The only trouble with the speech was that no one, including the captain himself, in his heart really believed it. Then came midnight, with eight bells for the old year, eight bells more for the new one; and we soberly faced the year 1881. 1879 and 1880 had been heartbreakers for us. What had 1881 in store for the Jeannette, there in the Arctic?
To start with, it had January gales, bitter cold, and the usual thunderous uproar of the pack in motion, but fortunately never close enough to endanger us. And wonder of wonders, the discovery that the gales were mostly easterly, so that both by observation and by drift lead, we found that at last we were going (when we went at all) steadily in one direction, northwest, and no longer endlessly zigzagging to and fro like a Flying Dutchman to the northward of Wrangel Land. And to lend a little further zest to this pleasing state of affairs, the month of January closed with the ship in latitude 74° 41′ N., longitude 173° 10′ E., a little farther west and three miles farther north than any of our previous peregrinations with the pack had ever got us. We began to take notice. Perhaps we were at last “going somewhere,” although since the pack was moving with us, our scenery was changing not the slightest.
February arrived, and with it on February 5 came the SUN—a glorious sight to us after ninety-one long days of night! And never was he hailed by sun worshipers in ancient Persian temples with such sincere joy and enthusiasm as by the sadly bleached and frozen array of careworn, fur-clad seamen on the Jeannette. We streamed out on the ice with the temperature at 40° below zero to bask in the light, real daylight! of part of the sun’s disk peeping over the horizon at us at noon. We thanked God for the sun’s return, bringing to us once more the light to shine on our ship, still pumping away at our leak but no more damaged than when he left us in early November.
The rest of February and all of March went by with no signs of letup in our winter cold. A few more gales, seemingly worse than ever, buried the ship in fine snow, leaving only the three masts sticking up out of the white wastes to mark our position, but the winds continued easterly and we continued our northwest drift with our soundings steadily increasing also. Were we at last getting off the Siberian continental shelf into the deeper water of the open Arctic Sea? We hoped so, for deeper water meant greater opportunity for the ocean to break up the pack.
We drifted across the 75th parallel of latitude, for us a red letter event. 75° North! It sounded much better. While not to be compared with the 83° North already attained along the Greenland coasts by other explorers, still it looked promising, and what a change from forever shuttling back and forth between parallels 72° and 74° for twenty weary months!
In other ways, matters in March were worse. Several times, from the screeching of the pack, the cracking of the ice, and the severe shocks to the ship, we feared we were in for a repetition of some of our hair-raising experiences of the first winter, but each time the tumbling floes failed to come near us, and we thankfully heard the distant roarings subside. On top of that, the doctor, who all through the year had hopefully lanced and probed the abscess in Danenhower’s left eye, found himself searching his soul as to whether he should undertake a major operation, but finally in view of all conditions, concluded he dared not. Dan, wan and emaciated from his long confinement, could at least see with one eye, his right, and that eye while weak from sympathetic suffering with its mate, seemed now in less danger of becoming permanently affected. As a result, Dan with his left eye blindfolded and his right heavily shielded by a colored lens, was occasionally allowed to walk over the ship, and even, when the weather was unusually favorable, permitted to grope his way round the ice alongside.
Aside from these matters, March brought us two other unusual episodes to break the monotony of our lives. The first was a bear, a she-bear as it turned out and recently a mother, which facts may have explained matters, for this bear, cornered by the dogs on top of a hummock near the ship, put up such a tremendous fight as we never saw before. The top of that hummock was a mass of flying fur and snarling dogs, the heavens resounding with howls, screeches, and roars, dogs leaping in to attack only to be sent sailing right and left on their backs. Bear and dogs were out for a finish fight—savage teeth and lunging claws made a shambles of the ice on that hummock—how it might have ended was a question, for finally Nindemann, coming up, settled the battle with his rifle.
For us she turned out to be a very expensive bear; when we took stock of casualties, we found one dog, Plug Ugly, dead; another, Prince, ripped open from back to shoulder; three more, Wolf, Tom, and Bingo, with gashed sides and stomachs; while Snoozer (the captain’s favorite) had his mouth considerably lengthened as by a razor, and Smike was badly chewed in two places, not to mention half a dozen other dogs licking minor injuries. Dr. Ambler put in a busy day with thread and needle sewing up the wounded. When it was all over, we had a badly battered pack of dogs who were quite agreeable to crawling quietly off into the snow, by unanimous consent suspending all hostilities among themselves.
The other deviation from monotony was the sudden interest taken by our two Chinamen, Tong Sing and Ah Sam, in flying kites. The steady and continuous east winds no doubt brought to mind their opportunity, and soon Chinese kites in all shapes, fashions, and colors—birds, flies, and dragons—were fluttering in the breeze as tranquilly as if they were on the green banks of the Yang-Tse-Kiang, instead of in the Arctic ice at 40° below. The antics of our cook and steward with their playthings kept the crew, lining the Jeannette’s rail watching them, in an uproar. But so seriously did Sing and Sam take their pastime that when imperative routine sent them back to cabin and galley, instead of winding in their lines, they would tie their kite-strings to whatever was handiest on the lee side, the shrouds, the davits, or the belaying pins, till they could emerge again and cast loose; and the captain believed that had it been necessary, they would cheerfully have torn up their shirts for kite-tails!
April 1 came, bringing with it by the calendar our spring and summer routine, but no particular break in the weather, which on April 16 was still -26° F., much worse than comparable temperatures of the year before; for us, certainly not a hopeful sign.