All day, and through the bright polar night, De Long had a lookout in the crow’s nest keep an eye on the departing men. Melville and his detail crept across the floes, their course marked by crazy detours. Their progress was nearly comical in its slowness. Watching them was like watching a column of dung beetles recede across an obstacle-filled desert. They became a collection of dots on the ice, then a blotch, then a speck—until, midway through the following day, they disappeared from view, lost behind the crusty ridges of ice.
CAPTAIN DE LONG soon became preoccupied with other worries. The ice pressure on the stern had been intensifying all week. The leaks that had bedeviled the Jeannette since she’d first been locked in the ice had grown worse. De Long ordered the hand pumps manned around the clock and had the windmill rigged up again. Its large, oblong blades thwanged in the fresh wind, bringing up more than 100 gallons every hour from the flooded holds. Yet with all this effort, the crew could scarcely keep pace. By De Long’s calculation, the ship was taking on 4,874 gallons a day.
To relieve some of the pressure on the stern, De Long armed the men with picks, mauls, and ice saws and had them dig a trench around the rudder and propeller well. “It is hard as flint,” De Long wrote, “and clings like an old and tried friend.” So powerful was the ice’s grip that when it was pried loose, strips of oakum caulking ripped from the seams. In some places, the grain pattern of the boards could be seen imprinted upon the chunks of removed ice.
If this weren’t enough, De Long was presented with a medical crisis, the most serious one of the voyage. The morning after Melville’s party left, Dr. Ambler broke the news that a good number of the remaining crew—at least seven—were now suffering from a mysterious “distemper.” Whatever it was, Ambler feared it could become an epidemic. (“What next?” De Long jotted in exasperation.) For weeks, crewmen had been complaining of a curious range of symptoms: listlessness, sleeping difficulties, low appetite, weight loss, anemia, a metallic taste on the tongue, and, especially, sharp cramping of the bowels. Some noticed a slight tremor in their hands; others appeared to be passing blood in their urine.
The complaints had lately increased, and now Chipp, Newcomb, Kuehne, Alexey, Ah Sam, Charles Tong Sing, and even Dr. Ambler himself were suffering. Newcomb, especially, was in horrible pain—looking “as woebegone as possible,” as De Long wrote. Newcomb was made all the more miserable by the fact that he had so badly wanted to join Melville’s party in the attempt on Henrietta. Newcomb felt that, as the voyage’s naturalist, it was his responsibility to make a study of the birds and other wildlife that might be living on the new island. Yet he couldn’t get out of bed.
Dr. Ambler wasn’t sure, but several long days of medical sleuthing led him to make an educated guess about the underlying cause of the strange malady. It was lead poisoning. If he was right, this was a grave matter. Lead toxicity could soon progress to delirium, seizures, kidney failure, and death. The doctor knew he had to find the source of the contaminant immediately; the expedition’s survival depended on it.
FOR DAYS, MELVILLE and his party of five struggled over the ice. The glaciated ramparts of the island loomed ever closer, but Melville’s progress proved even tougher and slower than he had imagined it would be. Dunbar led the way, carrying a black silk flag as a marker. They made only a few miles a day, straining up and down the jagged slabs. “Millions of tons of blocks were piled up,” Melville wrote, “as though they were the ghastly heaps of the slain from the battle that was forever raging among the broken masses; and great bodies of ice were incessantly fleeing, it seemed, from the mad pursuit of those behind.”
The dinghy, packed with their tent and all their food, wobbled on the McClintock sled. The men had strapped themselves to it with long canvas harnesses and were pulling the load alongside the dogs. At times the huskies proved more hindrance than help. They growled and snapped at each other; several times the men had to break up free-for-alls. In this jumbled terrain, the dogs kept snagging their harnesses and wrapping the lines around one another—often becoming, Melville said, as “hopelessly tangled up as a basketful of eels.”
