Not very hopefully we scanned the “head” situation. No chance of improvement there. Since the ship was immovably frozen into the ice, we dared neither to reopen the “heads” on the ship nor bring the ones on the floe any closer to the gangway without risking an outbreak of contagion.
So there being no safe water available from the pack ice, no hope of getting any from snowfalls, and the absolute need of providing some quickly lest the next movement of the ice find us with a helpless crew unable even to abandon ship, it was the conclusion of the council that, regardless of cost, we must make our own from sea water. Naturally enough since I was engineer officer, De Long turned that problem over to me.
Ordinarily it would not have been much of a problem technically. On the ship steaming normally, and feeding her boilers from the sea, I might have bled some steam off the auxiliary line, put it through a distilling coil or worm we had fitted in our engine room, and collected the resulting fresh water. But we were not only not steaming normally, we were not steaming at all, because for the reasons I have given previously our fires were out, our firerooms were cold, and our boilers were emptied.
Aside from that, there was another angle to it that griped the captain. To take sea water and distill it over into fresh water you’ve got to boil it. That takes heat, and heat takes coal, and coal was of all things we had aboard the most precious, more so even than food, for in a pinch with our food exhausted we might go out on the pack with rifles and knock down bears, seals, and walruses enough to exist on, but where in those icy wastes could we go to knock down even one ton of coal to feed our boilers when our bunkers were emptied? For we had left only ninety tons, which (save for the scanty supply I doled out to Ah Sam daily for cooking, and to Bosun Cole for stoking the two stoves forward and aft to keep men and officers from freezing to death) under the captain’s orders I was religiously husbanding, so that if ever we were released by the pack, we might be able again to fire up our boilers and do some of that exploring for which we had come north.
Up to now, to live at all, we had had to burn coal enough to run the galley and our heating stoves; from now on, if we were to live without scurvy, we would have in addition to burn coal enough to run some kind of an evaporator. What kind it might be, to give us safe water and still consume the least possible quantity of “black diamonds,” the captain left to me.
The problem started not with “How much water do we need?” but with “How little water can we get by on?” I canvassed this question with the doctor, the captain, the exec, Ah Sam and finally Jack Cole—all of whom had something to contribute on what was the least possible quantity needed for drinking, for cooking, for tea, and for washing—and I came out with the answer that 40 gallons of water a day, about a gallon and a quarter for each one of our thirty-three men, was the irreducible minimum.
Naturally for this quantity, which was more or less in line with the daily capacity of any really ambitious Kentucky moonshiner’s still, it was foolishness to think of firing up so large a kettle as one of our main boilers. Thinking over what else we had, my recollection lighted on a small Baxter boiler which we had brought along to furnish steam for driving an Edison electro-magnetic generator and illuminating the ship with his newfangled carbon lamps. Edison’s generator having proved a flat failure (probably because it got soaked in salt water on our stormy crossing of Behring Sea) the captain had ordered the whole works dismantled and struck below into the hold. Without further delay, I had Lee and Bartlett resurrect the Baxter boiler (leaving the rest of the outfit below) and this little boiler with the help of my machinist and fireman, I soon had rigged up inside the deckhouse, with its steam outlet hooked to a small coil set outside in the open air on top of the deckhouse, where the cold air would act as a very effective condenser on the vapor passing through the worm.
Meanwhile, not waiting for this contraption to get into action, at the surgeon’s suggestion the skipper ordered Cole to break out from the hold a couple of barrels of lime-juice, which on December 2 for the first time on the cruise, he started to issue. In our mess, a pitcher of this stuff was placed on the table at dinner, where under the watchful eye of the surgeon, each one of us, sweetening it to taste, had to drink an ounce. For the crew, Alfred Sweetman, carpenter, was given the responsibility of seeing that the men took theirs, and as each watch laid below for dinner, under Sweetman’s observation, each man was handed a tin cup with his ration of lime-juice and an ounce of sugar to sweeten the unsavory mess, and compelled to drink it before he could draw his food ration. Months of storage in casks had not improved its flavor any, so in spite of Ambler’s gaze and Sweetman’s vigilance, had it not been for the sugar generously served out to sweeten the dose, I have little doubt that, scurvy or no scurvy, all sorts of ingenious dodges would shortly have been developed to avoid swallowing that tart medicine.
When the last pipe joint was tightened up, Bartlett fired the Baxter boiler and we commenced distilling. Our first few days at it were to my surprise pretty much a failure, for the distilled water which we collected up on deck in a barrel set underneath the outlet of the condensing worm, while better than the melted snow, still tested far too high in salt for safe use, and our diarrhoea continued unabated. This puzzled me (not to mention severely disappointing the captain) and it took some hours of sleuthing about to discover the trouble. I then found that we were feeding the boiler from a tank atop the deckhouse. This tank was filled by the seaman on watch who hauled water to the topside in a bucket from a hole chopped in the floe alongside. Unless the man was careful (and a sailor working outside in a temperature of 30° below zero is interested only in speed and not in care) he would slop the sea water over both coil and deckhouse, from which places enough trickled down into the fresh water barrel to ruin completely our day’s output. Having discovered this, I promptly rigged a pan over the barrel to catch the drip and looked hopefully for better water. But my hopes were dashed once again when, watching Surgeon Ambler test a sample from our next barrel of water (the result of a whole day’s distilling), I saw to my disgust the sample turn as milky as ever immediately he dropped a little silver nitrate into it.
By now, we had been suffering four days from diarrhoea and the situation was serious. I dropped everything else to devote my whole time to watching the operation of our evaporator, endeavoring by an analysis of what I could see done and what theoretically must be going on inside the apparatus from firebox to receiving barrel, to locate the reason or reasons why from our sea water feed, we failed to get over and condense a pure steam, leaving all the salt behind as a brine in the boiler. Thinking at first we might be boiling off the water too fast, I had Bartlett damp his fire somewhat to make less steam, but I soon found that that solved nothing. For with too little steam going up through our condensing coil in the frigid atmosphere outside, the condenser promptly froze up and burst a pipe, putting a stop to distilling altogether till Lee thawed out the coil and repaired the leak.