We stayed one night on a mossy slope trying to thaw our frozen feet by tramping on something other than ice, and as Dunbar expressively put it, “Sanding our hoofs.” They needed it. The most pleased member of our party was Snoozer, now our sole remaining dog, who joyously tore round chasing lemmings, while we sought for real game which we didn’t find. And that night was served out our last ration of lime-juice which so heroically salvaged by Starr from the sinking Jeannette, had shielded us from scurvy for two and a half months on our tramp over the ice. But we saw the last drops of that unsavory medicine disappear without regret and without foreboding for the future, for now we were nearing the open sea and our voyage was nearing its end.
Next morning we shoved off from the south end of Fadejovski, only to discover despondently that we had embarked on a twelve days’ odyssey through the New Siberian Archipelago before which our previous sufferings seemed nothing. We had not wholly lost the ice; instead we had only added to our previous perils some new ones—vast hidden shoals, bitter freezing weather, long nights of sitting motionless and cramped in our open boats, while the Arctic winds mercilessly pierced our unshielded bodies, and the hourly dread of drowning in a gale.
It was seventy miles over the sea to Kotelnoi, the next island westward in the group. To get there, instead of being able to sail directly west, we found we had to stand far to the southward of Fadejovski to clear a shoal, getting out of sight of land. When night caught us far out in the open sea, we discovered even there shoals with less than two feet of water, over which a heavy surf was breaking badly. Standing off into deeper water, we beat all night into the wind to save ourselves from destruction, for we had no anchors in our boats. Wet, miserable, frozen by spray coming over, we stayed in the boats, so crowded we could not move our freezing legs. At dawn we stood on again westward, with streaming ice bobbing all about us, traveling before a fresh breeze all day. In the late afternoon, having lost sight of Chipp and the second cutter, his boat being unable to keep up, we finally spotted a floe sizeable enough to camp on. De Long signalled me to stop; we promptly secured to it and waited for Chipp to catch up, meanwhile for the first time in thirty-six hours stretching our wet forms out in our sleeping bags on the ice, while a gale blew up, snow fell, and the sea got very rough, which gave us grave concern over our missing boat. By daylight there was so much pack ice surrounding our two boats, it seemed unbelievable we had arrived there by water, and our anxiety for Chipp increased. We lay all day icebound, all night, and all next day, occasionally sighting the mountains on Kotelnoi Island, perhaps ten miles to the westward. And then Chipp and the second cutter finally showed up, coasting the north side of our floe, half a mile away across the pack, and soon Chipp and Kuehne, walking across the ice, were with us. They had had a terrible time the night we lost them; long before they sighted any floes, the gale caught them, and over the stern where Chipp and Dunbar sat steering, icy seas tumbled so badly that all hands bailing hardly kept the boat afloat till they finally found a drifting floe. When at last he steered in under the lee of the ice, but one man, Starr, was still able to jump from the boat and hold her in with the painter while the others, badly frozen, could barely crawl out over the gunwale. He himself and Dunbar in the sternsheets found themselves so cramped from sitting at the tiller that they could not even crawl and had to be lifted by Starr from the boat. To warm up his men, Chipp had served out immediately two ounces of brandy each, but Dunbar was so far gone that he promptly threw his up and fainted. The second day, underway again, he had kept westward for thirty miles before sighting us in the late afternoon, and there he was, with his crew badly knocked out, in the open water on the edge of the pack surrounding us completely.
To get underway next morning, there was nothing for it but to move our two boats over the ice to where Chipp’s was, and with no sledges, we faced that portage over bad ice with deep trepidation. Five men, headed by Nindemann, went ahead with our solitary pick-ax and some carpenter’s chisels to level a road. We carried all our clothes and knapsacks on our backs, but De Long dared not take the pemmican cans from the boats, for so scanty was our food supply getting that the chance of any man’s stumbling and losing a can of pemmican down a crack in the ice was a major tragedy not to be risked. So food and all, the boats had to be skidded on their keels over the ice, leaving long strips of oak peeled off the keels by the sharp floe edges as we dragged along. As carefully as we could, all hands at a time on one boat, we lightered them along that half mile, and when after seven fearful hours of labor we got them into the water, it was with unmitigated joy we saw they still floated.
