Dearest George,
I hope to see my own dear husband in a month or two at best, if you are well enough that you can reach St. Petersburg. I want to join you there. I would so like to be with you, to take care of you. I am afraid to think of what condition you may be in. I am not afraid to take the journey. I do not know the possibilities of traveling in Siberia or I would gladly go the whole way to you if you are still ill. I cabled Mr. Bennett asking him if it would be practicable for me to go to you to nurse you. Bennett answered that he had sent a correspondent; even if I could have been there in time to start with him, the extra preparations required to protect a woman against the hardships of Siberian winter travel would have caused serious delay. But I think I could take better care of you than anyone else and make you well and strong.
—Emma
40 · THE RUSSIAN NATION AT YOUR BACK
From a distance, the city rose like a vision from the west bank of the frozen Lena: fortress towers, wooden spires, onion domes, a sprawl of weathered homes wreathed in the smoke of a thousand birch fires. Melville could not believe his eyes.
Yakutsk, the capital of an enormous swath of Siberia known as Yakutia, was a settlement of five thousand people, mostly natives, but also with a large population of political exiles and banished criminals. Founded in 1632 as a Cossack ostrog (fort), it remained an important outpost of the czar’s fur monopoly and the center of a bustling trade in mammoth ivory. Yakutsk was widely considered the coldest city on earth—a designation it still holds today—and the world’s largest city built entirely on permafrost. As cold as it was, the first few feet of the soil thawed into miasmal bogs each summer, so that houses had to be built on reinforced pilings to keep the foundations from sagging in the mud.
It had taken Melville nearly a month to reach Yakutsk by reindeer team, traveling over the Verkhoyansk Range, down into the valley of the Yana River. He’d slept in cabins and, occasionally, the horse stables of Yakut families. Along the way, he had crossed south of the Arctic Circle before rejoining the Lena River, which, when frozen solid, functioned as a highway. The thousand-mile journey, while arduous, had brought no calamities.
When he pulled into Yakutsk on December 30, Melville was taken to the home of the highest Russian authority, Governor-General George Tchernieff. He was a strapping man in full uniform, a bachelor in his early sixties—“straight as a spear-shaft,” said Melville, with “flowing white hair and beard, large aquiline nose, handsome face and carriage, and a very soldierly air.”
Tchernieff looked Melville over, examining his encrusted face and his filthy furs with such intensity that for a moment Melville did not know what to do; he felt embarrassed by his raggedness. But then Tchernieff embraced the engineer and kissed him on both cheeks. “My son, my son,” he moaned in sadness at all that Melville had suffered. Tears rolled down his face as he hugged Melville again and again. “He was a soldier,” Melville wrote, “so apologies for my appearance were not necessary.”
The governor-general had been expecting Melville’s arrival for the past week. Tchernieff invited him inside, and they sat down to a sumptuous lunch: soup, fish, beef, potatoes and other vegetables, a little claret, a little Madeira, a glass of vodka. They finished it off with cigars and a bottle of champagne.
For the past week, Tchernieff had been regularly meeting with Danenhower, who had arrived in Yakutsk with his charge of Jeannette survivors on December 17. The governor-general had outfitted the Americans in proper clothes, billeted them in clean apartments with warm bedrooms lit by kerosene lamps, and arranged for them take regular steam baths at the Russian banya. He’d also given them spending money and all the food they wanted. He’d arranged for a Cossack to guard and protect Cole—the crazy one, whose dementia had only worsened since leaving the Lena delta. Doctors had attended to Leach’s frostbite and Danenhower’s eye. Tchernieff had treated the men of the Jeannette as though they were prized soldiers from his own garrison.
Now the governor-general wanted to make sure Melville was comfortable. Was there anything else he could do for the Americans?
Yes, there was, Melville replied. He wanted to return to the Lena delta as soon as the weather permitted and renew his search for his lost commander. He wanted dogs, reindeer, and a knowledgeable, multilingual guide. He wanted money and tobacco to serve as gifts along the way. He wanted official letters of support, and provisions enough to prosecute a search that might last two or three months.
