On returning to the United States, an officer of the Alliance echoed Emma De Long’s fears succinctly: “We are not so hopeful of the safety of the Jeannette’s crew as we were before.”
Meanwhile, the third vessel tasked with the search for De Long, the USS Rodgers, had scoured many thousands of miles of the Kamchatkan and Siberian coastlines that summer. But her captain, Lieutenant Robert Berry, had exactly the same thing to report: No sign of the Jeannette. A party from the Rodgers had landed on Wrangel Island a few weeks after John Muir and his colleagues, and they had been able to substantially explore the island, penetrating more than twenty miles inland. They found nothing to suggest that De Long had ever set foot on Wrangel. Now the Rodgers was safely harbored for the winter in a cove on the northeastern coast of Siberia and planned to send dog teams along the shore to search for tidings of De Long as far west as the Kolyma River. Among the crew of the Rodgers was yet another correspondent for the New York Herald.
The failure of all the 1881 summer searches only redoubled the public’s desire to learn of De Long’s fate. Multiple rescue expeditions were planned for the spring of 1882—and now the search for the Jeannette was taking on an international cast. Not since the search for Sir John Franklin had the world shown such intense interest in the fate of a single Arctic exploration party. In Copenhagen, a Lieutenant Howgaard of the Royal Danish Navy was collecting funds to start an ambitious search along the entire coastline of Siberia, retracing the route Nordenskïold had successfully traversed during his recent northeastern passage. In St. Petersburg, Russian authorities sent out alerts to every commandant and tribal representative in northern Siberia. In Canada, Great Britain’s Colonial Department wrote letters to all the governors of the Hudson’s Bay Company, urging them to inform the trappers and company employees along the Arctic coast of North America to keep a close eye out for the Jeannette.
The Royal Geographical Society in London, meanwhile, began to make its own plans for a relief expedition. “The American people may be assured that not only do English geographers feel the deepest sympathy for the gallant explorers on board the Jeannette, but that we shall gladly and actively do what lies in our power to make the search complete,” the society’s Clements R. Markham stated in December.
To an editorial writer in the New York Herald, the swell of goodwill surpassed the response seen in the aftermath of Franklin’s disappearance. “For a second time in the history of polar research, a great expedition is probably lost in the Arctic,” the Herald said. “There is to be another Franklin search, with this difference—that was an English and American search of a limited segment of the polar circle; this will be a universal search of the whole border of the ‘unknown region,’ participated in by nearly all the civilized nations of the earth.”
For the past year, Bennett had followed all the talk of rescue operations, but he had been distracted by other things. He had hatched a dream of starting a new newspaper, to be called the Paris Herald, that would be targeted primarily at American expatriates like himself. He had bought a beautiful seaside villa on the Côte d’Azur, in a lovely place called Beaulieu. He’d hosted extravagant hunts at his country place near Versailles, and he’d spent much of the year cruising the Mediterranean.
Bennett was further occupied by the opening of his new creation, the Newport Casino, which proved a bigger hit than anyone could have imagined. It was a rambling affair of wood, stone, and fish-scale shingles, with great verandas, open-air bars, and an immaculately manicured tennis lawn set in a courtyard large enough to accommodate thousands of spectators. “There is nothing like it in the old world or new,” gushed one newspaper reporter on the occasion of the casino’s grand opening. “It is doubtful if a more lively place can be found.”
In August, the Newport Casino held the first national championships of the newly formed United States National Lawn Tennis Association. It was the first tennis tournament ever held on American soil. A Harvard man named Richard Dudley Sears dominated it, winning five straight matches. True to Bennett’s vision, the Newport Casino became the birthplace of competitive tennis in the United States, and the annual tournament held there would be the forerunner of the U.S. Open. (The Newport Casino hosted the national championships until the summer of 1915, when they were moved to Forest Hills, New York.)
