DE LONG AND his men had left the site of the Jeannette’s sinking on the evening of June 18. Before taking off, De Long jotted a note: “We break camp and start to the southward over the ice, hoping with God’s blessing to reach the New Siberian Islands, and from there make our way by boats to the coast of Siberia.” The captain rolled the note in a piece of black rubber and stashed it in a small water cask. He left it on the ice, hoping that it “may get somewhere.”
As with nearly everything else connected with the voyage, De Long had foreseen the likelihood of this retreat—and had long ago mapped out a meticulous plan for how to proceed. He’d thought of everything, it seemed. First, he had decided to reverse their diurnal pattern: They would sleep during the days and march in the cool crispness of the evenings, when, by late June, temperatures usually hovered around twenty degrees Fahrenheit. The snow was firmer at night, and there was plenty of light by which to see—it never grew entirely dark. By avoiding the harshest glare of midday, they would minimize snow blindness and overheating. They would eat their “dinner” at eight in the morning and crawl into their tents to sleep away the day while their drenched furs were hung out to dry in temperatures that could reach well past forty degrees.
De Long had spent many hours refining a system for organizing the ranks. He divided the thirty-three members of the expedition into three parties, each with approximately eleven men. Each party was assigned to a boat, a sledge, and a camp area and was presided over by an officer. Each sled and boat had a name, a flag, and a legend affixed to it. One legend was In hoc signo vinces—“By this sign you will conquer”; another was Nil desperandum—“Never despair.”
This system of smaller crews would be the defining idea for the long march home. Each team hauled together, rested together, cooked together, ate together, slept together, and, if necessary, would die together. De Long was quite deliberate about the arrangement. He hoped to inject an element of esprit de corps, of group loyalty, into this great effort: A man wouldn’t want to let his fellows down, and he’d want his own gang to outperform the other gangs. Clever in its simplicity, it was a system that tapped into pride of person but also pride in the group.
Subdividing the expedition into smaller teams, he felt, might also help keep small gripes from growing pernicious. De Long, a close student of Arctic exploration, was vigilant to the ever-lurking possibility of mutiny. He could never forget Captain Hall’s fate on the voyage of the Polaris. De Long understood what happened when men under extreme duress were given the latitude to express their dissatisfactions unchecked—how quickly a wrong, real or imagined, could magnify in men’s minds, how a single misconstrued incident or comment could make its way through the ranks.
The march had started out with high morale, but De Long knew it could quickly disintegrate, and he had to keep a firm handle on things. He especially worried about Collins, who continued to sulk and stew, and whose hostility to De Long remained palpable. Danenhower, also, seemed a potential flashpoint—he did not think his syphilitic blindness nearly so debilitating as De Long did, even though he stumbled like a wino through the snow, and his pride had been chafed by his being put on the sick list. Apprehending several avenues of threat, De Long reasoned that stretching the men out in three discrete groups over many miles of ice might diminish the possibility that the germ of insurrection would spread during the ordeal.
That it would be a long ordeal, that profound grudges and dissatisfactions would arise, De Long had no doubt. He knew that clawing across the Arctic ice fields to open water would require “superhuman exertions.” In the annals of exploration, he could not recall a journey quite like the one on which they were now embarked. By his estimation, they were nearly a thousand miles from the Siberian coast, although the New Siberians, a poorly mapped and little-known archipelago of uninhabited permafrost islands, might be encountered along their path. There was, of course, no possibility of rescue or relief. As far as he knew, no one on earth had the remotest idea where they were, or whether they were alive.
Their survival was in their own hands. As Danenhower put it, they would literally be “working for our lives.” De Long knew that “we must eventually come to open water by making due south.” For months, they would be reduced to the role of beasts, slaving twelve hours a day in harness. Yet at least six men were too sick to haul—their lead-poisoning symptoms, slow to abate, left them with “no motive power.” Some of the poisoned invalids were able to walk as long as they didn’t haul or carry anything, while others were so feeble they had to be pulled in the hospital sled. In the worst shape of all was Chipp. He was so exhausted that he couldn’t dress himself or even stand up. Plying him with brandy and opium, Dr. Ambler noted that Chipp was in a “great deal of pain & cramp & very restless … The circumstances are all against him … He is pale & his pulse is weak.”
