And confirming this, Lieutenant Weyprecht, of the Austrian expedition which in latitude 81° N. had discovered Franz Josef Land only a few years ago, said that they found that ice over “a certain thickness” yielded a pure water.
We were confident therefore when we entered the pack that we needed only to send out a party with pick-axes to obtain from the nearest convenient spot on the floe an abundant supply of fresh water for drinking, cooking, and washing purposes. But we were unpleasantly surprised to discover that we could find not a particle of ice anywhere, whether cut from the top, the bottom, or the middle of the floe, whether taken from old floes fifteen feet thick or young ice a foot thick, that did not contain from twenty to thirty times as much salt per gallon as even the poorest water Dr. Ambler felt he could safely allow our men to drink continuously.
During our initial few weeks in the pack we regarded this situation with incredulity, the same incredulity I have no doubt that the medieval alchemist displayed when his dabbling revealed a fact failing to conform to the principles of matter set forth by the master, Aristotle—it simply could not be so! We concluded at first that perhaps the ice immediately around us had not been formed at low enough temperatures, or that it had not yet had time to reach that “certain thickness.” But having nevertheless to get drinking water the while we waited for temperature and time to form round us the pure ice for our permanent supply, we were reduced to scouting far and wide over the floes, scraping together from drifts here and there enough snow to melt up for our minimum needs.
But as 1879 faded into 1880, we drifted to the northward, and the Arctic winter struck us in all its cold fury, we were given a choice opportunity to try to our hearts’ content ice of every thickness, formed under every temperature from barely freezing down to -60° F., and we could no longer blink the facts. On this matter, the masters from Dr. Kane to Lieutenant Weyprecht were about as reliable as a lot of gabbling old witches—what they said simply was not so!
In the absence of any startling geographical discoveries or of any marked progress toward the Pole, that we had exploded a third Arctic fallacy (those respecting the Kuro-Si-Wo Current and Wrangel Land being the first two) gave to Captain De Long and Dr. Ambler a sense of having accomplished something at last. For Dr. Ambler deduced from the observed fact that all floe ice retained some salt, the mystery of the scurvy problem in previous expeditions. These, using floe ice more or less mixed either with pure snow or ice formed from melting snow, had obtained water passably potable but actually (though their fixed misconceptions kept them ignorant of it) containing so much salt that in spite of lime-juice rations and what-have-you in the way of canned vegetables, the scurvy had struck them down.
That deduction made it simple for us. All we had to do was to avoid the use of tainted floe ice and we would be the first Arctic expedition in history to dodge the scurvy. And in case the Jeannette Expedition discovered nothing else, to bring that discovery back home would at least salve in some measure our pride as explorers.
But if we were not to use the floes, where then was our water to come from? The obvious answer seemed to be from carefully selected snowdrifts, but as we floated north with the pack, we learned the futility of that. The drifts we relied on for the first weeks after we entered the pack were soon used up and Nature never replenished them. Apparently off the north coast of Siberia in the early fall it snowed, but as we drifted to the north of Wrangel Land and the temperature, falling far below zero, stayed there, to our dismayed astonishment we learned that in the ordinary sense it never snowed where we were! Apparently the intense cold froze all the vapor out of the atmosphere, leaving such a trifling percentage in the dry air that regardless of other favorable conditions for a fine snowfall, there just wasn’t enough moisture to provide the makings. The result was that in a gale when a temperature change brought snow, all that fell was a fine powdery deposit, ice mainly, which driven by the wind cut into our faces like needles. What was worse for us however (for in most cases we could stay inboard during a blow) was that the gale drove these particles over the pack with such force that they acted like a sand blast on the surface of the floes, with the net result that when the wind died, such drifts as we could find were so complete a mixture of powdered floe and driven snow as to be heavily salted and wholly unfit for human needs.
Now, while we could find no newly formed safe drifts, it had not been wholly impossible for us to get sufficient good snow from the old ones by going further and further afield in the pack until the last gale in November. This after making us “shoot the rapids” so to speak in that canal, had left us stranded miles from our original refuge in a pack of what was mostly relatively young ice. Naturally there were no old drifts in that vicinity and the captain, at first fearful of being torn away at any minute, was reluctant to permit anyone to get out of sight of the ship in searching for snow. Willy-nilly, therefore, we got our water by scraping the tops of nearby drifts formed in the last storm. This was so salty, however, that within two days Dr. Ambler had several of the officers and most of the crew under treatment for diarrhoea. Aside from the ordinary effects of this disorder in reducing the vitality of those afflicted, to us it was especially disastrous, for since the “heads” on the ship were for obvious reasons shut up, we had for months been using portable “heads” made of tenting, set up on the ice some little distance from the ship. It needs little imagination therefore to understand what diarrhoea meant to a man under the frequent necessity of hastily rushing off through the Arctic night to a flimsy canvas tent to sit there in the bitter cold of a temperature some thirty degrees or more below zero.
Given a few weeks of such excessive salinity in our water and it was obvious that scurvy would get us, but that at least would take several weeks. De Long was faced with the imperative necessity of rectifying the situation within a few days or of risking the loss of his crew as a result of the unavoidable physical exposure which diarrhoea entailed under our peculiar circumstances.
De Long, Ambler, Chipp, and I held an ambulant council of war. Muffled in our parkas, we first searched the pack around us for suitable snowdrifts in the forlorn hope that perhaps the men had missed a good one. We found a few that to the taste seemed passable, but in each case the hope faded when the surgeon squeezed a drop of silver nitrate into a melted sample, and inevitably the milky white reaction showed excessive salt.