In the Kingdom of Ice

by Hampton Sides

  If by any mischance we should never meet again in this world, be assured that in everything, word and deed, you have always been to me the truest, best, and most loving wife a man ever had. My whole heart and soul go out to you … my precious, darling, good-by.

  20 · A DELUSION AND A SNARE

  For the whole month of September, and all of October, too, the Jeannette remained trapped in the ice. De Long harbored no more illusions: They were beset for the season. It was time to dig in. He had the men unship the rudder and hoist it up on deck, out of harm’s way. He had them coat the engines with white lead and tallow and drain pipes to forestall freezing. He issued fur clothing. He had the carpenters hammer together an addition to the deckhouse and cover it with layers of insulating felt. To reduce heat loss from the hull, he ordered the men to pile snowbanks all around the Jeannette, up to the rails.

  The Jeannette was drifting mostly in a northwestern direction, though the pack could be erratic, shifting day by day, even minute by minute. Many times they found that they had circled back to the same spot, weeks and sometimes months later. The ship was heeled over to starboard at a sharp angle, and she trembled at times in gusts of wind, but otherwise she seemed quite stable, congealed in her slab of ice. Melville thought the ship was “embedded…as in a mould.” To De Long, the Jeannette felt “as steady as if she were in a dry dock.”

  As they drifted, they always kept an eye on Wrangel Land. Passing north of it, they obtained views of Wrangel that had never been seen by man. It was as though they’d crossed over to the dark side of the moon. As they cut across the top of it, two things became apparent to De Long. First, they would never reach Wrangel—the floes were sweeping them too far away from it, and too quickly, for them to attempt a safe landing.

  De Long’s second realization was that they’d made a substantial discovery. Seeing Wrangel from its north side and drifting across any possible connection it might have had with other lands farther north, he now knew the truth: Wrangel Land was a good-sized island, but it was no continent. Petermann’s idea of a transpolar landmass was wrong. “Dr. Petermann’s theory was no longer tenable,” Danenhower wrote, “for its insularity was evident.” Wrangel had nothing whatsoever to do with Greenland. (So much for “the much-boasted continent,” Melville scoffed.) The maps could now be altered: WRANGEL LAND had been demoted; it was now just WRANGEL ISLAND.

  De Long had effectively consigned another myth to the scrap heap: the thermometric gateway. The ice in which they were so stubbornly locked had certainly caused De Long to doubt Silas Bent’s celebrated theory, but it was the Jeannette’s slow and careful accumulation of scientific data that clinched the captain’s opinion. Every day, his men had gone out and hacked holes in the sea ice to take studious measurements of ocean depth, current, salinity, specific gravity, and temperature. Not once had they found the slightest evidence of a warm-water current flowing north—or, indeed, flowing in any direction. The Kuro Siwo was nowhere to be found. As De Long gazed out over the endless expanses of ice, he cursed the lustrous idea that had led him to their present fix. Said the captain: “I pronounce a thermometric gateway to the North Pole a delusion and a snare.”

  De Long was even starting to doubt the cherished concept of the Open Polar Sea. This implacable ice did not appear to be a mere “girdle,” or an “annulus,” that one could simply bust through. It seemed to stretch out forever, and the pressures locked up within the pack suggested unimaginably huge expanses of even thicker ice. “Is this always a dead sea?” he wondered. “Does the ice never find an outlet? Surely it must go somewhere. I should not be surprised if the ocean had frozen over down to the equator. I believe this icy waste will go on surging to and fro until the last trump blows.”

  During late-night smoking sessions in the wardroom, De Long and Danenhower had begun to guess at the truth: that the pole was covered by a huge and permanent though ever-shifting carapace of ice. There were no large landmasses, and no basins of open water, but this ice sheath did move, seemingly in a clockwise fashion, powered by the vagaries of current and wind. Said Danenhower: “Some of us talked about the polar region being covered with an immense ‘ice cap’ which seemed to have a slow, general movement in the direction of the hands of a watch; the direction of the drift, of course, being different in the different segments.”

