We promptly bestirred ourselves. Under Lieutenant Chipp’s direction, improvised torpedoes made of kegs full of black powder were planted in the ice under our stern, but with no results. In spite of an all day struggle, not a torpedo could we explode. To Chipp’s intense chagrin, every fuse we had proved defective and would not burn. And an attempt to fire the charges with that newfangled device, electricity, also failed, apparently because our current was so weak it all leaked away through our non-insulated copper wires into the ice, leaving not enough at the terminals to set off our torpedoes.
To aggravate us while we toiled to straighten up our ship, we had an extraordinarily clear day, giving a splendid view across the ice of Herald Island off to the westward, with far beyond it a distinct range of peaks—Wrangel Land which, when we set out on our expedition we had fondly expected to spend the winter exploring. Frozen in, Heaven only knows how far away from it, we gritted our teeth and worked in the freezing weather to explode those torpedoes but to no purpose. Night fell and left us still in that perilous position.
Our fourth day in the ice found us still struggling to right the ship. The torpedoes were abandoned. We resorted to more primitive methods, those used centuries ago on sailing ships to careen for cleaning the hulls.
Jack Cole, bosun, and a gang of seamen swarmed up the icy shrouds, rigged a couple of heavy tackles at the mastheads, one at the fore, the other at the main, and secured their lower ends to ice claws hooked under the thick floes on our port side.
Then to the hoarse cry of the bosun,
“Yo, heave!” our entire crew, stretched out along the falls, lay back and foot by foot hove them well taut, till our port shrouds came slack and the captain signalled to belay hauling lest something carry away. But even under this terrific strain on our masts tending to roll us to port, our vessel, gripped firmly by the ice, righted herself not an inch.
De Long, regarding with keen disappointment our strained cordage and bent masts, had still one more shot in the locker. Torpedoes had failed, careening had failed, but we had yet an ice saw. He motioned to Alfred Sweetman, our tall English carpenter, standing at the base of the mainmast dubiously eyeing the overstrained crosstrees above him.
“Rig that ice saw, Sweetman!”
The carpenter responded hurriedly. While Jack Cole braced back the main yard so that its port end plumbed our quarter, Sweetman and his mates broke out from the hold our ice saw, a huge steel blade twenty feet long and broad in proportion, its cutting edge studded with coarse teeth that would have done credit to any full-grown shark.
Under Nindemann’s direction, the port watch went over the side armed with pick-axes and crowbars and started to break a hole for the saw through the ice on our quarter, while Cole and Sweetman swung the saw from a tackle at the yardarm, weighted its lower end with a small kedge anchor, and then awaited the completion of the hole through the floe. They had several hours to wait, for not till the gang on the pack had dug down fifteen feet did a crowbar go through into the open water below, which, gushing unexpectedly upward into the hole, soaked the diggers with freezing spray and sent them madly scrambling up the rough sides of their excavation.