In the chill winter morning, with the thermometer not much above zero, we stood in our furs, officers indistinguishable in those baggy garments from seamen, waiting for the captain to emerge. A bleak enough scene. Along our whole port side was broken ice, piled up by the pressure (which was heeling us to starboard) in irregular heaps till it came practically fair with the rail and threatened if the pressure increased to rise still higher and flow like a glacier down our sloping deck. Aloft as usual, our rigging was outlined in ice, our masts and spars cased in it, and our furled sails against the yards so thoroughly frozen into a solid mass that had we wished to spread our canvas, it would have been beyond the power of human hands even with axes to loose one fold from another. That made me smile a bit. Our sails were even more useless than our engines, for given time, I could at least fire up again; but I could see no way in which Chipp could possibly make sail till summer came once more.
In the midst of my meditations, De Long emerged from the poop. Swiftly Danenhower called the roll, saluted the captain, reported three men absent. The captain, to whom by now this was no news, acknowledged curtly. The crew was dismissed, fell out, went below, and stood by their various stations there while the skipper inspected the berth deck, the galley, the storerooms, and in short, every space and hold, commenting briefly now and then. As a whole the ship was dry; in spite of the cold outside, no condensation and no frost as yet showed in our living quarters or storerooms.
Inspection over, the bosun passed the word for Divine Service in the cabin aft, but except for the officers aboard, the captain’s congregation was small. Attendance being voluntary, the majority of the crew stayed away, which may perhaps have been taken as a good omen for I well believe the old saying to be so, that the reliance of a sailor in God is in inverse proportion to his faith in the strength of his ship. Evidently then our seamen, seeing no special danger in our predicament, felt no great need for prayer, leaving that to the captain, who, they well knew, was in the absence of a chaplain required by the Navy Regulations to hold services. I may say here, however, for Captain De Long that he was a deeply religious man and it required no compulsion from the Regulations in his case to insure Divine Service and to ask the blessing of the Almighty upon his undertaking and his crew. Personally however, his position in the matter was a little odd, because De Long himself was of the Catholic faith. Nevertheless since most of the crew were if anything Protestants, he always conducted the services in the Episcopal ritual.
Services over, we laid up on deck, to find practically the whole crew lining the rail watching the absent hunters straggling back across the ice pack to the ship, with the winded Nindemann leading and the other two well in his rear. There were no signs of the bear, who had evidently successfully outrun his pursuers, but what I think mostly engaged the seamen’s attention as their eyes moved covertly from the captain at the starboard gangway to the returning hunters on the ice was their expectation of seeing the skipper light into the absentees for missing inspection. Nindemann, first over the side, a little surprised at seeing the captain at the gangway instead of Dunbar to whom he had turned over the the deck, saluted De Long, reported casually,
“Returning aboard, sir,” and unslinging his rifle, turned to go below.
“Wait a minute, Nindemann.” The quartermaster paused, De Long eyed him silently a moment, while the crew, a little forward, looked eagerly for fireworks, but to their disappointment De Long said very quietly,
“Nindemann, you were watch officer. For a quartermaster with all your years at sea, I thought you knew better than to leave the ship without permission. Never let it happen again.”
Nindemann, his stolid German countenance flushing under even that mild reproof, hesitated a moment between the relative desirabilities of silence and justification, then muttered,
“But, cap’n, before yet I go, I turn over the deck to Mr. Dunbar. And that bear, he was already yet running away. There was not time for anything.”
De Long shook his head.