  The Jeannette expedition had thus begun to shed its organizing ideas, in all their unfounded romance, and to replace them with a reckoning of the way the Arctic truly was. This, in turn, led De Long to the gradual understanding that an endlessly more perilous voyage lay ahead. They might reach the North Pole yet, but almost certainly they were not going to sail there.

  FOR NOW, DE LONG had to focus on establishing a workable shipboard economy. A daily routine started to form: All hands up by seven. Galley fires roaring by seven-fifteen. Breakfast at eight. Onboard chores performed through the midmorning. Soundings at noon.

  Then they headed out to the ice for two hours of exercise. Sometimes they put on snowshoes and clomped around the ship, often with rifles in hand, in case they spotted walruses, seals, or other game. Other days, if there was a nice flat spot in the ice, they laced up their skates. Often they held football games out on the floes.

  Dinner was served at three p.m., after which the galley fires were put out to save coal. Tea and a light meal were taken between seven and eight. At night Danenhower led a class in elementary navigation for all comers, while other officers met in the wardroom for a smoke and a review of the day. Lights out by ten.

  No rum or spirits were allowed except on a few festive occasions determined by De Long. The first of every month, Dr. Ambler conducted a medical examination of every officer and crew member—no exceptions. On Sundays, De Long would recite the naval Articles of War, then lead a short devotional service.

  Day by day, this was the general choreography, but certain individuals had specific tasks. Danenhower spent most of his time taking meteorological and astronomical observations. Dr. Ambler, when he wasn’t examining patients, roamed the cabins testing for excess carbon dioxide and subjecting the drinking water to silver nitrate tests to ascertain its salinity.

  The two Inuits, Alexey and Aneguin, mostly occupied themselves dealing with what De Long called “our hoodlum gang” of dogs, which were nearly always fighting, whining, and fouling the decks. Alexey and Aneguin hated the stuffy cabins of the ship so much that they constructed their own lean- to on the deck. They were formidable hunters—every other day a few fresh seals could be seen hanging up in the rigging—but the two Alaskans sometimes did strange things out on the ice, mystical things that spooked the other men. They spoke to the moon. They offered gifts of tobacco to the ice. They made predictions about the dogs’ behavior that often played out with astonishing accuracy. Once, after shooting a giant walrus, Alexey bared an arm, shoved it down the throat of his prey, and, pulling it out, wiped the warm blood on his forehead. “For good luck,” he said. Another time, after killing a seal, Alexey removed small pieces of each hind foot, as well as the gallbladder, and placed them carefully in a hole in the ice. “Make um more seal,” he explained. Still, De Long was impressed by the two Inuits and thought a “quiet dignity” pervaded everything they did.

  The two Chinese immigrants, Ah Sam and Charles Tong Sing, kept to the galley, where they had learned to prepare such delicacies as seal fritters, roast “squab” of seagull, and the company favorite, walrus sausage. (“A rare good thing it is,” De Long pronounced it. Seal and walrus, he insisted, “are not to be despised.”) Sam and Charley slept in their cookhouse, too, in a little curtained-off area they kept spotlessly clean. Aside from singing and playing cards, they seemed to enjoy only one other diversion from their pots and pans: Out on the ice, they loved to fly colorful kites with long paper streamers, a spectacle that amused and delighted the other men. Sam and Charley were “seemingly emotionless,” De Long noted, in “all weathers, all circumstances … as impenetrable in this cold weather as if we were enjoying a
tropical spring. They hold no communion with their fellow-men, but are nevertheless cheerful and contented with each other’s society.”

  Newcomb, the Smithsonian-recommended naturalist, spent his days shooting birds, scavenging curiosities from the ice pack, and dredging the blue mud of the sea floor for marine specimens. His study had become something of an abattoir, piled high with the carcasses of decaying animals—or parts of animals—which, when mixed with the astringent chemicals his work required, gave off a nauseating stench. His collection already included a walrus fetus, numerous starfish and bivalves, various species of Arctic fish, several puffins, an albatross with a seven-foot wingspan, and two rare Ross’s gulls. Most of the men found Newcomb—some called him Ninkum—morbid and strange. Said Melville: “The less I had to do with him the better.”

