Melville was aiming for Bulcour, the place where the native named Ivan had first found Nindemann and Noros in the fishing hut. Tomat and Vasili said they knew the place well, and although the land looked featureless to Melville, they seemed sure of the road.
Standing for days on the back of the bouncing sled, Melville could not ignore how much his already-frostbitten feet troubled him. They had become swollen, inflamed, and blistered, and “all feeling,” he said, “seemed to have forsaken them.” At a tiny collection of huts called Buruloch, a wizened Yakut woman took pity on Melville and rubbed his feet with warm goose grease, a rank-smelling remedy that seemed to work wonders.
When the party got to Bulcour, Melville made a crackling fire and warmed his feet until they throbbed back to life. Looking about the hut, he spied “several little articles that had been left or lost by Nindemann and Noros.” Melville also saw the remains of the pulverized fish his shipmates had eaten, but he wisely declined to partake of the putrid stuff. Yet the food he and his guides had to eat was not much better: raw frozen fish, which Vasili and Tomat cut into bite-sized chunks. They also boiled reindeer antlers and hooves and skimmed off the foamy broth. The three men washed it down with a little tea, then drifted off to sleep, with the dogs curled up in a snowbank just outside the door.
The next morning, Melville studied the ground. In places where the winds had blown off the snow, he could faintly trace the old footprints left by Nindemann and Noros in the encrusted ice, where they had “marched out of the jaws of death,” as Melville put it. Here and there he could see where Nindemann or Noros had “plunged through the ice while it was yet young.” For several days, Melville and his Yakut guides followed the tracks along the river, until they came to a spot Nindemann had marked on his chart as “The Place of the Sleighs.” Here, Nindemann and Noros had smashed up some sleds for firewood, and now Melville could see the charred remains of their bonfire. In a hut a few days later, he found a waist belt that had been made in the blacksmith forge on board the Jeannette—he recognized the markings on the buckle.
Melville felt like a detective on a scavenger hunt, compiling tiny clues as he traversed an impossibly huge landscape, working off a crude map that was nonetheless surprisingly accurate. So far, Nindemann’s chart had made sense; the delta unfolded just as his memory had captured it. Melville drew within just a few miles of the place where Nindemann and Noros had parted company with De Long.
But over the next few days, driving deeper into the icy wastes, Melville became convinced that he had “lost the scent.” The footprints faded or became obscured by snow, and the few huts they encountered had clearly not been occupied for many months. Nindemann’s chart no longer seemed to fit this bewildering landscape. The entire delta, Melville concluded in disgust, “was nothing but a congregation of islands.”
Vasili and Tomat began to question the merits of pushing on with the search. The dogs were half-starved and exhausted now. The temperature had plummeted to forty below zero, and a lashing snowstorm had reduced the visibility to only a few feet. The two guides implored Melville to turn back for Bulun. But the engineer remained, by his own description, “inexorable.” Melville goaded them constantly, having picked up on the journey a smattering of Yakut and Russian, which he mingled with a few “choice expletives selected at random from my own rich mother tongue, the import of which they eventually divined from the vehemence of my delivery.” Melville sensed that he was drawing close to De Long’s location and felt sure they were on the verge of a breakthrough; he could not abandon the hunt now.
But as conditions worsened, Melville began to suspect that his Yakut guides were plotting to desert him. One morning, they tried to do just that: Tomat and Vasili snuck outside the hut where they were staying, loaded up the sleds, and prepared to take off, leaving him stranded—presumably forever. Apprehending this almost too late, the engineer stumbled out the door, grabbed Tomat’s iron-shod staff, and, “dealt him a staggering blow.” When Tomat and Vasili continued running for their sleds, Melville seized his gun and fired a volley into the air. “The bullet went whistling over their heads,” Melville said, “and at the report both natives fell on their faces. Then, turning around on their knees, they began crossing themselves in terror,” pleading with Melville not to kill them.
With the crisis momentarily averted, Melville realized that he had to devise a new plan that would regain the Yakuts’ confidence. He decided that they would head for the tiny village of North Bulun, a speck of civilization not far from the Arctic coast and one of the only inhabited places in the delta during winter. North Bulun was supposed to be about 120 versts, or eighty miles, to the northwest. There, they would try to procure more provisions and fresh dogs. From North Bulun, they would make an eastward crease along the Arctic coast, in hopes of finding the cache of logbooks and instruments De Long had buried. Using the cache site as a new starting point, they would then try to retrace De Long’s trail inland.
Vasili and Tomat seemed to like the new plan—to the extent that they understood it—and in a few days they arrived in North Bulun, where the villagers greeted Melville warmly. He was led to a central yurt and crawled inside to find a dozen souls crowded in the smoky, greasy chamber. “A more motley or odoriferous crowd of mortals I never saw packed within so small a space,” Melville wrote.
The Yakuts had heard reports all over this part of the delta about strange footprints seen in the snow. They had also discovered that many of their traps had been torn up and used for firewood. They were “puzzled to know by whom the footprints had been made,” said Melville, “fearing at first that some ruffian band of freebooters or fugitive exiles had come their way.”
