Not as any compliment to me, but out of sheer necessity, De Long selected me to take charge of the expeditionary party and make the attempt to land. I was the only commissioned officer of the Navy available; Danenhower, Chipp, and Ambler were incapacitated in varying degree; the captain himself, anxious as he was to have the honor of being first to plant our flag on newly discovered soil, dared not leave the ship to the only one other seagoing officer still on deck, the whaler Dunbar. So by a process of simple elimination, I was given the doubtful honor of leading. To help me were assigned Mr. Dunbar and four picked men from the crew—Quartermaster Nindemann and Erichsen, one of our biggest seamen, from the deck force; with Bartlett, fireman, and Sharvell, coalheaver, from my black gang, the latter to act as cook.
With these men, one sledge, a dinghy to ferry us over any open water, provisions for seven days (including forty-two ounces of the inevitable lime-juice and eleven gallons of distilled water but no tomatoes), navigating instruments, fifteen dogs, and the silken ensign which Emma De Long had made for the Jeannette as the particular banner to be used in taking possession, we shoved off from the vessel’s side on May 31, cheered by all the remaining ship’s company. Henrietta Island was twelve miles off over the pack, bearing southwest by west. The ship, to guide me in my return, hoisted a huge black flag, eleven feet square at the main.
Our sledge carried between boat and supplies, a load of 1900 pounds, nearly a ton. With Dunbar running ahead as a leader to encourage the dogs and the other five of us heaving on the sledge to help along, it was as much as we could do to get it underway and moving slowly over the rough ice away from the ship. The harnessed dogs behaved as usual—they were not interested in any cooperation with us. In the first fifteen minutes, several broke out of harness and returned to the ship, there of course to be recaptured by our shipmates and dragged back to the sledge.
Of our terrible three day journey over only twelve miles of live ice toward Henrietta Island, I have little to say save that it was a nightmare. We made five miles the first day, during which we lost sight of the Jeannette and her black flag; and four miles the second. At that point, Mr. Dunbar, who had been doing most of the guiding while the rest of us pushed on the sledge to help the dogs, became in spite of his dark glasses totally snow-blind and could no longer see his way, even to stumble along over the ice in our wake. So we perched him inside the dinghy, thus increasing our load, and on the third day set out again in a snow storm, guided now only by compass toward the invisible island. In the afternoon, the storm suddenly cleared, and there half a mile from us, majestic in its grandeur, stood the island! Precipitous black cliffs, lifting a sheer four hundred feet above the ice, towered over us; a little inland, four times that height, rose cloud-wreathed mountains, with glaciers startlingly white against the black peaks filling their every gorge.
As we stood there, awestruck at the spectacle, viewing this unknown land on which man had never yet set foot, the silence of those desolate mountains, awful and depressing, gripped us, driving home the loneliness, the utter separation from the world of men of this Arctic island!
We were now only half a mile from the shore which marked our goal, but as we gazed across it, cold dread seized us. What a half mile! The drifting pack, in which miles away the unresisting Jeannette was being carried along, was here in contact with immovable mountains which could and did resist. As a result, around the bases of those cliffs, were piled up broken floes by the millions, the casualties in that incessant combat between pack and rock. While moving past between were vast masses of churning ice, forever changing shape, tumbling and grinding away at each other as that stately procession of floebergs hurried along. And it was over this pandemonium, that if ever we were to plant our flag on that island, we had to pass!
To get sledge, boat, and all our provisions across was utterly hopeless. So I made a cache on a large floe of our dinghy, stowing in it all except one day’s provisions and most of our gear, raising an oar flying a small black flag vertically on the highest hummock of that floe as a marker. Next there was Dunbar. Terribly down in the mouth at having collapsed and become nothing but a hindrance, he begged to be left on the ice rather than encumber us further. But to leave an old man blinded and helpless on a drifting floe which we might never find again, was not to be thought of. In spite of his distressed pleadings, I put him on the sledge together with our scanty provisions and instruments, and then with a lashing to the neck of the lead dog who had no intention whatever of daring that devil’s churn, we started, myself in the lead.
It was hell, over floes tossing one minute high in air, the next sinking under our feet. Splashing, rolling, tumbling, we scrambled from floe to floe, wet, frozen, terrified. Only by big Erichsen’s truly herculean strength in bodily lifting out the sledge when it stuck fast did we get over safely. When at last, soaked and exhausted, we crawled up on the quiescent ice fringing the island, we were barely able to haul Dunbar, dripping like a seal, off the sledge and onto the more solid ice.
We paused there briefly while little Sharvell, his teeth still chattering from fright, clumsily prepared our cold supper. Then marching over the fixed ice, I as commander first set foot on the island and in a loud voice claimed it as a possession of the United States. I invited my shipmates ashore, and in a formal procession led by Hans Erichsen (who as a special reward was carrying our silken ensign) they landed also on the island, where Erichsen proudly jammed the flagstaff into the earth.
With a few precious drops (and precious few) of medicinal whiskey, I christened the spot Henrietta Island, after which we six sick seamen drank the remainder of the medicine in honor of the event, and then revelling in a brief tramp over real earth for the first time in over twenty-one of the longest months men have ever spent, we hauled our sleeping bags about our weary bones and lay down, at last to rest again on terra firma.