That was hyperbole, of course. The captain had a long list of other worries—at the top of which remained Erichsen. The past four days had canceled any improvement he had made while recuperating at the previous hut. Now he was in pitiful shape. After consulting with Ambler, De Long wrote in his journal, “The ulcer in Erichsen’s foot has sloughed away so much of the skin as to expose the sinews and muscles. The doctor fears that he may have to amputate one half, if not the whole, of both feet.”
The smell of the decaying flesh was horrible, and Ambler occupied himself snipping away at it. Erichsen’s toes were unrecognizable black stubs. He was also complaining of stiffness in his jaw and what Ambler described as a “loss of power in his right side.” The doctor wondered how Erichsen could go any farther. “God knows how long this will continue & the man must finally break down,” Ambler wrote. “If we can find a settlement soon I am in hopes of saving his feet, but if not, his feet & possibly his life & that of the whole party would be sacrificed.” On this last point, Ambler was adamant; though Erichsen pleaded for it, they would not abandon him. “No man,” said Ambler, “will be left alone.”
The next day, a gull sailed over their camp, apparently attracted by the black blanket flying on the hill. Alexey promptly shot the hapless bird, and it became a meager soup. Some of the men baited hooks with the gull’s entrails and went ice fishing, but they didn’t get any bites. Nindemann took off hunting in the surrounding countryside, looking for “anything which would pay.” But he, too, was without luck.
Dr. Ambler, meanwhile, spent the day performing a most odious task, which his journal documented in clinical terms. “Removed four toes from Erichsen’s right foot & one from left foot, sawing near the tarso-metatarsal junction.” The amputation was surprisingly easy for Erichsen, as he had already lost all feeling in his feet. When the pain set in later, Ambler plied him with opiates and tried to reassure him. But the doctor was losing hope for his patient. The other men could not believe the tough, strapping Dane had sunk to this state. Collins lamented how the operation “cripples a big, able man and puts an end to his calling as a seaman.” De Long felt personal responsibility for Erichsen’s predicament. “A heartrending sight,” he wrote, “the cutting away of bones and flesh of a man I hoped to return sound and whole to his friends. May God pity us.”
Each night, the men kept the signal fire burning outside the hut, and the black flag snapped in the breeze. But no one came for them. The footprints, whoever they belonged to, disappeared in the mounting snow. De Long could not shake the feeling that he was being watched, yet the spies refused to show themselves. His imagined scenario—that other Jeannette survivors were out combing the delta for them—lost force. “I cannot understand how it is,” he wrote. “If the others are safe, why do they not come to look for us?”
FOR THE PAST few days, in fact, De Long and his men had been followed; he was not imagining it. A week earlier, two Yakut hunters from the village of Zemovialach had crossed the crew’s footprints in the snow. Following the tracks for several days, the hunters had stopped at the first pair of huts where the Americans had recuperated. There they saw fresh charcoal from the fires and found the old Winchester De Long had left behind. They took the rifle for themselves and continued to track De Long’s party for several more days.
But then they stopped. The two natives, studying the strangers from a safe remove, began to suspect that they were “contrabandists,” as they later put it—smugglers, convicts, and thieves. The Yakuts feared that if they showed themselves, these filthy, hairy foreigners would surely kill them. Quietly, they turned back toward their village, which lay nearly a hundred miles toward the southeast on a distant branch of the Lena.
EVEN WHILE LINGERING in the hut, De Long was making plans to move on. After scouting the terrain, he became convinced that the only way they could ever reach the place called Sagastyr—if it existed at all—was by crossing the river on whose high banks their hut was built. But that was much easier said than done: The channel here was more than five hundred yards wide. Either a sturdy raft would have to be constructed now or they would have to wait until more ice built up on the river’s surface so they could cross over on foot.
Right now the ice was too precarious to be trusted, so they could not move. Said De Long: “One does not like to feel he is caught in a trap.”
