We must have a nice home of our own some day. Mamma is saving all her money to buy one.
We miss you very much and want you back soon … I pray for you every night and ask God to bless you and make you successful and bring you home safe to Mama and
Your loving daughter,
Sylvie De Long.
34 · LUCKY FOURTEEN
All through the night, the gale battered De Long’s boat, tossing it about in tremendous seas. One gust ripped the mainsail in two. Another knocked down her mast. De Long and Nindemann began to jury-rig a solution but soon realized there was no use even trying to navigate in this blasting wind. So they turned the bow into the storm and rode it out as best they could.
Nindemann was put in charge of fashioning a sea anchor. He rather ingeniously constructed something from several oars, a water cask, and spare pieces of lumber, weighing it down with a pickax. The contrivance helped provide stability, but still the water kept pouring into the boat, worrying the bailers all night. One particularly gigantic wave left the cutter “full up to the thwarts,” Nindemann said. “Another little sea would have swamped her.” It was the most harrowing night they had ever experienced. “Gale increased,” jotted Ambler, “we became a wreck, taking in water, wallowing in the trough of the sea the whole night. We got her partially baled out before she caught another…Baling, baling all the time.”
At dawn, the gale still had not expended its fury. In the muted light, De Long kept a restless eye on the horizon. There was no sign of land; nor was there any sign of Chipp or Melville. The men in De Long’s boat spent whatever idle moments they had fretting over the fate of their shipmates. Everyone now seemed resigned to the belief that the sister boats had capsized and that both crews—nineteen men, in all—were dead. One dog and fourteen men were packed into the first cutter: De Long, Ambler, Nindemann, Noros, Erichsen, Kaack, Görtz, Collins, Ah Sam, Alexey, Walter Lee, Dressler, Nelse Iverson, and Boyd. Miserable though they were, they now viewed themselves as the lucky ones.
Throughout the day, all they could do was bob helplessly on the cold gray swells and wait for a break in the weather. At around six in the evening, it seemed to come. With a strange suddenness, the winds abated, and De Long’s spirits warmed. But the seas refused to lie down; indeed, they seemed as menacing as ever. So the men were forced to spend yet another night cowering in the boat, rolling on the huge sea, their nerves tensed by the frequent smack of the spray. “Utter misery,” Collins wrote. “Hopeless except in the mercy of Almighty God, we sat jammed together.”
“No sleep for 36 hours,” Ambler wrote. “God knows where we went during the night.” At least they had something to turn their gaze heavenward. The clouds had scudded away, and in their place the moon and stars shone crisp and bright. From time to time, auroras billowed across the blue bowl of the sky.
By the next morning, September 14, the seas had moderated enough to allow them to resume the journey. When De Long asked the crewmen if they had anything that could be fashioned into a sail, Nindemann produced a hammock and an old sled cover. Görtz and Kaack pulled out sewing needles and got to work stitching the two articles together into a fair approximation of a mainsail. De Long ordered the sea anchor pulled in and dismantled, while Nindemann repaired the broken mast. Soon they stepped the mast, hoisted the improvised sail, and were on their way again.
This should have been cause for elation, but most of the men—De Long especially—were in no condition to celebrate. The captain’s chilblains had returned, and he could no longer take the helm. He complained that he couldn’t feel his feet and had what Ambler described as “a nervous chuckle in his throat.” De Long propped himself up in his sleeping bag in the stern of the boat, drank some brandy, and tried to write in his journal, but he found that impossible, too—he couldn’t feel his hands.
Erichsen, though his feet were also in bad shape, gamely took the helm, and they sailed through the afternoon and all night. At about ten o’clock the following morning, September 15, Nindemann stood up in the stern sheets and spied some low smudges on the horizon that looked to him like land. He reported this to De Long, who was still down in the boat, nursing his hands and feet. The captain seemed doubtful, and when Ambler stood up to look, he couldn’t see anything. But a few hours later, the land burst into full view—and it was clear to all that this was not an illusion.
