But even that slight delay while coming about promptly put us in difficulties. As our stern drifted free of the bank, the oncoming ice struck us and we were jammed through that canal to an accompaniment of tumbling and shrieking masses of ice awful to contemplate. Huge hummocks, tons in weight, overhung our bulwarks, threatening to break off and crash down on our decks; floebergs large as churches bobbed up and down alongside like whales, seemingly about to come aboard and overwhelm us, time after time leaving us breathless as huddled inboard round the mainmast we watched, not daring to go near the rail, even more afraid to seek shelter below. Helpless, the Jeannette was pushed, rammed, squeezed, and hammered along amidst the screeching of the floes. Just as helpless, we stood in the Arctic night thankful nevertheless for the bright moonlight which at mid-afternoon was flooding the scene, for had we without that moon been in darkness forced to stand by and listen to that shrieking ice without being able to see, God alone knows what effect terror would have had on us!
This hair-raising passage lasted half an hour. Then as suddenly as our ordeal had started, it ended in the midst of an eruption of ice cakes by our being spewed from a final jam blocking the canal into a large open bay where the current, with room to spread at last, quickly lost speed, and the terrifying floebergs, no longer constricted, fell slowly away from our sides!
With fervent sighs of relief at our deliverance we saw the battered Jeannette lose headway, float gently toward the wide floe forming the southerly bank of the bay, and quietly ram her blunt nose into the young ice there, bringing up without a tremor and holding fast. So ended our day.
It was getting along toward the end of November. For three days after that, we lay against the edge of the bay while the young ice thickened about us and a heavy southeast gale kicked up. Our useless masts and spars whipped and rattled in the squalls, our rigging, swollen to two or three times natural size by coatings of frost, sang in the wind in a deep bass pitch wholly new to us, and the ship shook in the gusts as if her sticks were going to be torn clean out of her. But to us as sailors none of this was wholly novel; our only anxiety was what effect this gale, the worst we had yet seen in the Arctic, would have on the pack. We chopped a hole in the young ice alongside, got a lead line down, and soon observed that the whole pack was drifting to leeward with the wind, moving to the northwest apparently into a large water space temporarily existing unseen by us somewhere there in the Arctic Sea. These drift observations gave us cause for sober thought. What would happen if, with the gale still blowing to urge the ice northwest, something across its path brought the pack to a stand?
We soon found out. On the third day of the storm, in the dim light of a moon just rising in the morning, we saw the leeward ice commence to move past the ship, paradoxically going to windward. Whatever it was, something had brought the drifting pack to a sudden halt, but the gale still howled on, driving to the northwest, and unfortunately for us as we lay broadside to it, driving the ice to windward fairly onto our port beam, dead against our framing. We were in for another squeezing by the pack.
Before long the Jeannette, with the pressure squarely on her ribs, caught now between opposing floes extending her entire length, was quivering and snapping worse I think than ever in our experience. Our spar deck arched up under the strain, pitch and oakum were squeezed out of the seams, and a bucket full of water standing on a hatch on the poop was half emptied of its contents by the constant agitation.
To leeward of us, where the ice appeared weaker, one sheet rode up over another and against this double thickness of ice our starboard side jammed, while the port floe (which for some reason seemed stronger than the ice to leeward) pressed fiercely against us there. The Jeannette thus gripped, shivered and groaned dismally and her decks bulged upwards till the heavy athwartship trusses in her hull below came into play and took the squeeze directly. When the ship was able to give no further, the noise ceased, and for half an hour perhaps with only the trembling of the decks to indicate the struggle, the pack pressed and the Jeannette resisted while we as helpless spectators waited the outcome.
Suddenly the port floe humped and crumbled, relieving the thrust. Our sprung decks flattened out to normal; we gasped in relief. But our thankfulness was premature as it turned out, for piling its broken edges higher against our side, the port floe, driven in by the wind, pushed up for another nip and the whole performance was immediately repeated with the Jeannette in a few minutes as badly squeezed as before.
For eight solid hours the Jeannette fought the pack, over a dozen times seemingly compressed to the point of collapse, only to have the floe ice crumple up first and let her spring back into shape each time. There was nothing we could do to aid her—as De Long put it, it was simply a question of the ice going through her or of her being strong enough to stand it. She was strong enough, which was all we could say, and when at last in the late afternoon the gale died down, the pressure ceased and she was still intact, we said it fervently. A good ship, the Arctic Steamer Jeannette.