The other question was what to do about Erichsen. Could he survive any more traveling? Could Nindemann construct some sort of sled-litter to drag him across the river’s ice and the tundra beyond? Ambler, who in a second procedure had amputated a few more of Erichsen’s toes, now believed both feet might have to be sawn off entirely. Noting that his patient was suffering from lockjaw, Ambler hypothesized that a massive fever might “intervene and carry him off.” Erichsen was often delirious, and he was keeping the men up at night with weird ravings in Danish. “He is weak and tremulous,” said De Long, “and the moment he closes his eyes talks incessantly … a horrible accompaniment to the wretchedness of our surroundings.” Ambler told De Long that “unless Erichsen can very soon be given the care and medical treatment which only a prolonged stay at a settlement will admit, his life is in danger.”
De Long found himself in the midst of a horrible reckoning. Erichsen’s survival, it seemed to him, was now pitted against the survival of the whole group. “If we could move on,” De Long wrote, “it would probably shorten his life; if I remained here and kept everybody with me, Erichsen’s days would be lengthened a little at the risk of our all dying from starvation. This is a crisis in our lives.” In the end, De Long went with his better instincts: No man would be left behind. Erichsen would be dragged along, no matter the hardships.
On the morning of October 1—111 days since the sinking of the Jeannette—De Long decided that the river channel was sufficiently frozen over to attempt a crossing. A record he left inside the hut noted that while they had “no fear for the future,” one of their men was not well, and that his “toes have been amputated in consequence of frost-bite.”
As they moved gingerly across the big, icy river, they spread out widely so that their weight was never concentrated in any one place. Even so, the ice tinkled and cracked with each step, sometimes sending out frightening jigsaw patterns. Having strapped Erichsen to a sledge fashioned from two misshapen driftwood logs, they hauled the muttering invalid with several long ropes angled so that the pullers and the pulled stayed safely separated from one another—again, to avoid concentrating their weight.
Eventually, they all made it over safely, and once gathered on the other side, they started out on an excruciatingly difficult march. They covered more than twelve miles over impossible terrain, hauling poor Erichsen every jouncing inch of the way on the “sledge.” For two days after that, they continued wandering in the wilderness, making slower progress. At one point, they spotted a man’s tracks in the snow and followed them for the better part of a day, until they vanished. De Long began to realize that they were nowhere near Sagastyr, which he had come to believe was “a myth.”
His chart was “simply useless,” De Long now decided. “I must go on plodding to the southward, trusting in God to guide me to a settlement, for I have long since realized that we are powerless to help ourselves.” The topography was unrelenting in its mazelike complexity—he could not find its logic. “I was much bewildered by the frequent narrowing of the river to a small vein of ice,” De Long wrote, “and the irregular rambling way in which it ran. Our floundering around was both exhaustive of energy and consumptive of time. There is no use denying it, we are pretty weak.”
De Long recognized that given their state, he should probably abandon the heavy journals he was carrying, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it—they had become as precious as life itself. “As long as I can get along on my feet,” he said, “these records will go with me.” He could try to cache them somewhere—and mark the spot with a cairn made of driftwood—but he knew this was all Lena floodplain. Anything he put into the
ground would be ruined by the spring floods.
Collins, in particular, took issue with the burden posed by De Long’s books. (In his own journal he complained of “logbooks, etc, [that] weighed the men down beyond their strength.”) But by this point, the Irishman, smoldering with resentments, had found fault with every aspect of De Long’s “general plan of running the machine” and compared the captain to a “horse-leech” that “sucks our chances of escape away.” He told several of his confidants that he had been keeping a journal of events—presumably highly critical of De Long—which was tucked away in a pocket of his coat; should something happen to him, he wanted that record sent to the editors of Bennett’s Herald in New York.
Alexey, who’d been veering off on hunting forays, had enjoyed no luck. De Long had exhausted the last of the pemmican stores; now he and his men were truly starving. This left him no choice. On October 3, he gave the assignment to Iverson, who led Snoozer off behind their open-air encampment and shot him in the head, then butchered and dressed him. “Soon after a kind of stew was made,” wrote De Long, “of which everybody except the doctor and myself eagerly partook. To us, it was a nauseating mess.” The stew was prepared from the head, heart, kidneys, and liver. “There were some men,” said Nindemann, “that did not care much [for] it.”
