It was now late November, six wintry weeks since without food and without shelter, De Long had parted somewhere thereabouts in that ghastly wilderness from his two messengers. Only one of two things now was possible—either De Long and his party had somehow been found by natives who were sheltering him, quite as safe as I myself; or he had long since perished and was somewhere buried beneath the snowdrifts on the open tundra, where in the dead of winter it was hopeless to search for him. Weak and frozen myself from my desperate search, coming on top of my long exposure in the open whaleboat, it was now imperative that I get out of the delta before my frozen corpse found an unmarked grave beneath the snows alongside my missing shipmates. So sadly I ordered my worn dogs south. It took us a week to fight our way back to Ku Mark Surk at the delta head, and two days more to cover the final fearful miles along the Lena through the mountain gorges up to Bulun, where at last at the end of November I arrived, sick at heart at my failure to find my comrades, terribly sick physically from rotten food, from hunger, and with numbed limbs from which the Arctic cold had drained away every vestige of life.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
All winter long, while endeavoring to recuperate my frozen arms and legs, I gathered supplies and sledges from Bulun, from far-off Yakutsk, from all the villages between, for an intensive search of the delta in early March before the annual springtime freshets, feeding the Lena with the melting snows of southern Siberia, should come pouring out on the flat delta, burying it in a flood of raging waters and sweeping my shipmates out into the Arctic Sea.
I kept only Nindemann, now recovered, and Bartlett with me to help me in my search. All the remaining survivors, a pitiful party, under Lieutenant Danenhower’s charge, went south over the fifteen hundred mile trail to Irkutsk. Poor Aneguin, weakened by exposure, died before he got out of Siberia; Jack Cole, violently insane, reached America only to die soon after in a government asylum; and Danenhower himself, broken in health, after a few brief years spent undergoing a long series of operations, soon followed him to the grave. The rest except for Leach, whose toes had to be amputated, reached America safe and sound. Meanwhile by courier from Bulun to Irkutsk, the head of the telegraph lines in Siberia, the news of the disaster to the Jeannette finally went out on December 21.
For two and a half years not a word of us had ever reached civilization. As the months since our departure lengthened into years and no news came, anxiety in America and in Europe over our fate deepened into keen alarm. Swallowed by the trackless Arctic, fear for us grew, and in the summer of 1881, two relief expeditions fitted out by the American government went north to search for us. But where should they look? Which way did the polar currents go from Behring Strait where we had entered? No one knew save we on the Jeannette and our knowledge was useless to a world facing a search of the unknown north.
One expedition in the Revenue Cutter Corwin, searched for us fruitlessly off Wrangel Land but not daring to enter the ice, found no trace. A second expedition, in the U.S.S. Alliance, thinking perhaps we might have drifted east over North America and come out beyond Greenland into the Atlantic, searched during the whole summer the fringe of the polar pack around Spitzbergen, getting in open water as far as 82° North, five degrees higher than we in the Jeannette were ever carried by the pack before it crushed us.
But neither expedition found the slightest sign of us, and more alarmed than ever, an international search was being organized by our Navy, with the help of England, Russia, and Sweden for the summer of 1882. In the midst of these preparations in late December, 1881, from far up in the Arctic Circle, my first brief telegram from Bulun at last reached Irkutsk and flashed out over the wires to an astonished world, ending the mystery of the Jeannette’s disappearance, bringing joy to some whose friends had definitely escaped; blank despair to others whose lives were bound up with poor Chipp and his lost boat’s crew; and a terrible state of mingled fear and hope, not to be resolved for unknown months yet, to Emma De Long and the families of those men still with her husband. I felt that they were dead, but I did not know it, and dared not say so. I could only announce them as having landed safely, but yet unfound. My heart ached for Emma De Long, half the globe away from me, clinging to her daughter, praying that her husband might yet be alive, tortured by the long drawn out fear of waiting for word from Siberia, dreading each knock at the door as announcing the messenger bringing definitely the black news of his death, and all the while with her imagination able to dwell only on the agonies which her husband had undergone, and if by some miracle (for which she prayed) he still were living among those Arctic wastes, he must yet be suffering.
I received carte blanche from Washington for funds to pursue the search; from St. Petersburg, I was assured all the resources of Russia were at my command. But Washington and St. Petersburg were far away from the trackless delta where I must pursue my search, and carte blanche telegrams helped me little. A few dogs, a few interpreters, a supply of dried fish sold under compulsion by natives who could ill afford to spare them, was the total extent of the assistance I could use and get delivered to distant Bulun up in the Arctic Circle, fifteen hundred long miles away from civilization and the telegraph wires at Irkutsk, when in late February with practically all the fish in the Lena Delta in my possession and the poor Yakuts face to face with famine, I resumed my search.
Dividing my forces, I sent Bartlett and an interpreter to cover the eastern branches of the Lena, while with Nindemann to guide me, I started again to search the western branches myself.
I had seven dog teams hauling fish, having practically stripped Jamaveloch and every Lena village of its entire supply. Delayed considerably still by fierce snow storms, we went north from Ku Mark Surk into the delta, but it took two weeks for the straining dogs to drag our stores along to where the Lena started branching widely at Cass Carta, and many a burdened dog froze to death in the drifts before he got there. At Cass Carta at last, I reorganized my remaining teams and on March 12, still in the midst of-winter weather, sent Bartlett east, and with Nindemann, began myself the search of western rivers.