“I cannot let you put other peoples’ lives in jeopardy,” De Long said, adding that the navigator’s continual complaining was “very unofficer-like.”
“Am I to take that as a private reprimand?” Danenhower demanded.
“You may take it as anything you please,” roared De Long, dismissing him from his tent.
ON AUGUST 20, fourteen days since leaving Bennett Island, De Long and his men were camped on a large crust of ice after a hard night’s travel. They were in high spirits, because off to the south, all they could see was unobstructed water. Finally, it seemed, they had come to the end of the skeleton pack, and to the edge of the open sea. Improving things further, during the forenoon, George Boyd cried out to De Long that he had spotted land to the southwest.
De Long, conservative as usual, raised his field glasses and studied the smudgy form himself, harrumphing that he was “not sure about it.” But by two in the afternoon, “it showed plainly enough.” Examining his Petermann charts, De Long surged with new optimism. There was, he said, “no doubt in my mind that it was the Island of New Siberia”—Ostrov Novaya Sibir, as the Russians called it. It looked to be about twenty miles off. Novaya Sibir was a low-lying island but fairly huge—some four thousand square miles in area. According to Petermann’s notes, it was uninhabited but had been visited at times by fossil hunters dispatched by the czar to search for mammoth tusks.
De Long thrilled to the idea: Here, at last, was the known world. For the first time since drifting away from Herald Island two years earlier, De Long was seeing land that existed on a chart.
In anticipation of their first open-sea journey, they spent the rest of the day, and much of the night, patching the hulls, repairing the rigging, redistributing goods, packing snow into the boats, and jettisoning their last ounces of unnecessary things. In his tent that night, De Long wrote, “I hope for good weather tomorrow, when, with God’s blessing, I expect to start on our journey afloat.”
But the next morning, De Long emerged from his tent and was stunned by what he saw: To the south, there was nothing but ice. Overnight, a powerful shift in the winds had brought the ice fields down from the north and driven them against Novaya Sibir. The way to the island was now completely blocked. There were no lanes, no channels, just a churning expanse of pack. “So much ice has closed in around us,” De Long said, “that it looked as if we had never been afloat at all.” Melville could not hide his astonishment: “Not a speck of water anywhere,” he said. “The winds had crowded the pack together, and made it appear as though we would never get out of the wilderness.”
De Long sent a reconnaissance party out to test the condition of the ice. It was hopeless, they found, an unforgiving amalgam of crust and glop. There could be no forward progress through it or over it, either by boat or by sledging. And anyway, De Long had no sleds on which to convey his boats and—besides Snoozer—no dogs with which to haul them.
He couldn’t believe their bad luck. A few hours earlier the way had been clear, but now De Long and his men were stuck here, prisoners, once again, of the ice. He had no choice but to stay put and hope for another shift in the winds. Said Melville: “We could do naught but await a favorable change … and this we proceeded to do, having accustomed ourselves to make the best of every misfortune.” Dr. Ambler began to think a conspiracy was afoot. “The Fates,” he said, “seem to be against us.”
FOR A DAY, then two days, then three, they remained trapped on the ice. The inaction oppressed De Long. They were wasting precious time while exhausting equally precious supplies—and there was nothing he could do about it. Three days became a week, and still they could not budge. With each page of his journal, De Long’s anxiety mounted. “Another lost day … The day passed in dreary stupidity … Another weary day dragged along … Seven days have been utterly lost … The situation is the same, discouraging, disheartening, consuming provisions without doing work.”
Even though De Long put everyone on half rations, their stores were dwindling at an alarming rate. They had plenty of pemmican—some fourteen hundred pounds of the stuff—but everything else was going fast. They ran out of sugar. They ran out of hardtack. They ran out of lime juice. They boiled most of their beef extract. They brewed the last of their coffee. They burned all of the sled firewood. “Our situation worse than ever,” Melville said. “Our existence [is] now a mere question of provisions.”
They also ran out of tobacco, and this they missed the most. A few men had secret stashes, but for the most part the tobacco had been smoked up. In its place, many had started to smoke a mixture of tea leaves and old coffee grounds, which produced a horrible acrid smell but satisfied some of their cravings. Mainly, it gave them something to do, something to take their minds off their toil and tedium.