The temperature that night plummeted to near zero, and the men all stayed close to the fire, huddled arm in arm. Alexey and De Long tried to warm each other. Said De Long, “If [he] had not wrapped his sealskin around me and [kept] me warm by the heat of his body, I think I should have frozen to death. As it was, I shivered and shook.” For his own protection, Erichsen was kept lashed to the makeshift sled, which was pulled up beside the fire. But his “groans and rambling talk rang out on the night air,” De Long wrote, “and such a dreary, wretched night, I hope I shall never see again.”
Sometime during the night, Erichsen, in his delirium, tossed his mittens aside. The others failed to notice this until morning, though by then it was too late: Erichsen’s hands were frozen nearly solid. Boyd and Iverson rubbed them until some circulation was restored, but Ambler knew that Erichsen’s hands would now go the way of his feet. He was unconscious, utterly oblivious to what he had done. At around six in the morning, they strapped him tighter to the sled and resumed their march to the south.
A few hours later, they encountered another hut and immediately took shelter and made a fire. Ambler closely examined Erichsen and found that he’d sunk, said De Long, “very low indeed.” His pulse was weak, and he remained unconscious. The line of decay had moved up his ankles to the calves of his legs. De Long led the men in prayers.
TWO DAYS LATER, at eight forty-five in the morning of October 6, Ambler turned to the men still gathered in the hut and shook his head. “It is all over with him,” the doctor said, closing Erichsen’s eyes. “Peace to his soul.”
Hans Erichsen, the thirty-three-year-old career mariner and North Sea fisherman from Ærøskøbing, Denmark, was dead. “Our messmate has departed this life,” De Long wrote. “What in God’s name is going to become of us?”
They had no tools with which to bury him, and even if they had, it would have been almost impossible in the permafrost. “The seaman’s grave is the water,” De Long reasoned, and so he decided that they would consign him to the river. They removed and distributed his clothes and sewed up his body in a tent flap, stuffing it with clods of earth to weigh it down. Iverson collected his Bible, and Kaack clipped a lock of his hair. A flag was placed over the corpse, and they dragged him to the riverbank.
After a short solemn ceremony, they hacked a hole in the ice with a hatchet and slipped Erichsen into the cold Lena. Three rifle volleys boomed over the river. Nindemann carved a grave marker out of an old board he found in the hut and hung it up over the door. The inscription read:
IN MEMORY
H. H. ERICHSEN,
OCT. 6, 1881.
U.S.S. JEANNETTE.
THE MORNING OF October 9 dawned clear, crisp, and relatively warm after days of freezing mists. De Long called Nindemann over to confer about a plan that had been gestating for several days. He wanted Nindemann to use this break in the weather to push ahead of the group and find help.
Since Erichsen’s death, several more cases of frostbite had cropped up among the men. De Long was in especially bad shape, as were Collins and Lee. They had just a few pounds of dog meat left and were subsisting on a kind of grog made from brandy and old tea leaves boiled in river water. As a group, they could not advance more than a few miles a day. “We are all pretty well done up,” said De Long, “and seem to be wandering in a labyrinth.” Sending Nindemann was, he felt, their last chance.
De Long chose Nindemann because he remained the strongest of the group and the most likely to get through. There was no doubting the German quartermaster’s resourcefulness as well as his ferocious competency—and, as his ordeal in Greenland had proved, the man had an uncommon survival instinct. Collins volunteered to accompany Nindemann, but De Long scoffed at the Irishman, saying, “In your condition, Mr. Collins, you would not get five miles away from camp.” It was also true that the captain did not trust Collins; some would later speculate, on the basis of no particular evidence, that De Long feared that Collins, if he were to reach safety first, would race to the nearest telegraph station to transmit to the Herald a skewed version of the expedition.
