Hell on ice

by Edward Ellsberg

CHAPTER XXVI

On June 5, 1881, a Sunday morning, we got back to the Jeannette. In the early afternoon, in honor of our safe return. De Long with his eyes hardly visible through his bandages, conducted a Thanksgiving Service, attended only by Ambler and myself, for the other two usual members of the congregation, Chipp and Dunbar, were both on the sicklist. In further celebration of the event, the captain ordered in the evening the issue of a double ration of whiskey forward, which ceremony conducted in the forecastle by Jack Cole drew a somewhat larger attendance, I believe.

Our sicklist was now considerable—Danenhower, Chipp, Newcomb, Dunbar, and Alexey, with the skipper himself really belonging there, but nevertheless permitted by the doctor to be up so long as he stayed off the ice for a few days till his cut had a fair chance to start to heal. Chipp, Newcomb, and Alexey were still badly off from lead poisoning, but Tong Sing, our steward, had recovered sufficiently to go back on duty and was now mainly engaged in tending the sick when not actually serving.

From this unsatisfactory state of our personnel, I turned my attention after a week’s absence once more to the Jeannette and what was going on round her. Henrietta Island was rapidly dropping abaft our beam as we drifted westward past its northern side and it was evident that we would soon drop it out of sight. Jeannette Island had already vanished from our world.

But the action of the ice about us attracted most attention. Not since November, 1879, had we seen so much moving ice near the ship, the effect undoubtedly of nearby Henrietta Island. The day after my return, we found our floe reduced to an ice island about a mile one way and half of that the other, with ourselves about a hundred yards from the western edge, while all about us was a tumbling procession of floebergs, shrieking and howling as they rolled past. Leads opened and closed endlessly in the near distance with ridges of broken floes shooting thirty feet above the pack. The roaring of the breaking floes sounded like continuous thunder. And in all this turmoil our ice island with the Jeannette in it moved majestically along. Meanwhile we from our decks regarded it, thankful that our floe was not breaking up to crush our ship and leave our heavy boats and sledges to the mercies of that chaos, a half mile of which with a sledge lightly loaded only, off Henrietta Island we had barely managed to survive.

Another day passed, leaving the island in our wake. The moving ice closed up again with long rows of piled up floes all about us, one huge ridge of blocks seven to eight feet thick riding the pack not a hundred and fifty yards away from our bulwarks. And yet one more day and the captain got a sight, showing we were going due west at a fair rate, which if continued, unless we turned north, would ultimately bring us out into the Atlantic, though the chances seemed better for a resumption of our northwest drift toward the Pole. But toward either of these, now that we had some discoveries to add to the world’s charts, we looked forward hopefully. At any rate, since we had to leave the matter to the pack, for the present our motto was obviously “Westward ho!”

June 10th came with our drift still steadily westward, clear weather, and the temperature about 25° F., well below freezing though above zero, which for us made it very pleasant weather. Alexey came off the sicklist, and so also did Dunbar; leaving only Chipp as a bedridden case, and Newcomb, up but acting as if he were exceedingly miserable, which I guess he was. Danenhower, permanently on the sicklist, was allowed on deck an hour a day for exercise that the doctor hoped would gradually restore his health and save his one good eye, which now showed some signs of getting over its sympathetic inflammation. During these hourly periods, Dan was sternly ordered to keep in the shade and wear his almost opaque shield, but unfortunately our overbold navigator stepped out into the sun and pulled aside the glass, attempting to get at least one decent look around. Instead he had an instant relapse of his inflamed eye which nearly drove both Ambler and the captain wild.

Fortunately, the captain had had all his bandages save one small one removed from his injured skull by now, or I think he would have ripped them off in his attempts to tear his hair over the results of Dan’s reckless disobedience.

Except for this unfortunate mishap, June 10 passed away pleasantly enough. With no more thought than that it was just another day in the pack, most of us turned in at 10 P.M., concerned only about whether our drift next day would continue west or change to northwest. But I, having the watch from 9 P.M. to midnight, remained on deck. At 11 P.M., I was disturbed by a succession of heavy shocks to the ship which increased in frequency till as midnight approached there was such a thumping and thundering of cracking ice about us and so much reverberation as the shocks drummed against our hollow hull, that the uneasy deck beneath me quivered as I had not felt it since two years before when we had been underway with all sail set. So violent was this disturbance that De Long, asleep below, lost all thought of rest, pulled on his clothes and scrambled on deck to see what was up.