Siberia! The mainland of Asia … the delta of the mighty Lena River. How many times over the past three months had they doubted that they would ever reach it? For the first time since they had begun their retreat, they had a visible reason, a reason right in front of them, to believe that they might be saved.
There was a problem, though. Standing at the helm, Erichsen failed to see anything that looked like a true mouth to the river, an artery, a logical inlet into the delta. Not only that, but studying the intervening waters, he could see that a collar of young ice was forming off the coast, building at the place where the outflow of the Lena River found equilibrium with the larger currents of the ocean.
Within a few hours, they began to encounter this new obstacle. It was freshwater ice—recently formed, brittle, fragile, no more than a quarter inch thick. At first they could easily ram through it. But the next morning, September 16, they got stuck, and they had to use their oars to break the ice apart so they could worm their way through the slots and channels.
This technique worked until a new problem abruptly asserted itself: The boat ran aground. Although they were three miles from land, they were stuck fast in the mud. The tidal flats here were less than two feet deep. De Long and his men had come firmly to rest in the long, silty outsurge of one of the greatest rivers on earth.
THE LENA RIVER originates nearly three thousand miles to the south of the Arctic Ocean, in a mountain range near Lake Baikal in the deep interior of Russia, not far from the border with Mongolia. As the river flows through the forested solitudes of Yakutia, it picks up tributary after tributary—the Kirenga, the Vitim, the Olekma, the Aldan, the Vilyui. The Lena is the world’s eleventh-longest river, draining the world’s ninth-largest watershed, a boggy, mosquitoey swath of tundra and taiga that measures more than 960,000 square miles. The amount of sediment carried by the Lena is extraordinary—and the river’s enormous power discharges a plume of silt and debris more than fifty miles out into the Arctic Ocean.
The Lena, like only a few of the world’s largest river systems, flows northward, toward a mostly frozen sea. In the fall, it begins to freeze first at its mouth, not at its source, which means that it develops a natural barrier against the force of its own massive current. As winter approaches in the Arctic, the river continues to flow with unchecked power, until it meets the ever-thickening plug of ice at its lower reaches.
The water’s only response is to spread out, frantically seeking other paths to the sea. In other words, the ice distorts and magnifies the tendency all rivers have of fanning out at their mouths. The pressures that build behind the Lena’s ice dam become so tremendous that the river splays over more than eleven thousand square miles. This riot of swollen currents creates one of the largest and most complicated deltas in the world.
From the air, the Lena delta looks rather like the cross section of an enormous tumor that bulges far out into the Laptev Sea from the Siberian mainland. Inside this protruding mass, 125 miles in width, is a confusing mesh of branched streams twisting and threading across sandy flats pocked by thousands of ponds and lakes and oxbow swamps. The delta has more than fifteen hundred islands—though that number changes all the time. The river, as it pushes through this morass of alluvium, divides into seven main branches, which, in turn, subdivide into scores and scores of lesser ones, an array of channels that redirect themselves from season to season as they course like capillaries toward the Arctic Ocean. The river’s assiduous probing continues until early winter, when the weather finally turns so cold that this titanic natural plumbing project backs up entirely—freezing solid all three thousand miles upstream, c
reating a superhighway of ice.
A report that would come out in 1882 would note, “No chart had been laid down of this desolate region, and indeed it would seem impossible to make any which would not be falsified by the changes which every fresh season brought.” Petermann’s map was the only one that had been published with any level of detail, but it was largely hypothetical and riddled with major errors. His map showed eight mouths to the delta, when in fact there were more than two hundred—and the few place-names, landmarks, and villages specified on his map were either grossly misplaced or didn’t exist at all.
This was the utterly bewildering landscape that De Long and his men approached on the afternoon of September 16, 1881. They were three miles out from the delta, yet they were already stuck, grounded on the river’s massive deposits of silt.
When De Long stood up to assess the problem, only one solution came to mind. He had everyone crawl out of the boat to lighten her load, so that she would ride a few inches higher in the water. The men, wading in the riffling currents, gathered around the cutter and began to guide her, sometimes shove her, toward land. Only Snoozer and a few disabled men remained in the boat.