“How are we to get him through?” De Long fretted about his old friend Chipp. “Last night [he] was groaning and tumbling around all the time. I am very seriously disturbed about him.”
De Long knew that they had an extremely narrow window in which to accomplish their retreat: They had only sixty days’ worth of provisions. After that, they might gain a few more weeks by eating their dogs. But that was the end of it. Beyond the finite stores of food, there was the finite number of days left in the Arctic summer. Captain De Long understood that whatever happened, they would have to reach Siberia before winter set in. It was a fight against the calendar and the available calories—they had to move quickly but also efficiently. Yet they could do neither on these stretches of slurry and slop. “Our outlook,” De Long wrote in fantastic understatement, “was not encouraging.” He wondered when his men’s essential good humor would wear off.
His mainstay was Melville. De Long knew he could not face this hegira across the ice without him. The chief engineer had proved solid as oak, his judgment always sound, his sense of fairness unerring, his improvisational wiles seemingly without limit. He seemed impervious to illness and incapable of complaint. De Long’s pronouncement on Melville was all the more powerful for its succinctness: “As long as he remains as he is—strong and well—I shall get along all right.”
WHILE ABOARD THE Jeannette, the men had never been in want of food. For two years, they’d always had plenty of it, and enough variety in their diet to keep them satisfied. Now, on the ice, their diet was essentially reduced to two staples. There was Liebig’s beef extract, which they sipped as a warm broth, like consommé. And there was pemmican, a substantial mixture of dried meat, mashed berries, and animal tallow that had sustained many an exploring expedition over the decades. Pemmican was hearty, nutritious stuff that kept for years, weighed little, stored easily, and rarely went “off.” But it was boring, boring, boring. De Long noted with disgust how pemmican had become “fish, flesh, and fowl to us.” It had a sticky, salty sameness that was nauseating. It stuck to the roof of the mouth and glazed over the teeth and tongue. It radiated sour dyspeptic fumes from the stomach. It clung to their hands and fingers. It was everywhere, on them and in them: They had become walking pemmican.
Then, too—and there was no way to put this delicately—pemmican corked them up. It lingered in the system like cement and strained the nether regions. Comparative scatology became a conversation point around camp stoves. Dr. Ambler taxed his medical dignity by largely becoming a dispenser of laxatives, cod liver oil, and suppositories. (Ambler’s medical logs were soon peppered with charming entries: “Lauterbach better this A.M., bowels blown out freely … Alexey feels quite well to-day, had movement from his bowels … I myself passed blood freely from bowels on one occasion.…”)
All that pemmican also set the men to dreaming, as they never had before, about food. They grew nostalgic for the admittedly bland but comparatively excellent meals they’d eaten on the Jeannette. Sitting around their little stoves, picking pemmican jerky from their teeth, they fell into spirited discussions of the feasts they would prepare when they returned home. Chipp dreamed
of a broiled partridge on crisp points of toast. De Long could not get off the subject of fried oysters. For Newcomb, it was pumpkin pie. For others, it was hogs’ jowls and greens, corn on the cob, a plate of hash, or rich desserts. Melville fantasized about a whole canvasback duck—the engineer went on and on about how he would prepare the bird, and soon the men were all discussing the “luxury of carving and feasting on just such parts as we chose, each to his own taste—ah!”
