselves back to ease them down the other side. We couldn’t even coast down the lee slopes, for then the sledges buried their noses so deeply in the banks at the bottom that extricating them was horrible work.
So like horses (though sometimes seahorses as we plowed through water to our waists) we worked along through the ensuing week, making about a mile and a half a day over the ice. We were all in a bad way from exhaustion, and oddly enough the brilliant sun, cold though it was around 28° F., burned and blistered our faces and added to our general suffering. On top of that a mental trouble became noticeable; the men were grumbling because no news of our position or of our progress had been posted, for they had all seen the captain taking sights and felt that the results ought to be made known. As the week drew along and nothing was said, they began to get suspicious, but none dared ask the captain; when they questioned me, I merely shrugged my shoulders, saying,
“Don’t ask me, boys. I’m only an engineer! Why should I bother with the navigation?”
As for the growling which was plentiful over the shortened rations, I could point out that our progress was slower than originally expected so we must naturally stint ourselves to stretch them out longer, and thus allayed any suspicion on that score.
But De Long had a busy time dodging his other officers, lest they ask embarrassing questions. With Chipp and Danenhower this was not difficult, for Chipp could hardly walk and Danenhower could hardly see. Keeping away from them was easy. Ducking Dunbar was much harder, but since the ice-pilot was ahead laying out the road most of the night, the skipper with some finesse managed to steer the discussions into safer channels on the few occasions when he couldn’t avoid him. Ambler, however, turned out to be a Tartar who from the very nature of his duties the captain couldn’t keep away from. Finally, concluding that with Ambler confidence was better than suspicion, he acquainted him also with the reasons for our sudden change of course, and I must say for the doctor that I think he took it better than I did, for early in the week when he was told, he was more than having his hands full between swinging a pick-ax on the roads and tending his patients, especially Chipp.
Lieutenant Chipp, carried from his sick bed when the ship sank, was in a bad way from exposure and sleeping on the ice, despite the fact that he was the only person allowed to take an extra coat. Even the week’s rest before we started sledging south helped him little and he fainted in his harness the first day out. After that, though hauling no longer on the hospital sledge, he had since barely managed to stagger along with it as it went.
The day we started southwest, so badly off was Chipp that slow as we went that day, he could not hobble well enough to keep his emaciated and pain-racked body up with the hospital sledge and was delaying even its snail-like progress. De Long, bringing up the rear guard, ordered him to climb aboard the sledge and ride. Chipp made no move to get aboard, but instead staggered onward. Without a word, De Long picked him off the ice, laid him gently on his back on the sledge, and ordered briefly,
“You stay there, Chipp, or I’ll hand you a courtmartial for insubordination! You’re delaying our progress when you walk!”
Poor Chipp, broken-hearted at being made a burden for his overladen shipmates to drag, tried to roll off the sledge to the snow, but so weak was he that he could do no more than turn on his face when he stuck, clawing feebly, trying to pull himself off the sledge. Failing even in that, he looked pitifully up at De Long by his side.
“Don’t make them drag me, captain, please! I’m all gone anyway. Take me off!” he begged. “You’d better leave me behind right here!”
“Shut up, Chipp,” ordered De Long abruptly. “You’ll do what I say like everybody else in this outfit! Quit worrying; you’re going to get better. But better or worse, nobody gets left behind while there’s a man alive able to drag him along!”
He motioned to Lauterbach, Alexey, and Danenhower, dragging the sledge.
“Get underway now, men. I’ll help you till I can send someone else.” And with the captain pushing and the others pulling, the sledge started again with the enfeebled Chipp face down on the load, scarcely able to cling to the lashings, weeping bitterly.
We got along. But I might here mention that for every mile of progress over the ice that we made, we had to walk thirteen miles! To advance a boat sledge took the whole working party together; to advance a provision sledge half loaded took half the party, so to get our three boats and four provision sledges (the dogs handled the other one) along one mile meant that seven times under load and six times empty-handed, thirteen times in all, the staggering working party had to traverse that mile of ice. If the edge of the pack should by God’s grace turn out to be no further than a hundred miles from our starting point, still when we reached it we should have tramped thirteen hundred miles over that terrible ice, seven hundred of those miles dragging inhuman loads! If it were twice as far—God help us then!
