Before answering De Long looked off through the fog. Ice ahead, ice astern, ice on both beams, with only tiny disconnected patches of water showing here and there among the floes. He shook his head.
“No, chief, we won’t bank this time. Let your fires die out altogether; save every pound of coal you can. If a good chance comes to move, I’ll give you ample time to get steam up again.”
And so we left it. As the day ended, the Jeannette, hemmed in by ice, lay an inert ship, unable to move in any direction, as a matter of form only, held to an ice-anchor; while below, after securing the engines, I reduced the watch to one man only, young Sharvell, coalheaver, left to tend the boilers while the fires died out in them.
The temperature, which never during that day rose above the freezing point, started to drop toward evening and soon fell to 23°. The result was inevitable. Young ice, making during the night over all patches of open water, had by morning completely cemented together the old pack.
One look over the side in the midwatch satisfied me there would be no call for the engines next day, nor unless something startling happened, for many a day. All the steam I could put behind my engines could not stir the Jeannette one inch from her bed, and as for warping her now with our winch, our stoutest hawsers would be about as useful as threads in tearing her from that grip of ice.
And so September 6, 1879, ended with the helpless Jeannette solidly frozen into the Arctic ice pack.
CHAPTER X
That freezing into immobility of the Jeannette in so low a latitude, fell like an icy shower on the spirits of our wardroom mess, and from that day sociability vanished. Already Dunbar and Newcomb were not on speaking terms; Collins regarded me sullenly and the rest of the mess hardly less so; and the captain, who on leaving St. Michael’s, had after an unpleasant disagreement with Mr. Collins in the wardroom, decided that he should be more punctilious and less informal in his intercourse with us, now withdrew into his official shell completely. For myself, this worried me not at all, for I well knew the effect that responsibility has on most skippers, and particularly realized (as De Long seemed finally also to have done) that for a captain not much senior in years nor in rank to most of his officers, close comradeship is incompatible with the maintenance of proper respect and authority.
However, if we had no sociability to cheer us up, we soon had plenty of other matters to make us forget the lack. The ice pack which held us was evidently under way, headed northward, and we had not been in the pack a day before the pressure, nipping us on the beam, shoved the Jeannette up on a submerged tongue of ice projecting somewhere below our port bilge, giving us a list to starboard of over 5° and causing some inconvenience in getting about. As if this were not enough, after a few watches to our great uneasiness our list suddenly increased to 9°, and incidentally jammed our rudder hard starboard.
Here was cause enough for real worry. A permanent list of 9° is in itself a great nuisance in getting about on a ship even in the tropics, but now with the temperature below freezing and the decks slippery with ice, we were in a bad way to keep footing. And if the list got worse and carried away our rudder or laid us on our beam ends as it threatened to do, what then?