De Long came down off the bridge to encourage the men with the grapnels. Standing on the edge of the canal, directing the work, was our ice-pilot. Approaching him along the brink of the pack, the captain looked down through the cold sea at the submerged edge of the floe, the blue-white ice there glimmering faintly through the water till lost in the depths; then he looked back at the Jeannette with her tall masts and spreading yards erect and square at last across the Arctic sky, while her stout hull, stark black against the ice, seemed grimly to await the onslaught.
“Well, Dunbar,” asked the skipper, “what do you think of it?”
Dunbar, worn and dour, had his mind made up.
“No use doing this, cap’n,” he replied dully, indicating the men heaving on the grapnel lines. “Before tonight, she’ll either be under this floe or on top of it! Better start those men, instead o’ hauling ice, at getting overboard the emergency provisions!”
De Long shook his head. He couldn’t agree. In terrible winter weather, the sturdy Jeannette had often beaten the pack before; he couldn’t believe that she would fail us now.
At ten o’clock, the ice started to advance once more. Our job in plugging the canal was finished. We had done all that man could do. Now it was up to the Jeannette. But as we watched that pack come on, flat floes and tilted floebergs thick and jagged, urged forward by endless miles of surging ice behind, our hearts sank. In spite of our thick sides and heavy trusses, the contest between hollow ship and solid pack looked so unequal.
On came the pack. The bay narrowed, thinned down to a ribbon of water on our port side, vanished altogether. The attacking floes reached our sides, started to squeeze. The Jeannette, tightly gripped, began to screech and groan from end to end. With bow lifted and stem depressed, she heeled sharply 16° to starboard, thrown hard against the floe there, while we grabbed frantically at whatever was at hand to avoid being hurled into the scuppers. Then to our intense relief, the ice we had pushed into the canal ahead came into play, took the further thrust, and stopped the advance, so that for the moment everything quieted down, leaving our ship in a precarious position, but at least intact. Our spirits rose. Perhaps we had saved her!
Thus we lay for two hours till eight bells struck. Cole, a little uncertain as to routine now, glanced up at the bridge. De Long nodded, so Cole piped down for mess, and with our ship pretty well on her beam ends, one watch laid below. There clinging to the stanchions, they ate the dinner which the imperturbable Ah Sam, still cooking in all that turmoil, had somehow, by lashing his pots down on the tilted galley range perhaps, managed to prepare.
At two bells, mess was over and most of us on deck again, hanging to the port rail. Soon we got another jam, listing us a little further and still more raising our tilted bow, but the Jeannette took it well and I did not consider it anything serious, when suddenly, to everybody’s alarm, my machinist Lee, whose station at the time was down on the fireroom floor running the little distiller boiler, shot out the machinery hatch to the deck, shouting,
“We’re sinking! The ice is coming through the side!”