CHAPTER XXXII
After four harrowing days in the whaleboat, the first two in the gale, the second two fighting our way through offshore shoals in the open ocean, we finally sighted land. Hungry, thirsty, frozen, we gazed as hopefully across the sea at two low headlands barely showing above the horizon as though they were the very gates of Heaven. Under oars, for the wind at last had died away, we propelled our boat toward them, and soon found ourselves between two low hills apparently forming the mouth of a wide and muddy river running swiftly out into the sea. All hands leaned over the gunwales, and finding the water sweet, we drank greedily, regardless of mud, regardless of everything.
Where were we? Neither Danenhower nor I knew, but as that low and barren coast trended north and south, I assumed we were on the eastern side of the Lena Delta, how far south of Cape Barkin I could not tell. But at least we had Siberia at last before us! My orders directed me to land at Cape Barkin, where I should find native huts, but I had had enough of the Arctic Sea for the present and for the future, and with Barkin an unknown distance up an unknown coast, I decided to be satisfied with the land I could see and proceed up the river before me till I located some village there. So in spite of Danenhower’s objections to my course, we rowed (that is, if the feeble efforts of the half-dead sailors manning the oars could be called rowing) up the broad river, constantly attempting to make a landing on either bank, but always baffled by shoals which prevented us from getting within a hundred yards of those flat and muddy shores.
Finally in the late evening after a gruelling day at the oars, we spotted on one bank an abandoned hut, before which was a cove into which we made our way thankfully, and for the first time in five days landed to stretch our legs. I found that I could hardly move mine; most of my men were in like case. Only Danenhower, whose blindness had excused him from bailing, and Newcomb, who had most successfully evaded it, had managed to keep their legs in shape so that they could walk. The rest of us had practically to crawl from the boat.
Thinking to warm up and thaw out our blackened and frost-bitten feet, we gathered driftwood, made a fire in the hut, and huddled round it, stretched on the ground, with our numbed feet toward the fire. But instead of helping, agonizing pains started to shoot from my paralyzed feet as soon as the heat took effect, so stripping my legs for examination, I found they were frozen from the knees down, terribly swollen, covered with cracks, blisters, and sores all run together, and with the skin sloughing off at the slightest touch. Excruciating pain instead of sleep was my portion our first night ashore, and in place of the eagerly awaited comfort which we had looked forward to in Siberia, most of us writhed in pain, suffering the tortures of the damned.
At dawn, after a slim portion of pemmican washed down with muddy tea, we launched our boat and set bravely out up the river to find a village, only to discover instead that we were in a desolate maze of shoals, swamps, and muddy islands forming the delta, with rivers, sometimes swift and sometimes sluggish, crisscrossing erratically as they flowed over the low delta lands to the sea. Young ice was forming everywhere over river and swamp and through it with boathooks and oars we had to smash a way for our bow. Three days of this we had to endure alternating between slaving at the oars during the day and freezing at night in our camps on the barren mud flats, while both night and day we starved on scanty rations, and I finally began to despair of rescue. Here we were on the Lena Delta, but of the many villages indicated on Petermann’s charts, we could find no sign. Never a native did we see, and the few huts we spotted now and then were all abandoned, their owners having already retreated southward before the oncoming winter which was rapidly robbing us of what little vitality remained in our feeble bodies. Were we never to escape? Were all our sufferings to end only in our deaths in the delta? Had we not already borne enough since those harrowing years on the Jeannette to be spared that? First the torture of dragging boats and sledges over the pack, then the horrors of navigating amidst the streaming ice of the New Siberian Archipelago, finally that four-day nightmare of tumbling waves and freezing spray in the open whaleboat battling an Arctic gale—was all this not enough? Yet through all our trials since the loss of the Jeannette we had been sustained by the thought that if only we held out till we reached the Lena Delta, there at last our sufferings would end, amid friendly natives we would find food, shelter, and transportation home.
How different now was the reality! The Lena Delta we found a bleak and barren tundra, empty of game, as inhospitable and as desolate as that ice pack in which for two years we had drifted in the long-lost Jeannette. Our dream of a safe haven had exploded in our faces. With food gone, men worn out, and worst of all, the hope which had driven us all to superhuman labor proved a lie, our situation was desperate beyond conception. Bitterly we cursed Petermann and all his works, which had led us astray.
But there was nothing to do save to move on, working always toward the headwaters of the delta as long as we could swing the oars, so for the fourth day in succession, we shoved off from a mudflat camp, broke our way through new ice, and I pushed my men (whose arms fortunately were a little better off than their legs) upstream toward the delta head.
