Swiftly Cole threw a bowline round Starr’s waist. No use giving him a light; the water pouring through would extinguish it. He would have to grope in blackness. Starr dropped down to the berth deck. Standing in the water on the low side of the hatch, he stooped, with a shove of his powerful legs pushed himself through against the current, and vanished with a splash into the flooded hold. Cole started to pay out line.
How Starr, swimming in ice water in that Stygian hole amidst all sorts of floating wreckage there, ever hoped to find that one barrel, I don’t know. But he did know that the ship, flooded far above the point at which she should normally sink, was held up only by the ice, and that if for an instant, the pack should suddenly relax its grip, she would plunge like a stone and while the others on the spar deck might escape, he, trapped in the hold, would go with her.
With a thumping heart, Jack Cole “fished” the line on Starr, paying out, taking in, as the unseen swimmer fumbled amongst the flotsam in the black hold. Then to his astonishment, the lime-juice cask popped up through the hatch and following it, blowing like a whale, came Starr! Another instant and Starr, tossing the barrel up like a toy, was back on the spar deck, where all coming aft, Jack Cole proudly presented his dripping seaman and the precious cask on his shoulder, to the captain.
De Long, with his ship sinking under him, paused a moment to shake Starr’s hand.
“A brave act, Starr, and a very valuable one. I’m proud of you! I’ll not forget it. Now, bosun, get Starr here a stiff drink of whiskey from those medical stores on the ice to thaw him out!”
The lime-juice, still borne by Starr, went over the side, the last of our provisions. The floes round about the Jeannette were littered with boats, sledges, stores, and an endless variety of everything else we could pitch overboard. With our supplies gone, I tried to get down again on the berth deck aft to my stateroom to salvage my private possessions, but I was too late. The water was rising rapidly there, and was already halfway up the wardroom ladder, so I went back into the cabin in the poop above, where I had before tossed my knapsack, to retrieve it and get overboard myself.
The deck of the cabin was a mess of the personal belongings of all the wardroom officers—clothes, papers, guns, instruments, bearskins, stuffed gulls, that heavy walrus head over which Sharvell had once been so concerned (and apparently now, rightly) and Heaven knows what else. Pawing over the conglomerate heap was Newcomb, uncertain as to what he should try to save. As I retreated upwards into the cabin before the water rising on the wardroom ladder, De Long stepped into the cabin also from his upper deck stateroom, and seeing only Newcomb fumbling over the enormous pile of articles, inquired casually,
“Mr. Newcomb, is this all your stuff?”
Pert as ever in spite of his illness, Newcomb replied with the only statement from him that ever made me grin,
“No, sir; it’s only part of it!”