“All right, Lee; let’s get going,” I mumbled. We cracked open the steam valve a hair, started to drain the line. And no mother nursing her baby ever handled it more tenderly than Lee and I nursed that frozen pump, gradually draining and warming the steam cylinder, lest the sudden application of heat should crack into pieces that abnormally cold cast iron, and after our heartbreaking struggle with the boiler, leave us still helpless to eject the sea. With one eye on Jack Cole’s rapidly moving barrel and the other on that narrowing margin between flood water and furnace fires, I nursed the pump along by feel, taking as long to warm it up as I dared without swamping those flames. At long last the pump cylinder was hot; steam instead of water was blowing out the drains. And the boiler gauge needle stood at thirty pounds. Enough; we could go.
I straightened up, motioned Lee to start the pump. He opened the throttle valve. With a wheeze and a groan the water piston broke free in its cylinder, the nearly submerged pump commenced to stroke.
Leaving Lee at the pump, I ran (that is, if barely dragging one ice-weighted foot after another can be called running) up the ladder toward the deck. While I climbed, the empty barrel came hurtling down the hatchway, splashed into the water in the fireroom. Before Lauterbach could fill and upend it, down on top of the barrel in a maze of coils came the slack end of the hoisting line. Apparently Cole’s gang was through.
As I poked my head above the hatch into the open, there—Oh, gorgeous sight for bleary eyes and aching muscles! was a heavy stream of water pulsing into the scuppers! Nearby, prone on the deck where they had dropped in their tracks when they let go the hoisting line, were four utterly worn-out seamen, gazing nevertheless admiringly on that beautiful stream. And leaning against the bulwark watching it, was Jack Cole, who as he saw me, sang out,
“Praises be, chief; we’re saved! There’ll be no calls for Spell O from that chap!”
CHAPTER XX
Our immediate battle was won, but the war thus opened that 19th of January, 1880, between us and the Arctic Sea for the Jeannette dragged along with varying fortunes till the last day I ever saw her.
Our big steam pump made short work of all the water in the fireroom that was still water. In an hour the room was bare down to ice-coated floors and bilges, with the pump easily keeping ahead of the leakage coming from forward. But the men at the hand pump, optimistically knocked off the minute the steam pump began stroking, were unfortunately not wholly relieved. Despite the fact that we opened wide the gates in the forepeak and the forehold bulkheads to let the water run freely aft to the fireroom pump, the flow through was sluggish, impeded I suppose by having to filter through the coal in the cross bunker. So fifteen minutes out of every hour, the hand pump was manned again to keep down the water level in the forehold, while, sad to contemplate, our weary seamen, between spells at the pump, had to labor in the forehold storerooms breaking out provisions (much of which were already water soaked) and sending them up into the deckhouse to save our food from complete ruin.
It was ten-thirty in the morning when the leak was discovered; it was three p.m. when I finally got steam up and a pump going; but at midnight the whole crew was still at work handling stores. The state we were then in was deplorable beyond description.
Who struck eight bells that night I do not know, for since morning we had had no anchor watch, but someone, Dunbar perhaps, whose seagoing habits were hard to repress, snatched a moment from his task and manned the lanyard. At any rate, as the clear strokes of the bronze bell rang out on that frost-bitten night, De Long, in water up to his knees in the forehold, was recalled to the passage of time. The provisions actually in the water had been broken out; his effort now was to send up all the remainder which rising water might menace. But with the bell echoing in his ears, the captain, looking at the jaded seamen about him, staggering through the water laden with heavy boxes and casks, toiling like mules, came suddenly to the realization that they had only the limited endurance of men and called a halt.