Then several Yakuts approached Melville with relics they had found out in the delta. One native showed him a broken Winchester rifle that someone had left in a hut—Melville recognized it immediately as belonging to the Jeannette expedition. Then an old woman came forward and searched “in the inner recesses of her bosom,” said Melville, until she pulled out a note De Long had written on September 22. The note, which had been picked up by a hunter, read:
Thursday, 22nd Sept. 1881.
Arctic Exploring Steamer Jeannette
At a Hut on the Lena Delta, believed to be near Tch-ol-booje.
Whoever finds this paper is requested to forward it to the Secretary of the United States Navy. On Monday, Sept. 19, we left a pile of our effects near the beach, erecting a long pole. There will be found navigating instruments, chronometer, ships’ log-books for two years, tents, medicines, &c, which we were absolutely unable to carry. It took us forty-eight hours to make these twelve miles, owing to our disabled men. Last night we shot two reindeer, which gives us abundance of food for the present, and we have seen so many more that anxiety for the future is relieved.
George W. De Long, Lieut. Commanding.
Inspired by these new clues, Melville yearned to get started. The next day, November 13, he left North Bulun with fresh dog teams and several more Yakut guides to accompany Tomat and Vasili. The following day, they reached the coast, where blocks of ice “lay stranded like so many monuments of the Druids.” Within a few hours Melville spotted the flagstaff marking the cache, just as De Long had described it. When Melville pointed it out to his dog drivers, they could “scarcely contain themselves in their anxiety to see what was buried there.” They dug away the snow and sand and found a miscellany of guns, tents, medical supplies, navigational instruments, a large Bible, and, to Melville’s relief, the ship’s records, all in good condition. The Yakuts were struck with “wonder and delight…[they] had never before seen so much plunder in one heap.”
Also in the cache was a large tin box filled with rock specimens, mosses, and other natural bric-a-brac that had been found on Bennett Island. When Melville loaded it carefully, along with the other artifacts, onto the sleds, the Yakuts looked befuddled. They stared disbelievingly into the tin box, then rummaged through its contents. “After some chattering among themselves,??
? said Melville, “they finally burst forth into a loud guffaw at the idiocy of a man who, upon the point of starvation, proposed to encumber himself on a long journey with a load of worthless stones.”
Melville searched several hours in vain for the first cutter—the boat De Long had abandoned in the muddy shoals—but concluded that it had been crushed by the ice. He saw no sign of Chipp’s boat or his party.
Melville and his dog drivers camped in a hut not far from the coast and made a fire. The Yakuts discovered among the items retrieved from De Long’s cache a wicker-covered vessel containing a small quantity of alcohol. “The natives soon learned that I had spirits,” wrote Melville, “and all congregated around in the hope of having a spree.”
“Just a little! Just a little!” Tomat begged.
Melville refused him, saying that the alcohol was “only good for fire”—it was stove fuel, not for drinking. Then one of the other young Yakuts seized the container and bolted. “I caught him before he reached the door,” said Melville, “spilling the alcohol over the floor, whereupon he got down on his stomach and eagerly lapped up the precious fluid.” Furious, Melville emptied the remaining contents among the ashes of the hearth, “where it took fire and burned for a long while, greatly to the sorrow of poor Tomat and his friends.”
FROM THE ARCTIC coast, Melville turned his search inland, using Nindemann’s notes to follow the path De Long had taken. For several days they were clearly on the right course—Melville could see footprints from time to time, and he even traced the track of the makeshift sled on which the cutter’s crew had hauled the dying Erichsen across the ice. For several more days, Melville hunted without success for the hut where Erichsen had died and where Nindemann had carved his crude epitaph on an old board.
Melville feared he had lost the trail a second time—and, again, the Yakuts grew apprehensive about continuing the search. But Tomat told Melville something that gave him hope De Long might be alive yet: The Yakuts had what amounted to food depots hidden all over the delta. This was how they survived their wanderings in the harsh and unpredictable climate, how they forestalled disaster on their long forays, a stash of frozen fish here, a trove of goose carcasses there. In fact, just a few miles away, Tomat mentioned, the meat of twenty-three reindeer had been hoisted up on a kind of trestlework platform to keep it clear of the floods and scavenging animals. Melville wondered if by some miracle De Long and his men had found one of these food depots and perhaps were subsisting on its bounty even now. If not, he thought, it was “most pitiful to think how unconsciously near they were to salvation.”
By November 20, having made no more discoveries, Melville finally was ready to give up on the search. Even he could see that they were endangering their lives. They were freezing and demoralized, and the dog teams were “completely fagged out,” he said. The Siberian winter had proved too formidable a foe.
In the 1860s, the French scientist Louis Figuier had written eloquently about this same country in his book Earth and Sea, which was part of the Jeannette’s library collection. “The tundra,” Figuier said, “is the very grave of nature, the sepulchre of the primeval world … Dense grows the atmosphere; the stars wane and flicker; all nature sleeps a sleep that resembles death.” In the tundra, he said, “the people, and even the snow, emit a constant smoke, and this evaporation is immediately transformed into millions of icy needles, which make a noise in the air like the crackling of thick silk. The reindeer crowd together for the sake of the warmth derivable from such contiguity, and only the raven, the dark bird of winter, cleaves the somber sky with slow-laboring wing, and marks the track of his solitary flight by a long line of thin vapor.”