At first, De Long scoffed at the faux-tobacco blend, but then, as his own supply petered out, he warmed to the idea. “I expect I shall come [around] to it to-morrow,” he wrote, “for my last pipeful of tobacco is to be smoked after supper to-night.”
Within a few days, De Long found himself growing fidgety and irritable: “I confess I have been perfectly miserable for want of a smoke.” But soon the always cheerful Erichsen came to his aid. The big Dane “tendered me a small packet of the precious article,” De Long wrote. “I declined more than a pipeful, but he insisted upon my taking more, saying they had enough for some days in No. 6 tent.” De Long accepted the present with profuse thanks, and promptly shared it with Ambler and Nindemann.
After supper that night, De Long sat down to a luxurious smoke. “And now,” he said, with a nod to Shakespeare, “Richard is himself again.”
A few days later, De Long, having used up Erichsen’s gift, finally succumbed to the temptation of ersatz tobacco. “Being miserable all day without something to smoke, I had tea-leaves to-night, and, to my pleasant surprise, got considerable comfort.”
THEIR SENTENCE DRAGGED on. Eight days, nine days—and still there was no movement. Actually, that was not precisely true: The sprawling ice jam before them refused to clear, but it was moving. The whole swirl of chunky slush on which they were encamped had been drifting all the time, and generally in the right direction: south. Whenever the fog lifted, De Long could see that their position was changing dramatically. Novaya Sibir was now off to the east, but a new island had slid into view, to the southwest.
It was Faddeyevsky, De Long determined, another vaguely charted fragment in the New Siberian archipelago. The uninhabited island had been named after a Russian fur trader, Faddeyev, who had once spent a season there hunting for pelts and had built a tiny hut. De Long realized that the winds and prevailing currents had been funneling their floe piece down into the narrow channel that separated Novaya Sibir and Faddeyevsky. Though trapped all this time, they had in fact made fair progress.
On the ninth day of their stay upon the ice, August 29, an excited Chipp reported to De Long’s tent and informed him of a promising lead that had opened up toward the southwest—generally in the direction of Faddeyevsky. At once, De Long broke camp and had all the provisions and boats hauled several hundred yards across the floe to the edge of this new channel. They set up their tents at the water’s edge that night, and early the next morning, seeing that the lead had yawned open even farther, De Long had the boats prepared for launch. The channel was aswirl with shards of fast-moving ice, yet after ten days of imprisonment, De Long was eager to try it. “To load boats in such a hell-gate was a ticklish thing,” he wrote. But they pushed off from the floe and began their cautious voyage down the channel—hoping that, through its sinuous intrigues, it would somehow lead them to Faddeyevsky.
IT TOOK ALL day, but they wended toward the island, and though shoals complicated their arrival, they eventually beached on Faddeyevsky’s desolate shores. Bennett Island had offered its rocky pleasures, but this was the first real soil they had walked on since leaving Alaska. “My relief was great after the strain of the past ten days,” De Long said. “To get moss and grass under
my feet again warmed me, and my freezing feet got back their usual temperature.” They moved from the beach up to a kind of terrace of spongy lichen, where they erected camp and collected a pile of driftwood. “Snoozer tore around in glee, chasing lemmings, whose holes were abundant,” said De Long, “while we human beings more seriously sought for eatable game.”
The men found deer droppings that were quite fresh, pieces of velvety deer horn, and the tracks of a hare. A flock of black geese winged across the tundra. Another party located a pond, which immediately became their source of drinking water. Newcomb found two huge fossilized bones—he described them as the tibia and fibula of a woolly mammoth. A mile and a half from the place where they landed, Sweetman and Ah Sam discovered a hut tumbling to decay near the bank of a clean rushing stream—it was likely the hut Faddeyev himself had built decades earlier. But there were no signs of recent human presence. When De Long sent several hunters to follow the animal tracks, it was clear the deer had taken off far into the interior, no doubt spooked by the expedition’s arrival. The hunters shot a dozen ducks but saw little sense in spending precious time and energy chasing down the deer; the island was too large—Faddeyevsky is more than three thousand square miles—and its boggy tundra was dotted with innumerable ponds and lakes.
