“All hands!” was echoing fore and aft, and I rushed below to close the gates in our watertight bulkheads and stand by my steam pumps, not knowing what effect this sudden release of our bow from the ice might have on that leak we had been pumping, so it seemed, forever. Paradoxically, however, the leak immediately decreased, probably because our freed stem floated several feet higher than before, so I returned quickly on deck to find the crew under the captain’s directions busily engaged in preparing to re-ship our long-disused rudder. This, delayed by frozen gudgeons, took some hours. But when it was completed, and everything meanwhile had been cleared away from booms and yards for making sail, the Jeannette for the first time since 1879 (though we never saw the irony of that till later) was again ready to maneuver as a ship.
Amidst the hoarse orders of the bosun and the noise of seamen clearing running rigging and scrambling out on frosty yards to loose the preventer lashings on the long-unused sails, I climbed to the bridge. There I found De Long calmly smoking his pipe while he eyed the smooth black water in our bay, now perhaps a quarter of a mile wide between the separated edges of our late island.
“Shall I fire up the main boilers, captain, and couple up the propeller shaft?” I asked anxiously.
“How much coal have you left, chief?” he countered.
“Only fifteen tons, sir.”
Fifteen tons. That would keep us going only three days normal steaming. De Long thought a moment.
“No, chief, don’t light off. There’s no place for the engines to take us anyway and we might burn up all our fuel just lying here. Save the coal; we may need it to keep us from freezing next winter. We’ll make sail if we have to move, but just now, all we can do is get some lines ashore and tie up to that starboard floe, till we see what the pack is about.”
So instead of trying to move, Cole ran out the lines to ice-anchors on our bow and quarter and we moored to the floe.
Then began a desperate fight with De Long struggling to save his ship should the ice close in again before it broke up completely and let us escape. A measurement nearby showed the ice sixteen feet thick; deeper than our keel. If the pack, pressing in on us now, got a fair grip on our sides, we should be squeezed between thicker ice than ever before we had been, in a giant nutcracker indeed. But what could we do about it? The water lead was short, there was no escape from it ahead or astern. Just one chance offered itself. A little ahead of where we lay, on our port bow was a narrow canal joining two wider bays in the parted pack. If we could only fill that canal up with heavy floes, they might take the major thrust of the closing pack, thus saving us from the full pressure. Savagely the men on watch turned to and fought with lines and grapnels, hooking loose floebergs everywhere and dragging them through the water into that canal, anchoring them there as best they could.
We had made fair progress on filling the gap, when at 7:30 A.M. the ice started to advance. The sight of that massive pack slowly closing on us like the jaws of doom, quickened our muscles, and we strained like madmen shoving drifting ice into the opening ahead. Just then, as if playing with us, the pack halted dead, giving us a better chance to finish the job.