CHAPTER XXXVIII
All winter long, while endeavoring to recuperate my frozen arms and legs, I gathered supplies and sledges from Bulun, from far-off Yakutsk, from all the villages between, for an intensive search of the delta in early March before the annual springtime freshets, feeding the Lena with the melting snows of southern Siberia, should come pouring out on the flat delta, burying it in a flood of raging waters and sweeping my shipmates out into the Arctic Sea.
I kept only Nindemann, now recovered, and Bartlett with me to help me in my search. All the remaining survivors, a pitiful party, under Lieutenant Danenhower’s charge, went south over the fifteen hundred mile trail to Irkutsk. Poor Aneguin, weakened by exposure, died before he got out of Siberia; Jack Cole, violently insane, reached America only to die soon after in a government asylum; and Danenhower himself, broken in health, after a few brief years spent undergoing a long series of operations, soon followed him to the grave. The rest except for Leach, whose toes had to be amputated, reached America safe and sound. Meanwhile by courier from Bulun to Irkutsk, the head of the telegraph lines in Siberia, the news of the disaster to the Jeannette finally went out on December 21.
For two and a half years not a word of us had ever reached civilization. As the months since our departure lengthened into years and no news came, anxiety in America and in Europe over our fate deepened into keen alarm. Swallowed by the trackless Arctic, fear for us grew, and in the summer of 1881, two relief expeditions fitted out by the American government went north to search for us. But where should they look? Which way did the polar currents go from Behring Strait where we had entered? No one knew save we on the Jeannette and our knowledge was useless to a world facing a search of the unknown north.
One expedition in the Revenue Cutter Corwin, searched for us fruitlessly off Wrangel Land but not daring to enter the ice, found no trace. A second expedition, in the U.S.S. Alliance, thinking perhaps we might have drifted east over North America and come out beyond Greenland into the Atlantic, searched during the whole summer the fringe of the polar pack around Spitzbergen, getting in open water as far as 82° North, five degrees higher than we in the Jeannette were ever carried by the pack before it crushed us.
But neither expedition found the slightest sign of us, and more alarmed than ever, an international search was being organized by our Navy, with the help of England, Russia, and Sweden for the summer of 1882. In the midst of these preparations in late December, 1881, from far up in the Arctic Circle, my first brief telegram from Bulun at last reached Irkutsk and flashed out over the wires to an astonished world, ending the mystery of the Jeannette’s disappearance, bringing joy to some whose friends had definitely escaped; blank despair to others whose lives were bound up with poor Chipp and his lost boat’s crew; and a terrible state of mingled fear and hope, not to be resolved for unknown months yet, to Emma De Long and the families of those men still with her husband. I felt that they were dead, but I did not know it, and dared not say so. I could only announce them as having landed safely, but yet unfound. My heart ached for Emma De Long, half the globe away from me, clinging to her daughter, praying that her husband might yet be alive, tortured by the long drawn out fear of waiting for word from Siberia, dreading each knock at the door as announcing the messenger bringing definitely the black news of his death, and all the while with her imagination able to dwell only on the agonies which her husband had undergone, and if by some miracle (for which she prayed) he still were living among those Arctic wastes, he must yet be suffering.
I received carte blanche from Washington for funds to pursue the search; from St. Petersburg, I was assured all the resources of Russia were at my command. But Washington and St. Petersburg were far away from the trackless delta where I must pursue my search, and carte blanche telegrams helped me little. A few dogs, a few interpreters, a supply of dried fish sold under compulsion by natives who could ill afford to spare them, was the total extent of the assistance I could use and get delivered to distant Bulun up in the Arctic Circle, fifteen hundred long miles away from civilization and the telegraph wires at Irkutsk, when in late February with practically all the fish in the Lena Delta in my possession and the poor Yakuts face to face with famine, I resumed my search.
Dividing my forces, I sent Bartlett and an interpreter to cover the eastern branches of the Lena, while with Nindemann to guide me, I started again to search the western branches myself.
I had seven dog teams hauling fish, having practically stripped Jamaveloch and every Lena village of its entire supply. Delayed considerably still by fierce snow storms, we went north from Ku Mark Surk into the delta, but it took two weeks for the straining dogs to drag our stores along to where the Lena started branching widely at Cass Carta, and many a burdened dog froze to death in the drifts before he got there. At Cass Carta at last, I reorganized my remaining teams and on March 12, still in the midst of-winter weather, sent Bartlett east, and with Nindemann, began myself the search of western rivers.
For a week, systematically Nindemann scouted along each river, trying to pick out the one that he and Noros had followed south. But the innumerable storms since had changed the whole face of that frozen country. How many streams we examined, I cannot even guess. Nindemann, his broad brows knit with puzzled furrows, could find nothing familiar in any of them. Baffled, we gave up searching there and went far to the north, to follow down De Long’s trail from the coast, but at the same point where in November I had lost the track, Nindemann himself was able to do no better in pointing out the path. And then came a raging storm which held us snowbound for three days.