And then, thank God, in the middle of this day, while deadened arms and stupefied bodies swung wearily over the oars, we suddenly sighted three natives in kyacks shoot out from behind a bend in the swamp!
Like drowning men grasping at straws, we waved to them, shouted to them, and tried to row to them, but before the apparition of a strange boat in their waters, they were shy and afraid, and not till I held up our last tiny strip of pemmican did I entice one, more curious than his comrades, close aboard us to taste the strange meat. Then like the jaws of a trap closing on its victim, we grabbed his kyack before he could dart away!
Badly frightened, the fur-clad native attempted to escape, but we would sooner have released our only hope of salvation than our grip on that poor Yakut who represented now our last slim chance to avoid perishing in the maze of that frozen delta, and we held to him like grim death. Gradually I calmed his fears, gave him the pemmican, endeavored in pantomime to show him we were friendly, and at last holding to him while we beached our whaleboat, convinced him of our good intentions by giving him a little of the trifling quantity of alcohol we had left for our stove.
The alcohol settled the question. He promptly hailed his two comrades standing warily off in their kyacks, and soon all three of the natives, warming up on pure grain alcohol, were our bosom friends. In exchange for the alcohol, they gave us some fish and a goose out of which mixture we promptly made a stew which we wolfed down ravenously. And then with pencil sketches and gestures, I endeavored to make plain that I wanted them to guide us to a village, and specifically to Bulun, the largest town shown on my chart, some sixty miles up the Lena River from the head of the delta.
It was remarkable how, understanding not one word of each other’s language, we got along. The three Yakuts indicated we could not get to Bulun on account of ice in the river, that we should all die on the way. However, they made plain that another Yakut village, Jamaveloch, they could take us to, and next day for Jamaveloch we started. But so tortuous was the course and so hard the labor in working our boat through the delta swamps and rivers, that not till a week later did we finally, on September 26th, two weeks after the gale, arrive at Jamaveloch. Had it not been for the food provided by our guides as well as for their pilotage, it is inconceivable that we should ever have arrived alive at this village at the southeastern corner of the delta, seventy miles from Cape Barkin, and the only inhabited village for over a hundred and fifty miles in either direction along the Siberian Coast! Had we gone to Barkin, we should assuredly have perished, for there, the natives told us, Petermann was absolutely wrong—there were no villages, no lighthouses, no inhabitants of any kind there, nothing but a barren coast.
But Jamaveloch itself was not very promising as a haven except for a brief stay. It had but six huts and a few small storehouses, not over fifteen adult inhabitants, and no great surplus of food. Doubtful that its scant supply of fish and geese would long take care of eleven voracious seamen thrown unexpectedly on the resources of so small a community, I decided after one night at Jamaveloch to push on in our whaleboat up the south branch of the Lena to Bulun, a hundred and ten miles away by land but a hundred and fifty miles distant up the winding river. Strenuously in their native Yakut tongue (some of which I had now picked up) the villagers and especially their headman, Nicolai Chagra, objected that ice in the river would block us and leave us to perish along the uninhabited river banks, but I persisted. So accompanied once more by my original native pilots, I loaded my sick crew into the whaleboat, took aboard sixty dried fish (all I could get) for supplies from Nicolai, and we started. In an hour we were back. Nicolai Chagra was right. The Jeannette herself could not have plowed through the ice, alternately freezing and breaking loose in the river, which swept downstream in the current, effectively blocking any progress toward Bulun.
Willing or not, there was no choice but to stay at Jamaveloch. Unable to walk, I crawled from the whaleboat and was hauled on a sledge from the shore to a hut turned over to us by Nicolai; Leach, with the flesh falling from his frozen toes, was hauled up on another sledge; and most of the rest of my crew in the remnants of their tattered clothes, crawled or hobbled after us.
For two and a half weeks we lay in that hut, slowly recuperating from our frostbites, subsisting mainly on a slim ration of fish given us daily by the Yakut villagers, and thinking up weird schemes of getting away to Bulun. But till the rivers froze solidly enough to sledge over the ice, there was no chance. Even then, the limited facilities of the village could never provide the necessary sledges for eleven men nor the clothes to keep us from freezing in the sub-zero weather which October had brought. But get away soon we must, for all the flesh had sloughed from several of Leach’s toes and he needed medical attention badly if he were not soon to die; while Cole, lucid at intervals, required expert care also if his mind were to be saved; and Danenhower’s eye, a month now without surgical care, was beginning to relapse. As for the rest of us, our legs were getting better and we could soon drag ourselves about, but the food problem was rapidly getting acute, and I was very much afraid that we should awake some morning to discover that the natives, finding us too much of a drain on their stores, had silently moved on in the night to some other collection of vacant huts of which we knew nothing, leaving us to starve alone lest everyone starve together.
