With no further noticeable movement of the pack, we were left in peace to contemplate the possibilities of this situation till late afternoon, when the main stream again got underway and bombarded our floe to starboard heavily for four hours so strenuously that it seemed to all of us that this time we must surely go adrift. But at about 8 p.m., the motion ceased again, leaving us all in such a state of mind that the captain’s order for all hands to sleep in their clothes with knapsacks close at hand ready for instant flight, seemed to us the most natural thing in the world.
We didn’t get much sleep. Hardly had the midwatch ended, when little Newcomb, who unable to rest at all, had in spite of the bitter cold stayed on deck till 4 A.M., darted into De Long’s cabin, seized his shoulder, woke him with a shout,
“Turn out, captain! It’s all over this time! That ice is coming right down on us!”
De Long, already fully clothed, sprang from his bunk, seized his knapsack, and rushed on deck. The rest of us in the poop, none too sound asleep ourselves, were roused by the noise and hurriedly followed him up to find that Newcomb had hardly exaggerated.
On the starboard side, like buildings being poured through a chute, the broken floes were cascading along the channel at a livelier rate than ever, but that at least was hardly novel to us now. What froze our blood as we stood there in the cold light of the moon was the sight ahead. The rift in the pack which yesterday was headed across our bows, had changed direction squarely for our bowsprit, and now along that opening was coming toward us irresistibly and steadily, towering as high as our yardarms, a torrent of floebergs, thundering down on the yet unbroken pack between with a violence that made the sturdy Jeannette quiver under our feet like jelly!
Hardly audible in the roaring of the ice, Jack Cole shrilled away on his bosun’s pipe, then his hoarse voice bellowed along the berth deck,
“All hands! Stand by to abandon ship!”
Our entire crew poured up from below to shiver in a temperature of twenty below zero and shake, I have no doubt for other good reasons, as they stood helpless round the mainmast, all eyes riveted on that fearful wall of advancing ice, with a crest of hummocks, weighing twenty to fifty tons each, toppling forward like surf breaking on our floe. Another crash, another startling advance of the floebergs, and on top of the deckhouse I saw De Long suddenly grasp the mainstay with both hands and hang on for dear life, awaiting the final smash as that Niagara of ice struck us.
The blow never came. God alone knows why, but hardly twenty-five feet from our bows, the onrushing wall of ice suddenly halted, the pressure vanished, and we on the Jeannette were left to contemplate, in the deathly Arctic silence which ensued and in the growing light, the indescribable wreckage that had been wrought in the level floe that had once surrounded us. And then like a feeble anti-climax, the stillness was broken by the whistling of the bosun’s pipe, followed by his call,
“All hands! Lay below for breakfast!”