“But the captain is sick! He can’t walk!” protested Nindemann. “And besides, there’s all our food and the records to carry in yet!”
“Well, he can swim then for all I care!” replied Collins defiantly. “And as for those records, carry ’em ashore yourself. I won’t; I didn’t ship to be treated like a common sailor, and you can’t make me!”
“Suit yourself,” mumbled Nindemann uncertainly, for Collins was after all an officer. He turned to the Chinese cook. “Get underway there, Ah Sam.”
Poor Ah Sam, with his feet benumbed from constant immersion while bailing, staggered toward the water, then collapsed in the mud, unable to rise. The quartermaster dragged the inert Chinaman back on the beach and deposited him at Collins’ feet.
“Get me a fire started here then, Collins, and see maybe if you can thaw him out before I get back,” ordered Nindemann. “I’m going for the captain,” and he plunged into the icy seas.
“Where’s Ah Sam and Mr. Collins?” asked De Long anxiously when Nindemann, much behind the others, returned to the boat. “Anything wrong?”
“They’re all played out,” lied Nindemann glibly. “So I left ’em to make a fire for us when we got back ashore.”
“Poor devils!” muttered the captain sympathetically. “You should have left somebody with ’em, Nindemann.”
“Oh, they’ll be all right soon,” Nindemann assured him. “Besides, I needed here everybody,” and in that he was right enough for it took three trips with the seamen slithering through mud and water to get all the baggage ashore through that mile and a half of broken ice, and it was completely dark when Nindemann at last gathered what crew he had left round the lightened boat and attempted to work it ashore. But even lightened to the utmost, with nothing but the three incapacitated men and the doctor left in it, half a mile from the beach it stuck finally in the mud and they could get it no further inshore. The wind freshened, bringing a blinding snow-storm, blotting out everything. How to get the invalids ashore was now a problem; in the slimy and uneven footing through the shoal water they couldn’t safely be carried. There being no other way, one after the other, Boyd, Erichsen, and De Long were lifted over the side of the cutter by Dr. Ambler, and stood up in the knee-deep water on their frozen legs. Then, each held from falling by a seaman alongside, the three sufferers partly stumbled, were partly dragged in the falling snow across that last half mile through the broken lane of ice to the shore, while following them, Alexey, the Indian hunter, with Snoozer over his shoulders, brought up the procession, finally emptying the first cutter of its passengers.
It was eight at night and bitterly cold when De Long and his companions, ashore at last on the desolate beach, joined his forlorn seamen crowding round the fire which Collins had started and which Noros and Görtz soon built up with driftwood into huge proportions—the first bit of warmth the water-soaked men had felt in five days of frigid Arctic weather. But it was of little comfort; beneath the snow the ground was wet, and as the fire blazed up, it further softened the beach roundabout it, so the men trying to dry themselves before the fire soon found instead that they were sinking into the mushy tundra to their knees.