On his way down the precipitous slope, Newcomb had to bury his sheath knife to the hilt into the scree with each stride to keep from tumbling to his death. Suddenly, he heard someone crying up to him from below: “Look out, sir!” It was Sharvell, in a panic. When Newcomb turned around, he saw an avalanche of “huge rocks and earth coming for me.” His own movements had apparently dislodged something far above that had set the mass in motion. “Seeing a chance of safety behind an outcropping, I hastily availed myself of it and barely in time, as these missiles of death hurtled down,” Newcomb recalled. He pronounced it “a narrow shave” and continued his happy studies of seabirds.
BACK AT CAMP, Sweetman, the carpenter, was performing minor miracles of nautical engineering. All three of the boats, he’d found, were in bad shape. He doubted they would even float. In the whaleboat, for example, the sternpost was cracked, and the garboards—the planks closest to the keel—had been stove in. All the boats needed caulking, patching, and reinforcing, and some sort of rigging had to be devised to accept the crude sails that would power them toward the Siberian coast.
With limited tools, and with nothing for lumber save odd pieces of driftwood and walrus bones, Sweetman got working. The captain, who remained in camp taking barometric readings and astronomical observations, watched Sweetman with admiration. The man was a natural wizard with his hands, De Long thought. Of course, Melville had a few clever ideas as well, and in a few days the three boats were pronounced ready to sail.
Adding to this good news, Nindemann, on a survey of the southern coast of the island, had seen significant patches of open ocean. As he described it to De Long, there were “large lanes of water making to the southwest, and the ice was constantly separating to form new ones.” Offshore from their campsite, smaller lanes were beginning to clear. De Long understood that this was their chance. The icy world was finally opening up, just a little—and just in time for the closing weeks of the Arctic summer.
De Long noticed that one of the pieces of driftwood piled beside the camp was marred by a little notch. As he studied it more closely, he realized that it was the mark of an ax, and that this stick of faded gray wood had once been a fence post. From what continent or island it had drifted was anyone’s guess, but it touched him to find it here on this bleak shore; this was the first sign of civilization he had seen in two years, a subtle memento of a living world beyond his present ordeal.
With working boats and open water on which to sail them, De Long now had this piece of tooled wood to remind him that there was indeed a human society to sail for, somewhere on the southern horizon.
BEFORE HE COULD go, however, De Long had an immediate problem to ponder: What should he do with the dogs? Of the forty sled dogs they had taken aboard in Alaska, twenty-three remained. Many of them were sick, depleted, or too wild and irascible to do any real hauling. De Long saw no point in wasting any more food on them—prior to the landing on Bennett Island, they had been eating a pound of pemmican a day. In any case, there wasn’t room in the three boats for all of them.
So the dogs would have to be culled. De Long went over the pack and studied each animal. He conferred with Alexey and Aneguin, who knew them best. It was terrible work, but eleven dogs were chosen. “These,” De Long wrote, “were all worn out or subject to fits. The amount of food [they] eat is not compensated for by the work done, and I must think of human life first.”
On August 5, he gave Erichsen the order. One by one, the Dane took them behind a hummock. Eleven gunshots reverberated off the cliffs. The men cringed at the sad thought of what was happening. (“The poor brutes” was all Danenhower could say.) De Long was particularly distressed to see Jim and Tom go; they were two of his favorites, and loyal workers. The only consolation was that he still had twelve healthy dogs left—including Snoozer, who had become the expedition’s mascot.
De Long made no plans to eat any of the executed dogs. Beyond everyone’s obvious distaste for consuming canine flesh, he considered them diseased animals. Then, too, after their week on Bennett Island, the men were no longer in any danger of starving.
It was nearly impossible to bury the carcasses in the flint-hard permafrost. So, after a small ceremony, the men threw them into the sea.
THE NEXT DAY, after jettisoning some of the sleds and all of the unnecessary things, the men began to load their boats. Their interlude on Bennett Island was over.
