Hell on ice

by Edward Ellsberg

So “On to the Lena Delta!” became our object in life, and to the Delta we looked forward as our Promised Land. But getting there seemed next to impossible. We were well acquainted with all previous Arctic expeditions. Not one in that long and tragic history stretching back three centuries, when disaster struck their ships, had ever faced a journey over the polar pack back to safety half so long as what faced us, and some on far shorter marches over the ice had perished to the last man!

Gloomily we faced our situation. We would have to drag our boats; we would have to drag our food; we were handicapped by one half-blind officer, by another too weak to stand, by several men, Alexey and Kuehne mainly, who, thrown on the ice, promptly had had a severe relapse of cramps from lead poisoning, and by the knowledge that many others of the crew were weakened by it and might break down at any time.

But worst of all we had to face was the pack itself. The most wretched season of the year for traveling over it was thrust upon us. Under the bright sun, the snow was too soft now to bear our sledges on its crust, but the temperature, from 10° to 25° F., was too low to melt it and clear it from our path. And as for the rough pack ice itself, I knew best of all what traveling over that meant—the twelve mile journey to Henrietta Island with a far lighter load per man and dog, had nearly finished me and my five men. And here, how many hundreds of miles of such ice we had to cross, God alone knew!

The loads we had to drag across the ice if we were to survive, were enough to stagger the stoutest hearts. To carry our party over the open water when we reached it, required three boats and the three boats weighed four tons. And to keep ourselves alive over the minimum time in which we could hope with any luck at all to reach Siberia, sixty days, required three and a half tons of food. Seven and a half tons at least of total deadweight to be dragged over broken Arctic ice on a journey as long as the distance from New York halfway to Chicago! And the dragging to be done practically altogether (for at most our twenty-three remaining dogs could be expected to drag only one heavy sledge out of our total of eight) by men as beasts of burden—before that prospect we all but wilted.

But it was drag or die, and George Washington De Long was determined that not one man should die if he had to kill him to prevent it. For over De Long from the moment we were thrown on the ice had come a hardness and a determination which were new to us. Gone was the gravely courteous scholar, interested mainly in scientific discovery, scrupulously anxious to hurt no one’s feelings if it could be avoided. The Arctic ice had literally folded up his scientific expedition beneath his feet, closing the books at 77° North, in his eyes practically a complete failure. That part was all over, gone with the ship, and with it vanished the scientist and the explorer whom we thought we knew. In his place, facing the wilderness of ice about us, stood now a strange naval officer with but a single purpose in his soul—the fierce determination to get his men over that ice back to the Lena Delta regardless of their hardships, regardless of their sufferings, to keep them on their feet tugging at those inhuman burdens even when they preferred to lie down in the snow and die in peace.

For five days after the crushing of our ship, we camped on the floes nearby, sorting out stores, loading sledges, distributing clothes, and incidentally nursing the sick. What he should take along was in the forefront of every man’s mind. We had salvaged far more of everything than we could possibly drag—what should be left behind? De Long abruptly settled the question with an order limiting what was to be taken to three boats, sixty days’ food, the ship’s papers and records, navigating outfits, and the clothes each man wore including his sleeping bag and his knapsack, the contents of which were strictly prescribed. All else, regardless of personal value or desirability, must be thrown away. That was particularly trying to the men in freezing weather greedily eyeing the huge pile of furs, clothes, and blankets tossed aside to be abandoned on the ice, but there was the order—wear what you pleased in fur or cloth, trade what you had for anything in the pile if it pleased you more, but when you were dressed in the clothes of your choice, you left all else behind. The solitary article excepted was fur boots or moccasins; of these each of us could have three pairs, one on, one in his knapsack, and one in his sleeping bag along with his (half only) blanket.

But with the exception of much grumbling over the clothing to be left behind, there was no need of orders to enforce among the crew at least the abandonment of other weights; all the grumbling there was over what the captain ordered taken. Improvident as ever, the seamen growled over dragging so much pemmican, growled over dragging lime-juice, growled most of all over dragging the books and records of the expedition. But they didn’t growl in the captain’s presence. In range now of the steely glitter of those hard blue eyes, strangely new to them, they only jumped to obey. Still, among themselves (and I was always with them now) there was a continual growl over the loads building up on the sledges, and as for what articles they were themselves to carry, I saw seamen weighing sheath knife against jack-knife to determine which was lighter, and then tossing the heavier one away.

The start of our life on the ice the night we lost our ship was inauspicious. Dead tired from superhuman laboring, first in hurriedly getting stores off the ship and then in dragging them over the ice to what looked like a safe floe two hundred yards away from her, we turned in at midnight, camping in five small tents, five or six men and an officer in each, stretched out in a row on a common rubber mackintosh. At one a.m., with a loud bang the floe beneath us split, the crack running right through De Long’s tent, and the ice promptly opened up. Had it not been for the weight of the sleepers on the ends of the mackintosh there, the men sleeping in the middle would immediately have been dumped down the crevice into the sea! Even so, practically helpless in their sleeping bags, they were rescued with difficulty, while all the rest of us, weary as we were, hastily turned out to move our whole camp across the widening crack to another floe. By two a.m., this was done, and again we turned in, leaving only Kuehne on watch. At four a.m., as he was calling Bartlett, his relief, from my tent, he announced suddenly,

“Turn out if you want to see the last of the Jeannette! There she goes, there she goes!”

I leaped up and out of the tent. There was the listed Jeannette coming slowly upright over the pack, for all the world like a ghost rising from a snowy tomb. The floes holding the ship, as if satisfied at having fully crushed the life from her, were evidently backing away. She came erect, her spars rattling and creaking dismally as she rose, then the ice opening further, she started to sink with accelerating speed. Quickly the black hull disappeared, then her yards banged down on the ice, stripped from the masts, and in another instant, over the fore-topmast, the last bit of her I ever saw, the dark waters closed and the sturdy Jeannette had sunk, gone to an ocean grave beneath the Arctic floes!