With the sun even at midnight above the horizon, he had little difficulty seeing, and of course none at all in hearing. About eighty yards from us, a lane had opened in the pack some ten feet wide, while all about us as we watched, cracks were zigzagging across the surface of our floe to the accompaniment of thunderous detonations as the thick ice split. And all the while, the heavily listed Jeannette, still fast in the ice, rocked in her bed as in an earthquake.

For ten trying minutes this went on, and then with a terrific report like a bomb exploding, the floe split wide apart beneath us, the Jeannette lurched wildly to port and suddenly slid out of her cradle into open water! There she rolled drunkenly for a moment, till coming finally erect she lay free of the ice at last in a swiftly widening bay!

So rapidly did all this happen that the skipper, clinging to the rail of his reeling bridge, saw the situation change from that of a ship frozen in to one underway before he could give a single order. But immediately after, with the ship still rocking heavily,

“All hands!” was echoing fore and aft, and I rushed below to close the gates in our watertight bulkheads and stand by my steam pumps, not knowing what effect this sudden release of our bow from the ice might have on that leak we had been pumping, so it seemed, forever. Paradoxically, however, the leak immediately decreased, probably because our freed stem floated several feet higher than before, so I returned quickly on deck to find the crew under the captain’s directions busily engaged in preparing to re-ship our long-disused rudder. This, delayed by frozen gudgeons, took some hours. But when it was completed, and everything meanwhile had been cleared away from booms and yards for making sail, the Jeannette for the first time since 1879 (though we never saw the irony of that till later) was again ready to maneuver as a ship.

Amidst the hoarse orders of the bosun and the noise of seamen clearing running rigging and scrambling out on frosty yards to loose the preventer lashings on the long-unused sails, I climbed to the bridge. There I found De Long calmly smoking his pipe while he eyed the smooth black water in our bay, now perhaps a quarter of a mile wide between the separated edges of our late island.

“Shall I fire up the main boilers, captain, and couple up the propeller shaft?” I asked anxiously.

“How much coal have you left, chief?” he countered.

“Only fifteen tons, sir.”

Fifteen tons. That would keep us going only three days normal steaming. De Long thought a moment.

“No, chief, don’t light off. There’s no place for the engines to take us anyway and we might burn up all our fuel just lying here. Save the coal; we may need it to keep us from freezing next winter. We’ll make sail if we have to move, but just now, all we can do is get some lines ashore and tie up to that starboard floe, till we see what the pack is about.”

So instead of trying to move, Cole ran out the lines to ice-anchors on our bow and quarter and we moored to the floe.

Then began a desperate fight with De Long struggling to save his ship should the ice close in again before it broke up completely and let us escape. A measurement nearby showed the ice sixteen feet thick; deeper than our keel. If the pack, pressing in on us now, got a fair grip on our sides, we should be squeezed between thicker ice than ever before we had been, in a giant nutcracker indeed. But what could we do about it? The water lead was short, there was no escape from it ahead or astern. Just one chance offered itself. A little ahead of where we lay, on our port bow was a narrow canal joining two wider bays in the parted pack. If we could only fill that canal up with heavy floes, they might take the major thrust of the closing pack, thus saving us from the full pressure. Savagely the men on watch turned to and fought with lines and grapnels, hooking loose floebergs everywhere and dragging them through the water into that canal, anchoring them there as best they could.

We had made fair progress on filling the gap, when at 7:30 A.M. the ice started to advance. The sight of that massive pack slowly closing on us like the jaws of doom, quickened our muscles, and we strained like madmen shoving drifting ice into the opening ahead. Just then, as if playing with us, the pack halted dead, giving us a better chance to finish the job.

De Long came down off the bridge to encourage the men with the grapnels. Standing on the edge of the canal, directing the work, was our ice-pilot. Approaching him along the brink of the pack, the captain looked down through the cold sea at the submerged edge of the floe, the blue-white ice there glimmering faintly through the water till lost in the depths; then he looked back at the Jeannette with her tall masts and spreading yards erect and square at last across the Arctic sky, while her stout hull, stark black against the ice, seemed grimly to await the onslaught.

“Well, Dunbar,” asked the skipper, “what do you think of it?”

Dunbar, worn and dour, had his mind made up.

