“No use,” repeated the quartermaster hopelessly. “For a long ways from where we left them, there ain’t no huts, only a hundred rivers going every way and for a man twice to find the same spot there is impossible. You ain’t so strong no more. You’ll only die yourself!”
I laid the weeping seaman back on his couch. Probably he was right. But so long as the faintest shred of hope existed for Captain De Long and his comrades, I must look for them.
I got the best directions I could from Noros and from Nindemann as to the route south they had traveled, where they had stopped each night, the rivers they had crossed. Taking either man with me as a guide was impossible; they could not travel. So leaving instructions for my whaleboat party that, except for Bartlett (who was to stay in Bulun to search for me if in a month I did not return), all the others on arrival there were to proceed under Lieutenant Danenhower’s charge south to Yakutsk, I got a dog sled and immediately started north. At Ku Mark Surk I met the Russian Commandant next day; he helped me with another dog team and a ten day supply of fish. With that I proceeded northward along Nindemann’s trail from Ku Mark Surk, having two native drivers and twenty-two dogs.
Through fierce November storms we pushed on down the delta, sometimes finding Nindemann’s trail, often losing it. The going was slow, the cold was intense, we were frequently stopped by gales which completely blinded us and against which the dogs refused to travel, instead lying down in the snow and howling dolefully. The river began to divide as it spread out over the flat and treeless delta. One after another I searched along innumerable streams for Nindemann’s trail but in the deepening snows found no sign as we went north. Wrapped in thick furs, I nevertheless nearly froze to death on my sledge. It was inconceivable that De Long and his companions, long without food, clothed only in scanty rags, could live through such weather. But still I searched, hopeful now at least of recovering their bodies.
Our food gave out, the Yakut drivers wanted to return to Ku Mark Surk. I enquired if there were any village on the delta itself from which we might continue our search. They said there was one. On the far northwestern corner of the delta on the Arctic shore, some thirty miles due west of where from Nindemann’s account De Long had landed on the coast, was a small village called Tomat. I looked at my chart, a copy I had long ago made at Semenovski Island of De Long’s. There was no village marked there on that chart, but knowing now the chart to be wholly unreliable, I accepted my drivers’ statements as being true and ordered them to head for Tomat to replenish our food supply, intending then to pick up De Long’s trail at the abandoned boat, and follow him southward from there till I came upon his party, whether alive or dead. But my drivers protested; we must turn about and return to Ku Mark Surk; without food, we would all perish on the desolate road to Tomat. Fiercely I turned on them in their native tongue.
“Head north!” I ordered savagely. “And when we have to, we’ll eat the dogs! And when they’re gone, by God, I’ll eat you if necessary to get north to Tomat! Keep on north!”
Cowed by my threats, and thoroughly believing that this wild stranger from the sea might well turn cannibal, the dog drivers headed northwest toward Tomat, the solitary village on that northern Arctic coast. For three days our laboring dogs dragged us through the drifts along the road to Tomat, fortunately for us following a chain of deserted huts in each of which we found refuse scraps of fish heads, entrails of reindeer, and such similar offal, the which we (both men and dogs) ate greedily to save us from starvation, and on the fourth day, so frozen that I had to be carried from my sledge into a hut, we arrived at Tomat.
Staying there only a day to thaw out, to change my dogs for fresh ones, and to replenish my food supply (in that poor village, itself facing the winter with scanty food, getting each solitary fish was harder indeed than extracting from the villagers their teeth), I started east along the Arctic coast, with my feet so badly frozen I could not walk.
By evening, marked by a pole, I found the cache De Long had left on the beach but so thick was the falling snow I could not see the first cutter offshore. Salvaging the log books and the Jeannette’s navigating outfit, I loaded them on my sledges and turned south till I came on the first hut where De Long had stopped. For a week after, amid frigid Arctic gales with the temperature far below zero, I searched along the solidly frozen Lena, visiting every hut, finishing finally in that hut on the promontory where for three days De Long had waited for the rivers to freeze so he might cross, and where Dr. Ambler had sliced off Erichsen’s toes. There beyond the frozen river, on the wind-swept further shore, for a short distance I could follow where his toiling shipmates had dragged Erichsen along on his sledge, for the deep grooves left in the soft slush a month and a half before now stood clearly out in solid ice.
But there finally I lost the trail. The deep drifts of many snows buried all tracks. Facing a myriad of wandering streams, any one of which De Long might have followed south, I searched in vain for further tracks, for the hut in which Erichsen had finally died, for the epitaph board which Nindemann told me he had left there to mark it, but not another trace of De Long or of his party could I find in the ever-thickening snow as storm succeeded storm and buried the Lena Delta in drifts so deep that my floundering dogs could scarcely drag me through them.