“Knock off, lads,” he said kindly. “If anything more gets wet before morning, it gets wet. Lay up on deck!” And on deck, as the men straggled up the hatch to join the rest of the crew round the hand pump (at the moment unmanned) he ordered Cole to serve out all around two ounces of brandy each. Frozen hands poured it into chilled throats, to be downed eagerly at a gulp—there was not a man who might not have swallowed a whole quart just as eagerly, and probably then still have felt but little warmth in his congealed veins.
At the captain’s order, Cole then piped down—the starboard watch to lay below to their bunks, the port watch for whom there was to be no immediate rest, to man the hand pump as necessary through the remainder of that dreary night, keeping the water in the forehold down below the level of the as yet unshifted stores. The frozen seamen tramped wearily off, some to rest if they could, the others to bend their backs over the bars of the pump, which soon resumed its melancholy clanking.
But neither for me, for the captain, nor for Chipp was there any rest. Immediately I had downed my share of the brandy, I turned to at once, figuring how I might get steam and a steam pump forward to suck directly on the forehold and eliminate altogether the toil over the hand pump which must soon break our men down. I had in my engine room that spare No. 4 Sewell and Cameron pump (which my men and I had so thoughtfully picked up in the dark of the moon at Mare Island before we started). I set to work on a layout for installing it in the deckhouse forward; which task, between designing foundations and sketching out suction and steam lines for it, kept me up the rest of the night. As for Chipp, he was down in the forepeak with Nindemann, endeavoring to stop, or at least to reduce, the leak. The water was pouring in through the innumerable joints in that mass of heavy pine timbers, which stretching from side to side and from keel to berth deck in our bow, filled it for a distance of ten feet abaft the stem. However valuable that pine packing may have been in stiffening our bow for ramming ice, it was now our curse, very effectively preventing us from caulking whatever was sprung in the stem itself. All through the night Nindemann and Chipp labored, stuffing oakum and tallow into the joints of that packing where the jets of water squirted through. It was discouraging work. As fast as their numbed fingers rammed a wad of oakum into a leaking joint and stopped the flow there, water spurted from the joints above. Methodically through the night they worked in that dismal hole with freezing water spraying out over them, following up the leaks, caulking joint after joint, but when at last they got to the top, plugging oakum into the final crack, the water rose still higher and started to pour down their necks from between the ceiling and the deck beams overhead where they could not get to it. They could do no more. At five a.m., each man a mass of ice, they came up, beaten.
Meanwhile, De Long, foreseeing the possibility of such a contingency, had himself put in the rest of the night over the ship’s plans, designing a watertight bulkhead to be built in the forepeak just abaft that packing, so that if we could not stop the leak, we could at least confine the flooding to a small space forward and thus stop all pumping, either by hand or steam.
In the early morning, after twenty-four hours of continuous strain and toil, the three of us met again in the deckhouse, I with my sketches for the pump installation, De Long with his bulkhead plans, and Chipp with the bad news that we had better get both jobs underway at once for he had failed utterly to stop the leak. So we turned to.
I will not go into what we went through the week following—my struggles with frozen lines, improper equipment, and lack of men and tools for such a job. Suffice it to say that after three days I got that auxiliary Sewell pump running forward so that to the intense relief of the deck force, their torture at the hand pumps ended altogether, and I was able to keep the water in the forepeak so low that Sweetman and Nindemann were enabled to start building the bulkhead.
From then on, Nindemann and Sweetman bore the brunt. On these two petty officers, Sweetman, our regular carpenter, and Nindemann, our quartermaster (but almost as good as a carpenter) fell the entire labor of building that bulkhead. In the narrow triangular space in the peak, they toiled hour after hour, day after day, cutting, fitting, and erecting the planking. William Nindemann, a stocky, thickset German, was a perfect horse for work, apparently able to stand anything; but Alfred Sweetman, a tall, spare Englishman, had so little flesh on his ribs that he froze through rather rapidly, and in spite of his objections, had to be dragged up frequently to be thawed out or he would soon have broken down completely. As it was, every four hours both men got a stiff drink of whiskey to keep them limbered up, and as much hot coffee and food in between as they could swallow, which was considerable.
Meanwhile, during all this turmoil and anxiety, the captain was weighed down with the problem of what to do with the blinded Danenhower should the water get away from us, either then or later. To add to his worries, Dunbar, who was also still under the weather from his illness, seemed between that and his efforts to assist, to have aged overnight at least twenty years. It was pathetic to see the old man, looking now positively decrepit, struggling in spite of the captain’s orders to hold up his end alongside husky seamen, fighting with them to help save the ship. And as if to make a complete job of De Long’s mental anguish during that agonizing first day of the leak, Surgeon Ambler was suddenly taken violently ill, and to the captain’s great alarm had to be left in his cabin, practically unattended. Aside from De Long’s natural concern over what might happen to Ambler himself, the effect on the captain’s mind of this prospect of being left without a doctor to look after Danenhower and any others who might collapse in our desperate predicament, can well be imagined. It amazed me that the captain under the combined impact of all these worries and disasters, instead of caving in himself, maintained at least before the men an indomitable appearance, by his actions encouraging them, and with never a word of profanity, urging and cheering them on.
By the end of the ensuing week things showed signs of improvement—I had both steam pumps going, hand pumping was discontinued, Nindemann and Sweetman against terrible odds were making progress on the bulkhead, Dunbar was no worse, and Ambler (whose trouble turned out to be his liver) was under his own care, sufficiently on the mend to be no longer in danger.
Only Danenhower, aside from our leak, remained as a problem. He, instead of getting better, got worse.