And even the captain, broken-hearted over his ship, looking at that vast heap, stopped to laugh at that.
But from the way the deck was acting beneath me, there was little time for mirth, so I seized my knapsack and walking more on the bulkhead than on the deck, got outside the poop, followed by the captain carrying some private papers, and Newcomb lugging only a shotgun.
Things moved rapidly now on the doomed Jeannette. The ship started to lay far over on her beam ends, water rose to the starboard rail, the smokestack broke off at its base, hanging only by the guys; and then the ship, given another squeeze by the crowding ice, collapsed finally, with her crumpled deck bulging slowly upward, her timbers snapping, and the men in the port watch who were trying to snatch a last meal forward from scraps in the galley, finding their escape up the companionway ladder cut off by suddenly rising water, pouring like flies out through the forecastle ventilator to slide immediately overboard onto the ice.
It was no longer possible, even on hands and knees, to stay on that fearfully listed deck. Clinging to the shrouds, De Long ordered Cole to hoist a service ensign to the mizzen truck, and then with a last look upward over the almost vertical deck to see that all had cleared her, he waved his cap to the flag aloft, cried chokingly,
“Good-by, old ship!” and leaped from the rigging to the ice.
Flooded, stove in, and buckled up, the Jeannette was a wreck. The pack had conquered her at last. Only that death grip with which the floes still clung tenaciously to her kept her afloat. With heavy hearts we turned our backs on the remains of that valiant ship, our home and our shield from peril for two long years, and looked instead southward where five hundred miles away across that terrible pack and the Arctic Sea lay the north coast of Siberia and possible safety—if we could ever get there.
CHAPTER XXVII
Our situation was now truly desperate. There we were, thirty-three men cast away on drifting ice floes, our whereabouts and our fate, whether yet alive or long since dead, totally unknown to the world we had left two years before, completely beyond the reach of any possible relief expedition. Five hundred miles away at the Lena Delta lay the nearest shore, where from the charts in our possession, we might expect to fall in on that frozen coast with native huts and villages such as long before we had visited at Cape Serdze Kamen, and find even a slight pretense of food and shelter and perhaps a little aid in getting over the next thousand miles south into Siberia itself to civilization at Yakutsk.
How much of that five hundred miles before us was ice and how much was water, nobody knew. That a part of it, just north of Siberia, was likely to be water in the summer time was certain, so we must drag our boats with us across the pack between us and that open sea or else ultimately, unable to cross it, perish when we came to the fringe of the ice pack. A few uninhabited islands, the New Siberian Archipelago, lay halfway along the route, but we could expect no aid there of any kind nor any food. Grimly ironic on our Russian charts was the notice that all visitors were prohibited from landing on the New Siberian Islands unless they brought with them their own food, since the last party permitted a few years before to go there as fossil ivory hunters had all starved to death for lack of game.
But at the Lena Delta, the charts showed permanent settlements, and a book we had of Dr. Petermann’s described in considerable detail the villages and mode of life there. Magazine articles published and taken with us just before we left San Francisco indicated that the Russian government was then in 1879 about to open the Lena River for trading steamers from its mouth to Yakutsk, a thousand miles inland. Since it was now the middle of 1881 that should be completed and the river steamers running.