IT WAS IN late May, at a place called Marcus Bay, on the Siberian coast west of St. Lawrence Island, that the men of the Corwin first got wind of the story about an American shipwreck. A boatful of Chukchi natives came aboard and told the tale with animation. They said that three seal hunters had been out on the ice well to the west of Cape Serdtse-Kamen—a desolate outcropping of land several hundred miles away—and had discovered a ship beset in the pack, with its crew dead on the deck or in the cabin. The seal hunters apparently had taken a bag of money from the wreck, Muir wrote, “and such articles as they could carry away, some of which had been shown to other natives, and the story had traveled from one settlement to another thus far down the coast.”
Muir accepted the narrative. He thought the Chukchis had told it “with an air of perfect good faith, and they seemed themselves to believe what they were telling.” But, like Hooper, Muir also weighed the possibility that they were angling for a reward. “We listened with many grains of allowance,” Muir said.
The following day, in St. Lawrence Bay, the Corwin encountered still more Chukchis who were familiar with the story of the shipwreck. They came aboard the ship to trade walrus tusks and sealskin boots. An old man named Jaroochah sat down on the sludgy deck of the Corwin, called for a drink of water, then began to relate the tale—“in a loud, vehement, growling, roaring voice,” Muir recalled, “and with frantic gestures.” Speaking through a Chukchi translator who spoke passable “whaler English” (“three quarters profanity and nearly one quarter slang,” according to Muir), Jaroochah described how the masts of the ship had been snapped off by the ice, how the boats were stove in, how the hold was flooded with seawater. The old man went on to say that the ice all around was littered with “ghastly corpses.” He seemed unsure, however, whether there were one or two wrecks.
Hooper was suspicious of Jaroochah’s theatricality and the too-vivid particulars of his story—“all of which,” the captain thought, “were related in such an earnest and impressive manner that it would be difficult for any one unacquainted with Tchuktchi character to realize that most of it was manufactured on the spot.” Jaroochah would not shut up—he spoke, said Muir, “in overwhelming torrents…like a perennial mountain spring, some of his deep chest tones sounding like the roar of a lion…[He] could hardly stem his eloquence even while eating.” Later, he inquired whether Hooper had any rum to sell and declared “with vehement gestures” that it would “greatly augment my happiness.” Captain Hooper soon learned from other villagers that Jaroochah had a reputation as a teller of tales—he was, Hooper said, “one of the worst old rascals in the country.” Another Chukchi flatly regarded him as “a bad fellow, like a dog.”
Hooper quizzed Jaroochah about Wrangel Land, the place where he felt sure De Long was now trapped—or at least had been trapped. The captain showed the old man a chart and asked if he knew of this mysterious landmass out in the ocean to the north. Jaroochah immediately said, “Oh yes, many white foxes there.” He said the natives from the northeasternmost shore of Siberia often traveled there to kill those Arctic foxes. “But when pressed hard with questions he could not answer,” Hooper wrote, “he acknowledged that he had never known any one to cross there, but had heard of such things in his youth.”
On the other hand, Jaroochah’s story about the American shipwreck jibed, in important details, with what Captain Hooper had heard at Marcus Bay. “At the bottom of it all,” Hooper thought, “there seemed to be a foundation of truth, and I became more than ever convinced that some discovery had been made by the natives to the north.”
Hooper realized that he could not reach the supposed location of the ruined ship, not in the Corwin. The pack was choking his way and might not melt for another month. He would have to hire Chukchi guides and dog teams and dispatch a smaller party to chase the story overland along the coast of Siberia.
When Hooper announced that it was his intention to do this, Jaroochah replied that there was no use in going; everyone aboard the wrecked ship was dead, and the vessel had drifted away.
“We will seek them whether they’re dead or alive,” Hooper said.
But Jaroochah maintained it was no use. The ice and snow were too soft for good sledding during this season. When he saw that the Americans still intended to seek out their lost countrymen, Jaroochah “regarded us,” said Muir, “as foolish and incorrigible white trash”—and kept on talking.