The only solution to this dilemma, since we could not go to Bulun, was to have Bulun send us the necessary dog teams, sledges, clothes, and food to make the journey. How to get word to Bulun, however, was the difficulty, for none of the natives would go and no man in my party knew the road over the distant mountains to Bulun. I dared send no one without a guide.
The reason given by the natives for refusing to undertake the trip was that it was an impossible season for traveling, an in-between time in which they could safely move neither by boat nor sledge. A few weeks before, in early September, it would have been possible to go by boat but now new ice forming everywhere prevented. A few weeks later, it would be possible to travel by sledge cross-country over snow and ice, but just now that also could not be attempted for the ice on the many rivers to be crossed was continuously breaking in the current and was nowhere yet thick enough to bear the weight of a sledge without grave danger of crashing through into the river and losing sledge and dogs at least, if not drivers also. To all our entreaties, Nicolai Chagra merely shrugged his shoulders—early September, yes; late October, yes; but now, a most decided no!
Providentially the matter was settled for us about the middle of October by the chance visit to the village of a Russian exile, Kusmah by name, who lived nearby and who on the promise of the whaleboat immediately and five hundred roubles later (when I could get funds from America) undertook to make the dangerous journey and started off with his dog sledge over the frozen tundra to Bulun, expecting to return in five days.
Vaguely, while he was gone, we speculated on how long it would take us to sledge the fifteen hundred miles from Bulun via Yakutsk to Irkutsk on Lake Baikal, and then via post road get to Moscow and so home. And while we speculated over that, we also speculated earnestly over the fate of De Long and the first cutter. There was no doubt that his boat had followed Chipp’s, but over the question of how long the first cutter had lasted in the gale and whether she had come to her doom finally by capsizing or by swamping, there was many a hot discussion, as my seamen argued vehemently over the relative probabilities of a square-sterned boat like the heavily-built first cutter broaching before she flooded, or vice versa. The consensus of opinion was that she had swamped, for De Long had in his boat not only three more men than we, but also Snoozer, the last dog, all the navigating equipment, four rifles, the complete records of the expedition in ten cases, and one small sledge which De Long had kept to drag the records on. With so much ballast in his boat, that his men could have bailed fast enough to avoid foundering seemed incredible to most of us after our own experiences with the much lighter double-ended whaleboat, but the broaching theorists would never agree to it. Chipp, whom all hands freely admitted was the best sailor, had broached and capsized. How then could De Long have avoided it? And since, crowded in our little hut with nothing else to do, there was no outlet for men too feeble to get about save in talk, the argument went on endlessly, and of course with no chance of an agreement ever being reached.
Five days went by and Kusmah, our messenger to Bulun, had not returned. Ten days elapsed and we became alarmed for Kusmah. Had he perished in the ice? To add to our worries, Nicolai Chagra cut our food supply from four fish a day to three, with occasionally a putrid and decaying goose supplied in lieu of the fish.
I was seriously debating sending Bartlett, the strongest member of our party, on to Bulun in the forlorn hope of getting us assistance, when on the night of October 29th, after thirteen days’ absence on his hazardous journey, Kusmah at last returned, bringing on his sledge some supplies, about forty pounds of bread mainly, and no clothes for us, but instead a letter in Russian from the Cossack commandant at Bulun stating that next day he would start for us from there with a reindeer caravan and clothes enough to bring us all safely over the mountains to Bulun.
This news heartened us considerably, and in broken Russian I profusely thanked Kusmah. Meanwhile my men, not waiting to thank anybody, were revelling in the bread of which we had seen none for nearly five months, breaking the loaves in huge chunks into which they sank their teeth hungrily. All smiles at my expressions of approbation, and happy at the way everyone seemed to appreciate what food he had brought us, Kusmah bowed, then pulled from inside his fur jacket a dirty scrap of paper which he tendered me. On it was a pencilled message. Pausing casually between two mouthfuls of bread, I glanced at it, noted in surprise that it was in English, and then as I read the first words, I stiffened as suddenly as if I had been shot.
“Arctic steamer Jeannette lost on the 11th June; landed on Siberia 25th September or thereabouts; want assistance to go for the CAPTAIN and DOCTOR and nine (9) other men.
William F. C. Nindemann,
Louis P. Noros,
Seamen U. S. N.
Reply in haste; want food and clothing.”
