Briefly I outlined my ideas to the captain, who, willing to clutch at any straw, gave blanket approval to my making anything on the ship over into what I would, so long as it promised to save some coal.
“Good, brother,” I promised. “As soon as I get this pump running and knock off the hand pump, I’ll turn to with the black gang and try to rig up those small boilers so we can shut down that big coal hog. And even if we have to hook up Ah Sam’s teakettle to help out on the steam, we’ll get her shut down; you can lay to that!”
“I’m sure you will, chief,” answered De Long gratefully. “Now is there any way we can help you out with the deck force?”
“Only by plugging away on those leaks, captain. We’re making 3300 gallons of salt water an hour in leakage; every gallon of that you plug off means so much more coal left in the bunkers.”
“I well appreciate that, Melville. Nindemann and his mate are doing what they can with the bulkhead; I’m starting Cole and the deck watch to shoving down ashes and picked felt between the frames and the ceilings in the forepeak to stop the flow of water there. We’ll get something on that leak, I don’t know yet how much, but we’ll never get her tight. I see that now.”
And De Long, looking (though he tried to conceal it) as if that sight were breaking his heart, crawled back again to the freezing forepeak. I felt strongly tempted to seize him by the arm and start him instead for his bunk, but I was afraid he would urge the same on me and I had to get that line thawed and the Sewell pump going forward before I knocked off, so I let him go.
CHAPTER XXI
January dragged away, followed in dreary succession by February, March, and April, and the Jeannette drifting aimlessly with the pack, was still solidly frozen in. Our lives were only a wearing repetition of what had gone before—fierce cold, alarms, the roaring and tumbling of the ice pack, tremendous squeezes and pressures from the floes, and night and day the wheezing of the steam pumps, pumping, forever pumping. It seemed almost a reasonable supposition to conclude that we must have the whole Arctic Ocean nearly pumped dry to judge by the length of time we had been at it and by the huge masses of ice banked up against our bulwarks and spreading out over the floes where the streams of sea water flowing from our scuppers had frozen.
A few minor triumphs and reliefs we had, but not many. In late January the sun came back over the horizon for the first time in seventy-one days, to reveal that we had all bleached strangely white in the long Arctic darkness. On the mechanical side, I had succeeded, after many heartbreaking disappointments, in supplanting the main boiler with the two little ones; and that, aided by the never ending efforts of Nindemann in plugging leaks (which had cut the hourly flow nearly in half), had resulted in gradually reducing our coal consumption to only a quarter of a ton a day. We shot a few bears and a few seals, which gave a welcome variety to our diet of salt beef and tasteless canned meat; we even had hopes of knocking down some birds but there we were disappointed.
“No, Melville,” the captain gravely rebuked me, when empty-handed I returned to the ship after a February tramp over the floes and pushed my shotgun disgustedly into the rack, “birds have more sense than men. No bird with a well-regulated mind would possibly trust himself out in this temperature.”