Edward Ellsberg

“ The Lena Delta we found a bleak and barren tundra, empty of game, as inhospitable and as desolate as that ice pack in which for two years we had drifted in the long-lost Jeannette. Our dream of a safe haven had exploded in our faces. With food gone, men worn out, and worst of all, the hope which had driven us all to superhuman labor proved a lie, our situation was desperate beyond conception. Bitterly we cursed Petermann and all his works, which had led us astray. ”

“ In the faint gleam of a few oil lamps in that frigid fireroom, off the men splashed through the ice water on the floorplates, an incongruous group for a black gang if ever there was one, as clad all in furs from hoods to boots they stumbled away to their stations in a temperature more suitable to the inside of a refrigerator than to a boiler room. ”

“ More like stiffening corpses than sleepers, the exhausted men sprawled out in the snow and soon as the driftwood fire died away, darkness and falling snow enveloped the silent tents, while only the whistling of the chilling wind kept watch over De Long and his thirteen worn companions, stretched out at last on Siberian soil, victors in a heroic retreat over ice and ocean to which the long annals of the sea, whether in the tropics or round about the poles, offers no parallel. ”

“ First the torture of dragging boats and sledges over the pack, then the horrors of navigating amidst the streaming ice of the New Siberian Archipelago, finally that four-day nightmare of tumbling waves and freezing spray in the open whaleboat battling an Arctic gale—was all this not enough? Yet through all our trials since the loss of the Jeannette we had been sustained by the thought that if only we held out till we reached the Lena Delta, there at last our sufferings would end, amid friendly natives we would find food, shelter, and transportation home. ”

“ Why go into the agony of the next two hours? Wearily, without relief, my men heaved water, ice, slush, whatever the flying buckets scooped up, indiscriminately into the yawning void inside that boiler; just as wearily, with aching shoulders, Cole and his little group labored, unrelieved and unshielded from the bitter cold on deck, heaving that barrel up and down; while from the deckhouse, the more and more frequent cries of Spell O! showed that at the undermanned pump, backs were fast giving way under that inhuman strain. ”

“ It was a forlorn scene as De Long and his men took leave of the Polar Sea which for two years had held them prisoner—to the west flowed the Lena, a broad swift stream tumbling on its swirling bosom broken floes from further up the frozen river; to the north spread the Arctic Ocean, covered as far as eye could reach with young ice, through which, sticking up gaunt and bare, the only objects visible on its desolate surface, were the mast and the low gunwales of the abandoned cutter. ”

“ The snow-covered ground was swampy, with many ponds covered with thin ice and hidden under the snow, and into these pitfalls the men stumbled frequently, burying themselves to their knees in the mossy tundra beneath, and coming up with their leaking boots or moccasins filled, to plunge along again through the snow and the freezing wind, oozing a slimy mixture of mud and water from between their toes at every step. ”

“ The drift in that lead was rapid, the broken ice there was violently tumbling and eddying, and as we swept down the bleak coast five miles off Fadejovski Island unsheltered from the intense cold, with oars and boat hooks savagely fending off those heaving floes on all sides of us to keep our frail boats from being crushed, it was like making passage through the very gates of hell! ”

“ For thirty anxious minutes we fought before our two Scotch boilers with slice bars, rakes, and shovels to raise steam, while through our solid sides as we toiled below the water line, we heard the groaning and the crunching of the ice digging into our planking and from above the slapping of the sails, the howling of the dogs, and the kicks and curses of the seamen still struggling futilely to get the ship to claw off to windward. ”

“ The chances of our ever getting back were slight now, but as I shoved that case under the thwarts in the cutter, bachelor as I was, I hoped that even though our own bodies might soon be stretched in death over that desolate ice pack, somehow that flag in the boat might survive the drift, some day to be picked up and returned to the one person who would sense among its silken folds the message that it bore. ”