So we went along, over what Jack Cole, ruefully tugging in the lead harness, called,
“’Tis the rocky road to Dublin, me byes. Yo heave! Shure an’ we should be nearly there by mornin’!” But I knew it would be many a morning yet, if ever, ere Jack raised Dublin or anything like it over that ice horizon.
July 3rd arrived with good enough weather for the captain to get another set of observations of the sun, which on working out, he communicated to me. The new position was in latitude 77° 31′ N., longitude 150° 41′ E., which was to some degree gratifying, for while it was still thirteen miles north of where we left the Jeannette, it was thirteen miles generally southwest of where we were on June 25th, and checked very well with both the course we had been steering and our distance logged over the ice since then, twelve miles. This was cheering, for it seemed to indicate no ice drift at all for the last eight days, and things began to look up. Only thirteen miles more and we would be as far south as when we started sixteen days before! Naturally, while all this cheered De Long, Ambler and myself, the knowledge would have cheered nobody else, so no notice of it was posted and no mention made.
July 4th we celebrated on the ice, without any fireworks or speeches, simply breaking out our small boat flags (the woolen ones only) and, so to speak, dressing ship. De Long was excessively blue all day, for it was the third anniversary of the day in Le Havre, France, when Miss Bennett had christened his ship with her name, Jeannette, and he had listened to many glowing speeches of what was expected of her. Looking at the three small boats which were all that was left of his command made De Long decidedly sick. Had there been only the safety of himself to consider the day his ship went down, I am sure De Long would have gone down with her.
By way of a feast in honor of the day we had our usual short allowance of cold pemmican which we ate thankfully. I may say here that pemmican (which is a mixture made of beef pounded more or less to a powder, mixed with raisins, and then the whole stirred up in boiling fat which when cold is packed in cans) while a highly nutritious and palatable food served in cold slices which we ate like cake, as a steady diet gets infernally tiresome. Alexey on this day, with a naive faith in the white man’s powers, feeling that a holiday called for something better, in all seriousness told the doctor that he would take mutton instead!
At this, Lee, my machinist, who was also in the doctor’s tent, very gravely informed the doctor of the best way to make Rhode Island clam chowder, which he felt was the only proper dish for any July 4th banquet, and the poor doctor, with all this gastronomical advice bringing back recollections of past Independence Day feasts back in old Virginia garnished with everything from savory baked hams to candied sweet potatoes, found his mouth watering so that he lost all interest in his cold pemmican and fled from the tent.
Underway again that evening, we stumbled along as before, heaving, holding back, building ice bridges, ferrying on bobbing floes across the water leads when we did not fall into them. De Long, his mind a little relieved about the drift, spent fewer hours in the rear and most of the night tramping over our route, for the first time beginning to take some notice of individuals and what they were doing. Coming up to one bridging job, where I had a piece of floating ice jammed into a crack some fifteen feet wide while the crew were dragging sledges across it to the southern side, he noticed that Collins, standing at the edge of the gap, was holding the line securing the makeshift bridge in place.
“Mr. Collins,” said the captain icily, “you have many times in disrespectful language informed me that you didn’t ship to be treated as a seaman. I can’t allow you to go home, claiming that I forced you to work as one even to save your own life. Give that rope to one of the men!”
Collins made no move to obey. Instead for perhaps half a minute he stood glaring like a tiger at De Long, till the latter, noting Seaman Dressler close alongside, sternly ordered,
“Mr. Collins, give that rope to Dressler, and don’t let me catch you putting your hand to another line until I order you! You are still under suspension awaiting trial and don’t you forget it!”
Collins, ready to burst with anger, slowly passed over the line and without a word dropped to the rear.
We moved along. Under the continued burning rays of the sun, the snow melted and drained away from the surface, making the going a little easier, and our consumption of food lightened up our loads, still further aiding our speed, but our personnel troubles increased.
