The next few minutes, against a background of rushing water, screeching ice, and crunching timbers, were a blur of heaving over the side and dragging well clear our pemmican, sledges, boats, and supplies. Lieutenant Chipp, so sick in his berth that he could not stand, was dressed by Danenhower, and then the two invalids went together over the side, the half-blinded navigator carrying the executive officer who guided him.
I got up my knapsack from my stateroom, tossed it into the cabin in the poop, and then turned to on our buckled deck in getting overboard our stores while below us the ship was flooding fast. De Long, himself checking the provisions as they went over the side, looked anxiously round the spar deck, then asked sharply of the bosun,
“Where’s the lime-juice?”
Our last cask of lime-juice, only one-third full now, was nowhere in sight.
“Down in the forehold, sor,” said Cole briefly.
The forehold? Hopeless to get at anything there; the forehold was already flooded. De Long’s face fell. There would be no distilled water any more; no more vegetables at all; nothing but pemmican to eat and salty snow from the floes to drink on our retreat over the ice, a bad combination for scurvy. The solitary anti-scorbutic we could carry was that lime-juice. He had to have it.
“Get it up!” ordered De Long savagely.
“I’ll try, sor,” answered the bosun dubiously. He went forward accompanied by several seamen, peered down from the spar deck into that hold. Water was already pouring in a torrent from the forehold hatch, cascading away over the berth deck into the lee scuppers. It was impossible to get into the hold except by swimming down against the current through a narrow crack left in the hatch opening on the high port side which, the ship being so badly listed to starboard, was still exposed. Yet even if a man got through, what could he do in the blackness of the swirling water in that flooded hold to find and break out the one right cask among dozens of others submerged there? But then that barrel, being only partly full, might be floating on the surface on the high side to port. There was a slight chance. Jack Cole looked round at the rough seamen about him.
“Any of yez a foine swimmer?” he asked, none too hopefully, for aside from the danger in this case, sailors are notoriously poor swimmers.
“I try vot I can do maybe, bosun.” A man stepped forth, huge Starr, our Russian seaman (his name probably a contraction of Starovski), the biggest man on board. “Gif me a line.”