HOOPER SET OUT for various villages on either side of the Bering Strait in search of dogs to buy and natives to drive them. He made a successful stop at the Diomede Islands, two volcanic plugs set on either side of the international date line in the middle of the strait. Although the two islands were less than three miles apart, Big Diomede was Russian and Little Diomede was American. From the Diomede Inuits, Hooper bought nineteen dogs, paying a sack of flour for each one.
Hooper turned the Corwin back toward Siberia to find more dogs and guides. In one settlement, the captain was able to locate a man named Chukchi Joe who spoke sufficient English to serve as translator for the expedition. Hooper then made for a place called Tapkan, a village of twenty huts spread along a sandbar. The village inhabitants came out to greet Hooper’s party, and, said Muir, “we were kindly received and shown to good seats on reindeer skins. All of them smiled good-naturedly when we shook hands with them, and tried to repeat our salutations. When we discussed our proposed land journey, the women eagerly joined and the children listened attentively.” Nordenskiöld had wintered the Vega very near here two years earlier, and one of the villagers brought out a fork, spoon, and compass of Russian origin, which the Scandinavian explorer had presented as a gift.
Hooper’s party was invited into one of the deerskin huts. A woman was nursing a baby, while another woman roasted seal liver over some coals. After conferring with a few of the Tapkan elders, Hooper succeeded in engaging a few men and several of the village dogs to accompany the overland expedition. As they started back over the ice for the Corwin, one of the hired Tapkan men heard a sound that made his heart ache. “His little boy cried bitterly when he learned that his father was going away,” Muir wrote, “and refused all the offers made by the women to comfort him. After we had sped over the ice, half a mile from the village, we could still hear his screams.”
As the Corwin turned away, the villagers remained clustered at the edge of the ice, many of them no doubt wondering if they would ever see their men and dogs again.
THE FOLLOWING EVENING, the Corwin became so ensnared in the pack ice of the Chukchi Sea that the ship’s oak rudder snapped. What little was left of it was hoisted to the deck, and the crew spent a few frantic hours jury-rigging a new rudder, amid the howling of the dogs.
Dodging wind-driven ice floes, Hooper limped for Kolyuchin Island, where the overland expedition would go ashore with its dog teams and begin the long journey. The party was led by First Lieutenant William Herring, accompanied by Third Lieutenant Reynolds, a sailor named Gessler, and several dog drivers, with Chukchi Joe serving as translator. They had twenty-five dogs, four sleds, enough food to last for two months, and a skin-boat for crossing open water.
Hooper made sure Lieutenant Herring understood the orders. As Muir wrote, they were to search the coast “for the crew of the Jeannette or any tidings concerning the fate of the expedition; to interview the natives they met; and to explore the prominent portions of the coast for cairns or signals of any kind.” They were to travel as far as possible to the northwest, at least as far as Cape Jarkin, and then return to Tapkan, where the Corwin would attempt to rendezvous with them in about a month’s time.
The men and dogs slogged away from the ship, across the pack, and finally made landfall on Kolyuchin Island. “The dogs rolled and raced about in exuberant sport,” wrote Muir, but “a more forbidding combination of sky, rough water, ice, and driving snow could hardly be imagined by the sunny civilized south.” The Corwin turned back toward Alaska to pursue other errands and gather more intelligence. “We went on our way
,” Muir jotted in his journal, “while the land party gradually faded in the snowy gloom.”
My own dearest husband—
We ought to be exceedingly grateful that so many efforts are being made to rescue you. So many expeditions are in the field one of them ought surely to find you. This is going to be a trying summer to us all, anticipating news from you and possibly your return, and what bitter disappointment if we have to wait another year! Still, I will hope on until there is no possible ray of hope left.
The winter passed quickly in New York. I went very little to the theatre; had no inclination to go, strange to say. I did not enjoy it as I used to when we went together.
