CHAPTER XXVII
Our situation was now truly desperate. There we were, thirty-three men cast away on drifting ice floes, our whereabouts and our fate, whether yet alive or long since dead, totally unknown to the world we had left two years before, completely beyond the reach of any possible relief expedition. Five hundred miles away at the Lena Delta lay the nearest shore, where from the charts in our possession, we might expect to fall in on that frozen coast with native huts and villages such as long before we had visited at Cape Serdze Kamen, and find even a slight pretense of food and shelter and perhaps a little aid in getting over the next thousand miles south into Siberia itself to civilization at Yakutsk.
How much of that five hundred miles before us was ice and how much was water, nobody knew. That a part of it, just north of Siberia, was likely to be water in the summer time was certain, so we must drag our boats with us across the pack between us and that open sea or else ultimately, unable to cross it, perish when we came to the fringe of the ice pack. A few uninhabited islands, the New Siberian Archipelago, lay halfway along the route, but we could expect no aid there of any kind nor any food. Grimly ironic on our Russian charts was the notice that all visitors were prohibited from landing on the New Siberian Islands unless they brought with them their own food, since the last party permitted a few years before to go there as fossil ivory hunters had all starved to death for lack of game.
But at the Lena Delta, the charts showed permanent settlements, and a book we had of Dr. Petermann’s described in considerable detail the villages and mode of life there. Magazine articles published and taken with us just before we left San Francisco indicated that the Russian government was then in 1879 about to open the Lena River for trading steamers from its mouth to Yakutsk, a thousand miles inland. Since it was now the middle of 1881 that should be completed and the river steamers running.
So “On to the Lena Delta!” became our object in life, and to the Delta we looked forward as our Promised Land. But getting there seemed next to impossible. We were well acquainted with all previous Arctic expeditions. Not one in that long and tragic history stretching back three centuries, when disaster struck their ships, had ever faced a journey over the polar pack back to safety half so long as what faced us, and some on far shorter marches over the ice had perished to the last man!
Gloomily we faced our situation. We would have to drag our boats; we would have to drag our food; we were handicapped by one half-blind officer, by another too weak to stand, by several men, Alexey and Kuehne mainly, who, thrown on the ice, promptly had had a severe relapse of cramps from lead poisoning, and by the knowledge that many others of the crew were weakened by it and might break down at any time.
But worst of all we had to face was the pack itself. The most wretched season of the year for traveling over it was thrust upon us. Under the bright sun, the snow was too soft now to bear our sledges on its crust, but the temperature, from 10° to 25° F., was too low to melt it and clear it from our path. And as for the rough pack ice itself, I knew best of all what traveling over that meant—the twelve mile journey to Henrietta Island with a far lighter load per man and dog, had nearly finished me and my five men. And here, how many hundreds of miles of such ice we had to cross, God alone knew!
The loads we had to drag across the ice if we were to survive, were enough to stagger the stoutest hearts. To carry our party over the open water when we reached it, required three boats and the three boats weighed four tons. And to keep ourselves alive over the minimum time in which we could hope with any luck at all to reach Siberia, sixty days, required three and a half tons of food. Seven and a half tons at least of total deadweight to be dragged over broken Arctic ice on a journey as long as the distance from New York halfway to Chicago! And the dragging to be done practically altogether (for at most our twenty-three remaining dogs could be expected to drag only one heavy sledge out of our total of eight) by men as beasts of burden—before that prospect we all but wilted.
But it was drag or die, and George Washington De Long was determined that not one man should die if he had to kill him to prevent it. For over De Long from the moment we were thrown on the ice had come a hardness and a determination which were new to us. Gone was the gravely courteous scholar, interested mainly in scientific discovery, scrupulously anxious to hurt no one’s feelings if it could be avoided. The Arctic ice had literally folded up his scientific expedition beneath his feet, closing the books at 77° North, in his eyes practically a complete failure. That part was all over, gone with the ship, and with it vanished the scientist and the explorer whom we thought we knew. In his place, facing the wilderness of ice about us, stood now a strange naval officer with but a single purpose in his soul—the fierce determination to get his men over that ice back to the Lena Delta regardless of their hardships, regardless of their sufferings, to keep them on their feet tugging at those inhuman burdens even when they preferred to lie down in the snow and die in peace.
