Melville was proving to be the real chief scientist, more knowledgeable, more resourceful, and more proficient with the instruments Collins was supposed to have mastered. Collins truly was an expert on weather, but what he seemed to care most about was the “science” of puns, and by now he had exhausted his repertoire. The men had grown sick of his wordplay—“You give me an earache!” Newcomb had cried at one point—and yet Collins wouldn’t quit. He’d run out of musical numbers, too. When he sat at his little organ, playing sprightly Gilbert and Sullivan selections for the hundredth time, he could not see how he was grating on everyone’s nerves.
What Collins could see was that Melville had usurped his role. Hurt and resentful, Collins increasingly withdrew to his room, and he began to flout De Long’s rules. He would not go out and exercise, and he refused to let Dr. Ambler examine him for the monthly medical report. He would sleep late, smoking through the midmorning, dawdling with his chores. With each passing day, he became more marginalized.
Collins found himself in an impossible situation. Most likely, he wasn’t cut out for this kind of work. He was a man of many talents, but they did not run in the direction of nautical life. He had never been on a prolonged cruise before, to the Arctic or anywhere else, and he had never been under the watch of a man as formidable or as rigorous as George De Long. He fundamentally did not understand that De Long was the absolute master of this ship, and of everything that went on inside and around it. Then, too, Collins had an Irishman’s well-honed sense of persecution—once slighted, he could not easily shake it off. His frictions with De Long were inevitable.
Part of the problem was his ambiguous status: Neither an officer nor a seaman, Collins was something in between—a highly trained civilian who, though allowed to eat with the officers, enjoyed no official naval rank. He thought this situation inherently placed him in “a trap,” and probably he was right. As perhaps the best-educated man on board the ship, and as Bennett’s handpicked correspondent for the expedition, Collins felt he should be allowed to skirt Navy discipline, but De Long had other ideas. Certainly Collins thought he was entitled to more respect.
For all these reasons, the success of Edison’s lights loomed as an all-important test of Collins’s true place on board the USS Jeannette.
ON OCTOBER 15, Collins fished the sixty carbon lamps from their boxes, and De Long had them hoisted high in the rigging. A small steam engine, called a Baxter boiler, was fired to provide steam power, and Collins connected it to Edison’s “dynamo” device, which was, in turn, connected to the circuits of lamps. For several hours, Collins worked with the nest of machines and wires. But even when seventy pounds of steam pressure was applied, he could not get Edison’s device to make a spark. The little galvanometer needle on the contraption hardly budged.
The men peered up into the rigging with hopeful expressions, but the circuit of lamps failed to produce a wink of light. No one could hide his disappointment. It was as though the country had let them down.
Collins was befuddled. It was true that he had never tested the lamps in San Francisco, but in Menlo Park he had seen with his own eyes how brilliantly they worked, illuminating Edison’s lab with a “light greater than three thousand candles.” Why weren’t they working now?
De Long put Melville on the problem. After taking Edison’s device apart, the engineer concluded that it must have gotten doused during the turbulent crossing of the Bering Sea. He dried out the apparatus, then tried uncoiling all its wires and reinsulating them, but it was no use: Not even Melville, the Jeannette’s crafty Vulcan, could get the thing to work.
A few days later, Dr. Ambler told De Long of a curious dream he’d had about Edison’s lamps. In the dream, Sir John Franklin, the long-lost British explorer, had come aboard the Jeannette for a tour. Dr. Ambler led Franklin all over the ship and told him excitedly about Edison’s electric lights, an invention that, of course, wasn’t even dreamed about in Franklin’s day. But Franklin bluntly interrupted him. “Your electric machine,” he said, “is not worth a damn.”