Ambler was particularly burdened. Ten days of riding on the sledge and careful medical attention had so built up Chipp that he could walk again, and with that little improvement, he began to nag the doctor to put him off the sicklist and restore him to duty in command of one of the parties. Danenhower also, his physique improved by the enforced exercise he was getting in walking after his long confinement aboard ship, began to make the same demand, though he could hardly see through his one heavily shielded eye. Ambler naturally enough refused both requests. As a result, daily when he came into his tent after having wielded a pick-ax all night long on the roads, and crawled horribly tired into his sleeping bag to rest, it was only to listen to his two blessed invalids exchanging sneering remarks about his medical competence because he would not restore them to duty. Finally, unable to stand it further, he burst out,
“For God’s sake, shut up, both of you! Dan, if you’d obeyed my orders on the ship, one of your eyes would be well now! And you, Chipp, a little while ago were begging us to leave you on the ice to die! Now that you’re both barely able to get yourselves along, you want me to risk other men’s lives by putting them in your charge, and I’ll be damned if I will! Was ever a doctor cursed by two such patients!”
But if his patients aggravated him, his helpers on the road work tried his very soul. In charge of the road-building gang, Ambler had as assistant laborers Lee and Newcomb, and to draw along the sledge with the dinghy which was assigned to him for working in the open leads, seven of such miserable, broken-down dogs that they were worthless for any work on the heavy sledges and only an irritation on his lighter one. But even so, Ambler might philosophically have accepted the situation and kept on as he was, doing most of the work with a pick-ax himself, had it not been for Newcomb. For both the broken-down dogs and Lee with his shaky legs were at least doing their poor best. Quite to the contrary, our naturalist, though fully recovered from his indisposition, infuriated the doctor, himself manfully swinging a pick, by the piddling efforts which he was pleased to pass off as work. Patiently Ambler showed him how to swing a pick on the hummocks; then getting no results from him, sharply ordered him to turn to, only to find Newcomb more interested in pertly answering back than in obeying. For two days Ambler, with his southern temper slowly rising, stood it, merely remarking grimly to me one night,
“If that Yankee chatterbox doesn’t soon do some work instead of answering me back every time I speak to him, he’s going to get some medical attention that’ll astonish him!” I watched them working a little ahead of me that night as I trod back and forth with the sledges. We had only two pick-axes in our whole outfit. Newcomb, at the base of a steep hummock, was using one ax in a pretense of picking at it, while I could see Ambler, standing on its slippery crest, nervously tightening his calloused hands about our other pick-ax handle as if debating whether to swing then on Newcomb’s head or wait till he was a little surer of his footing. While the doctor was in this uncertain frame of mind, Newcomb below him quit picking at the ice altogether, lashed a line to his pick-ax to make it serve as an anchor for something or other, and then, sad to relate, overboard into an open water lead went the precious pick-ax, line and all, a total loss!
In spite of the real tragedy which the loss of that pick-ax meant to us, what happened next made me roar. Ambler’s fingers closed firmly on the handle of our sole remaining ax, apparently determined, poor as his shot now was, to swing and make an end of the gadfly below him; then changing his mind, he leaped from the hummock, stopped only a second to wave the pick in Newcomb’s face while he bellowed,
“You bird-stuffing idiot! If I weren’t afraid of breaking our last ax on your worthless skull, I’d kill you with it!” and dropping the pick on the floe, he ran off to find the captain.
A few minutes later he was back, all smiles, to find Newcomb, instead of manning the last ax, casually scanning the sky for something really important—gulls perhaps.
“It’s all fixed now, Mr. Newcomb,” said Ambler cheerfully. “I offered the captain to trade you for another worthless cur for my sledge, but he couldn’t find one poor enough to make it a fair exchange, so bless his heart, he gave me Seaman Johnson for my road gang and said I could do what I pleased about you. So now you’re fired! Get out of here!”
Newcomb, pert as ever, enquired,
“Discharged, I presume you mean me to infer? How welcome! What am I to do now?”
“Tie your shotgun round your neck for ballast and jump after that pick-ax, if you want to do me a favor!” advised the doctor, fingering the last pick significantly. “Now get out of my way while I work, or there may yet happen what will go down in the log as a most regrettable accident!”