Through the clear, shallow water, the wading men could see that the congealed beds of silt on which they oozed along had been brushed into ornate patterns by the play of the currents. Small fish darted this way and that. The water varied between one and a half and four feet in depth but generally became shallower the closer they drew toward land. The mud sucked at their boots, sometimes pulling them clear off their feet. In frustration, some of the men hurled their mukluks into the cutter and waded barefoot.
Often the boat ran aground, forcing the crew to heel her over and angle the bow toward a more promising channel. It was backbreaking labor, made more unpleasant by the cold of the river, which soon turned their feet and legs numb. While most of the men grunted and strained around the gunwales of the boat, others waded ahead, wielding oars to smash the young ice and scouting the best path toward land.
Throughout the day, they made only halting progress, advancing perhaps a mile. They could move only when the tide was in—at low tide the boat sat stuck in the slough. By late afternoon, said Nindemann, “everyone was pretty well played out.” They crawled back into the boat with Snoozer and shared a drab dinner of beef tongue. Afterward, Ambler asked everyone to take off their boots so he could examine their feet. What the doctor saw greatly alarmed him. A day of wading in the frigid water had come at a tremendous cost. The men’s feet were badly swollen and had developed a sickening bluish pallor. Ambler feared that frostbite was rampant among the crew. Boyd, Erichsen, Collins, Ah Sam, and Captain De Long were in the worst shape, but everyone’s extremities had suffered.
The shallow water had grown quite choppy, “washing in the boat all the time,” said Nindemann, “wetting everybody,” and rendering their sleeping bags “not fit for use.” Hunkered down and shivering on the curved floor of the boat, the men had what De Long called “a most miserable and uncomfortable night.” The cutter lay pinned on the Lena’s shoals, occasionally nodding in the shifting ebb and flow of current and tide.
EARLY THE NEXT morning, De Long and his men resumed their forward struggle. By midday they had advanced only a half mile across the mazes of water and silt. The situation was diabolical; it seemed as though the land was teasing them. It lay barely a mile and a half off, and yet they could not reach it. De Long feared they would never get ashore—and even if they did, that their feet would surely freeze in the process.
He was thus forced into a Hobson’s choice: They would have to abandon the cutter on the shoals and wade to the beach with all their things. De Long had wanted to keep the boat by any means necessary, knowing they would need it to navigate up the river. But he had now come to believe that the boat would kill them before it could play any role in their salvation. They would have to leave it here.
Piling their belongings high in their arms, they tromped toward the shore in a long column, with Snoozer struggling and splashing among them. Nindemann and Noros, who were the strongest of the fourteen men, led the way. They guided a makeshift raft, twined together from oars and odd pieces of lumber, that bore the pemmican and other heavy articles.
De Long, clutching some of the Jeannette’s logs and journals, staggered at the back with the worst of the frostbitten. These folio-sized books, though extremely burdensome, had become fetish-like objects for the captain. They were all that was left of the Jeannette’s expedition, the only record of their voyage and the only tangible proof of their exploratory and scientific accomplishments. He would hold onto them at all costs—“as long as I have men to carry them.”
As they marched across the mud flats, the water came up to their knees, sometimes to their waists, often in a powerful current that swished around their thighs with every straining stride. Even as the water grew shallower, the men could not raise their benumbed legs high enough to break through the veneer of young ice; they simply had to push through it, lacerating their shins until they bled. Snoozer floundered so badly that Alexey picked him up and carried him most of the way on his shoulders.