So De Long decided to pitch a temporary camp on the night of August 30, then move on. The next morning, they slipped into the bay and hugged the southern coast of Faddeyevsky, heading west. There was no ice to speak of, but the water was often dangerously shallow—the three boats kept running aground on sandbars. From the boats, the men could see that the island teemed with life—ducks, geese, owls, and a few seals were quickly spotted. At around five-thirty p.m., De Long tried to land again on Faddeyevsky’s coast to make supper and pitch another camp, but the approach was so rife with shoals he could not get within five hundred yards of the beach.
When darkness fell, it became apparent that they would have to spend the night in their boats—a night, it turned out, that would require nearly constant “tacking and pulling to keep in water deep enough to float us,” De Long wrote. “Sleep was impossible for anybody, and we waited in wretched discomfort for the morning’s light.”
For the next three days, they kept nosing along the island’s contours, covering some seventy miles of coastline. The twelve ducks that had been shot on Faddeyevsky swished around in the bottom of De Long’s cutter—he was saving them for a later feast. The seas were choppy, and De Long found that unless they maintained full speed ahead, the swells would pour over the rails, causing them to lose control of the boats. “As it was,” he said, “a sea would come in occasionally, wetting us to the skin and forcing us to bail as well as pump constantly.” With each new wave, the men would get a thorough dousing. “Ye gods!” wrote Melville. “What a cold bath!”
The second cutter, captained by Chipp, proved the slowest of the three boats, and it kept lagging behind the others. Then it disappeared. For forty-eight hours, De Long had no idea what had become of Chipp and his detachment of nine men, which included the beloved ice pilot, Dunbar. De Long and Melville hauled up on a platform of ice and, hoisting black flags from their masts, waited for any sign of Chipp. De Long was sick with worry—Chipp, his right-hand man, his lieutenant, his old friend from their Greenland days. “Anxiety and care seem to be my steady companions now,” De Long wrote, his thoughts fixed on Chipp’s possible fate, “and they are doubled in intensity.”
Late in the afternoon of September 3, De Long heaved a sigh of relief: Chipp’s cutter was spotted, skirting the edge of the ice to the north. A cheer went up as the missing men reunited with De Long. “How rejoiced we were to see them!” said Melville. Chipp and his crew had had a horrible time of it. His cutter had grounded against a sandbank and at one point had nearly flooded. Chipp, Dunbar, and all their men looked weak and battered—Dunbar, especially. The whaler was having fainting spells and problems with his balance. Upon examination, Dr. Ambler found that he’d had “an attack of giddiness” and was experiencing heart palpitations. “Dunbar looks quite ill,” noted De Long, who saw him “fall out and stagger to one side, when he sat down. I am afraid [he] has suffered more in the second cutter than he will admit. This is indeed serious, for in the hourly excitements no one can tell what may occur.”
While Ambler took care of Dunbar as best he could, De Long decided to celebrate the return of Chipp’s party by cooking up the dozen ducks he’d been saving. “I feared they would spoil,” said De Long, “hence a good dinner was made of them.” Over a savory stew, they toasted to their health and vowed never to separate again until they made it to safety.
THE FOLLOWING DAY, September 4, their old foe returned to block their way: Ice. For much of the morning they had to haul the heavy boats over a stretch of what De Long called a “rough and confused pack.” Without boat sleds, the keels took the brunt of it, and the bilges were constantly exposed to gouging, thumping blows. “Long strips are peeled off the keel runners,” fretted De Long, “and the boats themselves get many a scratch.” At one point, De Long plunged through an ice hole up to his chin. Throughout the rest of the day his furs “clung unpleasantly,” he said, “chilling me to the bone in spite of the ration of brandy which the doctor gave me.”
That night they beached themselves on Faddeyevsky’s adjoining island, Kotelny (the two land formations are attached by a low-lying plain). Kotelny is by far the most substantial stepping stone in the New Siberian archipelago and is one of the world’s fifty largest islands. It was discovered by a Russian hunter and merchant, Ivan Lyakhov, in 1773, and had been visited by furriers and fossil ivory hunters several times during the early 1800s. Like all the other New Siberians, it was uninhabited.