By the fourth day of their sojourn, it became obvious they would never reach Henrietta while dragging a dinghy filled with nearly a ton of supplies. So Melville decided to leave the boat and all but a single day’s worth of provisions and make a “dash” for the island. It was a brilliant sunny day, and Henrietta’s features shone so clearly that Melville felt he could touch them—its “black serrated rocks,” he wrote, were “streaked with veins of iron” and seemed to have been forged in a “great blast furnace.” Hurriedly, the men placed the dinghy on an elevated hummock and, to mark it for their return, flew a black flag from an oar stuck snugly in the ice. For good measure, Erichsen attached his bright felt hat to the top of the oar.
Melville understood that abandoning the boat and their food supply was a “hazardous expedient” and that returning safely to it might be “greatly a matter of luck,” especially if bad weather were to set in. But he could think of no other way to reach Henrietta with any reasonable chance of getting back to the ship alive.
With their load considerably lightened, they made good progress. But by the next morning, after a breakfast of pig’s feet simmered in mutton broth, they got under way only to learn of a troubling development: The previous day’s unremitting sun had taken a severe toll on Dunbar’s eyes, and he had become badly snow-blind. The crusty old whaler had spent most of his life at sea, often in the Arctic, but never had he been struck down with this age-old malady—photokeratitis, bake eyes, welder’s flash. Dunbar was supposed to be the guide, with the keenest vision in the party, moving ahead of everyone else to pick the clearest path. But he couldn’t see his own hand in front of him. His eyes burned and twitched and welled with tears. His pupils were constricted, his corneas inflamed. Strange specks of light danced across his field of vision. Still, Dunbar was too proud to admit this mortifying truth—and he didn’t, until it became obvious to everyone else that something was wrong.
Melville tried to comfort Dunbar and asked him to ride in the sled. There was no use in his stumbling across the pack like a drunkard—he might hurt himself. But the old ice pilot refused to be a burden. When Melville ordered him to get in the sled, Dunbar roared, “Leave me here then!”
“He begged in the most distressing manner to be left on the ice,” Melville wrote. “It was the first time in his life that he had ever been broken down, and it grieved him sorely.” Despite Dunbar’s strenuous protests, the men placed him in the McClintock (“greatly to the old gentleman’s disgust,” noted Melville), and they continued on toward Henrietta, now with Erichsen taking up the silk flag and serving as ice pilot.
They could no longer see the island—it had become veiled by a snowstorm. But Melville kept them on a steady compass course, and he knew they were drawing near. They maintained a good pace, until the sled plunged through the ice and was nearly submerged in freezing seawater. Dunbar, cursing helplessly inside the sled, clutched its crossbars while Erichsen rushed to his aid. The big, brawny Dane crouched over the McClintock and lifted it from the slushy pool, setting it on the ice as though it were a child’s toy. Melville, praising Erichsen’s “herculean feats of strength,” wondered how they would have survived without him. On this occasion, he had almost certainly saved Dunbar’s life.
Sometime that evening, June 2, the six men pulled themselves onto the shores of Henrietta Island. Elated, exhausted, and relieved, they padded across a thin beach and onto a field of black rocks splotched with moss and lichen. It was the first land they had stood on in 642 days. Dunbar expressed pure joy in the sensation of what he called “sanding my hooves.” It felt wonderful but also strange to amble on hard ground. It was different from walking on a ship pitched at queer angles, and different from walking on floating cakes of ice and snow; the muscles of their legs and feet were unaccustomed to it, and at first their gait was wobbly and uncertain.
Although Henrietta was an anc
ient place—volcanic rocks on the island date back five hundred million years—Melville and his men were by all evidence the first human beings ever to set foot on it. Knowing this ignited a complicated range of emotions in the engineer; he seemed to find the moment of discovery both beautiful and haunting. This was what explorers lived for, what animated and drove them. This was the joy that saw them through the hardships. At the same time, Melville was spooked. No one had ever been here. Perhaps no one was ever meant to be here. “We stood lost in the contemplation,” he wrote. “The silence was awful.” They had landed on “a black monster” whose steep headlands loomed “as they had for ages, like sentinels, challenging our strange advent.”
They had reached the end of the earth. For more than a thousand miles to the east, and nearly a thousand miles to the west, Henrietta was the northernmost mote of land, a lonesome satellite in the High Arctic. In this part of the world, no scrap of terra firma was so close to the earth’s apex.
