CHAPTER XXVIII
Twenty-five miles further north than when we started! Coming on top of all else, that was a knockout blow. With sagging knees, I leaned against the gunwale of the whaleboat, looked at the haggard captain, asked faintly,
“Sure?”
“Yes,” he replied mournfully, “sure. Two meridian altitudes of the sun and a couple of Sumner lines and they all check. I couldn’t believe the first sight myself; I thought my sextant was bad. But after checking that with nothing wrong, I spent all day getting check sights; you saw me shooting some of them. No question about it now. But, for God’s sake, don’t tell anyone! Not even another officer. If the men knew, I couldn’t get ’em to lay a hand on another sledge. They’d just sit down here and wait to die!”
I nodded at that. Who could blame them? Caught on a treadmill, why should they torture themselves with such labor as slaves would lie down under and suffer themselves to be lashed to death rather than rise and endure, when the only result was that they were being carried backward five times as fast as their puny efforts pushed them forward? If the men learned the results of those disastrous sights, we were finished! But weren’t we finished anyway, whether they knew it or not?
“That’s bad, captain,” I mumbled, my brain numbed at the news. “What can we do now?”
“I haven’t figured it out fully yet, chief; I want your advice on what I have in mind. That’s the only reason I told you; that, and maybe the thought that at least one other officer ought to know where we are and where we’re going in case something happens to me. Since Chipp and Danenhower, both my deck officers, are knocked out, you’re the only officer left I can talk to. But this mustn’t get out! It’d kill Chipp, who’s in a bad way anyhow, like hitting him with an ax. And what it’d do to the men, you can guess!” He finished with a ghastly smile.
Vaguely I felt that that might be a mercy to Chipp; indeed it might well be a mercy to all of us should a kindly Providence then and there somehow brain us all with an ax and end our sufferings. But of that I said nothing. The captain had hinted at something further to be done. What, I wondered, was it? Abandon the boats, speed up our progress, trusting to luck the ice held out under us till we got to the New Siberian Islands, there to live (or starve rather) on moss and Arctic willow till perhaps some year a chance party of ivory hunters landed and rescued us? A thin chance, that! I looked curiously at De Long.
“Well, skipper, no thanks for telling me. I could’ve got more work out of my gang if I were still in blissful ignorance like the others than I can now, but I’ll keep on doing my best. And if my advice is any good, you’re welcome to it. What’s your idea?”
“I know that well enough, chief. I would gladly have suffered under that knowledge alone, but the safety of the whole party requires someone else to know, and unfortunately to suffer with me. But no use talking about that now. Let’s get along with what’s next.” He jerked out from beneath his parka a chart, unfolded it, spread it on the midship thwart of the whaleboat. On it, marked by a bold cross enclosed in a red ink circle, was a spot in latitude 77° 18′ N. where the Jeannette had sunk, a spot unfortunately for us now, far to the southeast of the small penciled cross in latitude 77° 43′ N. which marked our present position as shown by the captain’s latest sights.
“There’s just one possible thing we can do, Melville; change the course from due south as we’re heading now, to southwest. The ice is drifting clearly enough northwest. It’s like crossing a river current; no use bucking into it as we’re doing now going south, even if land is closest that way. The only hope is to cut across perpendicular to the current and ultimately you get to the other bank, even though the current carries you downstream meanwhile. The same with us, we’ve got to cut directly across the drift, that is, southwest; and some day, regardless of how far north we’re carried, we’ll come to the edge of this pack and can launch our boats—provided we live long enough! And to insure that, we’re going to go on shorter rations now to stretch out our food,” he concluded significantly. “I’ve decided all that already, Melville. All I want to know from you—you’re working the men—is how thin I can cut it and still let you keep on driving them, harder even than now!”
I thought a moment. Our daily rations, pemmican, hard bread, and coffee, were none too generous in quantity as it was for the terrific physical effort the men were laboring under. But who knows what men can stand? I was learning all the time.
“Well, skipper, cut a third off. That’ll stretch it out for ninety days instead of sixty. I doubt that we can keep up long on such short rations, but maybe we can knock over a few seals to help out now and then. Anyhow, I’m willing to try.
“Good!” agreed De Long. “Nil desperandum! I knew I could count fully on you, chief; I always can. We’ll start that program, new course and all, tonight.” He started to fold up the chart again, when his eye fell on the penciled cross marking our position. “77° 43′ North,” he muttered. “Farthest North for us yet. And forever too, on this cruise anyway, I hope. Say, Melville, you remember that silk banner you used in claiming Henrietta Island? Well, it’s in the first cutter, alongside the whaleboat here. There’s something else about that flag my wife made for me. She wanted me to fly it in celebration when we made our ‘Farthest North.’ Let’s hope we’re celebrating that glad event right here and now. But the crew knows about that too, I think. If I fly that flag over this camp, they’ll smell a rat right off.” He looked furtively round. All our men were apparently still in the tents. No one was in sight. “I think I can take a chance to please Mrs. De Long on this; it’s little enough I’ve done for her since she married a sailor. Here, Melville, lend a hand.”
Together we drew from its case and unwrapped that silken banner, a moderately large American ensign beautifully embroidered round the edges by Emma De Long’s loving hands for her husband’s ship. And stealthily, keeping it below the gunwales of the first cutter lest someone looking from a tent should see and wonder, we fully extended it horizontally. Then standing on the ice alongside that open boat, with De Long to starboard and me to port, we two, looking certain death on the pack in the face, waved that banner beneath the Arctic sky in latitude 77° 43′ from the Equator—Farthest North for George Washington De Long, if not for the Jeannette!
And then, leaning over the gunwale, De Long buried his weather-beaten face in the rustling silk folds of his wife’s flag, kissing it fervently, while I, clinging to the other side, closed my wet eyes in silence. Well did I remember that June day in 1879, almost exactly two years before in San Francisco, when at our commissioning Emma De Long, a lovely figure, had herself proudly manned the halliards and hoisted that banner to the masthead on the Jeannette! But the Jeannette was gone beneath the floes, and far away at that moment, I envisioned Emma De Long, a different woman now, worn by two years of hourly dread over news that never came, praying for the safety of the man before me, who with heaving shoulders was caressing his country’s flag, the solitary symbol of his wife’s love still left in his possession.
De Long straightened up.
“All right, Melville. I think my wife’ll be glad to know when it gets back we flew her flag at our Farthest North. Come on, let’s fold it up; carefully now, so nobody’ll know we had it out and perhaps guess why.”
Silently I obeyed. We rolled up the flag, slid it into its oilskin case, carefully restowed the case as before. The chances of our ever getting back were slight now, but as I shoved that case under the thwarts in the cutter, bachelor as I was, I hoped that even though our own bodies might soon be stretched in death over that desolate ice pack, somehow that flag in the boat might survive the drift, some day to be picked up and returned to the one person who would sense among its silken folds the message that it bore.