The only other springtime event to compare with the bears was a brilliant idea which struck De Long.
While he never discussed his family with me or with anyone, De Long, alone among the ship’s company which had sailed from San Francisco, had a wife and a child to occupy his thoughts. I have no doubt that frequently in the dreary months when I saw him, as I did one morning, abstractedly gazing out over the pack, his mind was far away from us, perhaps dwelling on that moment in the tossing whaleboat off the Golden Gate when Emma De Long had to the last possible instant clung round his neck in her farewell kiss. Drifting backward down the years from that, his thoughts on this morning evidently got to the days of his youth as an ensign aboard the U.S.S. Canandaigua. While cruising through the Channel ports, he had amongst the dikes and mills of northern France and Holland courted Emma Wotton, and as he thought of that landscape, so different from the ice-fields round the Jeannette, his keen mind saw a connection. He waved me to join him.
“Melville,” he asked, obviously off again on the one ever-present topic, coal, “what’ll you do to keep your pumps going when the coal’s all gone?”
I pointed aloft.
“Cut down our masts and spars and burn them,” I replied. “They’re useless anyway.”
“And when they’ve gone too, what then?” De Long’s clear blue eyes gazed at me fixedly, as if he had me there.
“Break up our bulwarks, the deckhouses, and the main deck, and shove those into the fires too. They’ll all burn fine.”
“And after that, what?” he asked relentlessly, puffing away on his ever-present pipe.
“I guess then we abandon what’s left of the Jeannette and take to the ice, captain. I’ll admit I can’t keep any boilers going while I’m cutting the foundations out from under them for firewood. When the main deck’s gone, I guess we’re through.”
De Long looked gravely at me through his glasses, bent his head a little to shield his pipe from the cold wind sweeping the deck, and irrelevantly asked me,