Even with the distractions of his casino, Bennett had kept in regular contact with Emma De Long and had even invited her up to Newport, in the late summer of 1880, to visit his “cottage.” The small mansion, called Stone Villa, was conveniently situated right across Bellevue Avenue from the casino. He invited Emma to sail on his new yacht, the Polynia, which he’d built at a reported cost of $55,000. Bennett’s sister, Jeannette Bell, was also in Newport that summer. She and her husband had recently had a son, but Bennett showed no desire to play the role of a doting uncle. Bennett wrote out an inheritance check for $100,000, set it at the foot of his nephew’s crib, and never laid eyes on the boy again.
Bennett promised Emma that he would spare no cost to find her husband. To him, the polar problem was like a rousing match of polo or tennis—a sport that quickened the blood, a bracing challenge, a game. Everything would be all right, he was sure of it. And if it wasn’t, that was the risk of playing the game. He could think of no more honorable way to die than in the service of exploration—for the country, for the Navy, for science. And, of course, for the New York Herald. “The Herald is everything,” he once told a reporter. “The man is nothing.”
But by the end of 1881, even Bennett was starting to believe that something untoward had happened to the Jeannette. He resigned himself to the probability that the ship had been crushed and now slept at the bottom of the sea. As for De Long and his men, James Gordon Bennett remained sanguine. He cabled Emma from Paris:
Have no fears about your husband and his gallant crew. Should the Government be niggardly enough to refuse to send another expedition, I shall do so at my own expense, if it takes my last dollar. I wish I could inspire you with my own confidence in the safety of the Jeannette. Bennett.
37 · FRANTIC PANTOMIMES
As Nindemann and Noros marched over the Lena wastelands, the Siberian winter fell upon them like an untethered weight. Each night grew colder than the last, with temperatures reaching well below zero. It seemed at times that only their constant movement kept them from freezing to death. Sounds became brittle. The fluids in their faces hardened. The snow squeaked underfoot. The cold had become a physical presence, silently snatching the life from the delta in the way that a fire consumes the oxygen in a room. In the coldest hours of the night, their breaths froze in the air and drifted to the ground in glittery clouds, which, according to local tribesmen, made a faint tinkling melody called “the whisper of the stars.” (The coldest temperature ever recorded in the Northern Hemisphere, ninety degrees below zero Fahrenheit, would later be captured at a Soviet weather station to the east of the Lena.)
Nindemann and Noros moved steadily and determinedly, but they were too weak to move swiftly. They averaged about thirteen miles a day. Noros spat up blood and began to entertain ideas of shooting himself. In his lowest moments, only thoughts of his family back in Fall River, Massachusetts, kept him from taking his life.
Much of their journey seemed like a dream, a long whiteout of undifferentiated days punctuated by a few moments of haunting clarity: A snowy owl staring at them. A pile of decrepit sleds they smashed up for firewood. The corpse of a native buried in a box on a hill. A crow, circling and circling and circling.
The only landmark that rose above the interminable flats was a rock island, stuck like a plug in the middle of the Lena. The massive crag was known simply as Ostrov Stolb, “Rock Island.” In clear weather, it could be seen for a hundred miles. In the refractions of the Arctic atmosphere, Ostrov Stolb assumed various distorted shapes as it hovered over the floodplain; it sometimes looked like a castle fortress, or a whale emerging from the sea, or the back of some enormous prehistoric beast. Whatever form
it took, Nindemann and Noros relied on it as their guidepost as they worked their way south.
Lacking tents or any form of shelter, the two men each night became like burrowing animals. They slept in a natural crevice in a riverbank, then in the lee of a bluff, then in the shelter of a decrepit flatboat abandoned in the ice, then in snow caves of their own making.
They lived on residues of nutrition. One day, Nindemann shot a ptarmigan, a species of Arctic grouse. Then he caught a lemming, and they roasted the small rodent, hair and all, on a spit. They boiled tea from the roots of a stunted willow plant. Near the river one day, they found some fish heads to eat. The rest of the time, they were forced to gnaw on their boot soles or to chew swatches of their sealskin pants, which, to make more palatable, they soaked in water and charred in the fire.