Melville claimed this virgin land as an American possession “in the name of the Great Jehovah and the President of the United States.” Then he “baptized” the island by sprinkling a few drops of corn extract from a small wicker bottle. Erichsen planted an American flag in the rocky soil. Later, higher up the island’s flanks, Melville and his men looked back with satisfaction toward the ice field over which they had struggled. In the spectral light, they could see the Jeannette some ten miles away, still locked in the ice, its position having shifted to a troubling degree.
Tomorrow they would have to make haste. But now they pitched their tent and crawled inside and, as Melville put it, fell fast “in the arms of Morpheus.”
ABOARD THE JEANNETTE, Dr. Ambler and Captain De Long frantically searched for the source of the contamination. Several more crew members had come down with symptoms, and Ambler was alarmed.
The ship’s distilling system was the first suspect. De Long had the whole apparatus dismantled and minutely studied for any appearance of lead leaching into the water supply. A few lead pipe fittings were found, but they were in such good condition it seemed unlikely that they could be the cause of the acute symptoms being reported.
It took another day before Ambler was able to determine the culprit. At supper, the crew dug into a bowl of stewed tomatoes, as they had nearly every night for months. One of the men crunched down on something hard and removed from his mouth a metal pellet. As they picked through their portions, other men found more of the tiny gobbets. They didn’t think much of it, but at one point, someone joked, “Who shot the tomatoes?”
This got Dr. Ambler’s mind churning. After close inspection, he determined that the small bits of metal were lead and surmised that the natural acid in the tomatoes had, over the course of the long journey, reacted with the lead solder used to seal the tin cans in which the tomatoes were stored. Some of the cans were in bad condition, their insides coated with a residue of black oxide of lead. The crew had been ingesting small but steadily growing amounts over time.
There seemed little rhyme or reason behind who came down with the symptoms—each person’s metabolism was different. “Curious that so many of us feel no effects,” De Long wondered, “as we are all on the same diet.” On the other hand, he noted, Charles Tong Sing, who, along with Newcomb, was the sickest of all the “lead invalids,” was something of a tomato fanatic—“he is remarkably fond of this vegetable, and eats of it unsparingly.”
From the start of the expedition, Dr. Ambler had insisted that the crew regularly consume tomatoes to help avoid scurvy; they, like citrus fruits, were correctly thought to be good antiscorbutics (although the reason why—high vitamin C content—was not then understood by science). But with this turn of events, a countervailing danger of Arctic travel had presented itself: The food that might save you could be stored in a container that might kill you.
“What use is it,” De Long groused, “to secure exemption from scurvy for two years if disabling lead poison finishes you in the third?”
Dr. Ambler, even though he was quite sick, took charge. The tainted tomatoes were thrown out, and a new diet was drawn up, with increased daily rations of concentrated lime juice. Within days, Ambler began to see improvements among the sick. What most worried him was Melville and the men on the ice. They might be stricken with the same sickness and find themselves unable to move.
By this time, Captain De Long was nursing a “constant uneasiness” about the sled party’s safety. Melville and his men, he calculated, should have been back by now. Over the past two days, a thick, gelid fog had set in, limiting visibility to less than fifty yards. Not only had the crow’s-nest lookouts lost sight of Melville’s detachment; they’d lost sight of the island entirely.
For hours, De Long stared into the fog, hoping for a break in it, scouring in vain for human forms scuttling across the pack. All they could do, he said, was “fall back on our familiar resort, waiting in blindness.” Every so often he ordered the brass gun fired to send out an auditory beacon, now that all visual beacons had been rendered useless. De Long began to rue his decision to dispatch a party to explore the island. He feared he’d made a dreadful mistake.
EARLY ON THE morning of June 3, Melville and his men made a quick breakfast and then set off to explore Henrietta. Nearly half the island was covered in glaciers. There were no signs of life, other than large populations of birds—guillemots, mainly, nesting along the rocky cliffs, which were streaked with guano. The birds, never having seen a human being before, had no fear. Sharvell, shotgun in hand, walked up to their nests and shot a number of them. The guillemots sat dumbfounded, showing no presentiment of danger.
