Dr. Ambler could no longer keep track of all the sprains, cramps, contusions, and muscle spasms he’d treated. He was running out of pain-dulling drugs. Some of the men were developing queer tingling neuropathies in their hands and feet—as well as sores from frostbite. Danenhower’s eye was inflamed again, a condition Ambler found particularly worrisome. Chipp’s bout with probable lead poisoning had left him near death. Heinrich Kaack’s feet were covered in hideous blood blisters. The suppurating sore on Alexey’s leg would not heal, even though Ambler diligently kept it dressed in collodion solution and clean bandages. Erichsen was up nights with powerful toothaches, and Lauterbach was doubled over with such piercingly painful cramps that, De Long said, he looked as though “he were going to attend a funeral at any moment.”
Some men suffered frequent convulsions. Others seemed to be veering toward madness. Thirst and hunger were constant companions. Their tents leaked. Their furs stank. Their squishy boots oozed cold seawater. A new undertow of despair attended their work. The whole mission on which they were embarked—trying to reach open water—seemed increasingly dubious, for the three wooden boats they dragged were now so badly banged up (“limber as a basket,” Danenhower judged them) that it was doubtful they would float once they could be launched.
The dogs, meanwhile, were so hungry they had taken to eating their leather harnesses; they had fallen into such an agitated state that they were of little use. “The knots and tangles they can get in,” said Ambler, were “soul provoking and [the] cause of profound and deep swearing.” The plain fact was that the dogs were slowly starving to death. “Each man had a favorite animal, and would share his rations with him,” Danenhower wrote, “but this was not sufficient.” Many of the sickest, hungriest dogs were experiencing epileptic fits, then dying, one by one—leaving the humans to haul even more weight.
But many of the men could no longer pull. Some couldn’t walk. A few couldn’t even stand. These De Long referred to as “the ineffectuals.” A “sorry looking set,” Melville described their encampment, a “heap of rags, bags, and old battered boats.”
So far, De Long had managed to keep remarkable discipline in the ranks without resorting to force—in fact, he had not struck a single blow during the entire expedition. Still, dissident thoughts, perhaps mutinous ones, hung in the air. Not that anyone thought he could improve on De Long’s leadership. Not that anyone had better ideas on what to do or where to go. If the dissatisfaction had spread, it would have been an insurrection born of general discontent. Small personality defects had magnified. Petty wrongs swelled into high crimes. Grudges became righteous and all-consuming.
De Long was having difficulties with the two civilian scientists. Newcomb was proving useless—the man wouldn’t work at all aside from what Dr. Ambler called “piddling.” He spent his days somewhere in the back, muttering feeble obscenities at the officers. Melville found Newcomb “neither useful nor ornamental.” The young naturalist was the smallest, weakest member of the whole party but also the most obstinate. Ambler was nearly at his wit’s end with him. “He has not yet learned to obey without speaking,” the doctor wrote, “[and] will get himself hurt if he don’t desist.”
The situation with Collins, meanwhile, had only deteriorated. The hatred the Irishman felt for De Long, and vice versa, had become toxic. De Long kept Collins under a kind of house arrest, isolating him from the others, perhaps out of fear that he would indeed try to provoke a mutiny. The other officers seemed united in their disdain for Collins. Though a fair shot with a rifle, he was otherwise clumsy and inept, they thought, often more hindrance than help out on the ice. (Melville said he lumbered like an “Irish cow.”) At one point, De Long testily yelled to Collins, “Don’t let me see you put your hand to another thing unless I order you!” At least in his lonesome misery, Collins had stopped making puns.
In the face of all their trials, De Long sprinkled his journal with further gems of understatement. Gazing at a puzzle of jammed ice and meltwater that would require weeks to cross, he stoically predicted: “We are in for a time.” Hopelessly disoriented by fog for the better part of a week, De Long would only allow that “we are in the dark as to our position.” Halted by a lashing blizzard, he scribbled that the day’s weather was “anything but satisfactory.” After he plunged into a crevice and soaked himself in freezing water up to his neck, De Long wryly mentioned that the day had involved “a troublous trip.”