Alexey was probably the second-most fit after Nindemann, but De Long wanted the Inuit to stay with the group, as he was the best hunter. With Alexey’s shooting prowess and a little divine help, the captain remained optimistic. “I trust in God,” he said, “and believe that He who has fed us thus far will not suffer us to die of want now.”
Louis Noros was the next-strongest man. He would accompany Nindemann and obey his orders. They would travel light—“just the clothes we stood in,” as Nindemann put it, plus a rifle, forty rounds of ammunition, a few blankets, and a little grog to drink. “If you find game,” De Long told them, “then return to us.”
But if they didn’t, the captain wanted them to keep pushing south, aiming for a village called Kumakh-Surt, which he thought might be four days away. “Nindemann, do the best you can,” De Long said. “If you find assistance come back as quick as possible, and if you do not, then you are as well off as we are. You see the condition we are in.”
De Long gave Ambler the option of going with Nindemann and Noros, but the doctor declined. “I thought,” Ambler wrote, “that my duty required me with him & the main body for the present.”
The captain said a prayer, and then the men gathered around Nindemann and Noros and shook their hands. They all had tears in their eyes. Collins, his voice trembling with emotion, told Noros, “When you get to New York, remember me.”
Then the two men turned and started their march, heading south along the bank. “God give them aid,” said Ambler. As they vanished around a bend in the river, De Long’s men sent out three cheers.
I would so like to be with you, to see you, to take care of you. I am afraid to think of what condition you may be in. I am trying to wait patiently for news from my own suffering husband, and it is needless to say how very, very anxious I am. I have been brave all through these trying years and I will be so still. I am not a foolish woman and will not lose my head. I will try to banish from my mind all forebodings and melancholy thoughts. How I long to be with you now!
—Emma
36 · IF IT TAKES MY LAST DOLLAR
By the fall of 1881, Emma De Long had become gravely worried about the Jeannette’s fate. The Corwin had pulled into San Francisco on October 21, reporting that although it had combed more than eight thousand miles in the Alaskan and Siberian Arctic, its crew had not found a single piece of evidence of the Jeannette’s whereabouts, not even a rumor. Furthermore, the Corwin party’s historic landing on Wrangel, all but proving that it was an island, had dashed one of Emma’s last remaining hopes: that her husband and his men had made their way up the hypothetical tra
nspolar landmass toward the North Pole and beyond.
She had become almost laughably absentminded. She broke things, dropped things, wandered out of stores without paying for merchandise. She couldn’t think of anything else but the Jeannette. Her concerns only deepened on November 11, when the American man-of-war Alliance returned from her searches of the waters north of Norway. The Alliance had left on June 16 from Norfolk with a crew of nearly two hundred men and had traveled twelve thousand miles. Her captain, Commander George Henry Wadleigh, reported that he had found not a shred of evidence concerning the Jeannette or any of her crew members. One of Bennett’s best reporters, Harry Macdona, was on board and later published a series of popular Herald dispatches recounting the journey.
The Alliance had stopped at Reykjavik, becoming the first American Navy vessel to anchor in the Icelandic port. (The Icelanders were captivated by the Americans, especially several black sailors on board, whom they treated, said Macdona, as “escaped curiosities from a museum.”) Next, Wadleigh had steered the Alliance to Hammerfest, Norway, then on to Spitsbergen, an Arctic island north of Norway. Along the way, the Alliance encountered numerous whalers, sealers, and walrus hunters but gleaned no tidings of the Jeannette. Wadleigh’s men circulated placards printed in multiple languages offering rewards for information leading to the Jeannette’s discovery.
The Alliance attained a latitude of 80°10’ N, some 590 miles south of the North Pole, which was believed to be the highest point ever reached by a man-of-war. But then Wadleigh was halted by the pack. Given the ferocity of the ice barrier he saw, Macdona wondered if mankind would ever reach the North Pole: “No one who has seen this desert of ice, piled upon hummocks and forced into mountainous ridges by a force that the mind cannot comprehend, will venture an opinion as to the years of dreary endeavor yet to be endured before man shall reach that supreme spot.”