“My son, you may have anything you want,” Tchernieff assured Melville. “You have the whole Russian nation at your back.”
WHEN MELVILLE REUNITED with the other Jeannette survivors in their warm lodge, he was thrilled to see how good they looked. They were dressed in tight-fitting boots and stylish white shirts with crisp collars. They were given a samovar to make warm tea. “They seemed comfortable and happy,” Melville wrote, “and were already on visiting terms with the inhabitants. Many, too, had sweethearts, and had they stayed much longer, some would have had wives.”
Danenhower was now completely blind in his left eye, and his right was “suffering by sympathy,” as he put it. But he seemed otherwise healthy and in good spirits. “I always hope for the best,” Danenhower wrote his mother from Yakutsk, “and I am disposed to look upon the bright side. That philosophy has carried me through very trying experiences during the past three years.”
Only one man’s condition had deteriorated. Jack Cole was now completely out of his head—his daffiness would have been comical had it not been so sad. He told Melville that he was soon to be wed to Queen Victoria. He had recently come into a fortune, he said, and believed that the Cossack who guarded (and sometimes restrained) him for his own safety was his “body servant.” For reasons no one could understand, Cole kept asking his mates for matches, so that he could light a fire.
A photographer in Yakutsk took a group portrait of the thirteen Jeannette survivors: Melville, Danenhower, Newcomb, Nindemann, Noros, Wilson, Charley Tong Sing, Aneguin, Lauterbach, Bartlett, Cole, Mansen, and Leach. The photograph was later turned into an engraving that would run in newspapers around the world. The men were gathered tightly together in their thick furs. Danenhower’s left eye was covered by a black patch. Collectively, they wore an expression that was neither happy nor sad—simply implacable, determined, and proud.
For the Yakuts, the Amerikanskis were a curiosity. As far as anyone knew, no American had visited here since 1787, when a swashbuckling, Connecticut-born explorer named John Ledyard had made his way to this part of Siberia as part of an around-the-globe journey that had been encouraged by Thomas Jefferson, then the ambassador to France. In the broad, snow-covered streets of Yakutsk, the natives swarmed the men of the Jeannette and offered them food and presents. These town-dwelling Yakuts were different from the impoverished natives Melville had met in the delta. They lived in sturdy wooden homes with doors made of rawhide. Like the Mongols, they were horse lovers; over the centuries, they had bred a sturdy, shaggy strain of pony that could withstand the cold. The Yakuts drank great quantities of mare’s milk and preferred horsemeat to beef. The idiom they spoke was so close to modern Turkish that it was said to be “intelligible at Constantinople.”
They were expert metalworkers and dexterous carvers of ivory. It was astonishing how much mammoth ivory there was in this part of the world—the permafrost kept the massive tusks in pristine condition. The Yakuts used the ivory to make jewelry, buttons, utensils, combs, figurines, and all manner of work implements. According to their tribal legends, the mammoth was an animal that lived in the earth and burrowed like a mole, and it died when it came into contact with fresh air.
WHILE IN YAKUTSK, the Jeannette survivors began to glean their first reports from the outside world. They were still nearly two thousand miles away from the nearest telegraph station, in Irkutsk, but the settlement did receive occasional rumors and flickerings of international news. Melville learned, for example, that a new American president, a man named Garfield, had been elected in 1880
, while the Jeannette was stuck in the ice. In July 1881, however, President Garfield had been shot by a delusional assassin. The president had hung on for weeks but finally had died of his infected wound.
Garfield’s assassination resonated particularly strongly with the Russians Melville met in Yakutsk, for in March of that same year, Russia had experienced a very similar upheaval: Czar Alexander II had been slain in St. Petersburg, the victim of a bomb detonated by anarchists. Alexander II had freed the serfs and had planned other sweeping reforms, but the succeeding czar, Alexander III, reversed many of his father’s liberal measures. Although St. Petersburg lay more than five thousand miles from Yakutsk, the impact of the assassination could still be felt.
