With heads bowed, we stood while our ship steamed away from that bleak coast, our anchor hoisted in for the last time, with our thoughts divided between Nordenskjöld safely homeward bound and ourselves headed at last into the unknown polar seas.
As Collins rolled the notes solemnly out from the little organ and the rough voices of our sailors echoed the words, never before had I seen men at sea so deeply stirred by that heartfelt appeal,
“Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea!”
CHAPTER VIII
For the first time, ice now began to be a factor in our cruise. We had noted a little along the Siberian shore churned by the surf when the whaleboat attempted a landing off Serdze Kamen, but now as we stood away from the coast, pack ice to the westward making out from Koliutchin Bay bothered the ship noticeably, with loose ice in large chunks bobbing about in the waves, necessitating constant conning by the officer of the watch to avoid trouble. Finally at 10 P.M., with ice growing heavier, while our course to Wrangel Land lay N.W. by N., the captain changed course to N.E. for a few hours to take her out of it, and then having come to open water, back to N.W., on which course under sail and steam we stood on through the night and all next day with beautifully clear cold weather attending us.
About a hundred miles to the southward of where Wrangel Land should be, we made out the ice pack once more, extending this time from dead ahead uninterruptedly around to the westward as far as eye could see. Confronted thus by the solid pack across our path, there was nothing for it but to head the Jeannette off to the eastward, away from our objective, skirting as closely as we dared that pack on our port side, solid ice now seven feet thick!
Meantime a fine southeast breeze sprang up and to this we made all sail, heading northeast with wind abeam and the ice dead to leeward, while from the crow’s-nest, grizzled old Dunbar, our ex-whaler ice-pilot, closely scanned the pack for any lead of open water through it going northward, but he found not the slightest sign of one.
On that course we were constantly increasing our distance from Wrangel Land instead of diminishing it, so De Long after morosely regarding for some time the fine wake which our six-knot speed was churning up in the icy water astern, finally ordered me when darkness fell to stop the engines, bank fires, and save the coal, letting her go under sail alone for the night.
Late in the first watch then, the engines were secured, the fires heavily banked in the boilers to burn as little coal as possible, and stocky Bartlett, fireman in charge of the watch, instructed to keep them so. With all secured below I came up on deck, for a few minutes before turning in looking off to leeward across the black water at the vague loom of that solid ice pack fringing the near horizon.