“I begin to fear that Franklin is right,” De Long wrote. “Edison’s light is irretrievably worthless. Time enough has been lost in trying to make this machine of use.” Perhaps it was Edison’s fault, but De Long placed much of the blame on Collins. In any case, the lamps had “gone ‘where the woodbine twineth,’ ” as De Long put it—which was to say, into the junk pile of oblivion. Disgusted, he told Collins to box up the lamps and stow them in the hold. Collins was despondent, his mood as black as the unlit Arctic.
And so the days grew shorter and colder—and the natural light ever more feeble. The sun slowly slipped from the polar skies. On November 16, it left altogether and would not return for several months. Spermaceti candles and oil lanterns would have to suffice. So much for Thomas Alva Edison and his company’s pledge about “lighting the North Pole.”
For the next seventy-one days, the Jeannette would be cloaked in darkness.
21 · FOREVER, ALMOST
Scarcely a week after De Long declared Edison’s lights “irretrievably useless,” the inventor’s lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey, made a historic breakthrough. For several months, Edison had been homing in on an incandescent bulb that would be reliable and safe—a lamp that would throw steady, pleasing light without flickering or flaming out. The trick had been finding the right substance to serve as a durable filament. He had tested platinum, carbon, wood splints, cotton and linen thread, even fishing line. But now, Edison boasted to reporters, he had the principle in his grasp. It was, he claimed, “so simple that a bootblack might understand it.”
On the night of October 21, 1879, Edison was experimenting with a filament made from carbonized sewing thread. A vacuum bulb fitted with the new filament was arranged on a small platform in the lab. When power was supplied, the lamp burned, unflickering, for an hour, then two hours, then three. Edison, having grown tired of the experiment after slightly more than forty hours of steady light, ramped up the power until the filament finally sizzled and burned out.
“The electric light is perfected,” Edison crowed to the New York Times. Although this wasn’t quite true, his incandescent bulb was now well on its way to reality—and already it represented a quantum leap over the arc lamp system he had sold to De Long. His company had also made significant improvements in the reliability of its dynamos: The model Edison provided for the Jeannette expedition had caused endless problems for his customers, but after he overhauled the design, subsequent generations of his dynamo had proved admirably dependable.
By November, having applied for a patent for his incandescent lamp, Edison tried out a new filament made of carbonized bamboo. It burned true for more than twelve hundred hours. By December Edison was making public demonstrations and taking his first commercial orders. “We will make electricity so cheap,” he said, “that only the rich will burn candles.”
A new era was at hand. De Long had missed it by only a few months. When a reporter from Bennett’s Herald asked Edison how long his bulbs would last, the inventor, his mouth full of chewing tobacco, replied, “Forever, almost.”
22 · INVISIBLE HANDS
About the same time the sun vanished, the ice began to move again. The noise was terrible—first the sounds of the ice warring with itself, then the more dreadful sounds of the ice warring with the ship. The turbulence started early on a cold November morning. De Long was awakened by a “grinding and crushing—I know of no sound on shore that can be compared with it,” he said. “A rumble, a shriek, a groan, and a crash of a falling house all combined might convey an idea.”
He went outside to study the pack, which he likened to “a marble yard, adrift.” Soon others joined him on the deck. To Melville, it sounded at first like “distant artillery” but then it grew louder. “Giant blocks pitched and rolled as though controlled by invisible hands, and the vast compressing bodies shrieked a shrill and horrible song.”
Danenhower thought the pack was “in a state of greate
r confusion than an old Turkish graveyard.” The men watched in horror as great pieces of ice were “pushed about like toys,” Newcomb said, occasionally causing the ship to groan like “some leviathan in death agonies.” The noise was so unnerving that it set the dogs to whining; Newcomb found their “choruses of howls most unearthly.”
Then the ice began to squeeze the ship—literally, to strangle it. Beads of oakum tar and pine pitch oozed from the seams. At one point, the decks bulged. The wooden planks were so obviously stressed that De Long expected them to rupture.
