With the help of Lee, who was a machinist, and of Bartlett, fireman, first class, I now set about supplying a new pump-rod from our own resources. While at Mare Island, in view of the uncertainty of repair faculties in the Arctic, like prudent engineers we had acquired for the Jeannette quite a set of tools. I won’t exactly say we stole them, for after all they merely moved from one spot owned by Uncle Sam to another also under his jurisdiction, but at any rate, in good old Navy fashion during our stay at the Navy Yard everything not nailed down in the machine shop there that appealed to us and that we could carry, somehow moved aboard the Jeannette, and now all our recent acquisitions came in handy. I rigged up a long lathe. Out of some square stock once intended by the Navy Yard for forging out chain plates for the Mohican, we turned out a very favorable replica in iron of our broken rod, squared off the shoulders for the pistons, cut the threads for the retaining nuts, and long before the schooner showed up in port, had the disabled pump reassembled with the new rod and banging lustily away on the line once more, hammering feed water into our steaming boiler, thus making good my promise to the captain when the old rod broke. This particularly pleased De Long, who I am afraid, like most Line officers, underestimating the resourcefulness of Navy engineers and particularly Scotch ones, had been fearful that we might have to turn back or at least take a long delay while we awaited the arrival, on the St. Paul’s return trip, of a new rod from the United States.
For six days we waited in St. Michael’s, eyes glued to the harbor entrance, undergoing as the captain feelingly expressed it that “hope deferred which maketh the heart sick,” when at last on August 18 the Fanny A. Hyde showed up, beating her way closehauled into the harbor. She was a welcome sight not only to our careworn skipper but to all of us, who long before had completely exhausted in a couple of hours the possibilities of St. Michael’s, and in our then state of ignorance, were eager to move on into the even more barren Arctic.
In fact, so eager were we to be on our way that the captain signalled the schooner not to anchor at all but to come alongside us directly, prepared immediately for coaling.
The next three days were busy ones for all hands, lightering coal in bags up from the schooner’s holds, dumping it through the deck scuttles into our bunkers, and there trimming it high up under the deck beams to take advantage of every last cubic inch of the Jeannette’s stowage space. Most of this work of muling the coal around we had to do with our own force, for the schooner with a crew of six men only and being a sailing vessel, with no power machinery of any kind, could assist us but little. Here our deck winch, made of those old steam launch engines which I had fitted aboard at Mare Island, came in very handy in saving our backs, for with falls rigged from the yardarms by our energetic Irish bosun, I soon had the niggerheads on that winch whipping the bags of coal up out of the schooner’s holds and dropping them down on our decks in grand style.
Needless to say, however, with coal littering our decks and coal dust everywhere, with staterooms and cabins tightly sealed up to prevent its infiltration, and with our whole crew as black as nigger minstrels, we carefully abstained from taking aboard any other stores and least of all our furs or dogs from ashore, till coaling was completed and the ship washed down.
At this coaling we labored steadily until late on the twentieth of August when checking the coal we had already transferred and what was left aboard the schooner, I came to the conclusion that there would still be twenty tons remaining on the Fanny A. Hyde for which we could find no stowage, even on our decks, and entering the captain’s cabin, I suggested to him that instead of dismissing our escort at St. Michael’s as intended, he take a chance and order her to follow us on our next leg, the three hundred mile journey across Norton Sound and Behring Strait to St. Lawrence Bay in Siberia, where that last twenty tons of coal she carried, which otherwise would go back to the United States, would just about replenish what we burned on the way over to Asia.
To put it mildly, when I sprang this suggestion on him De Long greeted it with a cheer, but he went me one better.
“That twenty tons she’ll certainly carry along for us, chief, but that’s not all! What’s left in her now, and how long’ll it take you to get her down to that last twenty tons?”
“She’s got fifty tons still aboard her, captain,” I answered. I looked at my watch. It was getting along toward evening already. “But the last thirty tons which we can take aboard from her, will go almighty slow! Trimming it down inside those stifling bunkers to top ’em off for a full due is the devil’s own job—it’ll take us all day tomorrow certainly!”
De Long, who, downcast over the non-arrival of the schooner, had not cracked a smile for a week, now stroked his long mustaches gleefully.