“No use doing this, cap’n,” he replied dully, indicating the men heaving on the grapnel lines. “Before tonight, she’ll either be under this floe or on top of it! Better start those men, instead o’ hauling ice, at getting overboard the emergency provisions!”

De Long shook his head. He couldn’t agree. In terrible winter weather, the sturdy Jeannette had often beaten the pack before; he couldn’t believe that she would fail us now.

At ten o’clock, the ice started to advance once more. Our job in plugging the canal was finished. We had done all that man could do. Now it was up to the Jeannette. But as we watched that pack come on, flat floes and tilted floebergs thick and jagged, urged forward by endless miles of surging ice behind, our hearts sank. In spite of our thick sides and heavy trusses, the contest between hollow ship and solid pack looked so unequal.

On came the pack. The bay narrowed, thinned down to a ribbon of water on our port side, vanished altogether. The attacking floes reached our sides, started to squeeze. The Jeannette, tightly gripped, began to screech and groan from end to end. With bow lifted and stem depressed, she heeled sharply 16° to starboard, thrown hard against the floe there, while we grabbed frantically at whatever was at hand to avoid being hurled into the scuppers. Then to our intense relief, the ice we had pushed into the canal ahead came into play, took the further thrust, and stopped the advance, so that for the moment everything quieted down, leaving our ship in a precarious position, but at least intact. Our spirits rose. Perhaps we had saved her!

Thus we lay for two hours till eight bells struck. Cole, a little uncertain as to routine now, glanced up at the bridge. De Long nodded, so Cole piped down for mess, and with our ship pretty well on her beam ends, one watch laid below. There clinging to the stanchions, they ate the dinner which the imperturbable Ah Sam, still cooking in all that turmoil, had somehow, by lashing his pots down on the tilted galley range perhaps, managed to prepare.

At two bells, mess was over and most of us on deck again, hanging to the port rail. Soon we got another jam, listing us a little further and still more raising our tilted bow, but the Jeannette took it well and I did not consider it anything serious, when suddenly, to everybody’s alarm, my machinist Lee, whose station at the time was down on the fireroom floor running the little distiller boiler, shot out the machinery hatch to the deck, shouting,

“We’re sinking! The ice is coming through the side!”

“Pipe down there, Lee!” ordered the captain sharply. “Don’t go screaming that way to all hands like a scared old woman. You’re an experienced seaman; if you’ve got any report to make, make it to me as if you were one! Come up here!”

Lee, white and shaking, climbed up the bridge ladder, his wound-weakened hips threatening to collapse under him. The captain beckoned me, then faced Lee.

“What is it now, Lee?”

“Her seams are opening below, sir! The sides are giving way!”

“Is that all?” asked De Long bruskly. “What are you frightened at then? Here, Melville; lay below with him and find out what’s wrong!”

With the reluctant Lee following, I climbed down into the fireroom. There was no water there.

“What in hell’s the matter with you, Lee?” I asked angrily. “Do you want to shame me and the whole black gang for cowards? What set you off?”

“Look there, chief!” cried the agitated machinist. He led me into the starboard side bunker. We were well below the waterline. The air there was so full of flying coal dust it was difficult to breathe, and as the ship thumped against the ice outside, new clouds of dust continuously rose from our panting sides. “Look at that! She’s going fast!” yelled Lee, indicating with his torch. I looked.

The closely-fitted seams in the thick layer of planking forming our inner skin had sprung apart an inch or more, and as we watched, these cracks opened and closed like an accordion with startling frequency; but outboard of that layer we had a double thickness of heavy planking which constituted our outer shell, and though I could see traces of oakum squeezing out of the seams there, that outer planking, pressed by the ice hard in against the massive timbers of our ribs and trusses, was holding beautifully and there were no leaks.

“Keep your head next time, Lee,” I advised gruffly as I came out of the bunker. “We’re doing fine! Now mind that distiller, and don’t salt up the water!” Blinking my eyes rapidly to clear them of coal dust, I climbed on deck to inform the captain that there was no cause for alarm—yet.

So we lay for the next two hours, with the poor Jeannette groaning and panting like a woman in labor as the pack worked on her. At six bells, the captain, confident now that the worst was over and that she would pull through, took sudden thought of the future. The ship was a remarkable sight; what a picture she would make to print in the Herald on her return.

