For over a week, the listing Jeannette, which looked as if the pressure of a little finger would send her tumbling out of her inclined bed, nevertheless clung to her half cradle in the pack, defying apparently all the principles of physical force so far as I as an engineer understood them.
On the third day after the pack separated, we had a bad southeast gale blowing all night and all day, with terrific squalls at times reaching a velocity of fifty miles an hour. Although that wind hit us squarely on the starboard bow, its most favorable angle for casting us adrift, the Jeannette held grimly to her berth and nothing happened. Then on the fifth day, urged on by a northerly blow, the floebergs again got underway, broke up the young ice to port of us, and jammed themselves under our bows with heavy masses of ice pressing directly on the stem. We confidently looked to see the ship knocked clear this time, but evidently other floebergs jammed against our exposed side exerted such a heavy beam pressure that we stayed in place, though the poor Jeannette, squeezed both ahead and abeam, groaned and creaked continuously under the stresses on her strained timbers. The sixth day, the seventh day, and the eighth day, we had more of the same, with streams of floebergs bombarding our exposed port side, and on the starboard side our floe steadily dwindling under the impact of the bergs hurtling through the canal there.
Life on the Jeannette became almost impossible. Sleeping with our clothes on, jumping nervously from our bunks at every sudden crackling in the ship’s timbers, at each unexpected crash of the bergs outside, we got slight rest for our bodies and none at all for our nerves. And in the middle of all this, the sun disappeared below the horizon for good, leaving us to face what might come in the continuous gloom of the long Arctic night. According to Danenhower’s calculations, we could expect the sun to rise again in seventy-one days, unless meanwhile we drifted farther to the northward, in which case of course our night would be still further prolonged.
On the ninth day since the separation of the pack, the wind rose once more, blowing directly on our starboard beam, and the never-ceasing stream of bergs began again to pile up across our stem, for us an ominous combination.
On the tenth day, fearing the worst, we rounded up all our dogs, and waited. The pressure ahead increased, with floating ice piling up along the port side higher than our rail, finally starting the planking in our bulging bulwarks. Under the bowsprit, the rising ice blotted from sight our figurehead. Then an upended floeberg crashed violently into the pack under our starboard bow and wedged its way relentlessly toward our side. The pressure became tremendous. Beneath our feet the Jeannette’s tortured ribs groaned dismally. On deck we looked silently at one another, waiting. Something was going to collapse this time. Which would give way first, ship or ice?
Suddenly the Jeannette lifted by the stern, shifted a little in her cradle. Instantly the floeberg under our starboard bow drove forward, split our floe, and with a lurch and a heavy roll to port we slid into open water, afloat and undamaged, on an even keel once more!
Intensely relieved at having got clear without being crushed, we nevertheless looked back sadly, as we drifted off among the floebergs, at the shattered remnants of the ice cradle which for two and a half months had sheltered us, to see it now tumbling about in elephantine masses, no longer a haven of refuge in our trials.
Well, we were afloat. It was at least some consolation to have a level deck beneath our feet while we waited, sailors with no control whatever over our ship, for what next the ice pack had in store for us.
But the pack gave us a respite. Idly we drifted about in a wide bay of broken ice, stopping for a brief time alongside one floe, then drifting off till stopped by another. The wind moderated, the temperature rose somewhat till it stood near zero, and finally it began to snow. There being no signs of imminent danger, the captain ordered the bosun to pipe down and we went below, permitted at last to eat a meal without having the plates threaten to slide each instant off the table.