For five days after the crushing of our ship, we camped on the floes nearby, sorting out stores, loading sledges, distributing clothes, and incidentally nursing the sick. What he should take along was in the forefront of every man’s mind. We had salvaged far more of everything than we could possibly drag—what should be left behind? De Long abruptly settled the question with an order limiting what was to be taken to three boats, sixty days’ food, the ship’s papers and records, navigating outfits, and the clothes each man wore including his sleeping bag and his knapsack, the contents of which were strictly prescribed. All else, regardless of personal value or desirability, must be thrown away. That was particularly trying to the men in freezing weather greedily eyeing the huge pile of furs, clothes, and blankets tossed aside to be abandoned on the ice, but there was the order—wear what you pleased in fur or cloth, trade what you had for anything in the pile if it pleased you more, but when you were dressed in the clothes of your choice, you left all else behind. The solitary article excepted was fur boots or moccasins; of these each of us could have three pairs, one on, one in his knapsack, and one in his sleeping bag along with his (half only) blanket.
But with the exception of much grumbling over the clothing to be left behind, there was no need of orders to enforce among the crew at least the abandonment of other weights; all the grumbling there was over what the captain ordered taken. Improvident as ever, the seamen growled over dragging so much pemmican, growled over dragging lime-juice, growled most of all over dragging the books and records of the expedition. But they didn’t growl in the captain’s presence. In range now of the steely glitter of those hard blue eyes, strangely new to them, they only jumped to obey. Still, among themselves (and I was always with them now) there was a continual growl over the loads building up on the sledges, and as for what articles they were themselves to carry, I saw seamen weighing sheath knife against jack-knife to determine which was lighter, and then tossing the heavier one away.
The start of our life on the ice the night we lost our ship was inauspicious. Dead tired from superhuman laboring, first in hurriedly getting stores off the ship and then in dragging them over the ice to what looked like a safe floe two hundred yards away from her, we turned in at midnight, camping in five small tents, five or six men and an officer in each, stretched out in a row on a common rubber mackintosh. At one a.m., with a loud bang the floe beneath us split, the crack running right through De Long’s tent, and the ice promptly opened up. Had it not been for the weight of the sleepers on the ends of the mackintosh there, the men sleeping in the middle would immediately have been dumped down the crevice into the sea! Even so, practically helpless in their sleeping bags, they were rescued with difficulty, while all the rest of us, weary as we were, hastily turned out to move our whole camp across the widening crack to another floe. By two a.m., this was done, and again we turned in, leaving only Kuehne on watch. At four a.m., as he was calling Bartlett, his relief, from my tent, he announced suddenly,
“Turn out if you want to see the last of the Jeannette! There she goes, there she goes!”
I leaped up and out of the tent. There was the listed Jeannette coming slowly upright over the pack, for all the world like a ghost rising from a snowy tomb. The floes holding the ship, as if satisfied at having fully crushed the life from her, were evidently backing away. She came erect, her spars rattling and creaking dismally as she rose, then the ice opening further, she started to sink with accelerating speed. Quickly the black hull disappeared, then her yards banged down on the ice, stripped from the masts, and in another instant, over the fore-topmast, the last bit of her I ever saw, the dark waters closed and the sturdy Jeannette had sunk, gone to an ocean grave beneath the Arctic floes!
I stood a moment in the cold air (the temperature had dropped to 10° F.) with bared head, a silent mourner but thankful that we had not gone with her, then crawled sadly back to my sleeping bag.
On the sixth day after the crushing of the ship, our goods were sorted, our sledges all packed, and we were ready to go southward. Eight sledges, heavily loaded with our three boats and our provisions, carried about a ton each; a ninth sledge, more lightly loaded carrying our lime-juice, our whiskey, and our medical stores, was considered the hospital sledge; while a tenth, carrying only a small dinghy for temporary work in ferrying over leads, completed our cavalcade.
To minimize the glare of the ice and the strain of working under a brilliant (but not a hot sun) all our traveling was to be done at night when the midnight sun was low in the heavens, with our camping and sleeping during the day when the sun being higher, his more direct rays might be better counted on to dry out our soaked clothing.
At 6 P.M. on June 17th, we started, course due south.
Our first day’s journey was a heart-wrenching nightmare which no man there was like to forget till his dying gasp. The dogs were unable to drag even their one sledge; it took six men in addition to keep it moving. And so bad was the snow through which the sledges sank and floundered, that we found it took our entire force heaving together against their canvas harnesses to advance the boats and their sledges one at a time against the snow banking up under the bows of the clumsy boats.
Dunbar had gone ahead, planting four black flags at intervals to mark the path which he as pilot had selected for us to follow, the fourth and last flag, only a mile and a half along from the start, being the end of our first night’s journey. But so terrible was the going that by morning only one boat, the first cutter, had reached that last flag; the runners had collapsed under three of the sledges, stalling them; a wide lead had unexpectedly opened up in a floe halfway down our road, blocking the other sledges and requiring them to be unloaded and ferried over it; Chipp (who, with Alexey and Kuehne, in spite of being the sick were dragging the hospital sledge) had fainted dead away in the snow; Lauterbach and Lee had both collapsed in their harnesses, Lauterbach with cramps in his stomach, Lee with cramps in his legs; and by 6 A.M., when our night’s journey should have been finished and all hands at the last flag pitching camp, we had instead broken down and blocked sledges scattered over that mile and a half of pack ice from one end to the other!
