And that just about ended our party. With no more punch to serve as an excuse for conviviality, the conversation soon faded into the general murk gripping the room, and with everyone seemingly immersed in memories of happier Christmas Eves, one by one all hands drifted away to warm over their recollections in the solitude of their staterooms.
Christmas Day, mainly because it lasted longer, was even more dreary than Christmas Eve. A high wind and biting clouds of fine snow made going on deck or on the ice wholly uninviting. Confined again to the wardroom or to our staterooms, we moped over our memories, tried to imagine how friends, relatives, or families were spending the day, and thought a little enviously of Navy shipmates in port the world over with vessels decorated from deck to trucks with wreaths and garlands of greenery, and wardrooms echoing with the alluring laughter of women troubled with no deeper problem than how after dinner to get a husband or a sweetheart excused from watch and off the ship.
We did have a grand dinner, to provide which Ah Sam performed miracles with the humdrum materials available in the storeroom, topping off all with mince pies soaked in brandy. The eating of this unexpected banquet almost made us forget our surroundings and our situation. But not quite, for we ate our dinner to the constant rumbling of the unseen pack, the occasional explosive snapping of timber fastenings, and even a few sharp shocks from underrunning floes. And like a death’s head at the feast, to show that all was not joy and brotherly love on the Jeannette on this Christmas Day, there next to Danenhower at the foot of the table was Collins’ chair—empty, while Collins, sulking in his stateroom, dined alone.
I think I misstate nothing when I say that in the wardroom of the Jeannette we were all thoroughly grateful to see the last of that Christmas Day, and I have little doubt that each of us fervently prayed ever to be spared another like it.
December dragged away. We came to the end of the year 1879. To help the crew in welcoming in the year 1880 on which now he banked heavily for success, the captain sent forward four quarts of brandy, while I did what I could with a fifth quart to provide good cheer for the wardroom mess. As a result, when the rapid ringing of the ship’s bell at midnight marked the birth of 1880, the whole crew (despite a temperature nearly 40° below zero) gathered on the quarterdeck just outside De Long’s cabin, gave three cheers for the Jeannette, sent an embassy of two into the wardroom to wish us all a Happy New Year, and then hastily beat a retreat to the berth deck to warm up on those four bottles.
This evidently so heartened the crew that after their New Year’s dinner (mince pie and brandy once more) they staged an entertainment, the high lights of which were Aneguin imitating Ah Sam singing over his kettles, and a prompt and contemptuous imitation by Ah Sam of an Indian attempting to imitate a Chinaman, which performance brought down the house.
This comic relief for a brief while took our thoughts off what our more sober senses looked forward to with misgivings in contemplating 1880. Under our noses, so to speak, as we emerged from the crew’s entertainment to the deck, was the unpleasant discovery that the mercury in our thermometers had frozen at -40° F., unobtrusively suggesting thereby that what we had so far seen of Arctic temperatures was merely an introduction to what was yet to come.
A second more disquieting situation was that Danenhower’s eye inflammation had grown worse. The doctor had that day been forced to put him on the sicklist, confining him to his room in absolute darkness because the slightest light falling on his eye caused severe pain. Aside from the fact that the loss of his services threw an added load on the remaining officers—the captain, Chipp, and myself—in carrying on the ship’s work, his condition gave us real cause for worry. In case the ship went out from under us, leaving us stranded on the ice, there was a blinded and a helpless officer on our hands to care for, probably requiring to be dragged every inch on a sled, for it was as much as even a man with two perfectly good eyes could do to get over that rough pack without breaking his neck every few steps.
What had caused Danenhower’s eye troubles? All of us, from the first day we were caught in the pack until the sun in November vanished for good, had religiously worn snow goggles, for the glare off the ice was intolerable to face. Why had Danenhower, the youngest regular officer we had and physically by far the most powerful member of the wardroom mess, been knocked out by eye failure when neither forward nor aft had anybody else in the ship’s company been so much affected? Puzzling over that, I could conclude only that it was an unfortunate combination of his job and his personal characteristics functioning under very unfavorable circumstances. Dan was navigator. Innumerable times he stood under terrible conditions of cold, straining his eyes through his sextant, trying to get with poor horizons (or with an artificial mercury horizon) shots at the sun, the moon, or the stars to establish our position as we drifted with the pack. That was bad enough, but what apparently was worse was that Dan was the most painstaking and the most indefatigable worker over account books I ever saw aboard ship. In addition to being navigator, he was our supply officer, and hour after hour he had pored over coal reports and storeroom records, figuring and refiguring, trying to keep track of and account for each pound of coal used, almost each ounce of flour expended. Under the poor lamplight by which since early November he had worked continuously, the load on his eyes, already overstrained by constant squinting through sextant telescopes, proved too much and an inflammation enveloped his left eye, shortly developing into an abscess which threatened to blind that eye completely and even involve the other one. The result was that in a desperate effort to save his sight, the doctor was forced to make Dan a prisoner, forbidden (except when completely blindfolded, he was led out for meals) to leave the darkness of his room. And few prisoners in history, regardless of the horrors of their medieval dungeons, ever had a worse outlook to face than Danenhower in his pitch-black cell—small, damp, chilly, and with always the rumbling and screeching of the pack to remind him that any day the unseen walls of his prison might collapse and the prison itself sink from under him, leaving him helpless on the ice.
Over all of us, his shipmates, Danenhower’s disaster threw a pall of gloom that New Year’s Day. Over De Long, who felt a special responsibility for each man in the ship’s company, it fell like a blight, evoking apparitions for 1880 of calamities yet undreamed of.