Several times, he prepared to abandon the ship. Supplies were stockpiled on the deck, the boats made ready for lowering, and the sleds stuffed with forty days’ worth of provisions. De Long instructed the men to sleep with their clothes on and to pack their knapsacks and bedrolls. There wasn’t much else they could do but listen—and wait.
“We live in a weary suspense,” De Long wrote. “Wintering in the pack may be a thrilling thing to read about alongside a warm fire, but the actual thing is sufficient to make any man prematurely old. A crisis may occur at any moment, and we can do nothing but be thankful in the morning that it has not come during the night, and at night that it has not come since the morning. Living over a powder-mill waiting for an explosion would be a similar mode of existence.”
There was one moment when De Long thought he surely was witnessing the death of the Jeannette. Out on the moonlit ice, the men could see and hear an eruption taking place. Two giant plates of ice were colliding, creating a pressure ridge. Along the leading edge of this collision, the floes were smashing and telescoping, setting off a chain reaction of upheavals that seemed to be building straight for the Jeannette. De Long, Chipp, and several of the crew stood on the roof of the deckhouse and watched it come, as though it were an onrushing train. De Long grabbed a mainstay and yelled, “All hands hold firm!” As it approached, the wide-eyed men fumbled for the handiest rope or shroud and, muttering prayers, braced for the collision. “On came the frozen wave, nearer and nearer,” wrote Melville, “while silent and awestruck we watched its terrible progress.”
Then it hulked across the rails, smashing a hole in the starboard bulwark and covering the decks in skittering shards. The ship lurched and shuddered. The men twisted on their dangling ropes. Some had been smacked in the face with missiles of ice. Yet the violence, terrific as it was, passed in seconds, and the eruptions continued on the other side of the ship, as though some giant beast were tunneling just beneath the ice. The men grew silent, leaving only the whimpering of the terrified dogs.
Miraculously, the Jeannette was not mortally injured. “The ship is all right now,” Newcomb marveled, “but for how long no one knows. I have my gun and knapsack ready to leave at a moment’s notice for…God knows where.” Melville was astounded that the ship had survived. “Her time had not yet come” was all he could figure. He credited the work done at Mare Island—“the powerful trusses sturdily withstood the pressure,” he noted.
Like sinners who’d been granted a reprieve, the crew cheerfully got to work repairing the ship. “The men sang and joked with apparent sang froid,” said Melville, “while they cleared the decks of ice or pushed away the overhanging masses that were crushing the light bulwarks. The discipline of the ship’s company was perfect.”
De Long saw the Jeannette’s salvation as nothing less than providential: “The pack is no place for a ship, and I wish with all my heart that we were out of it. But a man must be a hard unbeliever who does not recognize a divine hand in these wonderful escapes.”
BY THE END of November, the ice had settled down at last. On December 2, De Long felt comfortable enough with the conditions to try sleeping normally again. “I shall undress before retiring tonight,” he wrote, preparing for a luxury he had not enjoyed for three weeks. Something of an insomniac anyway, he had hardly slept an unbroken hour during the whole ice siege.
Now he took to walking out on the ice at night before bed. He relished these midnight strolls. They were the only moments he got to spend alone, immersed in his thoughts. He would pull on his furs, light up his meerschaum pipe, and traipse about the ship, out where the pack was clean, beyond the garbage dumps and the ash heaps. Under the crisp moon and stars, safely embedded again in solid ice, the Jeannette looked as though “she had dropped out of fairyland,” he thought. Standing a hundred yards from the ship, “one has a scene of the wildest and most awful beauty.” The “majestic silence” made a man “feel how trifling and insignificant he is in comparison with such grand works in nature.” As he walked, De Long was often treated to light shows of auroras, meteor showers, lunar halos, or the oddity of a mock moon. One night a mysterious ball of light danced on the floes near the Jeannette—it blinked and pulsed, intensified, waned, extinguished itself, then returned brighter than ever to dance some more.