“ Still half a mile off our starboard quarter, there she was, plunging furiously along before the tumultuous waves, holding grimly to her original course, southwest, dead before the gale for Cape Barkin. I shook my head sadly. De Long should haul closer to the wind. As he was heading, it would be a miracle if the square-sterned first cutter lasted ten minutes, for one bad jibe would dismast his boat and broach her also, needing only another wave to send her tumbling on her side to follow in Chipp’s wake. ”

“ No possibility of shore leave, no foreign ports—nothing but the limitless ice pack holding us helpless and no hope of any change (except for the worse) till summer came and released us. And, impossible to conceal, a mental despondency, as ponderable and as easily sensed as the cold pervading the ship gripped our captain as we drifted impotently with the pack between Herald Island and Wrangel Land, a thousand miles from that Pole which in a blare of publicity from the Herald, he had set out in such confidence to conquer. ”

“ The going got worse. Pools of water from the late rain gathered beneath the crusts of snow and thin refrozen ice. As we came along, the surfaces broke beneath us, leaving us to flounder to our knees through slush and ice water. More sledge runners broke; Nindemann and Sweetman were kept busy at all hours repairing them. Chipp got worse, Alexey vomited at the slightest provocation, Lauterbach looked ready to die, and Lee staggered along on his weakened legs as if they were about to part company at his damaged hips. ”

“ Never had heroic explorers a more fitting tomb. Amidst the Siberian snows, looking out over the Lena’s great bay at the desolate cape below which had witnessed their last agony, and northward across that Polar Sea which he had valiantly given his life to conquer, De Long and his men of the Jeannette lay at last beneath the huge cross on that rocky cairn, with the fierce Arctic gales they had so often bravely faced mournfully wailing their eternal dirge. ”

“ On the tenth day, fearing the worst, we rounded up all our dogs, and waited. The pressure ahead increased, with floating ice piling up along the port side higher than our rail, finally starting the planking in our bulging bulwarks. Under the bowsprit, the rising ice blotted from sight our figurehead. Then an upended floeberg crashed violently into the pack under our starboard bow and wedged its way relentlessly toward our side. The pressure became tremendous. Beneath our feet the Jeannette’s tortured ribs groaned dismally. On deck we looked silently at one another, waiting. ”

“ So “On to the Lena Delta!” became our object in life, and to the Delta we looked forward as our Promised Land. But getting there seemed next to impossible. We were well acquainted with all previous Arctic expeditions. Not one in that long and tragic history stretching back three centuries, when disaster struck their ships, had ever faced a journey over the polar pack back to safety half so long as what faced us, and some on far shorter marches over the ice had perished to the last man! ”

“ At dawn, after a slim portion of pemmican washed down with muddy tea, we launched our boat and set bravely out up the river to find a village, only to discover instead that we were in a desolate maze of shoals, swamps, and muddy islands forming the delta, with rivers, sometimes swift and sometimes sluggish, crisscrossing erratically as they flowed over the low delta lands to the sea. Young ice was forming everywhere over river and swamp and through it with boathooks and oars we had to smash a way for our bow. ”

“ Fortunately at that instant, the broken mast and the ballooning sail, dragging alongside by the halliards streaming over the bow, caught the water, began acting as a sea anchor, and the startled men in the boat, too busy bailing to lift a hand for any other purpose, saw in amazement their submerged cutter swing slowly round in the trough into the wind and sluggishly rise head on to the next crest, heaving herself to! ”

“ To aggravate us while we toiled to straighten up our ship, we had an extraordinarily clear day, giving a splendid view across the ice of Herald Island off to the westward, with far beyond it a distinct range of peaks—Wrangel Land which, when we set out on our expedition we had fondly expected to spend the winter exploring. Frozen in, Heaven only knows how far away from it, we gritted our teeth and worked in the freezing weather to explode those torpedoes but to no purpose. ”

