Hell on ice

by Edward Ellsberg

That night before supper, the captain called Chipp and me to his tent. The question for discussion was the boat sledges. We had since leaving Bennett Island broken up all our other provision sledges and burned them for fuel. Chipp strenuously insisted that the boat sledges be treated likewise immediately.

“Captain,” he said, “I’m surprised I’m here to talk about it even! My boat’s so topheavy with that sledge across her rails, a dozen times I thought she’d either founder or capsize. And a man can’t swim a minute in these clothes in that ice water. If she’d sunk under me, long before you or the chief could’ve beat back against that wind to pick us up, we’d all be gone!”

With Chipp’s facts, honestly enough stated, De Long was inclined to agree and so was I, but the question was too serious to be decided out of hand. On our first journey across the pack, the sledges were our salvation, and it was the heavy boats (holding us back like anchors) which we then gravely considered abandoning lest our party perish before we ever reached water. Now the situation was reversed; it was those boats, dragged across the ice at the cost of indescribable agony, which had become our main hope of escape, but still could we afford to abandon the sledges which so obviously now imperilled our safety in the boats? We were not yet out of the pack; one had only to poke his head through the tent flap to see as much ice as ever we had seen. And if we had to sledge over much more of the pack to get south, without those boat sledges we couldn’t do it. What then should be done with the sledges?

With our lives very likely depending on that decision, we considered it deeply. The conclusion, concurred in by all, was that the certainty of disaster if we kept the sledges, outweighed the possibility of being now caught permanently in pack ice, unable to move except by sledging, and De Long finally give the order to burn the sledges. In a few minutes, knives and hatchets in the hands of sailors eager to make an end of those incubi before the captain could change his mind, had reduced them to kindling and they were burning merrily beneath our pots. No man regretted seeing them go who had toiled in the harnesses dragging them and their bulky burden of boats across the ice pack, laboring as men have never done before, and as I hope may never have to again.

Further to help Chipp, the captain in expectation next morning of a long voyage among the New Siberian Islands, decided to even matters somewhat more by removing from Chipp’s stubby cutter, only sixteen feet long, part of its load. Accordingly he decreased its crew by two men, taking Ah Sam (our Chinese cook who had since the sinking of the Jeannette with nothing but pemmican on the menu, not cooked a meal, serving instead only as a beast of burden like all others) into the first cutter with him, and sending Manson, a husky Swedish seaman, to join my crew in the whaleboat. In addition, De Long took into the first cutter part of Chipp’s supply of pemmican, still more to lighten his boat which was certainly a worse sea boat than either my twenty-five foot long whaleboat or his own twenty foot long cutter.

With these rearrangements, we camped for the night in the midst of a howling gale drifting snow about our tents, the while we earnestly hoped that the wind would break up the pack in the morning, and allow us to proceed.

But instead, for ten wearing days we lay in that camp, unable to launch a boat and unable of course to sledge them over the broken pack, while the weather varied between gales with heavy snow and dismal fogs, and we ate our hearts out in inaction, watching our scanty food supplies constantly melting away with no progress to show for it. Our hard bread gave out altogether, our coffee was all used up, and our menu came down to two items only, pemmican and tea three times a day, with an ounce of our fast-vanishing lime-juice for breakfast to ward off scurvy. To save what little alcohol we had left (we had been using it for fuel for making tea and coffee) we continued to burn up the kindling from our boat sledges, but long before we broke camp, even that was all gone, and we started again on our precious alcohol.

The tobacco gave out (each man had been permitted to take one pound with him from the Jeannette). To the captain, an inveterate pipe smoker, this was a severe trial and left him perfectly wretched, till Erichsen, who still had a trifle left, generously shared with him the contents of his pouch. De Long declined to take more than a pipeful, but Erichsen insisting on an even division of his trifling remnant, the skipper found he had enough for three smokes. Immediately seeking out the doctor and Nindemann, he divided with them and together they puffed on their pipes, in a mixed state of happiness and despair watching the last tobacco from the Jeannette curling upward in smoke wreaths into the Arctic air.

Next day, like the others, they were smoking used tea leaves and getting little solace from them.

Our second day in this camp, through a rift in the fog we sighted land twenty miles to the southward, in the captain’s opinion the island of New Siberia, one of the largest islands of the New Siberian group and the one farthest eastward in that archipelago.