For thirty anxious minutes we fought before our two Scotch boilers with slice bars, rakes, and shovels to raise steam, while through our solid sides as we toiled below the water line, we heard the groaning and the crunching of the ice digging into our planking and from above the slapping of the sails, the howling of the dogs, and the kicks and curses of the seamen still struggling futilely to get the ship to claw off to windward.
At last with fires roaring, the needle of our pressure gauge started to climb toward the popping point; I reported we were ready with the engines.
De Long doused all sail; under steam alone with our helm hard aport and propeller turning over at half speed, we swung our bow at last to starboard into the wind and slowly eased away from the pack, decidedly thankful to get clear with no more damage than a terrible gouging of our stout elm planking. And under steam alone for the rest of the night we stood on dead slow nearly to windward between east and southeast, keeping that ice pack a respectable distance on our port hand till dawn came and with it, a fog!
For the next few watches, we played tag with the ice-fields, standing off when the fog came in, standing in when the fog lifted, searching for an open lead to the northward. At one time during this period, the fog thinned to show to our intense astonishment, off to the southeast a bark under full sail, a whaler undoubtedly, standing wisely enough to the southward away from the ice, but so far off, anxious as we were not to lose any northing while we sought an open lead, we never ran down and spoke him.
Soon, a little regretfully, we lost him in the fog, the last vessel we ever saw, homeward bound no doubt and a missed opportunity for us to send a farewell message home before we entered the ice-pack around Wrangel Land.
Finally with nothing but ice in sight except to the southeast, De Long decided to try a likely looking lead opening to leeward, toward the northwest. So with the captain in the crow’s-nest and the ice-pilot perched on the topsail yard, we entered the lead, Lieutenant Chipp on the bridge conning the ship as directed from aloft. Cautiously we proceeded in a general northwesterly direction up that none too wide lead of water with broken ice-fields fairly close aboard us now on both sides, for some seven hours till late afternoon, when simultaneously the lead suddenly narrowed and the fog thickened so much that we stopped, banked fires, and put out an ice-anchor to a nearby floe.
Chilled, cramped, and dead-tired from his long day in the crow’s-nest, De Long laid down from aloft and promptly crawled into his bunk, while the fog continuing, we lay to our ice-anchor till next day.
For the first time on our cruise, the temperature that night dropped below freezing, with the odd result that by morning between the fog and the freezing weather, our rigging was a mass of shimmering snow and frost, magically turning the Jeannette into a fairy ship, a lovely sight with her every stay and shroud shining and sparkling in the early dawn, and the running rigging a swaying crystal web of jewels glistening against the sky.
But as the fog still hung on, and we consequently could not move, I am afraid our captain, more interested in progress northward than in beauty, gave scant heed, and it was left to Ambler and me, being early on deck, really to drink in the soul-satisfying loveliness of that scene.
Some new ice, a thin film only, made around the ship during the night, the weather being calm and the surface of our lead therefore undisturbed and free to freeze, but it was insignificant in thickness compared to the pack ice surrounding us, which seemed everywhere to be at least seven feet in depth, of which thickness some two feet were above water and the rest below, with some hummocks here and there pushed up above the smooth pack to a height of six feet perhaps.