“Melville,” said the captain, puffing calmly away at his meerschaum, “take the camera out on the ice and see what you can get in the way of a photograph.”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

Early in the voyage, when Collins had been relieved of that task, I had become official photographer. I went to the darkroom, got out the camera, tripod, black hood, and a few of the plates which I myself had brought along and for which I had a developer. Stepping from our badly listed starboard rail directly onto the ice there, I picked a spot about fifty yards off on the starboard bow and set up my clumsy rig.

The view was marvelous. Heeling now 23° to starboard, the spar deck, covered with men clinging to the rigging, the rails, and the davits to keep from sliding into the scuppers, showed up clearly; while with her black hull standing sharply out against the white pack, and with bow and bowsprit pointing high in air and stem almost buried, the Jeannette looked like a vessel lifting while she rolled to a huge ice wave. Never again would I see a ship like that!

I exposed a plate, then, for insurance, another; and folding up my rig, stumbled back over the ice to the ship, laid below to the darkroom on the berth deck, poured out my chemicals and proceeded with much difficulty (because of the extraordinary list) to develop the plates, which in that climate had to be done immediately or they would spoil. In the vague red light of a bull’s-eye lantern, I was struggling in the darkroom with this job, when the ship got a tremendous squeeze, the berth deck buckled up under my feet, and amidst the roar of cracking timbers, I heard Jack Cole’s shout,

“All Hands! Stations for Abandon Ship!”

Leaving the plates in the solution but extinguishing the red lantern, I hastily closed the darkroom door and ran on deck.

“Water coming up now in all the holds! I think that last push tore the keel out of her!” announced the captain briefly as I ran by him toward the cabin to get out the chronometers and the compasses. “I’m afraid she’s through at last, chief!”

Behind me as I ran, I heard in rapid succession the orders to lower away the boats, to push overboard the sledges, and to commence passing out on the ice our emergency store of pemmican. Carefully I lifted out the two chronometers and the four small compasses which it was my job to save. Below me I could hear water gushing up into the afterhold, while from above on the poop deck came the creaking of frozen cordage and blocks as the falls ran out and our heavy boats dropped to the ice. As tenderly as I could, I gripped the chronometers, sprang out on the ice, and deposited my burden in the first cutter, already hauled a little clear of the ship’s side.

The next few minutes, against a background of rushing water, screeching ice, and crunching timbers, were a blur of heaving over the side and dragging well clear our pemmican, sledges, boats, and supplies. Lieutenant Chipp, so sick in his berth that he could not stand, was dressed by Danenhower, and then the two invalids went together over the side, the half-blinded navigator carrying the executive officer who guided him.

I got up my knapsack from my stateroom, tossed it into the cabin in the poop, and then turned to on our buckled deck in getting overboard our stores while below us the ship was flooding fast. De Long, himself checking the provisions as they went over the side, looked anxiously round the spar deck, then asked sharply of the bosun,

“Where’s the lime-juice?”

Our last cask of lime-juice, only one-third full now, was nowhere in sight.

“Down in the forehold, sor,” said Cole briefly.

The forehold? Hopeless to get at anything there; the forehold was already flooded. De Long’s face fell. There would be no distilled water any more; no more vegetables at all; nothing but pemmican to eat and salty snow from the floes to drink on our retreat over the ice, a bad combination for scurvy. The solitary anti-scorbutic we could carry was that lime-juice. He had to have it.

“Get it up!” ordered De Long savagely.

“I’ll try, sor,” answered the bosun dubiously. He went forward accompanied by several seamen, peered down from the spar deck into that hold. Water was already pouring in a torrent from the forehold hatch, cascading away over the berth deck into the lee scuppers. It was impossible to get into the hold except by swimming down against the current through a narrow crack left in the hatch opening on the high port side which, the ship being so badly listed to starboard, was still exposed. Yet even if a man got through, what could he do in the blackness of the swirling water in that flooded hold to find and break out the one right cask among dozens of others submerged there? But then that barrel, being only partly full, might be floating on the surface on the high side to port. There was a slight chance. Jack Cole looked round at the rough seamen about him.

“Any of yez a foine swimmer?” he asked, none too hopefully, for aside from the danger in this case, sailors are notoriously poor swimmers.

“I try vot I can do maybe, bosun.” A man stepped forth, huge Starr, our Russian seaman (his name probably a contraction of Starovski), the biggest man on board. “Gif me a line.”