The departure came not a moment too soon. Almost literally overnight, the door to summer seemed to be slamming shut. The world of ice and snow was returning with a vengeance. “During our short sojourn here,” Melville wrote, “how marked the changes! When we landed, the water was rushing in torrents from the glacier.” But now, the engineer noted, “winter had really set in … The streams were dried up, young ice was making,” and the Arctic flowers “which had looked so cheerful to our eyes were fast being clad in their winter garb.” De Long noted that after a week of warm weather, everyone was suddenly “freezing all the time.” Some used sticks to beat their feet “as a bastinado,” to bring back their circulation. This dubious technique, “though making our feet tingle, hardly added to our comfort.”
At nine-thirty on the morning of August 6—fifty-five days since the sinking of the Jeannette—De Long gave the order and the men shoved their three heavily laden boats into the shallows. It was, said De Long, “generally a queer day,” twenty-seven degrees, with a fickle sun struggling to bore through the clouds. The boats floated low in the water under their heavy burdens, but Sweetman’s repairs held firm.
Before saying good-bye to Bennett Island, De Long left a message in a rock cairn that Dunbar had built high up on the escarpment, marked with a paddle. The message said:
Bennett Island, Cape Emma.
Latitude N 76˚ 38’, Longitude E 153˚25’. We break camp and start southward over the ice, hoping with God’s grace to reach the New Siberian Islands, and from there make our way by boats to the coast of Siberia. We have three boats, thirty days provisions, and sufficient clothing, and are in excellent health having rested here a few days. We have lost none of our original number, and have not had scurvy. Though at times we see much open water to the southwest, we cannot yet say whether or not we can take to our boats to resume our journey, or shall be forced to resort again to dragging everything over the ice.
George W. De Long, Commanding U.S. Arctic Expedition
Then they disappeared into the squalls, three boats wallowing forward under dingy sails attached to loose masts and clattering spars. De Long looked fondly back one last time at his discovery, the island’s summit “towering up like a dome…swimming in the clouds.” As they proceeded south, threading between the ice cakes, winter seemed to close in around them. “Our beautiful island,” said Melville, “was shrouded in white.… The last we saw of it was a mere shadowy contour, curved like a whale’s back, and lifted into the heavens as though to mingle its snowy purity with the silver glory of the clouds.”
My dearest George—You will feel happy to know how universal is the interest in the Jeannette and her crew. I have received telegrams and letters by the dozen. Of course papers from all over the country have been anxious for interviews with me, but I very politely but positively decline to be interviewed. I don’t want my husband to go off on any more undertakings. I want him to stay comfortably at home, or I will surely get a divorce!
—Emma
32 · THE KNOWN WORLD
It was the time of the skeleton pack. The time of tapered pools of meltwater and cul-de-sac canals, of aquatic riddles nearly impossible to solve. The floes were too soft and hole-ridden to allow the men to make any reliable progress by sledging, but neither was there enough open water to advance by sail. So they probed and threaded among these icy labyrinths, sometimes rowing their three boats, sometimes towing them, from cake to melting cake. “So winding and intricate” were these endless channels, De Long thought, “that I am reminded of the maze at Hampton Court.”
De Long called it
the “skeleton pack” because he thought it resembled an entanglement of bones. A dinosaur graveyard floating upon the slate-blue sea. A reliquary of ice—clean white ribs, winged vertebrae, cracked skulls pocked with eye openings, bleached balls floating loose in their sockets.
For fifteen days they struggled over, through, and around it. Sometimes they would venture for half a day down an enticing lane, only to find that it gradually narrowed and then terminated. Other times they had to haul up on a slab and portage a half mile over to a larger channel. Or they would use chisels and picks and ropes to pry open a large floe piece in order to obtain passage to another neck of water. In this way, they made fitful progress toward the south—one day nine miles, another day five, another day twelve. “Very severe,” Danenhower judged this kind of amphibious travel, “but much better than dragging the sleds over the ice.” Melville called it “work for a Titan … across pools, ponds, fissures, and hummocks, sinking to all depths from our knees to our necks.”
