In the midst of all this, Starr opening up the rations for our midnight dinner, found in a coffee can a note addressed to the captain, which he brought to him. It read:
“This is to express my best wishes for success in your great undertaking. Hope when you peruse these lines you will be thinking of the comfortable homes you left behind you for the purpose of aiding science. If you can make it convenient drop me a line. My address,
G. J. K—,
Box 10, New York City.”
“Apropos, eh, Melville? I guess we’re thinking of those homes, all right,” commented De Long bitterly, showing me the note. “Where’s the nearest post-box so I can drop that imbecile a line?” Nearby was a crack in the floe. “Ah, right here.” De Long scribbled his initials on the note, drew an arrow pointing to the writer’s address, and dropped it into the crack. “Now we’ll see how good the seagoing Arctic mail service is. At that, it may get to New York before we do,” added the captain grimly.
Before we moved off from this camp, the captain decided to check the loads to make sure we were taking nothing more than was absolutely necessary. The first thing he discovered was that flouting his order about clothing, Collins had smuggled into our baggage and was taking along an extra fur coat. Immediately, under the captain’s angry eye, it went flying out on the ice. And the next thing he found was that in their knapsacks (which were towed along stowed inside the whaleboat) the seamen almost without exception were taking some small mementoes of the cruise, trifling in weight in themselves, in the aggregate under our circumstances, a considerable burden. They went sliding out on the ice alongside Collins’ coat.
And then having cleaned house, the captain waited for the rain to end.
Since it rained all night, we stayed in camp, getting a rest if such it can be called. Next night we were underway again on a new schedule, the load of supplies on each sledge now cut in half (except of course for the boat sledges) the idea being to lighten up our overloaded sledges so we could move them to the designated point more easily and with less danger of breaking runners, then unload and send them back empty for the other half of their cargoes. Working this way we started out, only to find half a mile along a crack in the ice, not wide enough for a ferry, too wide to jump with the sledges. Here the ice broke up with some of our sledges floating off on an island, stopping all progress till we had lassoed some smaller cakes for ferries and on these we rode over our remaining loads, finishing our night’s work with hardly half a mile gained and everyone knocked out again.
So for the next four days we struggled along, sometimes making a mile a day; once, by great good luck, a mile and a quarter. The going got worse. Pools of water from the late rain gathered beneath the crusts of snow and thin refrozen ice. As we came along, the surfaces broke beneath us, leaving us to flounder to our knees through slush and ice water. More sledge runners broke; Nindemann and Sweetman were kept busy at all hours repairing them. Chipp got worse, Alexey vomited at the slightest provocation, Lauterbach looked ready to die, and Lee staggered along on his weakened legs as if they were about to part company at his damaged hips. Danenhower, of all those sick, while he could hardly see, at least had some strength, and was added to the hospital sled to help pull it under Chipp’s pilotage. Ahead Dunbar scouted and marked out our road south by compass, then with a pick-ax endeavored to clear interfering hummocks from that path, aided a little in that by Newcomb. I bossed the sledge gangs and kept them moving, putting my shoulders beneath a boat or a sledge when necessary to get it started. Ambler when not tending his patients, armed with another pick-ax helped Dunbar clear the chosen road. And bringing up the rear was De Long, supervising the loading, checking food issues, and relentlessly driving us all along.
On June 25, we had been underway eight days since starting south. By such grueling labor over that pack as men cannot ordinarily be driven to, even to save their own lives, and which in this case only the overpowering will of De Long rendered possible, we had made good to the southward by my most liberal calculation a total distance over the ice of five and one-half miles. I contemplated the result with a leaden heart. Even should the ice extend southward only one hundred miles out of the five hundred we had to cover (which seemed far too good to be true), at that rate of advance it would take us one hundred and fifty days to cross to open water. Long before that, unless we died of exhaustion first as now looked very probable, our sixty days’ rations would have been consumed and we should be left to perish of starvation midway of the pack.
In despair, I gazed at our three cumbersome boats, overhanging at both ends their heavy sledges, the last of which after soul-wrenching efforts my party had just dragged over rough hummocks into camp. Around it the men, too exhausted even to go to their tents, were leaning their weary bodies for a moment’s rest before they undertook the labor of lifting again their aching and frozen feet. Those massive boats, like millstones round our necks, were what were killing our chances. With our food alone, divided into reasonable sledge loads, we might make speed enough to escape, but with those boats—! Incapable of division, the smallest over a ton in weight, the largest over a ton and a half, dragging those boats was like dragging huge anchors over the floes. If only we could abandon them! But with a sigh, I gave up that dream. With an open sea somewhere ahead, the boats were as necessary to us as the pemmican. But only five and a half miles made good in our first week when we were strongest! It looked hopeless. We could only labor onward and pray for a miracle. I quit thinking and turned toward my tent, my supper, and my sleeping bag.