After four harrowing days in the whaleboat, the first two in the gale, the second two fighting our way through offshore shoals in the open ocean, we finally sighted land. Hungry, thirsty, frozen, we gazed as hopefully across the sea at two low headlands barely showing above the horizon as though they were the very gates of Heaven. Under oars, for the wind at last had died away, we propelled our boat toward them, and soon found ourselves between two low hills apparently forming the mouth of a wide and muddy river running swiftly out into the sea. All hands leaned over the gunwales, and finding the water sweet, we drank greedily, regardless of mud, regardless of everything.
Where were we? Neither Danenhower nor I knew, but as that low and barren coast trended north and south, I assumed we were on the eastern side of the Lena Delta, how far south of Cape Barkin I could not tell. But at least we had Siberia at last before us! My orders directed me to land at Cape Barkin, where I should find native huts, but I had had enough of the Arctic Sea for the present and for the future, and with Barkin an unknown distance up an unknown coast, I decided to be satisfied with the land I could see and proceed up the river before me till I located some village there. So in spite of Danenhower’s objections to my course, we rowed (that is, if the feeble efforts of the half-dead sailors manning the oars could be called rowing) up the broad river, constantly attempting to make a landing on either bank, but always baffled by shoals which prevented us from getting within a hundred yards of those flat and muddy shores.
Finally in the late evening after a gruelling day at the oars, we spotted on one bank an abandoned hut, before which was a cove into which we made our way thankfully, and for the first time in five days landed to stretch our legs. I found that I could hardly move mine; most of my men were in like case. Only Danenhower, whose blindness had excused him from bailing, and Newcomb, who had most successfully evaded it, had managed to keep their legs in shape so that they could walk. The rest of us had practically to crawl from the boat.
Thinking to warm up and thaw out our blackened and frost-bitten feet, we gathered driftwood, made a fire in the hut, and huddled round it, stretched on the ground, with our numbed feet toward the fire. But instead of helping, agonizing pains started to shoot from my paralyzed feet as soon as the heat took effect, so stripping my legs for examination, I found they were frozen from the knees down, terribly swollen, covered with cracks, blisters, and sores all run together, and with the skin sloughing off at the slightest touch. Excruciating pain instead of sleep was my portion our first night ashore, and in place of the eagerly awaited comfort which we had looked forward to in Siberia, most of us writhed in pain, suffering the tortures of the damned.
At dawn, after a slim portion of pemmican washed down with muddy tea, we launched our boat and set bravely out up the river to find a village, only to discover instead that we were in a desolate maze of shoals, swamps, and muddy islands forming the delta, with rivers, sometimes swift and sometimes sluggish, crisscrossing erratically as they flowed over the low delta lands to the sea. Young ice was forming everywhere over river and swamp and through it with boathooks and oars we had to smash a way for our bow. Three days of this we had to endure alternating between slaving at the oars during the day and freezing at night in our camps on the barren mud flats, while both night and day we starved on scanty rations, and I finally began to despair of rescue. Here we were on the Lena Delta, but of the many villages indicated on Petermann’s charts, we could find no sign. Never a native did we see, and the few huts we spotted now and then were all abandoned, their owners having already retreated southward before the oncoming winter which was rapidly robbing us of what little vitality remained in our feeble bodies. Were we never to escape? Were all our sufferings to end only in our deaths in the delta? Had we not already borne enough since those harrowing years on the Jeannette to be spared that? First the torture of dragging boats and sledges over the pack, then the horrors of navigating amidst the streaming ice of the New Siberian Archipelago, finally that four-day nightmare of tumbling waves and freezing spray in the open whaleboat battling an Arctic gale—was all this not enough? Yet through all our trials since the loss of the Jeannette we had been sustained by the thought that if only we held out till we reached the Lena Delta, there at last our sufferings would end, amid friendly natives we would find food, shelter, and transportation home.
How different now was the reality! The Lena Delta we found a bleak and barren tundra, empty of game, as inhospitable and as desolate as that ice pack in which for two years we had drifted in the long-lost Jeannette. Our dream of a safe haven had exploded in our faces. With food gone, men worn out, and worst of all, the hope which had driven us all to superhuman labor proved a lie, our situation was desperate beyond conception. Bitterly we cursed Petermann and all his works, which had led us astray.
But there was nothing to do save to move on, working always toward the headwaters of the delta as long as we could swing the oars, so for the fourth day in succession, we shoved off from a mudflat camp, broke our way through new ice, and I pushed my men (whose arms fortunately were a little better off than their legs) upstream toward the delta head.
And then, thank God, in the middle of this day, while deadened arms and stupefied bodies swung wearily over the oars, we suddenly sighted three natives in kyacks shoot out from behind a bend in the swamp!
Like drowning men grasping at straws, we waved to them, shouted to them, and tried to row to them, but before the apparition of a strange boat in their waters, they were shy and afraid, and not till I held up our last tiny strip of pemmican did I entice one, more curious than his comrades, close aboard us to taste the strange meat. Then like the jaws of a trap closing on its victim, we grabbed his kyack before he could dart away!
Badly frightened, the fur-clad native attempted to escape, but we would sooner have released our only hope of salvation than our grip on that poor Yakut who represented now our last slim chance to avoid perishing in the maze of that frozen delta, and we held to him like grim death. Gradually I calmed his fears, gave him the pemmican, endeavored in pantomime to show him we were friendly, and at last holding to him while we beached our whaleboat, convinced him of our good intentions by giving him a little of the trifling quantity of alcohol we had left for our stove.