The alcohol settled the question. He promptly hailed his two comrades standing warily off in their kyacks, and soon all three of the natives, warming up on pure grain alcohol, were our bosom friends. In exchange for the alcohol, they gave us some fish and a goose out of which mixture we promptly made a stew which we wolfed down ravenously. And then with pencil sketches and gestures, I endeavored to make plain that I wanted them to guide us to a village, and specifically to Bulun, the largest town shown on my chart, some sixty miles up the Lena River from the head of the delta.
It was remarkable how, understanding not one word of each other’s language, we got along. The three Yakuts indicated we could not get to Bulun on account of ice in the river, that we should all die on the way. However, they made plain that another Yakut village, Jamaveloch, they could take us to, and next day for Jamaveloch we started. But so tortuous was the course and so hard the labor in working our boat through the delta swamps and rivers, that not till a week later did we finally, on September 26th, two weeks after the gale, arrive at Jamaveloch. Had it not been for the food provided by our guides as well as for their pilotage, it is inconceivable that we should ever have arrived alive at this village at the southeastern corner of the delta, seventy miles from Cape Barkin, and the only inhabited village for over a hundred and fifty miles in either direction along the Siberian Coast! Had we gone to Barkin, we should assuredly have perished, for there, the natives told us, Petermann was absolutely wrong—there were no villages, no lighthouses, no inhabitants of any kind there, nothing but a barren coast.
But Jamaveloch itself was not very promising as a haven except for a brief stay. It had but six huts and a few small storehouses, not over fifteen adult inhabitants, and no great surplus of food. Doubtful that its scant supply of fish and geese would long take care of eleven voracious seamen thrown unexpectedly on the resources of so small a community, I decided after one night at Jamaveloch to push on in our whaleboat up the south branch of the Lena to Bulun, a hundred and ten miles away by land but a hundred and fifty miles distant up the winding river. Strenuously in their native Yakut tongue (some of which I had now picked up) the villagers and especially their headman, Nicolai Chagra, objected that ice in the river would block us and leave us to perish along the uninhabited river banks, but I persisted. So accompanied once more by my original native pilots, I loaded my sick crew into the whaleboat, took aboard sixty dried fish (all I could get) for supplies from Nicolai, and we started. In an hour we were back. Nicolai Chagra was right. The Jeannette herself could not have plowed through the ice, alternately freezing and breaking loose in the river, which swept downstream in the current, effectively blocking any progress toward Bulun.
Willing or not, there was no choice but to stay at Jamaveloch. Unable to walk, I crawled from the whaleboat and was hauled on a sledge from the shore to a hut turned over to us by Nicolai; Leach, with the flesh falling from his frozen toes, was hauled up on another sledge; and most of the rest of my crew in the remnants of their tattered clothes, crawled or hobbled after us.
For two and a half weeks we lay in that hut, slowly recuperating from our frostbites, subsisting mainly on a slim ration of fish given us daily by the Yakut villagers, and thinking up weird schemes of getting away to Bulun. But till the rivers froze solidly enough to sledge over the ice, there was no chance. Even then, the limited facilities of the village could never provide the necessary sledges for eleven men nor the clothes to keep us from freezing in the sub-zero weather which October had brought. But get away soon we must, for all the flesh had sloughed from several of Leach’s toes and he needed medical attention badly if he were not soon to die; while Cole, lucid at intervals, required expert care also if his mind were to be saved; and Danenhower’s eye, a month now without surgical care, was beginning to relapse. As for the rest of us, our legs were getting better and we could soon drag ourselves about, but the food problem was rapidly getting acute, and I was very much afraid that we should awake some morning to discover that the natives, finding us too much of a drain on their stores, had silently moved on in the night to some other collection of vacant huts of which we knew nothing, leaving us to starve alone lest everyone starve together.
The only solution to this dilemma, since we could not go to Bulun, was to have Bulun send us the necessary dog teams, sledges, clothes, and food to make the journey. How to get word to Bulun, however, was the difficulty, for none of the natives would go and no man in my party knew the road over the distant mountains to Bulun. I dared send no one without a guide.
The reason given by the natives for refusing to undertake the trip was that it was an impossible season for traveling, an in-between time in which they could safely move neither by boat nor sledge. A few weeks before, in early September, it would have been possible to go by boat but now new ice forming everywhere prevented. A few weeks later, it would be possible to travel by sledge cross-country over snow and ice, but just now that also could not be attempted for the ice on the many rivers to be crossed was continuously breaking in the current and was nowhere yet thick enough to bear the weight of a sledge without grave danger of crashing through into the river and losing sledge and dogs at least, if not drivers also. To all our entreaties, Nicolai Chagra merely shrugged his shoulders—early September, yes; late October, yes; but now, a most decided no!
Providentially the matter was settled for us about the middle of October by the chance visit to the village of a Russian exile, Kusmah by name, who lived nearby and who on the promise of the whaleboat immediately and five hundred roubles later (when I could get funds from America) undertook to make the dangerous journey and started off with his dog sledge over the frozen tundra to Bulun, expecting to return in five days.
Vaguely, while he was gone, we speculated on how long it would take us to sledge the fifteen hundred miles from Bulun via Yakutsk to Irkutsk on Lake Baikal, and then via post road get to Moscow and so home. And while we speculated over that, we also speculated earnestly over the fate of De Long and the first cutter. There was no doubt that his boat had followed Chipp’s, but over the question of how long the first cutter had lasted in the gale and whether she had come to her doom finally by capsizing or by swamping, there was many a hot discussion, as my seamen argued vehemently over the relative probabilities of a square-sterned boat like the heavily-built first cutter broaching before she flooded, or vice versa. The consensus of opinion was that she had swamped, for De Long had in his boat not only three more men than we, but also Snoozer, the last dog, all the navigating equipment, four rifles, the complete records of the expedition in ten cases, and one small sledge which De Long had kept to drag the records on. With so much ballast in his boat, that his men could have bailed fast enough to avoid foundering seemed incredible to most of us after our own experiences with the much lighter double-ended whaleboat, but the broaching theorists would never agree to it. Chipp, whom all hands freely admitted was the best sailor, had broached and capsized. How then could De Long have avoided it? And since, crowded in our little hut with nothing else to do, there was no outlet for men too feeble to get about save in talk, the argument went on endlessly, and of course with no chance of an agreement ever being reached.
Five days went by and Kusmah, our messenger to Bulun, had not returned. Ten days elapsed and we became alarmed for Kusmah. Had he perished in the ice? To add to our worries, Nicolai Chagra cut our food supply from four fish a day to three, with occasionally a putrid and decaying goose supplied in lieu of the fish.