“Melville, have you ever been in Holland?”
“Why—yes,” I mumbled, taken aback at his sudden change of front. “I guess it’s tulip time there now, captain. And quite a different scene from all this ice that’s sprouting round us in the merry springtime here. Why?”
“I was there in the springtime once also,” parried the captain. “Lovely scene. I just wonder if we couldn’t make the scenery round here resemble Holland in the springtime a little better. You remember the tulips, eh, chief? Do you by any chance remember anything else in the Dutch landscape—some windmills, for instance?”
And then a great light dawned on me. I looked at my captain with added respect. What did the Dutch have all those thousands of windmills for except to meet the same problem we faced—to pump water!
“Ah, you see it, do you?” asked the captain, gratified. “Melville, can you rig up a windmill here to run our pumps?”
“Can do, brother!” I exclaimed enthusiastically. “I’ll turn to on it right away; before long you’ll see a windmill going round here in the Arctic to beat the Dutch!”
This job was rather intricate for our facilities, windmills not being exactly in a sailor’s line, but aided by Lee, machinist, and Dressler, blacksmith, we contrived it. Lee especially was a great help, which might seem somewhat surprising, for having been shot through both hips in the second day’s fighting while helping Grant drive back Beauregard at Shiloh, Lee was rather slow and unsteady on his feet. But there was nothing the matter with his hands and he soon had Dressler’s crude forgings turned up in our lathe into a crankshaft and connecting rods, so that by the time Sweetman had made the wooden arms of the windmill, we were ready to go. Paradoxically, the one thing which on a ship we were best prepared to furnish, the sails themselves, failed to work well on our first trial. The mill occasionally hung on the center because the heavy canvas sails sagged too much to hold the wind. Chipp, responsible for making the sails, watched them in pained silence, but having no canvas more suitable, soon rectified the matter in a novel manner. Sending Noros and Erichsen down on the ice, he had them collect some dozens of the empty meat cans littering the ice floes, and beating these out flat, he laced them together with wire, and soon had our mill-arms covered with fine metal sails! Impelled by these, our windmill, mounted on the starboard wing of the bridge, was soon rotating merrily and, connected by a special rig to a bilge pump in the fireroom, was pushing overboard in grand style all our leakage. So well did it work, that we quickly were enabled to shut down the steam cutter’s boiler, leaving only the little Baxter boiler going for distilling and in case the wind died down (which in the pack it rarely did) for unavoidable steam pumping.
So to our intense relief as spring drew on to its close, we got our coal consumption down again to 300 pounds a day, as it had been before that leak started to chew into our bunkers in such ravenous fashion. Which was a very fortunate thing for us, for with only sixty tons of coal left to go on, our days on the Jeannette would indeed otherwise have been numbered. Not least among the blessings which resulted was the improved cheerfulness of De Long at this success. He once more began to have some hope that when the ice broke up, we would have coal enough to do some exploring, so that he might again without too much shame on his return face our sponsor’s sister, Miss Bennett, the ship’s godmother, the “Jeannette” whose name we bore.
As the long days dragged out under the May sun, we eagerly watched the floes, noting with satisfaction the increasing number of rivulets coursing toward every crack and hole in the pack, and how under the intense sunlight, the cinders and ashes about the ship fairly seemed to burrow their way down into the snow. (Watching the striking manner in which everything dark soaked up the sunshine and settled, De Long half-humorously suggested that we all take a day off and pray for some miracle which might make all the snow and ice about us black and thus hasten its disappearance.)
And so we came to May 31, to our discouragement still held in the unbroken pack which, as measurements close about us showed, was still four feet thick. We decided to defer the day of our liberation to July 1, giving the sun another month to work on the ice. But to damp our spirits, June 1, the first day of summer as we reckoned it, opened in a snow storm which continued through June 2 also, accompanied by a heavy gale which drove the snow, soft and mushy now, along in horizontal sheets.