This was the landscape that had defeated Melville. He would have to return at a different season of the year. For now, he turned south and headed back for Bulun, a week’s journey over the same frozen labyrinths. His memory of the trip was a blur of misery. “When night overtook us,” Melville said, “I felt as we floundered aimlessly about in the snow that it made little difference to me whether I lived or died. It seemed to me that the terrible journey would have no end. I was awake and aware of all that was transpiring around me, but had lost all feeling and power of speech, and existed like an animated dead man.”
Melville began to appreciate more fully why De Long had buried all those relics in the sand: They put a tremendous strain on the dogs. He worried that hauling this burdensome freight could eventually kill not just the dogs but the whole party. “Now and then, I would decide to cache the relics at the first safe place we came to, returning for them when I could; but after a moment’s reflection, recalling how persistently we had clung to these treasures—the records and valuable accumulations of our two years of toil and suffering—and setting my teeth against the storm, I would swear a new oath to carry them through, come what might.”
MELVILLE ARRIVED IN Bulun on November 27, his face wind-burned and frostnipped almost beyond recognition. He and his Yakut guides had been gone for twenty-three days and had driven more than fourteen hundred zigzagging miles over the tundra.
Most of the Jeannette survivors had headed south with Danenhower for the city of Yakutsk, nearly a thousand miles upriver; only Nindemann, Noros, and a few others were still in Bulun to greet Melville. The engineer told them how sorry he was to return with no good news—other than having found the cache on the beach. “I regretted my failure to find my lost comrades,” he said, but felt “satisfied that I’d done all that was possible for me to do. If De Long and his party were alive and in the hands of natives, they were certainly as well off as myself; if dead, then the natives had been wise in admonishing me that I should die too if I persisted in searching at that season of the year.”
Over the course of his search, Melville had at least been able to produce something of value: an accurate chart of the Lena delta, no doubt the most accurate one then in existence—and certainly far better than Petermann’s flawed rendering. Had De Long had the benefit of this improved map at the time of his landing, he and his men would have been spared most of their hardships.
After thawing out a few days in Bulun, Melville prepared to go south. The tiny, impoverished town of Bulun could not support them—as it was, the Americans had already overtaxed its meager supplies of food and livestock. Melville, Nindemann, Noros, and the others would push on, via reindeer team, to the provincial capital of Yakutsk, where they would regroup with the other Jeannette survivors, heal their wounds, try to communicate with the outside world, and plan a much more thorough search expedition for De Long and Chipp. They would return to the delta in the spring—when the weather was warmer but, hopefully, before the Lena floods came into their full fury.
Melville thanked Commandant Bieshoff for his assistance and urged him to keep the pressure on the sparse native populations of the delta while Melville was away in Yakutsk. “It is my desire and [that] of the government of the United States of America,” Melville wrote Bieshoff, “that a diligent and constant search be made for my missing comrades. It is necessary that all—every house and hut, large and small—must be examined for books, papers, or the persons of the party.”
On December 1, Melville and the others gathered up the Jeannette relics that had been found on the coast and headed south for Yakutsk.
LONDON, DECEMBER 22, 1881
The following telegram was received at the Herald’s London office at twenty past two this morning:—
Irkutsk, December 21, 2:05 P.M.
Jeannette was crushed by the ice in latitude 77 degrees 15 min. north, longitude 157 degrees east.
Boats and sleds made a good retreat to fifty miles northwest of the Lena River, where the three boats became separated in a gale.
The whaleboat, in the charge of Chief-Engineer Melville, entered the east mouth of the Lena River on September 17th. It was stopped by ice in the river. We found a native village, and as soon as the river closed I put myself in communication with the commandant.
On October 29th, I heard th
at the cutter containing Lieutenant De Long, Dr. Ambler, and twelve others, had landed at the north mouth of the Lena. All are in a sad condition and badly frozen. The commandant has sent native scouts to look for them, and will urge vigorous and constant search until they are found.
The second cutter has not yet been heard from. Telegraph money for instant use to Irkutsk.
(Signed), Melville
Navy Department
Washington, DC
December 22d, 1881
To Engineer Melville, U.S.N., Irkutsk:—
Omit no effort, spare no expense, in securing safety of men in second cutter. Let the sick and the frozen of those already rescued have every attention, and as soon as practicable have them transported to a milder climate. Department will supply necessary funds.
Hunt, Secretary
Department of State
Washington, D.C.
A dispatch from Mr. Hoffman, chargé d’affaires of the United States at St. Petersburg, conveying the assurance that the most energetic measures would be taken by the Russian authorities for the discovery and relief of the missing men, was received today by the Secretary of State at Washington.
Immediately upon receipt of the first news about the Jeannette, Mr. James Gordon Bennett, residing in Paris, transferred the sum of 6,000 roubles by telegraph, through Messrs. Rothschilds, to St. Petersburg, with a request to draw on Mr. Bennett for any further sums required for the succor and comfort of Lieutenant De Long and his party.