“I think the night one of the most beautiful I have ever seen,” De Long wrote after one of his strolls. “The heavens were cloudless, the moon shining brightly, and every star twinkling; the air perfectly calm, not a sound to break the spell. The ship and her surroundings made a perfect picture. The long lines of wire reaching to the tripod and observatory, round frosted lumps here and there where a dog lay asleep. The Jeannette standing out in bold relief against the sky, every rope and spar with a thick coat of snow and frost—simply a beautiful spectacle.”
But then De Long would catch himself, as though vaguely embarrassed by his rhapsodies. “I commence them and cannot finish them,” he wrote. “I seem to know the tune but never remember the words. These poetical outbursts are too much for me.”
EVER SINCE THEY’D gotten locked in the ice, De Long had worried about Danenhower’s mental state. All the terrors of the ice, the melancholy of the polar darkness, the claustrophobic dread that could set in while one was living under conditions of near imprisonment—the whole Arctic experience was a perfect incubator for insanity, De Long thought. So the captain had been discreetly watching Danenhower, fearful that the navigator’s depression—his “disordered intellect,” his history of “brain trouble”—might return.
So far, it hadn’t. De Long could not have been more pleased and impressed with the navigator. Danenhower, along with Chipp and Melville, had been a mainstay. Danenhower was resourceful, hardworking, good-humored. Many nights they lingered late in the wardroom, smoking, laughing, looking at maps, conducting their own Arctic seminars. If anything, Danenhower had cheered him up. “His efforts have kept us many an hour from moping,” De Long wrote. “He is highly prized by all of us.” Still, De Long said, “there is something about him which I cannot fathom. I cannot yet bring myself to have that implicit confidence in him that I would like to feel.”
Danenhower’s only medical issue so far was an aggravation in his left eye. He had apparently developed some sort of conjunctivitis that made his lens sore and irritated. Dr. Ambler didn’t think much about it at first. The navigator worked so hard at his inadequately lit desk, poring over nautical charts, making calculations, checking precision instruments, that it seemed inevitable that his eyes would become strained. There was little “navigating” to do, strictly speaking, while the ship remained icebound, yet Danenhower was constantly making observations to determine the Jeannette’s precise position while engaging in the larger scientific questions of the expedition. Danenhower studied so hard, De Long remarked, that “you would think the books would run away with him.” Everyone agreed that the navigator should take a break and give his eyes a rest.
But after a few weeks, Danenhower’s condition worsened. The pain was so excruciating he could scarcely think. When Dr. Ambler examined him again, he saw that something was wrong with his iris. It was inflamed, and it appeared “sluggish.” It had turned a strange hue—more or less the color of mud—and a sticky fluid oozed from his eye.
In late December, Ambler decided to review Danenhower’s entire medical history. After a lot of questioning, the navigator admitted that he had once contracted venereal disease, t
hough he believed it had been cured. Now Dr. Ambler told him otherwise: His condition was called syphilitic iritis. It was a fairly common symptom of second-stage syphilis. Syphilis was a strange and pernicious disease that manifested itself in countless maladies of the body and mind. It often masqueraded as some other disease—and did it so well that doctors often called it the Great Imposter. Ambler had seen and treated syphilitic iritis before. The malady could be very serious. Unless Danenhower was extremely careful—or extremely lucky—he would likely go blind in his left eye. There was always a chance it could develop in his right eye, as well.
Ambler treated Danenhower with a shot of mercury in his buttocks, a standard, if dubious, treatment for syphilis at the time that had numerous deleterious side effects. (A dictum common among doctors went: “One night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury.”) To dull the pain, Ambler applied lint doused with tincture of opium. He also dropped small doses of atropine into Danenhower’s eye to dilate the pupil. The goal was to keep the pupil open and to prevent the iris from adhering to the lens. If the drops didn’t work, Ambler would be forced to operate, inserting a probe into the eye’s tissues to release the gummy adhesions before the iris and lens melded together into a permanent scar.