Beyond their drab diet, the men suffered from a problem even more irksome: constant wetness. As the Arctic world slowly melted with summer’s advance, the men found that they could never get dry. Their skin, clammy and wrinkled, sloughed off in layers. Their sleeping bags became like pulp. Water and sludge spurted from their boots with every shambling step. Their rawhide soles, said Melville, became so soft they “took on the consistency of fresh tripe.” When they tried to sleep, the heat of their own bodies would melt the mushy snow beneath their rubber blankets, and soon they would be lying in puddles of cold water. Dr. Ambler wrote that “sleeping in wet clothes in a wet bag on wet ice makes every bone & separate muscle ache in the morning. To-day I have not been able to draw a breath without pain.”
As though to mock their general misery, Starr came across a handwritten note stuffed deep inside a bag of coffee—a droll message, cruel under these circumstances, evidently written by whoever had packed the container in New York City, back in the spring of 1879. Starr read the note aloud, chuckling: “This is to express my best wishes for your furtherance and success in your great undertaking. Hoping when you peruse these lines you will be thinking of the comfortable homes you left behind you for the purpose of aiding science. If you can make it convenient, drop me a line. My address, G.J.K. 10 Box, New York City.”
THEN A NEW problem began to reveal itself: Something was wrong with the dogs. First it was Jim, who experienced a severe seizure one day while pulling in harness. They cut Jim from the team, and he lay on the ice for quite a while, squirming and shaking violently, as if suffering from profound cold, even though it was a bright, warm day. A few days later, Foxy suffered a similar fit and was soon discovered drowned in a pool of water. Tom experienced a different sort of attack. He became disoriented for several minutes, appearing woozy. Then, just as he seemed to return to his senses, he suddenly wheeled on his pulling partner, Wolf, and attacked him in a blind rage.
De Long could not deduce the cause of the malady. Something in their food—or not enough food? A contagious disease? Exhaustion? Whatever it was, he could ill afford to give up the services of so many dogs, as he had already lost a good number. Some had proved so mean and quarrelsome in harness that they were declared unusable and eventually shot as food for their fellows. Jack, one of the better ones, and a favorite among the men, had to be temporarily relieved from pulling so his lame back could heal. One day in the confusion of ferrying across a yawning lead, Jack was left behind on an ice floe. It was several hours before he was discovered missing, and at that point, De Long proclaimed it too hazardous to go back and mount a search. Jack was not seen again.
Soon some of the men began to experience behavioral breakdowns not unlike those suffered by the dogs. The first one to crack was the last one De Long would have expected: Edward Starr. De Long had thought of Starr as “a man whose conduct has been so uniformly beyond reproach.” Along with Nindemann and Erichsen, he was always an even-tempered and eager workhorse. But one day while hauling with Melville and a small team of others, Starr reached into the boat, picked up a pair of wet boot soles, and flung them on the ice, growling in disgust. Melville turned around and glowered at Starr: The soles were Melville’s, and he’d spent hours gluing and stitching them for later use. “You pick them up—and don’t do that again!” Melville ordered. But Starr refused to obey. “I don’t care whose soles they are, they were on my sleeping-bag!” he yelled. Melville was livid. He repeated the order, and again Starr, growing even surlier, refused to retrieve the soles.
At this point, De Long intervened and commanded Starr to obey Melville’s order. Still Starr refused. He stood there by the boat, hurling expletives at no one in particular. “A nice place to put wet boot soles!” he grumbled. Summoning the full force of his personality, De Long told Starr to stop talking and repeated the order to go pick up the soles—twice, then three times. All the men in the vicinity stared in amazement. Finally, reluctantly, Starr obeyed, but he would not shut up.
“Stand apart!” De Long commanded. He approached Starr and interrogated him: “What have you to say for yourself?” Starr strangely claimed that he didn’t know Melville had ever spoken to him. “Consider yourself under arrest,” the captain said. He would deal with Starr later.
This was the first time anyone had openly flouted De Long’s authority. It was a small crack, an incident sparked by an absurd and trifling set of circumstances. But it was a sign of things to come.
