“The scene, as Colwell looked around, was one of misery and squalor. The rocky floor was covered with cast-off clothes, and among them were huddled together the sleeping-bags in which the party had spent most of their time during the last few months. There was no food left in the tent, but two or three cans of a thin, repulsive-looking jelly, made by boiling strips cut from the sealskin clothing. The bottle on the tent-pole still held a few teaspoonfuls of brandy, but it was their last, and they were sharing it as Colwell entered. It was evident that most of them had not long to live.
“Colwell immediately sent Chief Engineer Lowe back to the cutter to put off to the Bear with Long to report and to bring the surgeon with stimulants, while he fed the dying men with bits of the food he had with him. As their hunger returned, they cried piteously for more; fearing too much at one time would injure them, Colwell wisely dissuaded them, but ‘when Greely found that he was refused, he took a can of the boiled sealskin, which he had carefully husbanded, and which he said he had a right to eat, as it was his own.’
“The weaker ones were like children, petulant, rambling, and fitful in their talk, absent, and sometimes a little incoherent.”
The Bear having by this time arrived, Sergeant Long was lifted from the cutter aboard, and there told his pitiful tale; all were dead except Greely and five others, and they were on shore in “Sore distress—sore distress”; it had been “a hard winter,” and “the wonder was how in God’s name they had pulled through.”
“No words,” says Schley, “can describe the pathos of this man’s broken and enfeebled utterance, as he said over and over, ‘a hard winter—a hard winter’; and the officers who were gathered about him in the ward room felt an emotion which most of them were at little pains to conceal.”
Soon after the Thetis came in sight, and her officers, including brave Melville, whose last sad offices for De Long had been but lately finished, went ashore and aided those from the Bear in the care and succour of the forlorn party.
As soon as possible the men were carefully moved on stretchers and carried in boats to the ships, but not before a hurricane had broken upon them, which made the labour hazardous and difficult.
Meanwhile, Lieutenant Emory of the Bear was making a careful collection of all articles belonging to the camp. Near the sleeping-bags were found little packages of cherished valuables, carefully rolled up, and addressed to friends and relatives at home; the survivors, too, had already done up and addressed their own, and, strange as it may seem, a pocket-book was found containing a large roll of bills carried by the owner for some unaccountable reason to the barren shores of Lady Franklin Bay. It was not difficult to move the bodies of the dead; there was only a thin covering of sand above the mounds that formed the graves.
Looking out from the side of the hut to the ice-foot, Colwell’s attention was fixed by a dark object on the snow. Following a path which led to it from where he stood, he found the mutilated remains of a man’s body.
“It was afterward identified from a bullet hole,” writes Schley, “as that of Private Henry, who had been executed on the sixth of June.”