To struggle like a spavined mule yet advance only a mile or two a day was “rather discouraging,” De Long admitted. But he seemed to rise to the suffering—to thrive on it. His capacity for pain, his disdain for any kind of languor, his steel-cut work ethic—where did it come from? It was a masochism that was nevertheless warmed by sanguinity. He was nearly always able to locate some spare pocket of optimism.
Turning to his journal at the end of one nightmarish day, he wrote, “Tired, cold, wet, hungry, sleepy, disappointed, and disgusted; but ready to tackle it again to-morrow.”
There were others who shared De Long’s outlook and determination. Among the seamen, Nindemann, Louis Noros, Bartlett, Sweetman, and Erichsen stood above the rest. They were strong as oxen, seemingly impervious to disease, always solicitous of others, and driven by indomitable will. Among the officers, Melville continued to be De Long’s rock. The engineer could do no wrong.
Still, even with men like these, De Long recognized that this tramp across the pack was quite nearly impossible—physically, mentally, and spiritually. “There is no work in the world harder than this sledging,” he wrote. “The drag, drag, the slips and jerks, the sudden bringing up of the hauling belt across the chest, are fearfully trying; and the working with pickaxes through flinty ice makes every bone ache. Men cannot do this … ten and a half hours each day without breaking down.”
Ambler went further, suggesting that “such work by men could never have been done before & I hope may never be done again.” Recalling his days in a Civil War prisoner-of-war camp, he added, “I have seen something of men in trying times, but I have yet to see men who will equal these. For 40 days we have been under way, with all kinds of … hardships; but not a murmur & tonight after 19 hours of work, they are cheerful and come up smiling.”
DE LONG HAD to agree with Ambler, but the captain could see that the men’s good cheer was flagging. They were depleting their supply of pemmican and had not seen any wildlife for a long time. Open water was still nowhere in sight—these moving mazes of mush and rubble seemed to stretch out forever, with no landmarks to aim for, no fixed destination on the horizon to give purpose to their toil. The central coast of Siberia was still more than five hundred miles away. And, De Long knew, time was running out; the short Arctic summer would soon expire, and they would be trapped on the winter ice.
At least then, however, the ice would make some manner of sense. At least then it would freeze into something reliable, with surfaces that feet could understand. There was no order to this kind of ice, no consistency. Its every feature—its color, texture, solidity, expansiveness, crystalline structure, collapse points, tendency to shift, potential for fracturing, capacity for absorbing or reflecting light—seemed in constant flux.
This was what Petermann had called the Paleocrystic Sea. It was the product of millennia’s smashing churn of the elements acting on freezing and frozen and thawing and refreezing ice. One could stare at it all day and never see coherence. Needle ice gave way to striped puddles, to thick driven snow, to rippled pockets of new ice, to mires of goop, to lagoons of open water, to ruined battlefields of shards and bricks, to spectral blue sculptures of ancient ice, and to the wind-whipped corrugations of snow that the Russians called sastrugi. The pack’s logic, its forces of repulsion and attraction, were inscrutable. It was the very definition of random.
Splashing and stumbling over it, the men kept trying to find the lip of some pattern, something predictable or usable, some groove they could lay their thoughts into. But none was apparent. This melting icescap
e seemed to observe an Arctic corollary of pi—a sequence that never repeated or resolved itself. Every scalloped intricacy, every winking lane, every hummock and pressure ridge, every honeycombed crevice offered mysterious new warps of design.
At first, De Long strove for a vocabulary to characterize this exasperating quality of the ice. On page after page in his journal, he kept varying the descriptions. He spoke of “ugly openings,” of fields “terribly wild and broken,” “such a jam, so full of holes,” “ice resembling alabaster,” “lanes [that] meander away to narrow veins between piled up masses,” “terrible masses of hummocks and rubble,” “puzzling masses of ice and water.” Finally, he seemed to tire of descriptors, settling instead on one all-purpose word: mess. “A fearful mess,” he wrote, “the rotten and ugly mess,” “such a mess of … rotten ice,” “a confused mess,” “a mess of loose pack,” “one bad mess,” “the sliding, shifting mess.”