Enveloped by the island’s “candle-snuffer hills,” as De Long called them, he and his men had a meager dinner on Kotelny’s shore—but at least they found enormous piles of fuel to burn. “Long windrows of driftwood were thrown upon the beach and crowded far back from the watermark by the ice,” Melville wrote. Soon they had a roaring fire going. “Though choked by smoke and scorched by sparks,” said De Long, “we stood around it and steamed ourselves into partial dryness.” It was, thought Melville, “the first really good camp-fire we had enjoyed since leaving the United States.… We warmed our fronts, froze our backs, and shriveled up considerable of our saturated garments.”
Several of the sticks of flotsam they consigned to the flames bore what Melville called “marks of the friendly axe.” This noticeably brightened the mood around camp. Said Melville: “How eloquently such silent signs of civilization spoke to our hearts, recalling distant scenes and friends.”
De Long and his men so enjoyed the warming bonfires that they stayed two nights on Kotelny Island. De Long discovered that he was suffering from chilblains, a painful circulatory condition that produced ulcerous sores on his feet that nearly immobilized him. Others had developed incipient frostbite. For weeks, everyone had stayed wet and cold, through and through. Even more than food, what they needed was to get dry and keep warm. De Long probably would have lingered even longer on Kotelny had the hunts been more successful. But hunting was nearly impossible: A blanket of what De Long called “regulation fog” obscured everything and reduced visibility to a matter of yards. The only potential entrées they even got close to were “a few black ducks,” said Melville, “paddling shyly about in the open water.”
Kotelny offered far happier hunting when it came to artifacts and souvenirs. Many of the men prowled off into the mud hills, like happy kid scavengers. Nindemann brought back a hoop from a fish keg. Herbert Leach produced a perfect mammoth tusk, while others scooped up smaller specimens of elephant ivory. Alexey found a surprisingly well-built log hut, its gaps chinked with mud and rags. He returned with a wooden drinking cup, wooden utensils, and a metal coin, a Russian kopeck dated 1840. Some of these objects—the coin, especially—seemed starkly incongruous here in the misty Arctic. The concept of money, and its profound irrelevance in this lonesom
e wilderness, amused the men.
The only creatures that seemed to thrive on Kotelny were lemmings, the small burrowing rodents of the Arctic whose annual population cycles veer wildly from overabundance to near extinction and then back again. They must have been at the peak of their cycle, for De Long described them as running around “without number”—occasionally pursued by snowy owls. De Long’s campsite was infested with lemmings, their high chirps and shrieks filling the air. The shaggy rodents skittered over everything and found their way into the tents. Wrote De Long: “Mr. Collins evidently had a bedfellow last night, a lemming, for when he went out of the tent this morning, one of these little creatures jumped out of the hood of his fur coat and burrowed his way into the sand like a flash.”
ON SEPTEMBER 6, De Long and his men shoved off from Kotelny, but the conditions they faced were deplorable. The breeze had strengthened, whipping the seas into frothy whitecaps, and the swells were studded with wayward chunks of ice. “We came very near being smashed up,” said Danenhower. “To have struck one of these ice pieces,” Newcomb wrote, “would have been death.”
Navigating these menacing waters required more effort than anything these men could have imagined. “Away we pulled for our lives,” said Melville. “The sea roared and thundered … the sailors, blinded by the wind and spray, pulled manfully at the oars, their bare hands frozen and bleeding; and the boats tossed capriciously about with the wild waves.” For the first time since the start of the Jeannette voyage, the crewmen were being seriously tested as sailors, in the direst and most fundamental sense. Melville was impressed: “Drenched to the skin by the cruel icy seas, the over-taxed men performed wonders.”
They sailed day and night through the huge swells, aiming west by southwest. Those unaccustomed to sailing—including Ah Sam and Collins—got terribly seasick. For more than thirty hours, the boats pitched and yawed and, several times, came close to capsizing. The winds were so powerful that De Long had the men double-reef the sails to reduce the area of canvas; this provided stability but also slowed them down considerably. No one slept a wink; everyone stayed vigilant to what Melville called the “multi-form dangers [that] arose constantly before us.” The smallest error of the helmsman, he said, “would certainly engulf us.”