It was sickening. Twelve hours of man-killing effort and we had made good over the ice not even one and a half miles!
Willy-nilly, we made camp, breakfasted, and turned in at 8 A.M., for our exhausted men could do no more without a rest. But for Surgeon Ambler, there was no rest. While the remainder of us, dead to the world, slumbered that day, Ambler, who as much as anyone the night before had toiled with the sledges along that heartbreaking road, labored over the sick, struggling to get them on their feet again for what faced them that evening.
That night we turned to once more, repairing runners, shifting loads, digging sledges out of snowbanks in which they were buried, and fighting desperately to advance all to the first camp. Regardless of a temperature of 20° F., we perspired as if in the tropics, and tossing aside our parkas, worked in our undershirts in the snow. All that night and the next night also, we labored thus. By the second morning following, thank God, we had all our boats and sledges together there, and tumbled again into our sleeping bags, wearied mortals if ever there were such on this earth! Three nights of hell to make a mile and a half of progress! It was worse even than my journey to Henrietta Island had led me to believe could be possible.
And then that day, of all things in the Arctic, it started to rain! Miserable completely, we sat or lay in our leaking tents, soaked, muscle-weary, and frozen, while the cold rain trickled over us and over the icy floors of our tents. But while I had thought no creatures could possibly be suffering greater misery than we, I changed my mind when I saw our dogs, cowering in the rain, snuggle against our tent doors, begging to be admitted to such poor shelter as we had. So soon, with men and beasts shivering all together, the picture of our misery was completed.
In the midst of all this, Starr opening up the rations for our midnight dinner, found in a coffee can a note addressed to the captain, which he brought to him. It read:
“This is to express my best wishes for success in your great undertaking. Hope when you peruse these lines you will be thinking of the comfortable homes you left behind you for the purpose of aiding science. If you can make it convenient drop me a line. My address,
G. J. K—,
Box 10, New York City.”
“Apropos, eh, Melville? I guess we’re thinking of those homes, all right,” commented De Long bitterly, showing me the note. “Where’s the nearest post-box so I can drop that imbecile a line?” Nearby was a crack in the floe. “Ah, right here.” De Long scribbled his initials on the note, drew an arrow pointing to the writer’s address, and dropped it into the crack. “Now we’ll see how good the seagoing Arctic mail service is. At that, it may get to New York before we do,” added the captain grimly.
Before we moved off from this camp, the captain decided to check the loads to make sure we were taking nothing more than was absolutely necessary. The first thing he discovered was that flouting his order about clothing, Collins had smuggled into our baggage and was taking along an extra fur coat. Immediately, under the captain’s angry eye, it went flying out on the ice. And the next thing he found was that in their knapsacks (which were towed along stowed inside the whaleboat) the seamen almost without exception were taking some small mementoes of the cruise, trifling in weight in themselves, in the aggregate under our circumstances, a considerable burden. They went sliding out on the ice alongside Collins’ coat.
And then having cleaned house, the captain waited for the rain to end.
Since it rained all night, we stayed in camp, getting a rest if such it can be called. Next night we were underway again on a new schedule, the load of supplies on each sledge now cut in half (except of course for the boat sledges) the idea being to lighten up our overloaded sledges so we could move them to the designated point more easily and with less danger of breaking runners, then unload and send them back empty for the other half of their cargoes. Working this way we started out, only to find half a mile along a crack in the ice, not wide enough for a ferry, too wide to jump with the sledges. Here the ice broke up with some of our sledges floating off on an island, stopping all progress till we had lassoed some smaller cakes for ferries and on these we rode over our remaining loads, finishing our night’s work with hardly half a mile gained and everyone knocked out again.