“ Shore leave gets you away from your shipmates, while foreign ports, foreign customs, foreign scenes, and foreigners give flavor to a cruise that makes life not only livable but to my mind rich in variety, and to a person like myself, completely satisfying. But in the polar ice, we came quickly to the realization that life on the Jeannette was life on shipboard at its worst—a small cramped ship, a captain who socially had retired into himself, only a few officers, and not a solitary compensation. ”

“ We noted only that we were less sensitive to cold than the year before—luckily for us, for apparently we were in for a worse freezing. All hands, officers and men, became more moody, less talkative. By now it was evident to even the dullest-witted that we might go on thus forever in the ice pack; that is, at least till death in one form or another—by starvation, when our food gave out; by freezing, when we exhausted our coal; or by the ice crushing our weak bodies at any time—put a period to our tale. ”

“ To get sledge, boat, and all our provisions across was utterly hopeless. So I made a cache on a large floe of our dinghy, stowing in it all except one day’s provisions and most of our gear, raising an oar flying a small black flag vertically on the highest hummock of that floe as a marker. Next there was Dunbar. Terribly down in the mouth at having collapsed and become nothing but a hindrance, he begged to be left on the ice rather than encumber us further. But to leave an old man blinded and helpless on a drifting floe which we might never find again, was not to be thought of. ”

“ And few prisoners in history, regardless of the horrors of their medieval dungeons, ever had a worse outlook to face than Danenhower in his pitch-black cell—small, damp, chilly, and with always the rumbling and screeching of the pack to remind him that any day the unseen walls of his prison might collapse and the prison itself sink from under him, leaving him helpless on the ice. ”

“ January drew along, bringing gales, biting clouds of flying ice particles, and deeper cold. The ice, getting denser and denser as it grew colder, shrank, and about the middle of the month cracked open, forming little canals on both sides, leaving us in a small island of ice hardly a shiplength across. We contemplated that dubiously, for if any pressure came from the pack about us, now forty inches thick, we would receive almost directly the thrust of the pressing floes with no protection at all. ”

“ In a large circle surrounding the ship, the surface of the pack was everywhere heaving up into a ring of rugged mountains high above the level of the sea! Huge masses of ice, large as ocean liners, pitched and rolled on the crests, while reverberating from all about came a shrieking and a screeching from the [Pg 161] tumbling ice that froze the very marrow in our bones. ”

“ For the first hour of that gale, the howling of our forty Eskimo dogs was a fair rival to the howling of the wind through the rigging, but as the waves began to break aboard, the poor dogs, half-drowned, quieted to a piteous whimper, and with their tails between their legs, sought shelter from the rushing seas in the lee of the galley, the bulwarks, the hatch coamings even—anything that would save them from the impact of those swirling waves. ”

“ Without a word, De Long picked him off the ice, laid him gently on his back on the sledge, and ordered briefly,
“You stay there, Chipp, or I’ll hand you a courtmartial for insubordination! You’re delaying our progress when you walk!”
Poor Chipp, broken-hearted at being made a burden for his overladen shipmates to drag, tried to roll off the sledge to the snow, but so weak was he that he could do no more than turn on his face when he stuck, clawing feebly, trying to pull himself off the sledge. Failing even in that, he looked pitifully up at De Long by his side. ”

“ Fog, snow, and hail made our lives miserable, and between the everlasting ferrying over open leads and the plowing through pools of surface slush, we kept our clothes continuously soaked in ice water. ”

“ And no mother nursing her baby ever handled it more tenderly than Lee and I nursed that frozen pump, gradually draining and warming the steam cylinder, lest the sudden application of heat should crack into pieces that abnormally cold cast iron, and after our heartbreaking struggle with the boiler, leave us still helpless to eject the sea. With one eye on Jack Cole’s rapidly moving barrel and the other on that narrowing margin between flood water and furnace fires, I nursed the pump along by feel, taking as long to warm it up as I dared without swamping those flames. ”