De Long tried to hug the floes but not too closely, for they often had sharp tongues projecting underwater that could ground the boats—or rip a hull apart. The waves constantly gnawed at the ice, honeycombing it with tunnels and hidden voids. “The ice was very much wasted,” De Long wrote, “and had numerous holes extending through to the sea.” Melville described one floe piece that was “undershot by the action of the waves, which dashed madly over it, the surf flying in the air to a height of twenty feet; and, where the sea had eaten holes upward through its thickness, a thousand waterspouts cast forth spray like a school of whales.”
For several days at a time, most of the men would never leave their boat. They sat huddled together, a few pulling at the oars, while others trundled ahead on the nearby ice, scouting the leads. Those down in the hulls of the boats shivered away the long hours, stamping their numb feet in the cold water that sloshed among the floorboards. At mealtimes, they chewed their pemmican or sipped a mug of beef tea that had been boiled from the stores of snow tightly packed into the ribbed recesses of the boats. Though their progress was slow and often drearily dull, the sailors could never really sleep—or even relax, for the boats were so prone to leaks, they had to be bailed frequently.
Not only that, but the three boats were so loaded down with men and provisions that they were dangerous whenever the water turned the least bit choppy. Sometimes the narrow channels opened up into whitecapped bays, on which the boats, said Melville, “capered and scampered like circus horses.” De Long, worried that one of the boats would surely capsize, saw no way around it—they would have to reduce their aggregate weight by a third.
So the captain began hunting for things to abandon. He drew up a meticulous inventory of every single object carried by the expedition—every spool of thread, every glob of putty, every scrap of lumber, every hatchet, file, and awl—and then tossed out anything he felt was not absolutely imperative.
But by far the heaviest and most cumbersome objects in his inventory, aside from the wooden dinghy, were the long sleds, the ones with stout oaken runners that De Long had been using to carry the boats. Since leaving Bennett Island, he had been storing the sleds crosswise—that is, laying them athwart the gunwales of the three boats. This gave the effect of big, clumsy wooden wings that often splashed awkwardly in the water and caused the boats to stagger and wallow. “The sleds,” said Dr. Ambler, “are a great nuisance towering astern, hold us back and interfere with steering.”
It was obvious what De Long had to do. And yet it was a terrible gamble to have to make. In their expeditionary metamorphosis, they would have to commit to becoming entirely aquatic—which is to say, no longer travelers of the ice. They would have to dismantle the sleds and use them for firewood, with the idea that all travel hereafter would be by boat until they reached the coast of Siberia. If they encountered long stretches of ice again, the men would no longer have anything in which to convey the fragile boats; the keels would be irreparably abused as they bumped and banged and skidded across the ice. And besides, trying to drag the heavy boats without any runners would be a nearly pointless struggle for De Long’s already exhausted men.
So De Long had to trust that nature would no longer clog their way with any significant expanses of pack. This was a delicate calculation, he realized, as the Arctic summer was ending, the days already growing shorter and darkness slowly returning to the night skies. Still, it was mid-August, and every day they were inching southward, drawing closer to the 75th parallel, which left him room for optimism that the ice would continue opening up.
Then again, it might not. As he knew, Arctic literature was replete with stories of marooned men dying on surprisingly large packs, during surprisingly warm summers, and at surprisingly southern latitudes. The unpredictable Arctic had a way of squeezing in on all sides, capitalizing on any human error. Destroying the sleds, while bringing the men some measure of safety, could also be the very thing that would ensure their deaths.
Using the sleds for firewood had another urgent appeal, however: the stores of cooking alcohol had dwindled to nearly nothing. At least for a few days, this new stack of firewood would obviate the need to burn precious stove fuel. As soon as they were able to stop and haul out on a cake of ice strong enough to support a camp, De Long had Sweetman and Nindemann smash up the boat sleds, as well as the dinghy. The wood would be burned with the utmost economy—only for cooking, not for warmth. That night, as they simmered their modest dinners in crackling flames fueled by the sled wood, a few of the men wondered if they were, in effect, staring at their own funeral pyres.
