With a fair breeze, we stood southwest for Stolbovoi Island, fifty miles off now. The breeze freshened and we made good progress, too good indeed for Chipp and the second cutter, as both De Long and I had to double reef our sails to avoid completely losing Chipp astern again. The sea increased somewhat, the boats rolled badly, and we had to bail continuously, but as we were getting along toward the Lena, that didn’t worry us, nor did the fact that being poor sailors, Collins, Newcomb, and Ah Sam became deathly seasick again.
We kept on through the night, delayed a bit from midnight until dawn by streaming ice we couldn’t see and cold, wet, and wretched as usual. Several times during the night we were nearly smashed by being hurled by surf against unseen floes. Once, under oars, I had to tow the captain’s boat clear of a lee shore of ice from which he couldn’t claw off, to save him from destruction. But after daybreak, we could see better our dangers and avoid them in time, so that we stood on all day till four in the afternoon, when having been underway thirty-three hours in extreme danger and discomfort, the captain signalled to haul out and camp on a solitary floe nearby. Long before this, we should have hit Stolbovoi, but a shift in the wind had apparently carried us by it to the north.
After a cold night on this floe, at four in the morning on September 9th we were again underway through rain and snow. By afternoon we were picking a path through an immense field of drifting floes which luckily we penetrated and got through to the southwest, when sighting a low island to the westward, evidently Semenovski, the last island of the New Siberian Archipelago between us and the Lena, we abandoned all idea of searching to the southward for Stolbovoi which we had never sighted, and headed west instead for Semenovski. As luck would have it, the wind of which we had too much the day before to suit some members of our party, now died away completely and out went our oars. Through a calm sea we rowed the lumbering boats for six hours, warming up the oarsmen at any rate, though horribly chafing their frozen hands. Then, a fog setting in at 10 P.M., and it being impossible to see the other boats, the captain sang out through the night to haul out on the ice, where by candlelight we ate our pemmican.
Next day, September 10th, still rowing through the fog, we made Semenovski by noon, and after a passage of one hundred and ten miles from Kotelnoi, we beached our boats and camped for a much needed rest. We were all of us stiff, frozen, and sore, but Dunbar especially was quite feeble and looked indeed to be on his last legs.
Semenovski, a tiny island, was to be our last stop before crossing ninety miles of open ocean to Cape Barkin on the Lena Delta, with little chance on that leg of meeting any floes large enough to haul out on for shelter in case the sea kicked up. So while a few men went out with rifles to look for game, we turned to in a final effort to make our boats more seaworthy for this last ocean leg, our experiences so far in rough water strongly indicating the need for improvement. On my whaleboat, I took the canvas boat cover, and by nailing it firmly to both bows and securing it tightly around the mast, I decked over my bow, forming a sort of canvas forecastle. The rest of the boat cover, from the mast aft to the stern, I split in half lengthwise, giving me two long strips of canvas which I nailed fore and aft to the sides. Then making a set of small stanchions which were lashed to the gunwale on each side as supports, I had both starboard and port a flexible canvas weathercloth eighteen inches high which the men on the windward side could hold up with their backs against the fixed stanchions, in effect raising our rail eighteen inches above the gunwale on either or both sides, but allowing us to drop the weatherscreens instantly should it become necessary to get out the oars. Cole and Bartlett did this work on my whaleboat. Nindemann on the first cutter, and Sweetman on the second cutter, fitted them out in a generally similar manner.
While this was going on, our hunters, accompanied by a dozen others as beaters, spread across the narrow island and started to sweep it from north to south. They soon started up a doe and its fawn, which fled in fright, but before long a rifle shot knocked down the doe which, quickly tossed over a small cliff onto the beach, was brought in a boat to our camp. Needless to say, all else was suspended, driftwood gathered, and at four o’clock, though it was long before our supper hour, we turned to on a pound of venison steak apiece, which I have little doubt surprised our astonished stomachs, as, accompanied by hot tea, it went down our throats instead of the usual pemmican. That held us until 8 P.M., when we had our regular supper (slightly delayed), consisting of somewhat more than a pound each this time of roast deer, which cleaned up the deer completely except for her bones. Out of these we intended to make soup next day, all except one meaty bone which went to the overjoyed Snoozer. And with that, we felt well fed for the first time since Görtz provided us with bear steaks a month and a half before off Bennett Island, bear steaks so far removed from us now in point of time and suffering between, that it seemed almost in a previous incarnation we must have enjoyed that bear!
During our second supper, it blew up half a gale and started to snow, so the captain announced that since the next day was Sunday, instead of getting underway, we would rest on Semenovski, finish our boat work, and if we could, get that fawn, shoving off Monday for the Lena. I thought this suited all hands, but apparently it didn’t for I heard Collins grumbling to Bartlett,
“Losing over a day for the sake of a feed of meat!”
I looked at the sullen Collins curiously. Whatever the captain did or didn’t do was wrong with him. Yet he had downed his “feed of meat” as voraciously as anybody, but perhaps since he expected to taste it again when he heaved it up after we got into the tossing boats, another feed didn’t mean as much to him as to a sailor.
Sunday, as on every Sunday without exception which we had passed whether on the pack or in the boats since the Jeannette went down, after mustering the crew and reading them the Articles of War, De Long held Divine Service in his tent, attended as usual only by Chipp, Ambler, Dunbar, Danenhower, and myself. Solemnly we listened, seamen about to embark in frail shells for a long and dangerous voyage across the open Arctic Sea, as De Long reverently read the service, and never were we more sincere in our lives than when at the end our rough voices, mingling with the freezing gale howling outside, rose in the final fervent plea,