“Never mind, Chipp, we won’t need it. I got there just in time to watch that lead close up so tight you can’t get a toothpick into it now! At least I had the melancholy satisfaction of realizing that if the Jeannette had been there, she would in all probability have been in for a very fine squeezing!”
And so June ended. We were still in the ice. Danenhower, thin and bleached, was worse. Iversen seemed to be improved; while still occasionally hysterical, his delusions of mutiny were no longer obvious.
July came and went. We dressed ship on July 4 in a thick fog and a chilling mist. The flags came down at midnight (there was no sunset) all covered with frost. Rain, mist, and fog were general. Our hopes for what the summer sun would do for us began to fade. And even the few glimpses we got of the sun, instead of cheering the captain up, further irritated him. For De Long being now navigator and having finally after days of delay got a shot at the sun on meridian for latitude, hopeful that the drift had carried us north, glanced at his sextant only to exclaim in anguish,
“Look at that altitude! All the sun shows me is how much closer I’m getting to the South instead of to the North Pole! If ever a man had justification for profanity, this southerly drift is it! The Bible says that Job had many trials and tribulations which he bore with wonderful patience, but I’ll bet he was never caught in pack ice! Nor drifted south when the wind was blowing north! But then Job’s may have been an ante-glacial period!” De Long picked up his pipe and nearly bit the stem in half. But a puff or two of tobacco partly, at least, restored his equanimity. Putting his sextant back in its case, he remarked to Chipp, also engaged in shooting the sun,
“I suppose we might as well look at it philosophically. As Jack says, ‘It’s all in a cruise, boys; the more days, the more dollars!’”
July ended, and we were still in the ice. Such a miserable month we were glad to be rid of.
August opened. Looking back over two thirds of the spent summer, with the highest temperature only 38° F. on the hottest day, all hands began to despair. So also, I think, did the captain, for he changed the schedule for taking meteorological observations, requiring them only once every three hours instead of hourly.
We came to the middle of the month, with the only change in our condition an increase in our heel to 7-1/2°, a change indeed in something, but not an improvement. We began to get morose—summer was fast fading, we were not released, and our hopes of doing anything in 1880 or in any succeeding year were vanishing into space. I tried to cheer the mess up by singing (if I say it myself, for an engineer I have a very good voice), Irish songs and ditties having been my specialty since early in my Civil War days on blockade. Whether I cheered up anyone except myself with the sound of my voice, I do not know, but I did get some sullen looks for my efforts from Collins, who being Irish himself may have thought I failed to do justice to the songs of his native land. Collins (who also imagined he could sing) reciprocated by regaling us with melodies from Pinafore, then only two years old, but I thought he did the English far more violence than I did the Irish. In this conclusion, I have as independent evidence the reactions of Newcomb, who, whenever I sang in the cabin, continued reading wholly oblivious of me, but whenever Collins opened up on Pinafore, immediately closed his book and remembered that he had a gull or a seal that required stuffing.
As August dragged along, the little pools of water covering the floes round about the ship now began to give us real cause for depression by freezing over at night with a skin of ice which failed to melt until the next noon. When that commenced, what chance was left for the sun to have any effect on floes still thirty and more feet in thickness?
And to add to our woes, we found that as a result of our southerly and easterly drifting, we had been steadily going backward. We were much closer to our starting point, Herald Island, in late August than we had been in early May. A whole summer’s drifting in the pack, and for a Polar Expedition, we had got worse than nowhere!