A little more than an hour later, Nindemann and Noros shoved their raft onto dry land. One by one, the twelve others hobbled in from the tidal flats to join them. Sending up exhausted cheers, they assembled on the beach—dazed, elated, relieved to have crossed this remarkable threshold. They were now standing on the continent of Asia. From the place of the Jeannette’s sinking, they had covered nearly a thousand miles—though most of the men, having backtracked multiple times across the ice cap to haul belongings, actually had trekked a distance in excess of twenty-five hundred miles. Their odyssey had ended one phase and was now beginning an entirely new one. Whatever obstacles might lie ahead, salt water and ocean ice pack would not be among them. Their metamorphosis was complete. Having been creatures of the ice, then of the sea, they were now creatures of the land.
The beach was desolate. A cluttered line of driftwood followed the contour of what looked to be a stagnant river channel. A few seagulls wheeled in the sky. Freezing drizzle slanted sideways in the stiff sea breeze. It was too overcast for De Long to take a positional reading, so he could not determine precisely where they were. He saw no sign of Melville or Chipp, no sign of humans at all—no artifacts, footprints, or dwellings. This place seemed as godforsaken and as lonely as any of the New Siberian Islands.
This surprised De Long. He could only surmise that they had come ashore along some barren back channel of the river, one that Petermann had not mapped. Petermann’s charts and notes indicated that there were numerous settlements throughout the delta and that the mouths of the Lena were often busy with small-boat traffic. De Long had been assured that they would meet natives quickly—this was the main reason he had chosen to aim for this point along the Siberian coast.
But Petermann’s information was almost entirely wrong. Native Yakuts and other local tribesmen did venture out to the northern reaches of this part of the delta, but only in small groups, and only for a few weeks during the summer. Living out of crude huts, they trapped foxes and hunted reindeer and fished, much as they had for centuries. By mid-September, however, they always returned to their villages far upriver, to escape the dangerous floods that built up behind the seasonal formation of Arctic ice.
De Long, then, had arrived a week too late. “We must look our situation in the face,” he gravely wrote, “and prepare to walk to a settlement.”
Unbeknownst to De Long, there was one large village close to the coast, on the northwestern edge of the delta. It was called North Bulun, a settlement of a hundred people situated on ground high enough to avoid the Lena’s seasonal flooding. If De Long had landed only eight miles farther to the west, he would have struck a clear branch of the river that would have led him straight to North Bulun within a day. He and his men would never have had to leave their boat. But he had no way of knowing this. Neither the channel nor the village was on Petermann’s map. r />
THOSE WHO WERE able to walk at all waded back to the grounded cutter for a second load, then a third. As night fell, the men collected a gigantic pile of driftwood and soon had a brilliant bonfire going on the beach. They hung their drenched furs and undergarments out to dry and stood around half-naked, trying to beat and squeeze and knead their insensate limbs back to some approximation of life.
Dr. Ambler was appalled at the condition of the men’s feet. In most of them, the signs of frostbite were apparent—purple blisters, waxy skin, nerve damage, the first signs of tissue necrosis. “Everybody was badly frozen,” said Nindemann, but the worst were Collins, Boyd, Erichsen, and Ah Sam. The Chinese cook crawled into his sleeping bag and moaned in agony.
Ambler was most worried about Erichsen. The Dane’s legs were horribly swollen, his calves had turned rock hard, and his feet were splotched with hideous blisters, which, when Ambler lanced them, spurted a bloody yellow serum. Ambler dressed Erichsen’s feet with carbolated petroleum jelly and a bandage of cotton batting and propped him up beside the fire.
While most of the group tried to recuperate around the flames, Nindemann and Noros kept working. In the pitch dark, they waded back to the boat to retrieve a few more articles. An hour later, they returned and dumped the stuff on the beach; then they circled back and did it again.
These staunch men seemed almost superhuman—their feet impervious to wet and cold, their circulatory systems robust beyond understanding, an apparently different kind of blood pumping through their veins. No one could keep up with them. “Going out to the boat it was dark,” Nindemann said, “and we could not see the fire or the beach; but we felt our way back again through the broken, young ice.” De Long was continually amazed by these two men—Nindemann especially. The captain had already made a note to recommend the German for a Congressional Medal of Honor when he had stemmed the flood in the Jeannette’s hold; now he seemed worthy of another commendation.