Already heavily populated with exiles, Yakutsk was seeing an almost daily influx of new arrivals. They came from all over the Russian Empire, from Moscow, from the Crimea, from Poland. Many of them were well educated, and most did not know what they had done to earn their term of banishment—which, often as not, was for life. Seldom had they even been charged with a crime; they had simply been issued an “administrative order” and sent east to live out their lives in a prison without bars. The land itself was harsh and vast enough to detain them. Their stories were beyond tragic, and they made Melville realize that the Jeannette’s tale of woe was all but swallowed in a land of limitless sorrow.
One of the exiles Melville met was a young nihilist intellectual named Leon—“a slender, dark, and cadaverous-visaged young man,” said the engineer, “whose hair was black and long, reaching to his shoulders.” Leon had been arrested in a protest on the streets of Moscow and banished to Siberia for life. While he was en route, a Cossack officer let Leon look at his detention papers, which read: “We can prove nothing against this man, but he is a student of law and no doubt a very dangerous man.”
Leon introduced Melville to a group of other exiles—young, idealistic intellectuals who for years had been planning to escape from Siberia by boat. “My coming filled them with the wildest hopes,” Melville understood, “for heretofore it had been considered as impossible to effect an escape by the ice of the Arctic Ocean as to cross a living sea of fire. Yet before I left they told me that they intended to make the attempt.” They looked upon the men of the Jeannette as a “most curious phenomenon,” said Melville. It was a measure of their desperation that they could find solace in a shipwreck tale as dark as the Jeannette’s. “We had risen before them,” Melville said, “like a pillar of hope.”
Leon and his band of exiles had scrounged a few compasses and other instruments and were attempting to build a sextant. They had been collecting charts and supplies for the journey. Their plan sounded deranged, a Jeannette voyage in reverse. They intended to construct a small vessel and float more than a thousand miles down the Yana River to the Arctic Ocean, and then attempt a voyage of nearly two thousand miles along the coast of Siberia to the Bering Strait and Alaska, where they would seek asylum in the free United States. “I ardently hoped that [they] might be crowned with success,” Melville said. “For here I saw youth, intelligence, and refinement immured for life in an Arctic desert.”
(The following year, Melville learned that Leon, together with twelve other exiles, did embark on their bold plan of escape. “Eluding their pursuers,” Melville wrote, “they succeeded, after many difficulties, in working their way down the [Yana] River, past a village near its mouth, to within sight of the sea; but the rolling waves paralyzed them with terror.” Two of the escapees surrendered themselves to the authorities; the rest were soon captured, and all were sent off to an even more hopeless and squalid exile elsewhere in Siberia.)
TO USHER IN the New Year, Governor-General Tchernieff presided over a party at the public assembly room. There was much drinking, dancing, and gaming, and a large orchestra played through the night. All the elite of Yakutsk were in attendance, as were the men of the Jeannette. One high-ranking official turned to Melville and explained with a smile, “On this night, as on no other, every man has his own wife at his side, instead of some other man’s.”
At the stroke of midnight, Tchernieff announced the start of 1882. He proposed a toast to the life and health of the new czar and to the intrepid men of the USS Jeannette. Melville was moved by his warmth, but as the evening wore on and the champagne and vodka flowed without end, he became disgusted. Everyone in Yakutsk, it seemed to him, had been drunk for several weeks and would stay drunk for at least another, as the religious festivals and public holidays continued. “In Russia,” Melville wrote, “intoxicating drink is a clog and a curse. I am satisfied that the Russians surpass every nation on the face of the globe in their ingenuity for avoiding work and getting drunk.”
The Jeannette survivors would stay together in Yakutsk for only another week. Melville finally received the telegram from the Navy Department acknowledging receipt of his earlier transmission and advising him to send most of the survivors south to “a milder climate” so they could recover in preparation for the long journey home, across six time zones to St. Petersburg, then to London, and then by steamer to New York. Danenhower would take nine men—everyone but Bartlett and Nindemann, the two men Melville judged to be the most competent and useful for his coming search in the Lena delta.