For a moment my heart stopped beating as I read, then I called out huskily,
“Men! De Long and the first cutter landed safely! They’re alive!”
All over the hut broken loaves of bread thudded to the floor as open-mouthed in astonishment at this startling declaration, my shipmates stared at me, then clustered round to read the note, while I turned abruptly to Kusmah, asked in my best Russian,
“That note, Kusmah! Where did you get it?”
With some difficulty, Kusmah explained to me his trip. To get to Bulun, he had to go fifty miles due west cross country over the mountains to Ku Mark Surk on the Lena River (where he was delayed a week waiting for the main stream to freeze over so he could cross) and then sixty miles due south along the west bank of the Lena to Bulun. On his way back to us from Bulun, coming again to Ku Mark Surk, he had met there a small reindeer caravan of Yakuts bound south for Bulun and with that caravan, clad only in tattered underwear and sick almost to death, he had come across two strangers feebly expostulating with the natives against going south and almost hysterical at their inability to make themselves understood.
He spoke to them in Russian, with no better luck at communication than the Yakut reindeer drivers had had, but suddenly recalling what we had told him of our two lost boats, he enquired of them,
“Jeannette? Americanski?” and immediately the men had understood, nodding vigorously in assent; and writing this note, had placed it in his hands, begging him piteously,
“Commandant! Bulun! Bulun!”
That he understood also, but as he was bound for Jamaveloch and knew that I would be most interested in the matter, he had forthwith resumed his journey, and now, two days later, there was the message in my hands, while Nindemann and Noros no doubt were by this time in Bulun itself.
I retrieved the note from Bartlett and read it again carefully. De Long had landed, but simply “on Siberia.” Where was he now? The note was blank on that. I could not tell. But evidently he was in a bad way, for Nindemann and Noros, somehow separated from their shipmates, were from Kusmah’s account obviously far gone, and as for the others, that closing scrawl,
“Reply in haste; want food and clothing” had an ominous ring. And then my eyes fell again on “the CAPTAIN and DOCTOR and nine (9) other men.”
Nine? Hastily I counted up. The captain, the doctor, Nindemann, Noros and nine others—that made only thirteen! But De Long had had fourteen all told in his boat! Was nine an error? No; as if to emphasize it, the nine was repeated as a figure in parenthesis. So already one of De Long’s party had died. Sadly I wondered who. Collins, perhaps? No, I decided; Collins had done no work on the ice to wear him down. Lee, my machinist, was most likely, I concluded. His injured hips would have made it most difficult for him to keep up and he might have had to be left behind.
But this was no time for wondering. Only Nindemann and Noros could tell me where the captain was and how to get there. And if those two men were as badly off as Kusmah said, they might both soon die, taking their secret with them. The Lena Delta was large, over 5000 square miles in area, and from bitter experience I knew now how difficult it was to find one’s way amidst its myriad islands, swamps, and freezing streams. And as for charts, there were none worthy of the name—Petermann’s, which had nearly led my party to starvation, was worse than useless. I shivered as I thought of that. De Long, relying on that same Petermann chart, had intended to land near Barkin! Barkin and the north coast of the delta thereabouts, were not only uninhabited and a hopeless stretch of barren tundra, but a hundred miles further north and by so much further removed even from such slight shelter as we had providentially encountered at Jamaveloch! De Long and his party must be in fearful straits!
“Kusmah!” I said sharply. “Return with me to Bulun at once! Get your dogs! We start right away!”
But Kusmah demurred, objecting that his dog team was completely worn out and could not travel the ice again without several days’ rest. On investigating his dogs, this proved to be true, so getting hold promptly of Nicolai Chagra, I insisted vigorously that he provide immediately from somewhere another team if it stripped the village of its last dog.
Chagra was willing enough, but it took him all night to scrape up the necessary dogs, and not till next morning, October 30th (a day which later became indelibly burned into my memory), behind a team of eleven dogs driven by my original Yakut pilot, did I set off in a temperature twenty degrees below zero for Bulun where from Nindemann and Noros I hoped to learn of De Long’s whereabouts. Two days later, after hard labor by the dogs through deep snow and over broken ice, I was at Ku Mark Surk, where I changed my worn-out dog team for a reindeer sledge, and with that made the last sixty miles southward up the frozen Lena to Bulun, arriving on the evening of November 2.
I promptly enquired my way to the hut where were lodged Nindemann and Noros, and in mingled fear and hope hurried there. What was I going to hear of my captain, of Dr. Ambler, about my other shipmates? Which one of them was already dead, what chance had I of rescuing the survivors? With my heart pounding violently, I pushed open the door of the hut.