The men fanned over the island, making sketches, taking measurements, and exhilarating in the first prerogative of explorers; naming things. There was Mount Sylvie, Mount Chipp, Point Dunbar, the Bennett Headlands. Melville and the men climbed a promontory, which Dunbar declared Melville’s Head but others dubbed Bald Head, in honor of the chief engineer’s shiny pate. There, in a cleft in the rock 250 feet above the frozen sea, they erected a cairn of stones. Inside, Melville placed a zinc case containing several copies of the New York Herald and a copper cylinder, eighteen inches long, in which was stored a written record of the Jeannette’s voyage thus far, penned by Captain De Long.
Melville, though “flushed with the success of the undertaking,” did not linger on Henrietta. He knew he had to rush back to the dinghy and the supplies, and then back to the ship before it drifted out of sight or out of range. The men collected a few souvenirs from the island—some moss, some stone samples, and Sharvell’s dead birds. After less than twenty-four hours on the volcanic rock, Melville’s party repacked the sled and pushed off, with Erichsen leading the way, hoisting the black silk flag.
The weather was “miserable” and “cruel,” and so fogged in that they had to travel the first two days entirely by compass. Open lanes of seawater halted them, and several times the sled was completely drenched. The ice, churning and popping with concussive sounds, left the dogs panic-stricken. Worse, Nindemann had come down with a severe illness. He was doubled over with excruciating cramps, almost certainly caused by the same lead poisoning that afflicted the men back on the ship. Melville had never seen Nindemann in such a state; he had always been the toughest, most stalwart member of the crew, but now the German was “enduring the agonies of the lost,” Melville wrote.
With everyone gathered inside the tent that night, Melville rummaged in the medicine chest and produced a bottle of capsicum tincture for Nindemann. Distilled from cayenne and other powerful peppers, capsicum extract was then a common antidote for cramps. But the engineer’s fingers were so cold and sore that he couldn’t pry open the bottle. The always cheerful Erichsen intervened, drew the cork from the vial, and gave Nindemann a few drops. Then the big Dane clumsily spilled the capsicum extract all over his hands. Thinking nothing of it, he dug into the medicine chest and fished out a bottle of sweet-oil emollient, which he liberally rubbed over his sore body, chafed
groin, irritated eyes, and sunburned face.
Suddenly Erichsen’s body seemed to be on fire; he’d forgotten about the capsicum oil still on his hands. “The result,” said Melville, “was at once a surprise to him and a delight to us.” Shrieking, smarting, eyes wide with astonishment, Erichsen hurled himself from the tent, peeled off his clothes, and writhed in the snow to cool his stinging skin—squirming, said Melville, “like an eel.” Everyone in the tent, even Nindemann, broke out in raucous laughter.
Dunbar, squinting, yelled through his chuckles at the naked form outside the tent: “Erichsen, are you hot enough to make the snow hiss?”
BY JUNE 3, De Long had grown heartsick with worry. Where was Melville? The captain realized that sending out a search party in this low-visibility weather would be a fruitless, if not foolish, exercise. All he could do was keep firing off volleys of the brass gun and hope that Melville might home in on the report.
On the morning of June 4, the weather cleared. It was crisp and cold, and the windmill blades whirred in the sharp breeze. The lookouts couldn’t see Melville’s party, but Henrietta loomed vividly. De Long had the men build a big fire on the ice, feeding it with tar and oakum to send up a thick plume of black smoke. Surely Melville, if he was within twenty miles, would see it. Yet there was no sign of him.
A polar bear, apparently lured by the acrid smell of the smoke, came lumbering over to the ship and was seen scratching itself on a clothes pole stuck in the pack and sniffing around the few remaining sled dogs, curled on the ice behind the ship. Edward Starr was the first to react. He grabbed a rifle and fired a shot, which missed. He jumped onto the ice and chased after the bear, firing twice more. “Away ran Bruin,” De Long wrote, the animal seeming to accelerate as it “heard the bullet sing across the ice. But alas!, our 600 pounds of fresh meat escaped.”