So for the next four days we struggled along, sometimes making a mile a day; once, by great good luck, a mile and a quarter. The going got worse. Pools of water from the late rain gathered beneath the crusts of snow and thin refrozen ice. As we came along, the surfaces broke beneath us, leaving us to flounder to our knees through slush and ice water. More sledge runners broke; Nindemann and Sweetman were kept busy at all hours repairing them. Chipp got worse, Alexey vomited at the slightest provocation, Lauterbach looked ready to die, and Lee staggered along on his weakened legs as if they were about to part company at his damaged hips. Danenhower, of all those sick, while he could hardly see, at least had some strength, and was added to the hospital sled to help pull it under Chipp’s pilotage. Ahead Dunbar scouted and marked out our road south by compass, then with a pick-ax endeavored to clear interfering hummocks from that path, aided a little in that by Newcomb. I bossed the sledge gangs and kept them moving, putting my shoulders beneath a boat or a sledge when necessary to get it started. Ambler when not tending his patients, armed with another pick-ax helped Dunbar clear the chosen road. And bringing up the rear was De Long, supervising the loading, checking food issues, and relentlessly driving us all along.
On June 25, we had been underway eight days since starting south. By such grueling labor over that pack as men cannot ordinarily be driven to, even to save their own lives, and which in this case only the overpowering will of De Long rendered possible, we had made good to the southward by my most liberal calculation a total distance over the ice of five and one-half miles. I contemplated the result with a leaden heart. Even should the ice extend southward only one hundred miles out of the five hundred we had to cover (which seemed far too good to be true), at that rate of advance it would take us one hundred and fifty days to cross to open water. Long before that, unless we died of exhaustion first as now looked very probable, our sixty days’ rations would have been consumed and we should be left to perish of starvation midway of the pack.
In despair, I gazed at our three cumbersome boats, overhanging at both ends their heavy sledges, the last of which after soul-wrenching efforts my party had just dragged over rough hummocks into camp. Around it the men, too exhausted even to go to their tents, were leaning their weary bodies for a moment’s rest before they undertook the labor of lifting again their aching and frozen feet. Those massive boats, like millstones round our necks, were what were killing our chances. With our food alone, divided into reasonable sledge loads, we might make speed enough to escape, but with those boats—! Incapable of division, the smallest over a ton in weight, the largest over a ton and a half, dragging those boats was like dragging huge anchors over the floes. If only we could abandon them! But with a sigh, I gave up that dream. With an open sea somewhere ahead, the boats were as necessary to us as the pemmican. But only five and a half miles made good in our first week when we were strongest! It looked hopeless. We could only labor onward and pray for a miracle. I quit thinking and turned toward my tent, my supper, and my sleeping bag.
On the way, I bumped into Mr. Dunbar, just returning from a preliminary scouting trip over our next night’s route. Dunbar, hardly fifty, hale and hearty, a fine example of a seasoned Yankee skipper when first he joined us, now with his face wrinkled and worn, looked like a wizened old man staggering under a burden of eighty years at least, and ready to drop in his tracks at the slightest provocation.
“Well, captain,” I sang out jocularly to cheer him up a bit, “what’s the good word from the front? Sighted that open water we’re looking for yet?”
The whaler looked at me with dulled eyes, then to my astonishment broke down and sobbed on my shoulder like a baby. I put a fur-clad arm gently round his heaving waist to comfort him.
“What is it, old shipmate? Can’t you stand my jokes either?”
“Chief,” he sobbed, “ye know it ain’t that; I like everything about ye. But that ice ahead of us! It’s terrifically wild and broken, and so chock-full o’ holes, chief, I could hardly crawl across! We’ll never get our sledges over it!” The weeping old seaman sagged down in my arms, his gray head nestling in my beard.
“Don’t be so sure, mate,” I said with a cheeriness I didn’t feel. “My lads are getting so expert heaving sledges over hummocks, I’m thinking of putting ’em on as a flying trapeze act in Barnum’s Circus when we get back, and making us all as rich as Commodore Vanderbilt in one season! Come on, captain, forget it; let’s have a cup of coffee to warm us up—no, let’s belay the coffee. Come to think of it, I guess I still got drag enough with Dr. Ambler to work him for a shot of whiskey apiece for a couple of good old salts like us.” And I led him away to the hospital tent, where Ambler, after one look at Dunbar, hardly needed the wink from me to produce without a word his medical whiskey.
Leaving Dunbar with the doctor after swallowing a drink myself, I started again for my own tent, but once more I was stopped, by the captain this time, who beckoned me to join him in the snow alongside the deserted whaleboat. All hands were in their tents by now, working on their cold pemmican.
“What have you made our mileage to the south so far, chief?” opened the skipper listlessly.
“Being generous, about five and a half miles, sir.” I looked at him puzzled. The captain knew our progress, logged daily in his journal, even better than I. Surely he wasn’t keeping me from my supper just for that.
De Long nodded, continued,
“That’s right, over the ice of course. Melville, I’m sorry to say that today I got some good sights of the sun for the first time since we started. Chief,” and his voice broke as he looked at me, “the northwest drift has got us! We’re twenty-five miles further north tonight than the day we started!”