I have sometimes pictured you surrounded by ice, unable to control the actions of the ship and worn from hope deferred. I will not dwell on this. I have hoped and prayed you are all good friends and helpful to one another, that no sickness has fallen upon the little band.
Your adoring wife,
Emma
26 · DEATH STROKES
During the first week of June 1881, as the Jeannette continued her westward drift, Henrietta Island faded into a wispy gray form off the stern. Although Melville had found very little about Henrietta to recommend—no large animals to hunt, no safe ports, no driftwood to burn—De Long could not hide his sense of regret. “One might call [Henrietta] a thing of the past,” he wrote, “and before many days it may be lost to view.”
The ship was still stuck fast within a massive slab, but the ice was cracking and softening in the warming sea. Here and there, the men could glimpse large disconnected patches of open water around them. What a sight it was for sailors so long deprived of it—moving water, waves cresting and smashing into mare’s tails of spray. The open ocean was what they knew, and the open ocean, if they could reach it, remained their only clear way home.
Yet returning home was not foremost on De Long’s mind. By his calculation, the ship was little more than seven hundred miles from the North Pole, and a part of him still dreamed of reaching it—or at least of making a push through open sea to claim a “farthest north” record. Given the ship’s sorry condition, he knew this was quixotic, yet he couldn’t let go of his northering quest, especially now that so much open water was revealing itself.
De Long’s state of mind was as fixed as the spring weather was capricious. The same hour might bring bright sun, fog, gale-force wind, rain, mist, needles of blowing ice, then sun again. All around them, the men heard dramatic shudderings as the melting pack disintegrated and bashed into other floating masses of ice, young and old, sending immense shards into the air. Yet for now, the Jeannette was so securely lodged in the middle of her ice island—“our friendly floe-piece,” as Melville called it—that she was spared all the surrounding turmoil. “We are moving along slowly and grandly,” De Long said, “a dignified figure in the midst of a howling wilderness.”
Through the hourly changes, one larger trend was unmistakable: Spring was sliding fast into summer. “At last,” De Long wrote, “there seems to be a disposition on the part of the weather to grow warmer, and it is high time.” The sun now skimmed the horizon but never vanished behind it. In the new warmth, signs of life appeared. It was as though the men could sense the groaning tilt of the earth itself.
One morning, from the crow’s nest, Dunbar thought he spotted whales surfacing through a distant opening in the ice. On another day, a huge flock of eider ducks, estimated to be more than five hundred, arrowed across the sky, flying low toward the north. (Why they were headed in that direction was the subject of discussion. Could there be more islands, or even Petermann’s surmised polar continent, somewhere farther north?) The dogs, roused by the sight, scampered after the flock until they were halted by open water.
WITH SO MANY signs of summer’s return, De Long’s spirits brightened; everyone’s did. Warmth and water brought the foretaste of freedom. Any day a major lead was sure to develop, releasing the Jeannette at last. “We knew that the important moment was coming,” Danenhower said, “when the Jeannette would be liberated from her cyclopean vise.”
It wasn’t clear, however, whether liberation was a welcome thing. Ice had ravaged the ship for so long that no one could be sure she would float when cast upon the water again. It was possible that her frozen cradle, while posing its own dangers, was the only thing keeping her afloat. Danenhower, for one, worried about “our being launched into the confusion raging about us.” He seemed certain that a liberated Jeannette would be in far greater peril than she was “while in the monster’s grip.” He thought the ship would be “crushed by the impact of antagonistic floe-pieces, among which the Jeannette would be like a glass toy.”
During the first week of June, the ice steadily loosened its hold, with results that seemed, for now, quite promising. Down below, Melville noticed that the hull was relaxing; wooden planks that had buckled and yawned apart under the pressure were assuming their old contours—lying down again, end to end. For the first time in nearly a year, the leaks slowed to a trickle.