Swiftly Cole threw a bowline round Starr’s waist. No use giving him a light; the water pouring through would extinguish it. He would have to grope in blackness. Starr dropped down to the berth deck. Standing in the water on the low side of the hatch, he stooped, with a shove of his powerful legs pushed himself through against the current, and vanished with a splash into the flooded hold. Cole started to pay out line.

How Starr, swimming in ice water in that Stygian hole amidst all sorts of floating wreckage there, ever hoped to find that one barrel, I don’t know. But he did know that the ship, flooded far above the point at which she should normally sink, was held up only by the ice, and that if for an instant, the pack should suddenly relax its grip, she would plunge like a stone and while the others on the spar deck might escape, he, trapped in the hold, would go with her.

With a thumping heart, Jack Cole “fished” the line on Starr, paying out, taking in, as the unseen swimmer fumbled amongst the flotsam in the black hold. Then to his astonishment, the lime-juice cask popped up through the hatch and following it, blowing like a whale, came Starr! Another instant and Starr, tossing the barrel up like a toy, was back on the spar deck, where all coming aft, Jack Cole proudly presented his dripping seaman and the precious cask on his shoulder, to the captain.

De Long, with his ship sinking under him, paused a moment to shake Starr’s hand.

“A brave act, Starr, and a very valuable one. I’m proud of you! I’ll not forget it. Now, bosun, get Starr here a stiff drink of whiskey from those medical stores on the ice to thaw him out!”

The lime-juice, still borne by Starr, went over the side, the last of our provisions. The floes round about the Jeannette were littered with boats, sledges, stores, and an endless variety of everything else we could pitch overboard. With our supplies gone, I tried to get down again on the berth deck aft to my stateroom to salvage my private possessions, but I was too late. The water was rising rapidly there, and was already halfway up the wardroom ladder, so I went back into the cabin in the poop above, where I had before tossed my knapsack, to retrieve it and get overboard myself.

The deck of the cabin was a mess of the personal belongings of all the wardroom officers—clothes, papers, guns, instruments, bearskins, stuffed gulls, that heavy walrus head over which Sharvell had once been so concerned (and apparently now, rightly) and Heaven knows what else. Pawing over the conglomerate heap was Newcomb, uncertain as to what he should try to save. As I retreated upwards into the cabin before the water rising on the wardroom ladder, De Long stepped into the cabin also from his upper deck stateroom, and seeing only Newcomb fumbling over the enormous pile of articles, inquired casually,

“Mr. Newcomb, is this all your stuff?”

Pert as ever in spite of his illness, Newcomb replied with the only statement from him that ever made me grin,

“No, sir; it’s only part of it!”

And even the captain, broken-hearted over his ship, looking at that vast heap, stopped to laugh at that.

But from the way the deck was acting beneath me, there was little time for mirth, so I seized my knapsack and walking more on the bulkhead than on the deck, got outside the poop, followed by the captain carrying some private papers, and Newcomb lugging only a shotgun.

Things moved rapidly now on the doomed Jeannette. The ship started to lay far over on her beam ends, water rose to the starboard rail, the smokestack broke off at its base, hanging only by the guys; and then the ship, given another squeeze by the crowding ice, collapsed finally, with her crumpled deck bulging slowly upward, her timbers snapping, and the men in the port watch who were trying to snatch a last meal forward from scraps in the galley, finding their escape up the companionway ladder cut off by suddenly rising water, pouring like flies out through the forecastle ventilator to slide immediately overboard onto the ice.

It was no longer possible, even on hands and knees, to stay on that fearfully listed deck. Clinging to the shrouds, De Long ordered Cole to hoist a service ensign to the mizzen truck, and then with a last look upward over the almost vertical deck to see that all had cleared her, he waved his cap to the flag aloft, cried chokingly,

“Good-by, old ship!” and leaped from the rigging to the ice.

Flooded, stove in, and buckled up, the Jeannette was a wreck. The pack had conquered her at last. Only that death grip with which the floes still clung tenaciously to her kept her afloat. With heavy hearts we turned our backs on the remains of that valiant ship, our home and our shield from peril for two long years, and looked instead southward where five hundred miles away across that terrible pack and the Arctic Sea lay the north coast of Siberia and possible safety—if we could ever get there.