Another problem with this universally churned-up ice was that it was almost impossible to find fresh—truly fresh—water. De Long had instructed the water crew to scrape ice and snow only from the highest hummocks and, even then, to go only one inch below the surface. The water they harvested generally tasted fine. But when Dr. Ambler conducted a silver nitrate test on their supply of drinking water, it showed an alarming degree of salinity. The conclusion was unmistakable: Salt permeated this icy world, even its highest, safest places. For more than a month, they had been drinking brackish water without knowing it—adding further salt to their already salty pemmican diet. De Long was able to chalk up another one in the long tally of August Petermann’s dangerously wrong ideas: The late cartographer’s theory that the ice pack was a limitless source of fresh water, De Long said, “has been thoroughly exploded.”
There was no telling which of their present health troubles were attributable to or exacerbated by their steady intake of brine. De Long worried specifically about scurvy, which many then thought was tied in some way to salt intake—and he increased the daily ration of concentrated lime juice accordingly. But the captain knew they couldn’t go on this way much longer. They had to find fresh water.
ON THIS INDEPENDENCE Day, the men tried to enjoy themselves, happy to remove their slitted ice goggles and relinquish all concerns about navigating the “mess.” But De Long, alone in his office tent, lapsed into an uncharacteristically doleful mood. He was lost in bittersweet thoughts that took him back three years. “Our flags are all flying in honor of the day, though to me it is a very blue one,” he wrote. “Three years ago to-day in Havre the Jeannette was christened, and many pleasant things were said, and anticipations formed, all of which have gone down with the ship. I did not think that three years afterward would see us all out on the ice, and a story of a lost ship to carry back to our well-wishers at home.”
On that fine day in Le Havre, with Emma at De Long’s side, Bennett had spoken of sending Stanley off to the Arctic should the Jeannette run into trouble. But, realistically, De Long understood that he and his men were far beyond any rescuer’s reach. Bennett couldn’t help them, and neither could their country, which would be celebrating its 105th birthday once the sun came up on the far side of the planet. The American flags snapping over the tents seemed to mock De Long, seemed to symbolize his nation’s fecklessness and his own irredeemable solitude. His only hope, he knew, was to try to redouble everyone’s resolve. They would have to save themselves.
Yet the responsibility for preserving human life was beginning to weigh on him. “My duty to those who came with me is to see them safely back, and to devote all my mind and strength to that end,” he wrote later that day. He had to look “misfortune in the face and…learn what its application may be.”
EIGHT DAYS LATER, on July 12, De Long’s fortunes seemed to turn. Early that morning, something flickered on the horizon. Dunbar, as usual, spotted it first. He had marched far out ahead of the others, planting his black flags in the snow. Just for a moment, in the southern distance, a vent opened in the clouds, and he swore he saw an island—a large one, luminous, bulging with mountains. Then, just as abruptly, the clouds snapped shut, leaving Dunbar to wonder if he’d really seen what he thought he had.
A little later, after supper, the clouds opened again, and this time nearly everyone saw something. “A bright vision arose before our eyes,” Melville wrote. A spontaneous cheer erupted from the ranks. Danenhower described it as a “ ‘whaleback’ that looked very much like a snow-covered island,” though it appeared so “greatly distorted by atmospheric effects” that “a great many would not believe that it existed at all.” De Long was extremely skeptical. “There was something which certainly looked like land,” he conceded. “But the fog assumes so many deceiving forms that one cannot be sure of anything.”
Still, the captain’s interest was sufficiently piqued that he broke out his Petermann charts and studied the sketchy topography of the New Siberian Islands. According to his calculations of their current position, the nearest known island—marked on his map as “Ostrov Faddeyevsky”—was more than 120 miles to the southwest. That was too far away to be the smudgy mass they had just spotted. “I cannot believe that we have seen land to-day,” he concluded, and he dismissed the sighting as a mirage.