The sun’s perpetual glare revealed to crew members the full measure of their winter squalor, what Melville called “the hideous results of forty dogs and thirty-three men living in one spot for six months.” Spring cleaning commenced in earnest; De Long had the crew scrub every surface, beat every blanket, shake out every animal skin. The holds, reeking like the Augean stables, were swept clean of bones, rat droppings, dander, offal, and dog feces. The men siphoned out the pools of stagnant water that, as De Long said, had for so long “greeted our noses.” Every removable object was brought out on the ice, scoured, and dried in the bright light. The sun-starved crew relished this strenuous, mostly outdoor work, for during the long winter everyone had become “bleached to an unnatural pallor,” said Melville, “like vegetables grown in the dark.”
After the discovery of Jeannette Island and the successful landfall on Henrietta, a guarded optimism surged through the ranks. Everyone felt that the expedition, despite its grueling hardships, had made significant accomplishments—including exploring many hundreds of miles of the planet never before seen by man. Danenhower believed that they had added considerable knowledge to the geography, understanding of currents, and meteorology of the Arctic, while dispelling many wrongheaded ideas. If nothing else, De Long said, they had “exploded so many theories of other people.” The Open Polar Sea had been put to bed, at last, as had the thermometric gateway. The Kuro Siwo had been shown to play no role in altering the climate or softening the ice north of the Bering Strait. Wrangel Land, they’d learned, was just an island in no way connected to Greenland. De Long’s expedition, through its constant soundings of the ocean floor beneath the ice, had come close to proving an important geographical truth: The polar basin was covered by an ocean, just as Petermann had said, but an ocean sheathed year-round in ice.
They’d shown something else, too. Whether by current or wind, the gyre of the ice cap, though erratic, had a prevailing direction, and they’d been generally heading the right way all the time—toward the pole. So the whalers’ idea was not entirely wrong: This was, in a way, “going downhill,” nature’s route to the top.
The Jeannette had made contributions to nutritional science and medicine, as well: Amazingly, no one had died, and no one had been touched by the horror of scurvy. “If we [can] get out safely without loss of life,” Danenhower wrote, the voyage would be judged “a grand success.”
By the end of the first week of June, the mood on board was suspended between this new optimism and growing angst. The men threw themselves into their usual work but couldn’t ignore the tingling awareness that something momentous—possibly wondrous, possibly catastrophic—was about to happen. De Long declared, “The crucial moment in our voyage is at hand.”
AROUND MIDNIGHT ON June 11, something momentous did happen. While most of the men slept away the bright polar night, the ice opened with a ragged crack, and the Jeannette slipped into the water. It sounded to Danenhower as though “she were slidin
g down hill or off the launching ways.” Once the Jeannette settled, she righted herself and bobbed gently in the frigid water.
After almost two years, the ship was … floating. It was a strange sensation. All of the men rose from their bunks, threw on clothing, and streamed onto the deck to take in the moment.
Not only was the Jeannette floating, she was holding firm. Melville and De Long studied the ship inside and out. In the hold, the leaks were negligible. The ice-locked lagoon in which she floated was dead calm and crystal clear, affording a view of the hull they had not enjoyed since she’d been in the shipyard in California. After they’d scoured every visible inch, the captain’s spirits soared: She seemed structurally sound. There was, De Long said, “no injury whatever to the after body,” and he now saw “no difficulty in keeping the ship afloat and navigating her.” All those months at Mare Island spent reinforcing the hull had apparently paid off; the Jeannette had withstood nearly two years vise-gripped by the ice.
The men cheered their good fortune. The ship, as Danenhower put it, had finally been “released from her icy fetters” and “floated calmly on the surface of the beautiful blue water … a small pool in which she could bathe her sides.” There were nasty-looking floes swirling nearby, but for now the Jeannette seemed safe.
The ship looked so idyllic basking in her little pond that around three o’clock the next day, June 12, De Long asked Melville to break out his camera and make a portrait of the fair ship. Happy to oblige, Melville shambled onto the ice with a tripod and other photographic equipment. While he fussed with the camera, Bartlett and Aneguin came in from a hunt, dragging a fresh seal, which left a smear of blood on the pack.