Round About the North Pole

by W. J. Gordon

The Jeannette was the old Pandora, bought from Sir Allen Young by James Gordon Bennett, and accepted by and fitted out, officered, and manned under the orders of the Navy Department of the United States, her commander being Lieutenant George Washington De Long. She left San Francisco on the 8th of July, 1879, and two months afterwards had been run into the pack and was fast in the ice off Herald Island, drifting to her doom. Her route, in the main, was north-westerly, with many complicated loops, at first at the rate of half a mile a day, then at two miles, then at three, showing that the current from Bering Strait had been reinforced by some other current as she went further west, and, from its direction, there seemed to be land to the northward which was never sighted.

Wrangell Land, passed to the south, proved to be not a continent but a small island. No other land was seen for a monotonous twenty months, and then, in May, 1881, the ship drifted, stern first, past that sighted by Hedenström from New Siberia, which was found to consist of two islands, to be henceforth known as Jeannette and Henrietta. On the 12th of June, in latitude 77° 14´ 57˝, the Jeannette was crushed and sank, her fore yardarms breaking upwards as she slipped down through the rift in the pack, and a start was made for the Siberian Islands over the ice; but the drift had taken the party to 77° 36´, before they got on their proper course, and after a most laborious journey, lasting up to the 28th of July, they were safe ashore on the land sighted by Sannikof from Thaddeus, which De Long named Bennett Island.

Bennett Island was left on the 7th of August, the party of thirty-three being in three boats, thirteen under De Long in the first cutter, ten under Lieutenant Chipp in the much smaller second cutter, and ten, under Engineer George W. Melville, whose skill and resourcefulness had been conspicuous throughout, were given the whale-boat, the most suitable of the three. Sail was made for Thaddeus Island, which was reached in safety; after a halt of some days it was left on the 31st of August. Then Kotelnoi Island was reached and rested at; then the boats made for Semonovski, which was left on the 12th of September.

The same day a gale came on in which the first cutter had great difficulty in keeping afloat, the second cutter disappeared never to be heard of again, and the whale-boat, behaving excellently, went off before the wind straight for the continent to reach in safety one of the eastern mouths of the Lena, up which Melville arrived at a Russian village on the 26th of September. De Long's party ran their boat aground in shallow water, on the 17th of September, and rafted and waded ashore to one of the most inhospitable spots on the globe. Heavily laden they made their way down the dreary delta, toiling through the snow, delayed by the tributaries which were not frozen over hard enough to bear, hampered by sickness and disablement, and finally dying one by one of starvation.

On the 9th of October De Long sent two of the seamen, Nindemann and Noros, ahead in search of relief. They had no food but what they could find, and on the second day out their dinner consisted of a little willow tea and a burnt boot sole. Next morning they burnt another sole of a boot, and they spent the day struggling through a morass in drifting snow, crossing streams of all sizes, and halting for the night in so high a wind that they were unable to light a fire and took refuge in a hole in the snow from which they emerged with difficulty in the morning, owing to the wind having piled up the snow against the opening. At the end of the third day they reached a deserted hut in which were some deer bones, which they grilled and tried to eat, and in the morning a gale was blowing and the wild drifting snow was so thick that they had to remain where they were and continue their diet of charred bones and willow tea.

Next day, Thursday, the 13th of October, they began against a strong head wind. In the afternoon they sighted a hut on the west bank of the river. "They had seen one in the morning, but had in vain attempted to cross the ice to it. Now they tried to reach this, but were turned back by the brittle ice. They kept it in sight as they moved southward, and made another attempt to cross the ice, but it broke and they came back. Then they saw that there was no further progress possible to the southward on that side of the water, and they returned to the ice. It broke again, but they kept on. They went in up to their waists, but managed to pull themselves up on the stronger ice." The wind was blowing against them and the ice was like glass, so that they were driven back. They looked about for ice which had been roughened by the ripples beneath, and finding some they succeeded at length in reaching the other side, where were two wooden crosses beneath a bank, which rose fifty feet above them. They pulled themselves up the bank, but when they came to the hut which they had kept in sight they found it a ruin nearly full of snow. "While Noros was trying to make a place in it for shelter, Nindemann saw a black object farther along to the south and went to it. It was a small peaked hut without a door, but large enough to hold two men. There were some fresh wood shavings outside the hut and higher up on the hill two boxes. On going to them Nindemann found them old and decayed, and he began to break one of them open. When he had ripped off the top he discovered that there was another box enclosed; breaking into it he found a dead body, and hastily left it. Doubtless the two crosses below on the river bank were memorials of the two beings left high up above the reach of the floods."

