Our sicklist was now considerable—Danenhower, Chipp, Newcomb, Dunbar, and Alexey, with the skipper himself really belonging there, but nevertheless permitted by the doctor to be up so long as he stayed off the ice for a few days till his cut had a fair chance to start to heal. Chipp, Newcomb, and Alexey were still badly off from lead poisoning, but Tong Sing, our steward, had recovered sufficiently to go back on duty and was now mainly engaged in tending the sick when not actually serving.
From this unsatisfactory state of our personnel, I turned my attention after a week’s absence once more to the Jeannette and what was going on round her. Henrietta Island was rapidly dropping abaft our beam as we drifted westward past its northern side and it was evident that we would soon drop it out of sight. Jeannette Island had already vanished from our world.
But the action of the ice about us attracted most attention. Not since November, 1879, had we seen so much moving ice near the ship, the effect undoubtedly of nearby Henrietta Island. The day after my return, we found our floe reduced to an ice island about a mile one way and half of that the other, with ourselves about a hundred yards from the western edge, while all about us was a tumbling procession of floebergs, shrieking and howling as they rolled past. Leads opened and closed endlessly in the near distance with ridges of broken floes shooting thirty feet above the pack. The roaring of the breaking floes sounded like continuous thunder. And in all this turmoil our ice island with the Jeannette in it moved majestically along. Meanwhile we from our decks regarded it, thankful that our floe was not breaking up to crush our ship and leave our heavy boats and sledges to the mercies of that chaos, a half mile of which with a sledge lightly loaded only, off Henrietta Island we had barely managed to survive.
Another day passed, leaving the island in our wake. The moving ice closed up again with long rows of piled up floes all about us, one huge ridge of blocks seven to eight feet thick riding the pack not a hundred and fifty yards away from our bulwarks. And yet one more day and the captain got a sight, showing we were going due west at a fair rate, which if continued, unless we turned north, would ultimately bring us out into the Atlantic, though the chances seemed better for a resumption of our northwest drift toward the Pole. But toward either of these, now that we had some discoveries to add to the world’s charts, we looked forward hopefully. At any rate, since we had to leave the matter to the pack, for the present our motto was obviously “Westward ho!”
June 10th came with our drift still steadily westward, clear weather, and the temperature about 25° F., well below freezing though above zero, which for us made it very pleasant weather. Alexey came off the sicklist, and so also did Dunbar; leaving only Chipp as a bedridden case, and Newcomb, up but acting as if he were exceedingly miserable, which I guess he was. Danenhower, permanently on the sicklist, was allowed on deck an hour a day for exercise that the doctor hoped would gradually restore his health and save his one good eye, which now showed some signs of getting over its sympathetic inflammation. During these hourly periods, Dan was sternly ordered to keep in the shade and wear his almost opaque shield, but unfortunately our overbold navigator stepped out into the sun and pulled aside the glass, attempting to get at least one decent look around. Instead he had an instant relapse of his inflamed eye which nearly drove both Ambler and the captain wild.
Fortunately, the captain had had all his bandages save one small one removed from his injured skull by now, or I think he would have ripped them off in his attempts to tear his hair over the results of Dan’s reckless disobedience.
Except for this unfortunate mishap, June 10 passed away pleasantly enough. With no more thought than that it was just another day in the pack, most of us turned in at 10 P.M., concerned only about whether our drift next day would continue west or change to northwest. But I, having the watch from 9 P.M. to midnight, remained on deck. At 11 P.M., I was disturbed by a succession of heavy shocks to the ship which increased in frequency till as midnight approached there was such a thumping and thundering of cracking ice about us and so much reverberation as the shocks drummed against our hollow hull, that the uneasy deck beneath me quivered as I had not felt it since two years before when we had been underway with all sail set. So violent was this disturbance that De Long, asleep below, lost all thought of rest, pulled on his clothes and scrambled on deck to see what was up.
With the sun even at midnight above the horizon, he had little difficulty seeing, and of course none at all in hearing. About eighty yards from us, a lane had opened in the pack some ten feet wide, while all about us as we watched, cracks were zigzagging across the surface of our floe to the accompaniment of thunderous detonations as the thick ice split. And all the while, the heavily listed Jeannette, still fast in the ice, rocked in her bed as in an earthquake.
For ten trying minutes this went on, and then with a terrific report like a bomb exploding, the floe split wide apart beneath us, the Jeannette lurched wildly to port and suddenly slid out of her cradle into open water! There she rolled drunkenly for a moment, till coming finally erect she lay free of the ice at last in a swiftly widening bay!
So rapidly did all this happen that the skipper, clinging to the rail of his reeling bridge, saw the situation change from that of a ship frozen in to one underway before he could give a single order. But immediately after, with the ship still rocking heavily,