DE LONG TURNED his attention to the question of the twelve remaining dogs. The problem wasn’t so much their weight as their erratic behavior. They were restless in the boats, and every time they squirmed about, water came gushing in at the oarlocks. The dogs were proving a menace. Though he knew something had to be done, De Long agonized. The dogs might be needed again for hauling (though with the sleds destroyed, that seemed doubtful); or, God forbid, they might be needed for protein. A dog lover at heart, De Long ideally wanted to keep the entire dozen, as he put it, “to the end.”
But happenstance soon intervened. One day, as the trio of boats eased along the edge of a large floe, four dogs—Smike, Armstrong, Dick, and Wolf—leapt onto the ice and scampered off. It took a while for De Long, who was well ahead in the first cutter, to learn what had happened, and by then it was too late. “Time was too precious,” he said, to put a search party on the floe to chase down the dogs and haul them back. So the three boats crept on. Later that night, as the men cooked and ate their dinner, they could hear the “doleful howling” of the stranded dogs echoing over the pack.
A few days later, after other dogs followed suit and bolted, De Long came to the reluctant conclusion that the “most sensible thing” was to shoot all the dogs. He didn’t want any more of them to stray off, only to suffer and starve on the ice. “Much to my regret,” De Long said, he had them “led off to execution.” Some of the men were terribly upset to see so many go—Erichsen was especially grieved at the shooting of his beloved Prince.
In the end, De Long elected to spare two: Kasmatka and Snoozer. They seemed to be, said Danenhower, “the only two that had sense enough to remain by us.” But Kasmatka proved too clumsy and big, and after a few days he, too, was shot. Having started with forty dogs in Alaska, the expedition was down to one. “I shall keep Snoozer,” De Long vowed, “until it becomes perilous to do so.”
MEANWHILE, LIEUTENANT DANENHOWER’S eye continued to flare up, especially on sunny days. Although he continued wearing a patch over his left eye and a goggle over the right, his condition was worsening. His bad eye was secreting copious amounts of mucus and there was, said Ambler, an “angry look” to it, with a growing area of inflammation beneath the cornea. The doctor treated it with iodide and quinine and followed its daily progress in his journal: “inflamed,” “muddy and congested,” “red and congested,” “vessels showing on sclerotic.” Ambler dreaded the i
dea of operating to remove Danenhower’s eye. The surgeon had neither the proper instruments nor anesthesia. The men would have to hold Danenhower down on the ice, and Ambler would have to remove the eye with a file, with nothing more than a little alcohol to see the patient through his pain.
Oddly, Danenhower continued to deny that his eye was a significant problem, insisting that he should be put in charge of one of the three boats. Although he had been assigned to Melville’s whaleboat, his rank was higher than Melville’s, and as a Naval Academy graduate and a navigational officer, he felt his experience and authority had been spurned. But De Long’s position on Danenhower was clear: As long as he was on Ambler’s sick list, Danenhower would not be allowed to lead other men, nor be placed in a position to endanger them.
The navigator fumed and sulked. He nursed conspiracy theories. He uttered threats of reprisal—suggesting that once they were back home, he would use his family connections to have De Long permanently removed from the Navy. Ambler watched Danenhower closely and began to think his behavior was bordering on the delusional. From Danenhower’s “very peculiar mind,” Ambler wrote, “he has gotten the idea in his head that he is being unjustly treated and has a fixed idea that there is a combination to keep him out of what he considers to be his right. He has given any amount of annoyance in his repeated attempts to get himself placed on duty. I do not consider any man who has the affliction that he has…[to be] a fit man to be put in charge of a boat & party of men under any circumstances.”
Yet Danenhower was incorrigible. He kept going back to De Long and insisting that he be given charge of Melville’s whaleboat. “You are on the sick list, sir,” De Long replied. “You are unfit to take command. You cannot see.”
Danenhower denied that he was the least bit blind. “I’m perfectly able to perform my duty.”