Hell on ice

by Edward Ellsberg

Meanwhile, the problem of how to move Erichsen became acute. Finding a solitary driftwood plank, six inches thick and about four feet long, Nindemann was turned to with a hatchet and the doctor’s saw (which but a few hours before had been used on Erichsen’s feet) to make a sledge on which to haul him, and by the night of September 30th, it was done.

October 1st came and the Arctic winter descended on them in earnest. After a bitterly cold night, they issued from the hut to find the Lena apparently frozen from bank to bank. Cautiously, with the thin ice cracking ominously beneath them at each step, Alexey and Nindemann scouted a path across, then one by one, with the men widely separated, to distribute the weight, the others crawled over, last of all Erichsen on his sledge drawn by two men some distance apart hauling on a long line.

With all hands finally on the west bank without mishap, the party turned south and for three days struggled on through increasingly bitter cold, never finding any shelter, sometimes traveling on through the night because that was less of a torture than freezing while stretched out in the snowdrifts. The delta became a maze of intersecting streams among which De Long was wholly unable to locate his position on his useless charts. And a new horror was added to their others—Erichsen became delirious and each time the shivering men halted, he raved incessantly in Danish and English, making sleep impossible even had the frigid nights otherwise permitted it. And then the food (except for tea) gave out completely, first the remaining scraps of reindeer going; finally the last hoarded bits of the pemmican (which for nearly four months they had dragged with them from the Jeannette) went for dinner on October 3rd.

Without food the party staggered on from their dinner camp, De Long praying earnestly that some game might by a miracle again cross their path. But they saw none, and weak with hunger dragged their ice-clogged feet along, skirting the thin ice on the river edge where the going was easier than on the mossy snow-covered tundra. Suddenly De Long broke through and went into the river up to his shoulders; while he was being hauled out, Görtz plunged through to his neck and Collins was soused to his waist. A moment after they had been dragged back to the surface soaked to their skins, each was a glistening sheet of ice, with no help for it but to keep hobbling onward till evening, when still in the open, they camped by the river bank and, in the midst of a whistling gale of wind and snow they huddled round a driftwood fire where the ice-coated sufferers endeavored vainly to thaw themselves out.

There was nothing left for food for the wan and hungry crew—except Snoozer. De Long, hoping to take at least this favorite dog back home with him, had clung tenaciously to Snoozer through thick and thin, kept him in the boat when the other dogs ran off at Bennett Island, saved him when the other seamen would have left him to starve or drown in the abandoned cutter off the Siberian coast, fed him from his vanishing store of pemmican when he had little enough to eat himself. But now with his men starving about him, desperately needing food if they were to hold a little life in their chilling bodies, sentiment and affection had to give way. Sadly he called over Boyd and Iversen, told them to take Snoozer where no one could see them, kill him, and dress the carcass.

So for supper each had a little dog meat, eaten with revulsion by everyone, but eaten. And then followed a night horrible beyond description. Erichsen’s ravings mingled with the whistling of the wind; in the sub-zero blackness, the stupefied men, unsheltered from the driving snow, crouched about a fire from which they could get no warmth; in his wet and freezing garments, De Long huddled alongside Alexey to keep from freezing to death; while all about, shivering limbs and chattering teeth beat a gruesome accompaniment to Erichsen’s groans as lashed to his sledge, as close to the fire as they dared put him, he alternately shrieked and moaned in delirium till finally he lapsed into a coma.

Morning came at last, to bring the unpleasant discovery that Erichsen had somehow worked off his mittens during the night and both his hands were completely frozen, through and through. The doctor set Boyd and Iversen to work chafing his fingers and palms, endeavoring to restore the circulation, but it proved hopeless. Erichsen was now totally unconscious.

Meanwhile Alexey had spied a hut a few miles off, and after a hastily swallowed cup of tea which constituted breakfast, the men hurriedly shouldered their burdens and dragging their unfortunate shipmate, moved off toward it, fumbling along through the driving snow and the intense cold for two hours, when, fervently thanking God for the shelter, they reached the hut and building a fire inside, proceeded to get warm for the first time in four days.

Here after a brief prayer for the unconscious Dane, read in a broken voice by the captain, the entire party (except Alexey) sank to the floor to rest at last. Alexey refused to rest. He had shipped for the cruise, not as a seaman but as a hunter, and now with his captain and his mates urgently needing food, regardless of himself, he went out to seek it. But there was not the slightest sign of game about, and frozen worse than ever from having broken through the river ice on his hunt, the faithful Indian was at last compelled to return empty-handed.

Supper, half a pound of dog meat apiece, and the last of the tea, was the only meal for the day, but grateful to be out of the blizzard raging roundabout, no one complained.