A week into their journey, they had grown so weak that they often could not make forward progress against the force of the wind. They had nearly lost all hope when, on the night of October 19, they stumbled upon a collection of huts at a place known to locals as Bulcour. They made a fire inside one of them and collapsed in a heap. All told, they had traveled 129 miles since parting from De Long ten days earlier.
The next day, in one of the neighboring huts, amid a collection of tattered nets, they found a large quantity of dried fish that had the consistency of coarse sawdust. Almost tasteless, it was a kind of fish the natives used not for food but for lamp oil they extracted by heating and pulverizing the flesh. Paying no heed to the blue mold growing all over it, Nindemann and Noros eagerly devoured the fish, shoving handful after handful of the putrid fluff into their mouths. They soon grew violently ill, and by the next day they had developed severe diarrhea, their stools containing a bloody mucus—they were sure they had dysentery. Even so, they kept eating the fish, thinking the sensation of food in their bellies worth the agony.
AROUND MIDDAY ON October 22, they heard a strange whooshing noise outside their hut. It sounded to them like a large flock of geese swooping overhead. Their profound hunger had so affected their hearing that they did not trust their own ears. Nindemann cracked the door and glimpsed something moving; then, in a blur, he saw the head and antlers of a reindeer. He grabbed his rifle and was just loading it when the door burst open. There at the threshold stood a native man in warm furs—and, behind him, a sleigh hitched to a whole team of reindeer, snorting and stamping in the snow.
The native was shocked to see these two begrimed, half-dead foreigners living in his tribal hut at Bulcour. Nindemann and Noros were brought to joyful tears at the sight of this visitor, for they had not laid eyes on a human being, beyond their Jeannette shipmates, for 809 days.
Nindemann lurched forward to greet him. Seeing the rifle in Nindemann’s arms, the man recoiled in fear and fell to his knees, throwing up his hands and pleading with Nindemann not to shoot. Nindemann tossed the rifle into a corner and beseeched the native to come inside. The man hesitated, but then took a step forward when Nindemann offered him a bite of fish. Studying the moldy mush for a moment, the native, whose name was Ivan, shook his head and indicated by signs and grimaces that it was not fit to eat.
Ivan, noticing the threadbare state of Nindemann’s boots, went out to his sleigh and produced a new pair of deerskin mukluks as a gift. Nindemann thanked him and then, with Noros, fell into a frantic pantomime, trying to convey to the native that they were not alone, that eleven more men were still out in the cold, somewhere to the north. It was useless—Ivan gave no sign that he understood anything they tried to tell him. Instead, he indicated that he had to leave and held up four fingers, which Nindemann interpreted to mean that he would return either in four hours or in four days; Nindemann could not tell which. Ivan climbed onto his sled and hawed the reindeer into action. He took off toward the west, following the river. A few minutes later, he was gone.
Nindemann and Noros slumped in silence and looked at each other, fearing they had made a critical mistake in letting the native take off without them. They began to despair that they would ever see their visitor again—that they had lost their last chance at salvation. Nindemann cursed himself for having brandished his rifle, which he was now sure had frightened Ivan away.
But early in the evening, Ivan returned to Bulcour, accompanied by two stout men on sleighs pulled by dozens of reindeer. The visitors had brought a fresh fish, which they skinned and cut up. Noros and Nindemann promptly devoured every morsel of it, raw. Then Ivan furnished the two wretches with deerskin coats and blankets and guided them out to the sleds, securing them on board like precious cargo.
Soon the whole party took off through the night, over the ice and snow. They rode about fifteen miles toward the west, until they spotted a huddle of deerskin tents pitched in the hills ahead. Perhaps a hundred reindeer were clustered nearby. Through the partly translucent skins of the tents, Nindemann and Noros could see the glow of flickering fires, and the savory smells of cooking food mingled in the air. They could hear laughter and spirited conversations inside the tents, the muffled sounds of women and children.
It was only then that the two castaways became convinced of their good fortune: They were going to be saved.