But the next day, the men spotted the island once again. This time, the details were so vivid that there was no doubt. “The sun shone clearly in the southward,” Melville wrote, “and the land stood boldly revealed; its blue mountain peaks rising grandly aloft, the ice and water showing plainly below, while a white, dazzling cloud floated dreamily above.” It was “the most perfect scene,” the engineer said. “It inspired us with new hope,” like a “second Land of Promise.”
De Long reshaped his course to intercept the landmass, which he had to assume was Faddeyevsky Island after all. At that moment, the tenor of the march changed profoundly. Land could mean food, fresh water, driftwood, and the possibility of rescue. Just as important, land was something to shoot for, an impetus, a focal point. The island was still many miles off. But its effect was electrifying. Everyone rallied again around Nindemann’s crisp “Yo-Heave-Yup!” and dug in as never before. Said Melville: “Each man straightaway became a Hercules.”
As they drew near the island, wildlife presented itself. The skies coursed with guillemots, Ross’s gulls, auks, pelagic cormorants, and other birds. Out on the ice ahead, the shadowy forms of sea mammals were glimpsed. On July 14, with De Long’s permission, Collins grabbed a Winchester repeating rifle and took off on a hunt. An hour later he came back with a seal. The men were all so starved for fresh meat that De Long dispensed with his habit of first hanging up the carcass to dissipate the animal’s heat. Instead they butchered the seal then and there, removing the blubber and the spine and slicing up the warm flesh into small chunks, which they promptly boiled in a stew of beef-extract broth.
It tasted sublime. “It was a feast I shall long remember,” De Long said. “We feel as if we had dined at Delmonico’s.” Ambler’s assessment was more equivocal. At first it “tasted very well” and he “ate a good allowance, but at the last I did not fancy it as much as when I started.” Afterward, they rendered the blubber into grease, which they daubed on their leaky boots and tents.
A few days later, Collins and Ambler, hunting together, bagged an even bigger quarry: a walrus. Collins got the first shot into the swimming mammal, hitting him near the eye. “Down went the walrus,” said De Long, “and we thought we had seen the last of him.” Moments later, though, some in the party heard a raspy blowing sound and saw large spatterings of ejected blood on the ice pack. Then Ambler ran down the walrus and shot him five times in the skull. Dunbar, giving chase with a knife, pierced a hole through a flipper and hooked a line through it just as he was starting to sink.
A large party of men hauled the walrus to camp. He was a young bull, weighing as much as fifteen hundred pounds. De Long was thrilled by their bonanza. “The choice parts, tenderloin, sirloin, heart, liver, brain, and flippers, will
more than suffice for three meals for us,” he wrote, “and the dogs may eat all day if they like.” When they butchered the animal, they found shrimp, anemones, sea cucumbers, and smelt in his belly. Every part of the carcass would be used. The skin would be cut into pieces for boot soles, the blubber would become grease and fuel for cooking, bones would be used to shore up the now rickety sleds, and the tusks would be given as trophies to the shooters, Collins and Ambler—but would see use as makeshift pickaxes. De Long judged the resulting stew “excellent,” though “not as good as seal stew, the meat coarser and not so sweet.” Newcomb thought the boiled skin “not unlike pig’s feet, and with vinegar I think would be very good.”
FOUR DAYS LATER, their larder grew even richer. On July 24, a young polar bear, his coat smeared dirty brown from forays on dry land, was sighted. Alexey and Aneguin stalked the animal for a while, firing two shots at long range but missing. A few hours later, Carl Görtz sighted it. The animal had come within five hundred yards of camp, apparently attracted by the scent of simmering walrus. “Görtz crawled within one hundred yards of him unnoticed,” De Long noted, “and planted his two bullets with good results.”
The meals they had from the bear outdid even their recent feasts. Using empty pemmican cans for stoves, they fried steaks and chops. Then, said Melville, they “roasted his paws, and made stews of his flank pieces, using his blubber for fuel.” Two days later, the carcass was totally consumed. In a few sittings, they had eaten a five-hundred-pound bear.
The effect all this fresh meat had on the men could not be exaggerated. Laughter returned. Their observations grew keener. Their stamina increased. Everyone, even Chipp, came off the sick list. As they marched toward the island, the galley songs welled up again.