Hell on ice

by Edward Ellsberg

For the owner of a Republican newspaper, this was more than sufficient. Bennett promptly accepted him, subject only to De Long’s approval. Scheduled shortly to sail from Havre to San Francisco with the Jeannette and confronted with the imperative need of finding immediately to help him work the ship some assistant in the place of the distant Chipp who was still ineffectually struggling in China to get his detachment, De Long gladly assented to this solution. Between Bennett, General Grant, and the cables, Navy red tape was rudely cut, Danenhower’s transfer swiftly arranged, and after a hasty passage by steamer and train across the Mediterranean and Europe, he arrived from Smyrna shortly before the Jeannette shoved off from Havre.

Danenhower, hardly thirty when we started, masked his youth (as was not uncommon in those days) behind an ample growth of sideburns. Unlike his two seniors in the Line, he had had no previous Arctic experience of any kind, but he was enthusiastic, impetuous, big in frame, strong and husky, and from all appearances better able than most of the rest of us to withstand the rigors of the north.

Concerning myself, then a passed assistant engineer in the Navy with the rank of lieutenant, little need be said. Of all the regular officers on the Jeannette, I was the oldest both in length of service and in years, being at the time we set out thirty-eight and having entered the Navy when the war began in 1861 as a third assistant engineer. My years in the poorly ventilated and hot engine rooms of those days had cost me most of my hair, but to compensate for this, I had the longest and fullest beard aboard the Jeannette, which I think gave me somewhat of a patriarchal appearance to which however my age hardly entitled me. Oddly enough, my first polar service was coincident with that of De Long and Chipp, for I was engineer officer of the U.S.S. Tigress, also searching Baffin Bay in 1873 for the Polaris survivors when we fell in with the Juniata’s launch, officered by De Long and Chipp, on the same mission searching off Cape York. When the launch had exhausted its small coal supply and returned to the Juniata we in the Tigress (which was really a purchased whaler and therefore better suited for the job than a regular naval vessel like the Juniata) continued the task.

My first acquaintance with De Long had come however several years earlier than this, when in the sixties, we were shipmates on the U.S.S. Lancaster on the South Atlantic Station, where in spite of the fact that he was on deck and I in the engine room, we got to know each other well. It was as a result of this friendship and the interest in polar research I had myself acquired on the Tigress that at De Long’s suggestion, I volunteered my services for the Jeannette. I had some difficulty getting the berth, however, for the Bureau of Steam Engineering, being hard pressed for personnel, was loath to let anyone in the Bureau itself go.

So far as her operation as a ship went then, these four of us, three officers of the Line, De Long, Chipp, and Danenhower, and one officer of the Engineer Corps, myself, made up the commissioned personnel of the Jeannette.

We had with us one more officer of the regular navy. Passed Assistant Surgeon James M. Ambler, a native of Virginia and a naval surgeon since 1874. Upon the recommendation of the senior medical officers of the Navy, Ambler was asked by De Long to take the berth, and gladly accepted.

I met Ambler for the first time on the Jeannette. Quiet, broad of brow, dignified in manner and bearing, of amazing vitality, he impressed me from the first both as an excellent shipmate and as a competent surgeon to whose skill, far from hospitals and resources of civilization, we might safely trust our health in the Arctic. And in this belief, the hazards of the months to come proved we were not mistaken.

These five mentioned, regularly commissioned in the Navy, comprised the whole of those technically entitled to be considered as officers, but in the wardroom mess we had three others, Collins, Newcomb, and Dunbar, who came into that category in spite of the fact that they were shipped as seamen. The Act of Congress taking over the vessel authorized the Secretary of the Navy to detail such naval officers as could be spared and were willing to go, but as for the rest of the crew, it permitted only the enlistment of others as “seamen” for this “special service.” To some degree this created a dilemma which from the beginning had in it the seeds of trouble, for as a scientific expedition, Bennett desired to send along certain civilians. These gentlemen, who obviously were not seamen, and who felt themselves entitled to consideration as officers (in which belief the rest of us willingly enough concurred) were nevertheless informed by the Navy Department that legally they could go only as “seamen for special service” or not at all. How they were to be considered aboard ship and what duties they might be assigned, would rest with the commanding officer. This fiat of the Department, a bitter pill for the men concerned to swallow, was soon ameliorated by De Long’s assurance that those affected were to be treated as officers, and on this understanding Collins, Newcomb, and Dunbar were accordingly shipped as “seamen for special service.” And then and there was laid the basis of a quarrel which long after those involved were stretched cold in death, mercifully buried by the snowdrifts on the bleak tundras of the Lena Delta, still raged in all the unbridled malevolence of slander and innuendo through naval courts and the halls of Congress, venomously endeavoring to besmirch both the living and the dead.

Jerome J. Collins, of the staff of the New York Herald, was appointed by Mr. Bennett as meteorologist of the expedition, but was obviously aboard mainly as a newspaper man. Collins, a big man with a flowing mustache but no beard, was active, energetic, eager in a news sense to cover the expedition, often in trouble with the rest of us, for the usual naval temperament, taught to regard the captain’s word as law, was wholly missing in this newspaper man’s ideas of the freedom befitting a reporter. Collins’ appointment as meteorologist was natural enough for he ran the weather department of the Herald, though scientifically his knowledge of meteorology was superficial. But he plunged whole-heartedly into the subject, and aided by De Long who got him access both to the Smithsonian Institution and to the Naval Observatory, he absorbed all he could on meteorology in the few months which elapsed while we were fitting out.

Still, shipping as a “seaman” rankled in Collins’ soul; a small thing to worry over perhaps, but he was overly sensitive and often took offense when none was meant. Many times since have I wondered whether Collins, the only one amongst the wardroom mess not born an American, may not, like many immigrants, have been unduly tender on that account and therefore imagined subtle insults in the most casual comments of his shipmates about his birthplace, Ireland.