THOUGH THEY DIDN’T know it yet, Nindemann and Noros had fallen in with a group of Yakuts—a large tribe of seminomadic hunter-fishermen who built their world around the reindeer. In their facial features the Yakuts resembled the Mongols, but their language was more closely related to Turkish. Starting in the thirteenth century, the Yakuts had migrated to the high north country of central Siberia from the forests around Lake Baikal. By the 1830s, the Russian state had converted most of the Yakuts—sometimes at gunpoint—to the Eastern Orthodox Church, but they still followed their traditional animist beliefs and relied on the power of their shamans.
The Yakuts were a proud and openhearted people who had long ago figured out the puzzle of the delta and had spent centuries perfecting techniques for thriving in extreme cold; indeed, it seemed to some that they preferred the extreme cold, for the solitude it brought and the independence it gave them from the long reach of the czar. Much of their freedom came from their ability to live in a place where no one else much wanted to be. In the land of the Yakuts, the expression went, “God is high up and the czar is far off.”
Nindemann and Noros were welcomed into the Yakut camp and given warm water to clean their filthy hands and faces. But Nindemann couldn’t wash himself—his hands were crippled from the cold, and his fingernails had become long, jagged claws. A Yakut woman, observing his pitiful condition, kneeled beside him and gently wiped his dirty, frostnipped face. This kind act, this first human touch, overwhelmed him. Nindemann would never forget her.
After a venison feast, Nindemann and Noros lingered by the fire and attempted to explain their predicament to the natives: There were other shipwrecked sailors, starving to the north. Eleven men, trapped in the snow. They tried to convey the situation with stick figures, wild gesticulations, and images drawn in the ashes. But the Yakuts did not seem to have any idea what they were talking about. They just smiled awkwardly and nodded their heads. They were probably still trying to figure out how these two vagabonds had landed in the delta, from what direction they had come, from which nation—or planet—they hailed. The Yakuts likely suspected that Nindemann and Noros were fugitive criminals, political exiles, or pirates. The two Americans, seeing that they were getting nowhere, gave up for the night and drifted off to sleep.
The next morning the Yakuts broke camp and took off toward the south—exactly the wrong direction if they were going to save De Long. Around midday, the reindeer teams ascended a high hill, from which they could see Ostrov Stolb, the massive rock island Nindemann and Noros had used as a guiding landmark. Pointing in the direction of Ostrov Stolb, Nindemann once again tried to tell the story of the Jeannette and of their shipmates freezing and starving to the north. He drew diagrams in the snow and pleaded with the group’s leader to aim the party in that direction. But the Yakut elder only smiled a sad sm
ile, without registering any further comprehension, giving no indication that he would turn the group around.
The next day the Yakut party reached the small village of Kumakh-Surt—the place De Long had been aiming for when he had dispatched Nindemann and Noros on their errand. It was a feast day in the village, and as Nindemann and Noros were paraded around they became the objects of much curiosity. “Everybody stopped and looked at us,” recalled Nindemann. “Everybody wanted to know who we were and where we were from.”
Someone handed Nindemann a toy boat, which he used to tell the story of the Jeannette. All the villagers gathered around as he related the woeful tale: How the ship had left America and sailed the ocean. How it had become trapped in the ice and drifted for two years. How it had been crushed and had sunk far to the north. How thirty-three men had traveled for three months over the ice, hauling three boats behind them until they came to open water. And then how the three boats had become separated in a storm.
“I then showed them a chart of the coast line,” Nindemann recounted, “and that our boat went in here, and we did not know what had become of the other two.” He indicated with pencil marks where they had waded ashore and, with vigorous gestures and playacting, reenacted the way they had marched along the banks of the Lena, and the place where one of their party had died and been buried in the river. “Everybody shook his head,” said Nindemann, “as much as to say they felt sorry for it.”
Nindemann then showed that he and his present companion had left the captain behind with his men and had wandered the delta for ten days. In pleading tones, he said he now needed the villagers’ help to go back and rescue his shipmates before they all died.