To start with, the only possible opening was on the port bow, but with heavy ice ahead and astern, there was insufficient room to maneuver the ship by backing to head her for the opening. So over the side went Bosun Cole and half the starboard watch, dragging with them one end of a six-inch hawser. Selecting a sizeable ice hummock a few shiplengths off on the port side which gave a proper lead to our forecastle bitts, Cole expertly threw a clove hitch in the hawser round the hummock, using the ice, so to speak, as a bollard; while on deck, Quartermaster Nindemann heaved in on the ship end of that line with our steam winch, warping the bow smartly round to port till it pointed fair for the opening, when Chipp gave me the signal,
“Slow ahead!”
With a few turns of the propeller, we pushed our bow into the crack between the floes. After that, with the line cast off, it was a case of full out on the throttle. With connecting rods, cranks, and pistons flying madly round, we certainly churned up a wild wake in that narrow lead wedging those cakes apart while the Jeannette squeezed herself in between the ice floes.
And so it went for the next three hours, the captain and the ice-pilot directing from aloft, while in the engine room we nearly tore the engines off their bedplates and the smoking thrust block off its foundation with all our sudden changes from “Full ahead” to “Full astern” and everything in between, while the Jeannette rammed, squeezed, backed, and butted her way through the ice, sometimes relying only on the engines, sometimes only on Jack Cole and his mates plodding along on the floes ahead of the ship dragging that six-inch hawser and occasionally taking a turn with it on some hummock to help warp the ship into position for ramming. Our solid bow and thick sides took a terrific beating that watch as we hammered our way through pack ice deeper than our keel, but everything held, and when we finally ceased a little after four, it was not from any fear of the consequences to the Jeannette, but only because the fog came down again, blotting out everything.
Once more we ran out our ice-anchor, and with that secured, recalled aboard the warping party. I came up out of the engine room, having taken enough out of our engines in a few hours to drive us halfway to China. Chipp, Danenhower, and the captain all were gathered on the bridge over my head.
“Well, Dan, how much’ve we made good toward Herald Island?” I enquired eagerly of Danenhower.
The navigator’s thickset brows contracted dejectedly as he peered down at me over the after rail.
“Maybe a mile, chief,” he answered.
Maybe a mile? And to get that mile, keeping up a full head of steam all the time for ramming, I had been burning coal furiously these past three hours. A hundred miles of progress at that rate and our coal would be completely gone. I turned questioningly toward the captain, asked,
“I suppose it’s bank fires now and save coal, hey, brother?”