Round and round went the buckets, Lauterbach filling, Boyd and Iversen passing them up full to Bartlett, and little Sharvell catching the empties as they came tumbling down the boiler front. All the men were soon coated from head to foot with ice from the water slopping from the buckets—only their constant stooping, rising, and twisting which kept cracking the ice off in sheets prevented their soon accumulating so heavy a weight of it as no man could even stagger under.
Meanwhile, as they labored, I turned to, and took Boyd’s place in spreading fuel on the grates, preparatory to lighting off. Hastily I scattered the kindling over the cold furnace bars, then slid several buckets of coal out the nearest bunker door, carefully maneuvering them through the slush and ice across the flooded floorplates to avoid slopping the sea water which reached nearly to the tops of the buckets, in on the coal. Seizing then a shovel, I started to heave coal into the furnaces, an awkward job, for getting the shovel into the tops of the upright buckets was difficult, and naturally I dared not dump the coal out on the floorplates first. As best I could, I managed it, spreading the coal over the kindling, a little thin at the front of the grates, a thicker bed at the rear. That done, I leaned back on my shovel, and alternated between watching the waterline creeping up the boiler fronts and my men frantically passing up buckets to fill the boiler.
It was a big boiler, eight feet in diameter, and would require innumerable buckets. Mentally I calculated it, making a rough estimate. Nine tons of water had to be manhandled up into that boiler to fill it properly, a thousand bucketfuls at the very least. I timed the heavy buckets; about six a minute were going up, but the men could hardly maintain that pace. Still, even if they could, it would take three hours to fill that boiler to the steaming level! Long before then, the fireboxes at the bottom of the boiler would be flooded, we could never light off! Somehow, we had to keep the water down in the fireroom till I got steam, or the Jeannette was doomed. And her going meant a two hundred mile retreat over the broken pack to Siberia—in mid January at 40° or worse below zero, an absolutely hopeless journey!
“Keep ’em flying, boys!” I called out to my coalheavers, “while I lay up on deck for help. I’ll be back here in a minute!”
Coated with ice to the waist, I clambered up the ladder, went forward into the deckhouse. Swinging on the pump bars there, were eight straining seamen; against the bulkhead, resting a moment, were eight more, including even the Chinamen Ah Sam and Tong Sing. A little forward of them was De Long, anxiously peering down a hatch into the forepeak, while below him in that gloomy hole, Lieutenant Chipp and Nindemann were sloshing round in deep water with a lantern, searching for the source of our troubles.
“Where’s the leak, captain?” I asked, bending down alongside him.
De Long straightened up, intensely worried.
“We don’t know, chief; Chipp can’t find it. All he can see is that the water’s gushing through that supposedly solid pine packing the Navy Yard filled our bow with, as if it were a sieve. The leak’s in the stem, down somewhere near the keel; I think our forefoot’s twisted off.” He looked at me with haggard eyes. “We’re still holding our own on the forepeak with the hand pump; but the men’ll break down before long. How soon can you give us steam and help out, chief?”
I drew him aside, a little away from that squad of resting seamen, not wishing to discourage them.
“Never, captain!” I whispered hoarsely, “unless we get help ourselves!” Briefly I outlined our desperate position. There was no hand pump in the fireroom, the water was gaining on us there also. “I’ve got to have a gang to hoist water out of that fireroom by hand someway to keep it down till my boiler’s filled and I get steam up, or we’re done for! And it’ll take three hours yet. My gang’s all busy. Who can you spare?”