In the small hut they found a sort of floor, the boards of which they pulled up for firewood, and in a hole beneath was a box in which were a couple of fish and two fish heads; and, as these were discovered, a lemming came out of another hole and was promptly caught. On the lemming, roasted on the ramrod, and the fishes, which were so decayed that they dropped apart as they were handled, they made their meal for that day. Next day the snowstorm was so heavy that they were driven back here after striving in vain to make headway. On the Saturday, still without food, they rested for the night in a fissure in the river bank, where as a last resource Nindemann cut a piece off his sealskin trousers and soaked it in water and burnt it to a crust. Their breakfast consisted of the remains of this toasted sealskin. During the day they saw a crow flying across the river and in among the hills, and, as the crow in these regions is rarely found away from the haunts of men, Nindemann decided to cross the river in the hope of meeting with either natives or game on the other side. When darkness came on no shelter was discoverable, and so, after a meal of more sealskin and hot water, they went to rest in a hole in the snow. Next day, during which they recrossed the river, their experiences were similar and the end the same.

On Tuesday the 18th, after a terrible day, they came upon a hut with a pile of wood close by, which proved to be sledges, and these they broke up, as there was no other firing. Next day as they were struggling on they reached a place where there were three huts, in one of which was a half-kayak and in it was some blue mouldy fish; and here, attacked by dysentery, they remained until the Saturday, unable to go any further. About noon there was a noise outside like a flock of geese sweeping by. Nindemann, looking through the crack of the door, saw something moving which he took to be a reindeer, and was going out with his rifle when the door opened and a man entered, who promptly fell on his knees when he caught sight of the gun. Nindemann threw the rifle into a corner and, trying to make friends with the man by signs, offered him some of the fish, which the man by an emphatic gesture pronounced not fit to eat. After some more of the sign language it was clear that the native had no food with him, and holding up three or four fingers to show that he would return in so many hours or days he drove off. About six o'clock in the evening, while they were preparing their fish dinner, the visitor returned with two other men, one of whom brought in a frozen fish which he skinned and sliced, and while the sailors were eating it—the first healthy meal they had had for weeks—the natives invited them to accompany them, and brought in deerskin coats and boots and finally got them into the sledges and drove off to the westward for about fifteen miles. Here there were two tents, and Nindemann was taken into one, Noros into the other, and both were well looked after, the natives doing their very best to get them well.

This was intelligible on both sides, for the language of kindness is universal, but as the sailors knew not the language of their hosts, and the natives knew not the language of their guests, the difficulty of being understood by each other was great, and the delivery of the urgent message in signs was almost impossible. Nindemann did his best; he appealed to the man who seemed to be the head of the party, and drawing in the snow a map of the places where he had been, with every combination of signs he could think of, he tried to explain what he wanted. That he succeeded to a certain extent was clear, though he did not think so at first, for the natives loaded up their sledges, twenty-seven in number, with reindeer meat and skins and fish, and struck their tents, and, with over a hundred head of deer harnessed up, started for the south. At noon, when the deer were resting, the man for whom the map had been drawn in the snow took Nindemann to where he could show him a prominent landmark, and asked by signs if that was where he had left his friends. And on learning by signs that it was further to the north, he shook his head as if sorry, and resumed his journey to the south. During the next day they reached Ku Mark Surka, where there were a number of natives who were much interested in the new-comers, and again the sailors used every effort to deliver their message.

Immediately after breakfast on the morning of the 25th, Nindemann began talking to these people in signs and pantomime. Soon one of them showed that he had an idea of where the sailors came from, for he spoke to one of the boys, who ran off and returned with a model of a Yakutsk boat. Then they gathered round and evidently asked if the ship was anything like it. And in answer, Nindemann took up some sticks and placed three of them in the boat to show that his ship had three masts, and then he fastened smaller sticks across to show that she had yards, which seemed to surprise them greatly. Then he made a funnel out of wood and put it in position, and pointed to the fire and smoke to show that she was a steamer, and then he cut out a propeller with his knife and put it where the rudder was to show that she was a screw. Continuing his work he soon chipped out so many small boats to show how many she had; and then, signing to one of the men to get him two pieces of ice, he showed them how the ship had been crushed. Pointing to the northward he tried to tell them that the ship had been crushed up there; and then he put away the ship and kept only three of the little boats to tell that part of the story, and in the boats he put so many sticks to represent the number of men in each. When he had done this one of the men pointed to a dog that was looking on and asked if the ship had any, whereupon the sailor counted on his fingers to show there were about forty, and by pantomime explained that they had been shot. This being evidently understood, Nindemann drew a chart of the coast-line, and imitating a gale of wind showed that the boat he came from went to the land at a certain point and that he knew nothing of the others. Then he went on to show how they had all left the boat, waded ashore and walked along the river-bank, and he marked the huts where they had stopped, and then he indicated where one of the men had died and been buried in the river. This was understood, for all the audience shook their heads as if to say how sorry they were. But when he tried to tell them that he had left the captain two days afterwards and had been so many days on the way to ask for help, they showed that they either did not or would not understand; and really it was not easy to make such a matter clear.