Despairingly I considered the situation. Would we ever pick up De Long’s track? It must be soon or never! Before long the river ice would break up, we could no longer travel, and swollen with melting snow from the whole interior of Siberia, the Lena would come flooding down in torrents to drown out the low delta lands, washing away forever every trace of my comrades! De Long must be somewhere to the south. In desperation, I gave up searching the central delta for his track, and decided to go back again to the delta head, to sweep the spreading rivers there as I came north.
Soon after, starting from the southward again, since Nindemann also felt that there he could do best, we began at a wide bay, from which one tremendous river flowed eastward toward Jamaveloch, another flowed westward and northward toward Tomat, and in between the Lena, in many smaller branches, flowed due north, spreading widely out and meandering over the delta, though now of course it flowed beneath the ice as every stream was still solidly frozen over.
Following the edge of this tremendous bay, I examined every headland on it. Broken slabs of ice were piled up in tangled masses on the banks; the snow, drifted by the winds, ran in smooth slopes from the river ice to the tops of the promontories, filling in the banks; dozens of frozen streams, like twigs spreading from a limb, branched out from the bay, complicating the search.
Coming in the late afternoon to a high headland on the western side of the bay, I left my sledge as usual on the river ice, and clambered up the crust of snow to its top. The crest was strongly wind-swept and fairly bare of snow; as I stooped to brace myself against the wind, I saw right on the point of the promontory signs of a long-dead fire, with half-burned driftwood logs hove into the wide bed of ashes and apparently many footprints in the ice about.
Beckoning to Nindemann to come up, I asked him,
“Did you or Noros build that fire here?”
“No,” said Nindemann, “it looks to me we came this way, but we never had a fire like that.”
I motioned up my dog-driver, questioned him in native dialect,
“Do Yakuts build fires this way?”
“No, no, master,” he protested volubly, “Yakuts build only small fires, never big fires like this.”
“Well, Nindemann,” I said, “I think we’re on the trail at last. This looks to me like a signal fire, especially since it’s built on this promontory to shine out over the bay. De Long must have passed here.”
“Yah,” agreed the quartermaster, “that is right. There! See? There is the old wreck of a flatboat on the bank and I remember Louis and me passed by that wreck the same day we left the captain! This is the way we came, and the captain said he’d follow our trail!”
Going down to the river again, we climbed aboard our dog sledges. Nindemann on his sledge led along the ice, and with me following on mine, we set off on a short journey up the stream to examine the bare skeleton of that flatboat, stranded on the bank a quarter of a mile downstream.
I rode, sitting sideways on my sledge, facing the high bank which rose some thirty feet above the river, and which, as usual, had hard-driven snow packed in a glistening slope from its crest down over the frozen river. Going swiftly along over the ice this way while eagerly scanning the river bank, I noted standing up through the sloping snow what seemed to be the points of four sticks lashed together with a rope.
Immediately I rolled off the speeding sledge, and swiftly going to the spot, found a Remington rifle slung from the sticks, its muzzle some eight inches out of the snow. A real sign of De Long at last!
Instantly I sent my driver to bring Nindemann back, feeling that here the weakening wanderers might have made a cache of such belongings as they could no longer carry, and perhaps even have left a record of their progress. We were certainly on the trail now!
While the Yakuts at my orders began digging in the snow around those sticks, Nindemann returned to the flatboat, and I with a compass again climbed up the steep river bank, intending to get some bearings from which later I might find that spot in case a sudden snow-storm should blot out the way to it.
Panting from my exertions, I looked about for a good place on that high ground from which to take the compass bearings when a few steps off, partially buried in the snow still left on that forlorn and gale-swept height, I saw a copper tea kettle. With a beating heart, I started for it, then stopped short. There before me on that desolate plateau, protruding stiff and stark above the snow—was an extended arm!
Lena Delta
For an instant I gazed, aghast at my discovery, then dropped to my knees to find that that arm belonged to Captain De Long! There he lay, cold and silent in death, half buried in the snow. A yard or two off lay Dr. Ambler, while near their feet, closest to where the fire had been beneath the copper kettle, was stretched Ah Sam. My long search was ended at last!
Mournfully I looked. There had the saga of the Jeannette ended, there in the Arctic snows was my lost captain—dead. For a long time with bowed head, I knelt sobbing before my commander, whom last I had seen, erect in the cockpit of his boat in the midst of that roaring polar gale which had brought swift death to Chipp, waving me on to safety.
As I gazed tear-stricken into his face, calm even in death, I was struck by the odd position of his left arm, upraised with open fingers as if, lying there dying, he had tossed something over his shoulder and his stiffening arm had frozen in that gesture. I looked behind him.
A few feet away in the snow beyond his head lay a small notebook, the journal he had kept since the Jeannette sank. To me it seemed as if De Long, in his dying moment had tossed that journal over his head, away from the fire at his feet lest it should blow in there and be destroyed. I seized the journal and rose. Before me were only three of the captain’s party—where were the other eight? Perhaps the journal, if the dying captain had kept it up, might tell me. Nindemann had parted from the captain on October 9. What had happened since that day? Hurriedly, I separated the frozen leaves and turned to the page marked—