For some days we drifted impotently with the pack toward the northwest. With broken ice under pressure piling up along our high side and jamming our rudder hard against the pintles, the captain (who inwardly had been hoping for a series of September gales to come along and break up the pack and free us) at last reluctantly gave the order to unship it, which task with great difficulty on account of the thick ice, Cole and Sweetman finally succeeded in accomplishing, tricing the rudder up to the davits across the stern. So the end of the first week found us a rudderless ship moving at the whim of the ice pack, all chance of exploration gone, stopped at latitude 71° North, a latitude which had easily been reached in these same waters twenty years before by a sailing ship. And gnawing bitterly at our captain’s soul was the knowledge that till summer came to free us, in spite of steam or sail, the Jeannette Polar Expedition must drift idly with the pack, so far from the Pole as to be the laughing stock of the world when it became known, the while we consumed our supplies, burned up our coal, and wore out our bodies to no purpose.
Where was the pack taking us? Anxiously we daily watched the trend of the driftlead dropped to the bottom through a hole in the ice under our stern, then checked against occasional bearings of distant Herald Island and the few astronomical observations Danenhower got through the fogs. The navigator announced finally that we were drifting northwest with the pack, at a rate of about two miles per day. Where would that lead us? And when? By spring, to the shores of Wrangel Land perhaps, the captain hoped, not overly optimistic apparently even for actual realization of that prospect.
Meanwhile, I prepared for the worst below. To save coal, fires had on the day the ice caught us, been allowed to die out under the boilers. Now with our underwater hull practically sheathed in ice, the cold below was increasing, and to avoid freezing boilers and pipelines and bursting them as a result, it was necessary to free everything of water, leaving boilers, pumps, and engines empty, dry, and unfortunately as a consequence, unavailable for immediate service if required. Not to have some steam up and his auxiliaries, at least, ready for service, would irk any engineer. But to be even more helpless below, not even to have boilers filled and ready to light off in an emergency, gave me serious cause for worry. However, there was no way out. Keeping the water warm in the boilers and lines meant keeping fires alight which would consume precious fuel and leave us with empty bunkers when the ice at last released us and we could steam again. Keeping water in the boilers and lines without the fires, meant freezing and bursting our lines and perhaps our boilers, leaving us helpless to utilize the coal we had saved. One horn of that dilemma was as bad as the other; was ever an engineer faced with a worse choice of evils? The only way out was to be even more reckless, to empty everything, save coal, avoid freezing, and trust to luck that in a pinch somehow the boilers could be filled again with water, fired up, and steam raised once more before it was too late.
And that I did. Lee, machinist, and Bartlett, fireman, who were acting as my assistant engineers, turned to with their wrenches. Aided by the rest of the black gang, Boyd, Lauterbach, Iversen, and Sharvell, serving as a bucket brigade, they were soon busy breaking pipe joints, draining out water, drying out the boilers, and finally assembling everything as free of moisture as it was humanly possible to get it.
And that completed the job of reducing the Jeannette to a helpless hulk. No rudder with which to steer, no steam with which to move her engines, she was more helpless even than Noah’s Ark, which indeed she soon came to resemble when the portable deck house we brought with us from San Francisco was finally erected.
CHAPTER XI
On the Jeannette, we settled down to spending the winter in the ice pack. The first step was to turn loose on the ice all our dogs—a proceeding greeted with yelps of joy from the dogs at no longer being prisoners, and cheers from the men who foresaw not only the prospect once again of living in some peace and safety, but also of keeping our decks clean and shipshape. There was only one drawback. Some distance from the ship we had planted bear-traps in the hope of varying our menu with fresh meat. To our disgust, instead of bear, our first catch was one of our best dogs, Smike, nipped by the foreleg between the jaws of a trap. With some difficulty, Aneguin extricated the yelping brute and the starboard wing of the bridge having been converted to a dog hospital, Smike was turned in for repairs. Hardly had this been done before a second dog, Kasmatka this time, sprang another trap and Aneguin had two patients for his canine sickbay. This disturbed the captain, who fearful of losing all our dogs with the sledging season coming on, ordered the traps set out only at night when all the dogs had been herded aboard.
Meanwhile De Long kept a watchful eye on Herald Island looming up in the distance as we drifted with the ice to the northwest. Our skipper, anxious to discover if the island contained any driftwood which might serve us for fuel, or a possible harbor if by any chance the hoped-for September gales broke up the pack and allowed us by steaming up again to reach it, determined on exploring it while still it bore abeam, apparently only five miles off. So on the captain’s orders, Chipp, Alexey, and I made up an exploring party, taking a sledge, eight dogs, and provisions for a week. We set off on the morning of September 13, cheered by all the crew, and immediately I discovered something about dog teams. Instead of my boyhood pictures of a dog team racing in full cry over the snow with the Eskimo driver having nothing to do except to snap a whip as he gracefully reclined on the sledge, there was chaos. The dogs yelped and fought; the leaders battling in the rear, the rear dogs in the center, the harness all atangle, and progress the last thing apparently any dog was interested in. It took all our efforts to untangle the mess and get underway, with Alexey whipping the dogs to hold them in line, and Chipp and I behind pushing the sledge to get it started and encourage the dogs. Fortunately for us, the going at first was fair, with much young ice, still smooth and unbroken to ease our path, but we soon ran into rough and broken floes, over which we toiled for hours. In this wise we covered fifteen miles without Herald Island appearing any closer when, to our dismay, a wide open water lead blocked our path. From the edge of that gap we scanned the island beyond, still five miles away but clearly visible through the frosty air, to find that its shores were precipitous cliffs of rock, offering no signs of a safe harbor even if we could have worked the Jeannette inshore, while there was not the slightest evidence of vegetation or of any driftwood which might ease our fuel problem.
Chipp and I considered the situation. Without a boat, it was folly to attempt proceeding farther—we might, even if we managed to skirt this lead and make a landing on the island, find our return cut off by other leads and with our ship being carried to the northward by the drifting ice, be left to starve on that barren rock. Reluctantly then we turned back, but so slow was our progress over the rough ice pack we were forced at last to camp on the ice for the night. It was not till nine the next morning, which happened to be Sunday, that we sighted the ship, a little glum at returning with nothing to show for our journey except one small seal which Alexey had shot at the edge of the lead and which we carried strapped down on the sledge.
Instead of the peaceful calm of a Sunday morning, however, I found the ship in a turmoil. As we approached the stern with our sledge, trudging wearily along in Alexey’s wake and watching eagerly the thin column of smoke from the galley that to us meant just one thing—a hot breakfast—someone on deck shouted,