ON THE EIGHTH day of their retreat, De Long took astronomical measurements to determine the extent of their progress. It was June 25. He entered into the enterprise hopefully, for the amount of effort thus far expended, and the optimism among the ranks, could not have been higher. Using his sextant, he took a meridian altitude reading of 77°46’ N. This was curious, and surely wrong, for it was considerably north of the latitude reading he had captured at the location of the Jeannette’s sinking—indeed, it was the northernmost point of the entire expedition.
The next day, De Long, employing a celestial navigation method called the Sumner line of position, validated his earlier reading. He wondered if there was something wrong with his equipment—perhaps the jolts and jounces of their ice traverse had broken something, or perhaps he had made a simple mistake. He surmised that a refraction of starlight, or some other phenomenon of the High Arctic, might be interfering with the instruments. He triple-checked his calculations. He plotted more Sumner lines, then took another sextant observation at midnight. The readings came out the same.
De Long ransacked his navigational knowledge. What was the problem—where was the error? At noon the next day, he asked Melville to take an upper-meridian reading. Only then, when the latitude came back the same, did he accept the truth. For the past eight days, they had, by his guess, traveled some twenty miles to the south. But the observations indicated otherwise. In fact, they had drifted north and northwest more than twenty-eight miles. In other words, the ice pack over which they were toiling was shifting faster to the north than they were traveling south. Through all their grueling efforts, they had gone backward. Or, as Melville preferred to put it, they had “retroceded.” It was, De Long wrote, in another vintage understatement, “enough to make one thoughtful and anxious.”
De Long couldn’t bring himself to broadcast his demoralizing discovery to the men. He couldn’t even confess it to some of his closest officers. “I dodge [them],” he said, “lest they should ask me questions.” The captain hated this evasion—it cut against his nature to prevaricate or hide anything—but given the dire circumstances, he couldn’t see a way around it. He was sure that “great discouragement, if not entire loss of zeal, would ensue were such a disagreeable bit of news generally known.”
The only ones he could confide in were Dr. Ambler and Melville. The engineer did not mince words in acknowledging the gravity of their predicament. “Our situation,” he said, “[is] absolutely hopeless.” He noticed that the men soon became “despondent and suspicious, rightly guessing the reason why the results of the first observation had been kept secret.”
It was then that Captain De Long sounded his very first note of genuine despair. “If we go on this way,” he wrote, “we will never get out.”
Oh my dear husband—
I do so long to see you that I cannot write properly. I can hardly wait for the summer to pass, bringing its good news or bad. I have been patient so long, but it seems almost impossible for me to keep it up much longer. Still I will try my best.
How tired and weary you must be; how out of all patience
at your long exile; how you must long for home and family and friends. What trials and privations you have had to undergo. I pray you may come out of them victorious and amply repaid for all your sacrifices. Sylvie and I will try to make you forget them when you return to us.
I am building all sorts of plans of future happiness when you return and you are no doubt doing the same; we must try to carry them out and fill our lives with as much joy as this earthly globe will admit.
29 · THE PHANTOM CONTINENT
The shamans gathered on the high grass outside the palisade fort, beneath the double cross of the old Russian Orthodox church. On a warm summer day, with Arctic flowers blossoming all around, they began a ceremony to call on the polar gods. Natives from the coastal settlements and natives from far into the interior were crowded along the shore. They danced, sang, chanted, and tapped their drums, invoking the spirits of the Far North.
Captain Hooper had called at St. Michael, Alaska, to buy coal and provisions before heading toward Wrangel and the High Arctic to look for De Long. Now, though skeptical of the proceedings, he wanted the shamans to tell him whether they could learn anything of the fate of the Jeannette. What did the deities know? Was De Long still alive? Was it worth the risk to steer the Corwin into the ice in search of the lost explorers?
These were questions of special interest in St. Michael, since two local Inuits, Alexey and Aneguin, had signed on with De Long’s expedition and had not been seen in two years. The natives around St. Michael had vivid memories of De Long’s men—the furs they had purchased, the dogs they had brought on board, their ambitious talk of taking their boat farther north than any man had ever dared. Alexey’s wife was still waiting for him, but like all of the villagers, she was worried.