On January 9, Danenhower and his charges started by reindeer team toward Irkutsk. Governor-General Tchernieff and half the population of Yakutsk turned out on what Melville described as “a blue frosty day.” With tears in their eyes, Melville, Bartlett, and Nindemann bid their countrymen good-bye. Yet many of the citizens of Yakutsk also had tears in their eyes—especially the exiles, who tried to imagine the freedoms the travelers would enjoy on the other end of their journey. The exiles had come, said Melville, “to see the Americans set out for America. They hungrily eyed the travelers and envied them their journey. I pitied the poor exiles, gazing wistfully on our little band of sailors, as though they were so many happy spirits bound for heaven.”
In my last letter I had not yet fully realized the situation. I thought you were with Mr. Melville and well cared for. The papers now say you have not as yet been found, that Nindemann and Noros left you all badly frozen and in danger of starvation. All this forms a dreadful picture for me to dwell upon, and I do not know whether I will ever see my own dearest husband again.
The thought of what you have suffered is heartrending. I wish I had listened to no one but had gone right off and tried to get to you whatever the consequences might have been. If I could only be on my way to you, doing something for you! You who are so impatient can well understand the hardship of having to wait supinely day after day, waiting and watching, fearing and hoping. My dearest husband, I am not giving up.
All I can do is put my trust in Providence. I have been struggling day after day between hopes and fears, praying to God every minute. My mind is scarcely in a fit condition to write you even now. Every day, every hour tells. I can only hope you have come across some natives. I suppose your fate is decided one way or the other by this time.
41 · THEY THAT WATCH FOR THE MORNING
A week later, Melville left Yakutsk, heading in the opposite direction: north, toward the Lena delta. This time he had Nindemann and Bartlett with him, but he was also accompanied by a retinue of soldiers and hired guides. Governor-General Tchernieff had made good on his promise. The Russian nation, it seemed, really was at Melville’s back. At last, the engineer would have the resources he needed to carry out a thorough search: official letters of support, translators, scouts, laborers, excavation tools, fresh dogs and reindeer, sturdy sleds, a supply train extending all the way north from Yakutsk, and food depots scattered about the delta, stocked with ten thousand dried fish. It was a marshaling of assets that had never been seen in this part of Siberia.
Yet even with all this, the search proved nearly impossible. It took Melville more than a month just to reach the delta, only to find the region buffeted by nonstop gales. The storms blew for more than a month. Most of the time, Melville couldn’t b
udge.
When the weather briefly broke in mid-March, Melville pressed his advantage. Traveling with Nindemann and a team of some of the best hired Yakuts, he made straight for the place where Nindemann and Noros had parted company with De Long. From there, Melville planned to fan out and work south, searching in a systematic fashion, quadrant by quadrant.
For a week, they had no luck at all. But on March 23, while following a broad bend in a frozen back channel of the river, Melville spotted something dark in the snow a few thousand yards ahead. They hurried to it and found that it was a marker of some kind: Four sticks had been propped together and lashed with rope. Hanging from this makeshift construction was a hunting rifle. Melville instantly recognized it as Alexey’s Remington. This, Melville reflexively thought, was a bad sign: Alexey was the only real hunter in the group, De Long’s mainstay. Melville cleared the barrel and found no note inside. He could not understand why the rifle had been placed there. If it was a marker, what was it meant to mark?
Although everything was buried in deep snow, Melville got a powerful sense that De Long and his men had camped here, along this desolate bend in the river. He asked the Yakuts to scour the flats, while he and a native named La Kentie walked to higher ground to take compass readings and get an overview of the scene. As Melville ascended the bank, he spied an old scrap of clothing, then a pair of mittens, half-buried in the snow. He came to a place where a fire had been built. Huge logs of driftwood, some of them charred, had been hauled up from the river. Nearby was a large cake of river ice that evidently had been intended for drinking water.
Then Melville discerned a familiar object peeking from the snow, not far from the charred logs. It was a copper teakettle, smudged black from innumerable fires. Melville tramped over to pick it up, and as he did he nearly tripped over another object: a human arm and hand, protruding from the snow, frozen solid and cocked at a curious angle. La Kentie dropped his compass and backpedaled in fright, crossing himself.