“Don’t make them drag me, captain, please! I’m all gone anyway. Take me off!” he begged. “You’d better leave me behind right here!”
“Shut up, Chipp,” ordered De Long abruptly. “You’ll do what I say like everybody else in this outfit! Quit worrying; you’re going to get better. But better or worse, nobody gets left behind while there’s a man alive able to drag him along!”
He motioned to Lauterbach, Alexey, and Danenhower, dragging the sledge.
“Get underway now, men. I’ll help you till I can send someone else.” And with the captain pushing and the others pulling, the sledge started again with the enfeebled Chipp face down on the load, scarcely able to cling to the lashings, weeping bitterly.
We got along. But I might here mention that for every mile of progress over the ice that we made, we had to walk thirteen miles! To advance a boat sledge took the whole working party together; to advance a provision sledge half loaded took half the party, so to get our three boats and four provision sledges (the dogs handled the other one) along one mile meant that seven times under load and six times empty-handed, thirteen times in all, the staggering working party had to traverse that mile of ice. If the edge of the pack should by God’s grace turn out to be no further than a hundred miles from our starting point, still when we reached it we should have tramped thirteen hundred miles over that terrible ice, seven hundred of those miles dragging inhuman loads! If it were twice as far—God help us then!
So we went along, over what Jack Cole, ruefully tugging in the lead harness, called,
“’Tis the rocky road to Dublin, me byes. Yo heave! Shure an’ we should be nearly there by mornin’!” But I knew it would be many a morning yet, if ever, ere Jack raised Dublin or anything like it over that ice horizon.
July 3rd arrived with good enough weather for the captain to get another set of observations of the sun, which on working out, he communicated to me. The new position was in latitude 77° 31′ N., longitude 150° 41′ E., which was to some degree gratifying, for while it was still thirteen miles north of where we left the Jeannette, it was thirteen miles generally southwest of where we were on June 25th, and checked very well with both the course we had been steering and our distance logged over the ice since then, twelve miles. This was cheering, for it seemed to indicate no ice drift at all for the last eight days, and things began to look up. Only thirteen miles more and we would be as far south as when we started sixteen days before! Naturally, while all this cheered De Long, Ambler and myself, the knowledge would have cheered nobody else, so no notice of it was posted and no mention made.
July 4th we celebrated on the ice, without any fireworks or speeches, simply breaking out our small boat flags (the woolen ones only) and, so to speak, dressing ship. De Long was excessively blue all day, for it was the third anniversary of the day in Le Havre, France, when Miss Bennett had christened his ship with her name, Jeannette, and he had listened to many glowing speeches of what was expected of her. Looking at the three small boats which were all that was left of his command made De Long decidedly sick. Had there been only the safety of himself to consider the day his ship went down, I am sure De Long would have gone down with her.
By way of a feast in honor of the day we had our usual short allowance of cold pemmican which we ate thankfully. I may say here that pemmican (which is a mixture made of beef pounded more or less to a powder, mixed with raisins, and then the whole stirred up in boiling fat which when cold is packed in cans) while a highly nutritious and palatable food served in cold slices which we ate like cake, as a steady diet gets infernally tiresome. Alexey on this day, with a naive faith in the white man’s powers, feeling that a holiday called for something better, in all seriousness told the doctor that he would take mutton instead!