And so to the final entry, by the irony of Fate recording that man’s death, the dying captain’s stiffening fingers scrawled out faithfully the record of his shipmates, but not one word regarding George Washington De Long!
With wet cheeks, I stood humbly before the frozen body from which the great soul of my Captain had passed, till finally Nindemann approached and with his aid, I loosened the three terribly emaciated forms from the snow and bore them gently to our sledges. Evening fell and we returned to a hut at Mat Vay, ten miles south across the great frozen bay, where I established headquarters. The next few days, digging in the snow near the tripod where I had found the rifle, we uncovered the bodies of the rest of the party, all fearfully gaunt. There was not a whole garment on any man; and not one pair of boots or of fur clothing could we find. Everything made of skin or of leather had been eaten; most of the men lay in ragged underwear with their feet bound in canvas, and the first two who died had been stripped naked and so lay in the snow, their poor rags wrapped round their then dying comrades.
As we dug away the snow in the lee of that river bank where the last ten survivors (Alexey had died a short distance away near that grounded raft) had huddled, trying to shelter themselves from the fierce gales, we found first the ashes of their fire, then the sticks with which they had sought to rig their sole remaining piece of canvas as a windbreak, and then so close to the ashes that their underwear was badly scorched, the bodies of all hands except Lee and Kaack. And there also we found De Long’s main ship journals. But those two men and the expedition’s silken ensign we could not find.
I puzzled over that, and then reading back again De Long’s journal, I noted that Lee and Kaack had been carried “around the corner out of sight.” But where was there a corner in that bank running straight north and south? And then it came to me that as all the gales De Long had logged blew from the southward, they must have set their bit of canvas up athwart the wind and camped on its north side, so that he meant around the corner of the tent. Directing the natives to dig to the southward of the sticks, they soon found Lee and Kaack, naked both, and now there was nothing missing but the ensign. Knowing well that De Long, however weak he might be, would never have abandoned that, I ordered the edge of the tent line excavated and there at last we found the silken banner, deep in the snow, safely rolled in its oilskin case.
But one thing still puzzled me. Why were the men whose deaths De Long had recorded all there in the lee of that high bank, while he himself, with Ah Sam and Dr. Ambler, the last survivors, lay on top that promontory where there was not the slightest shelter from the biting wind? After another survey, I could only conclude that De Long, wholly despairing of rescue and feeling death swiftly approaching, had with his two dying companions started to move the records of the expedition up from the river bank onto the higher ground where they would longer escape the spring floods, but the three of them having made one trip up the slope in which they dragged with them the copper kettle and a tin chart case (which I found there near the captain) had none of them the strength to crawl back for another load and there they all soon perished. Evidently of those three Ah Sam died first; his arms were crossed above his breast as if laid out by the others close to the little fire they had built beneath the kettle in which they were trying to boil a few twigs of Arctic willow. Whether Dr. Ambler or Captain De Long was the last survivor, no one will ever know—Ambler lay face down near the fire, De Long a little farther off.
At my direction, Nindemann and Bartlett carefully searched the camp and all the bodies for any final messages left, but only on Surgeon Ambler did they come across anything like that. The last page of his journal was in the form of a letter. I sobbed as I read it.
On The Lena,
Thursday, Oct. 20, 1881.
To Edward Ambler, Esq.,
Markham P. O., Fauquier Co., Va.
My dear Brother:
I write these lines in the faint hope that by God’s merciful providence they may reach you at home. I have myself very little hope of surviving. We have been without food for nearly two weeks, with the exception of four ptarmigans amongst eleven of us. We are growing weaker, and for more than a week have had no food. We can barely manage to get wood enough now to keep warm, and in a day or two that will be passed. I write to you all, my mother, sister, brother Cary and his wife and family, to assure you of the deep love I now and have always borne you. If it had been God’s will for me to have seen you all again I had hoped to have enjoyed the peace of home-living once more. My mother knows how my heart has been bound to hers since my earliest years. God bless her on earth and prolong her life in peace and comfort. May His blessing rest upon you all. As for myself, I am resigned, and bow my head in submission to the Divine will. My love to my sister and brother Cary; God’s blessing on them and you. To all my friends and relatives a long farewell. Let the Howards know I thought of them to the last, and let Mrs. Pegram also know that she and her nieces were continually in my thought.