We made a hasty meal of cold pemmican, and all hands embarked. De Long, last off to board his cutter, was bracing himself on the floe edge to climb aboard, when the ice gave way beneath him, and he went overboard, disappearing completely beneath the surface. Fortunately, Erichsen in the cockpit got a grip on him while he was still totally submerged (for he might not ever have risen except under the widespread pack) and hauled him, completely soaked to the skin, in over the stern. Without delay, except to wipe the water from his eyes, the captain signalled us to make sail.
We fought again fog, ice, and shoals for six hours more to cover the last ten miles to Kotelnoi, and when night finally caught us, all we knew was that we were on a sandbank where we gladly pitched camp, in total ignorance of whether we had made the island itself or an offshore bank and caring less so long as we could stop. We found some driftwood on the bank, made a fire, and soon, most of all the captain still in his soaked clothes, we were trying to warm ourselves around it. So ended September 4th.
The next two days we tried to struggle west along the south coast of Kotelnoi, largest island of the archipelago, but a blinding snow-storm and ice closing in held us to our sand spit. Going inshore, some of the men found the long-deserted huts of the fossil ivory hunters, and even a few elephant tusks, but not a trace of game, and our supply of pemmican kept on shrinking.
Signs of physical breakdown were becoming plain enough in our company. Our rations were slender and unsatisfying. Long hours on end of sitting cramped and soaked in wet clothes and icy water, often unable in the overcrowded boats even to stretch a leg to relieve it, no chance in the boats to stretch out and sleep at all, and the mental strain of working those small boats in tumbling seas and through tossing ice, were beginning to tell. On the pack at least, each night we could camp and stretch ourselves in our bags to rest after each day of toil; now except when bailing, we were compelled to endure the cold motionless.
Captain De Long’s feet were giving way. Swollen with cold and with toes broken out with chilblains, he could barely move about, and then only in great pain. Dunbar looked older than ever, fainted frequently, and the doctor said his heart showed a weakness that might carry him off under any strain. De Long admonished the ice-pilot to give up all work and take things easy, but even merely sitting up in the boat was a strain which could not be avoided. To keep him braced up, the doctor gave him a flask of brandy with orders to use it regularly. Danenhower’s eyes continued the same—poor, but with one eye at least partly usable when the sun did not shine, which fortunately for Dan in all that fog and snow was most of the time. But Dan continued to pester the doctor to put him off the sicklist, driving Ambler nearly wild that he should be nagged to consider such an unethical request. Others too began to complain—Erichsen of his feet, Cole of a general dullness in his head. As for all the rest of us, gaunt and underfed, with seamed and cracked faces, untrimmed whiskers, haggard eyes, shivering bodies, and raw and bleeding hands and feet, against a really well man we would have stood out as objects of horror, but there being none such amongst us, our appearance excited no special comment among ourselves.
Our third day on Kotelnoi, we managed to work a few miles to the westward along the coast, rowing and dragging our boats along the sand, making perhaps thirteen miles inshore of the ice pack which we could not penetrate to the sea beyond. But on September 7th, before an early morning northeast breeze with the temperature well below freezing, the pack opened up and we sailed away through drifting ice streaming before the wind, for Stolbovoi Island, sixty-five miles southwest. By noon, I concluded that somehow I must have stove in the bottom of my boat, for we were making water faster than it could be bailed and the boat started to sink. Signalling the others, I hastily ran alongside a nearby floe, where my crew had a lively time getting the whaleboat up on the ice before she went from under us. Capsizing her to learn the damage, I was much relieved to find we had only knocked the plug up out of the drain hole. We found the plug beneath the overturned boat, tried it again in the hole, and found it projected through an inch. Evidently bumping on some ice beneath the bilge had knocked it out, so I sawed off the projection to prevent a recurrence, righted and floated my boat again. Meanwhile being on the ice, we all had dinner and shoved off again.