Only one hope kept us going. No one really knew what happened to that moving pack in summer time—no one before us had ever wintered in it, involuntarily or otherwise. So we lived on in the expectation that as the days lengthened and the thermometer rose above zero, summer weather and the long days under the midnight sun would sufficiently melt the ice to break up the pack, and if by then we still had any coal left, permit us to do some little exploring northward before with bare bunkers we loosed our sails and in the early fall laid our course homeward.
In that spirit then, we cheerfully greeted the advent of May, and as if to justify our confidence, May Day burst upon us with gorgeous weather—no clouds, and glistening at us across the ice a brilliant sun which even at midnight still peeped pleasantly over the horizon, and a temperature which in mid-afternoon reached the unbelievable height of 30° F., only two degrees below freezing. We were positively hot. All hands (except of course Danenhower) turned out on the ice to bask in the sunshine, with the queer result that many of us came back aboard with our complexions sunburned to a fiery red and unable at first to believe it. Our hopes started to mount; if the sun could do that to such weather-beaten frost-bitten hides as ours, what would it not do to the ice imprisoning us? Release was seemingly just around the corner of the calendar—by June 1 at the outside, say.
But meanwhile, awaiting that happy event, the captain prudently ordered (lest more casualties go to join the luckless Danenhower) that snow goggles be worn on all occasions by all hands except when actually below on the ship.
So May moved along, made notable mainly by a positive flood of bears, which daily kept us on the jump. The bears, ravenous with hunger after a long winter, were attracted to the Jeannette by mingled scents, mainly canine, which to their untutored nostrils probably meant food. But we had long since lost any fear of ice bears and the dogs apparently never had any, so the cry of—
“Bear ho!”
was the immediate signal for whoever had the captain’s permission (which now meant practically anyone off watch) to seize a rifle from the rack placed conveniently at the gangway, and be off. We became so contemptuous of the bears, that we chased them even with revolvers, and if necessity had arisen, would no doubt have done so barehanded, for I have never seen a bear which would rush a man. Except when brought to by the dogs, with a man in sight all that ever interested the bear was to get behind the nearest hummock or into an open lead, where swimming with only his nose above water, he could escape the rain of bullets from our Remingtons and Winchesters. The vitality of the bears was amazing. Unless filled so full of lead that the mere weight of the bullets as ballast slowed them down enough for the dogs to bring them to a stand where a close range shot into the brain finished them off, they usually got away.
We had queer experiences with the bears. On one occasion, exploring one of the narrow leads in the pack about a quarter of a mile from the ship, the captain was sculling unconcernedly along in the dinghy when he found himself facing an ice bear not a hundred feet off. Wholly unarmed, De Long regarded the bear with dismay. He could not run, for over broken ice he was no match in speed for Ursus; besides he was in a boat, which prevented running away, for while the water was an obstacle to him, to the bear it was merely the most convenient means of transportation. Inquisitively the bear advanced; De Long, unable to do anything else, sat and stared, trying out the power of the human eye as a defence. The bear, only fifty feet off, still approached, sniffing curiously and De Long, short-sighted though he was, said he could clearly make out where the short hairs ended at the edge of the bear’s beautiful black nose. The captain quickly concluded there was nothing in hypnosis as applied to polar bears. So gripping his oar, prepared to fend off the bear should he approach closer to the boat, he sang out lustily,
“Ship there! A bear! A bear!”
At this, the bear, more puzzled than ever, sat down on the ice to contemplate De Long and was still seriously thinking him over, trying to make him out, when a pack of dogs hove into sight from under the Jeannette’s stern, followed by several seamen, and off lumbered the bear.
So long as we had the Jeannette under us, the plethora of bears meant at most only a break in the monotony of our existence and a welcome change in our salt beef diet. Should we have to abandon ship, however, they offered a ray of hope. For convinced now that we could never drag across the upheaved pack pemmican enough to keep us from starvation till we reached Siberia, we looked on the bears as a possible source of fresh meat on the hoof which we might with a little luck knock over as we went along and thus keep life in our bodies.