“On deck, quick, chief, while you got a chance! The ship’s sinking! The fireroom’s flooded already!”
CHAPTER XIX
The Jeannette sinking? Sharvell must be crazy. The ship had gone through far worse squeezes before without a leak. Nevertheless, forgetting our encounter, I raced down the ladder. There was the fireroom entirely flooded from port to starboard, with water already over the floorplates and rising steadily toward my empty boilers!
For a second I stared in cold dismay. No steam on the ship to run a pump. If the water rose over our furnaces before we got our fires going and steam up, there would never be any steam—and we were through! Once the water got that high, nothing under Heaven could prevent the ship from filling at her leisure and sinking from under us. I had to get steam and get it fast!
On deck, Sharvell had already spread the alarm. Even as I watched the rising water, sizing up my procedure, estimating my chances of getting steam before the water got us, overhead I heard the noise of running feet, guns being fired to recall the men on the ice, the shrill piping of the bosun, and Jack Cole’s stentorian call,
“Man the pumps!”
Man the pumps? Why man them? There in the engine room a little abaft me, their bases already in the water, were my frost-covered pumps. What they imperatively needed in those frozen cylinders was steam, not manning. Then it came to me. The Jeannette was a sailing ship as well as a steamer—she still carried hand pumps, the same crude hand pumps with which Columbus had kept his leaky caravels afloat. And they might save us too; keep the water down below the level of my furnace grates till I raised steam!
And now came action. Down the ladder to join me slid my black gang—Lee, machinist; Bartlett, fireman; all my assortment of coalheavers—Boyd; Lauterbach, the German; Iversen, the Swede; and even that frightened little Englishman, Sharvell. In the biting cold of the fireroom, 29° below zero (it was 45° below outside), I hastily detailed them.
“Lee! Get aft into the engine room and line up the main steam pump to suck on this fireroom as soon as you get steam!”
“Bartlett! Outboard there with you! Open the port sea cock and flood the port boiler to the steaming level. Open her wide, and four bells on that flooding!”