  De Long thought Newcomb a tad odd, too, but was impressed with his zeal. “Natural History is well looked out for,” De Long had to concede. “Any animal or bird that comes near the ship does so at the peril of its life.” Newcomb rarely mixed with the men. “He may be deemed to be our silent member,” De Long wrote. “But he has his little place in the port chart-room all fixed up with his tools, and is as happy as can be.”

  All in all, the crew seemed more or less content. De Long called them “our little colony” and was pleased to note that “everybody is in good health and in good spirits … They have their musical instruments every night and play and sing. There are so many good voices that I am thinking of getting up a choir.”

  Inevitably, though, a certain monotony began to set in. “It is unnatural for us to have this enforced close companionship,” De Long wrote, “and we seem to get in each other’s way.” He admitted that on some days, a few of the men seemed “mentally ‘out of sorts,’ ” and felt “the time hang heavily”—but that was to be expected. “If life within the Arctic circle were perfect comfort,” De Long reasoned, “everybody would be coming here. We must be thankful that our discomforts are no greater.”

  If the daily routines and rituals ran smoothly, the credit for that belonged to one man: Lieutenant Charles Chipp, the ship’s executive officer. Chipp was a loner, and so laconic and cheerless-seeming that he sometimes made the other men uncomfortable. He spent most of his free hours studying the auroras that often danced across the night skies. But De Long had become utterly dependent upon his number two. “Chipp is putting everything in order quietly and steadily,” De Long said, “and he has everything reduced already to a system. Today when I inspected the ship she was as neat as a pin, the men nicely dressed, and everything looking more like a man-of-war.”

  Chipp was good for keeping things right, but when things went wrong, De Long had come to place his deepest faith in Melville. There was nothing, it seemed, the engineer couldn’t fix, no problem he couldn’t solve. “More and more a treasure” was how De Long described him. If a piece of machinery was ailing, he would tear it apart and rebuild it, cannibalizing components from other machines. Back in the summer, when a pump rod had broken on the engine, Melville had blithely told De Long that he could make a new one—or, if the captain preferred, he could make twenty new ones; it was all the same to him.

  Melville, who usually had a pipe fitting or soldering iron or welding torch in his hand, was always tinkering, inventing things to improve life on the ship. He devised a new method for recording wind velocities. He designed a little machine to crimp the soles of the fur boots the men had been sewing from pelts purchased in Alaska. When the distiller started putting out water that was too salty, Melville ripped the whole apparatus apart and built it anew, so that it produced a perfectly pure liquid. Whenever De Long asked him if such-and-such contraption could be built, Melville would go to the drawing board and madly sketch out diagrams. Usually the answer was “Yes, it can be done,” and that became Melville’s mantra.

  Melville sang lustily in a stentorian voice and cursed with such gusto that De Long had to formally reprimand him for profanity. But he was “bright as a dollar and cheerful as possible all the time,” said De Long. He seemed to have “indomitable energy” and a “splendid … fertility of device.”

  “Melville is one of the strong points in this expedition,” De Long said. “I believe he could make an engine out of a few barrel hoops.”

  PART OF THE Jeannette’s daily routine involved baiting the bear traps, usually with the bloody entrails of some seal Alexey had shot. So far, the crewmen had spotted a few polar bears at a distance and had seen innumerable pawprints on the ice, but what De Long wanted was fresh Ursus steaks for the mess table. In the first weeks, the only prey they had caught in the bear traps were two of the expedition’s sled dogs—which were pulled howling from the steel jaws, hurt but not irreparably maimed.

  Early on the morning of September 17, Chipp and Dunbar, the New England whaler and ice pilot, went out to examine the bear traps. About a mile from the ship, they came upon one that had been sprung. The caught bear had managed to yank the trap away from its ice anchor, and Dunbar could see a trail of blood on the ice. As the bear had dragged the trap along, it had left a broad scrape across the ice, which rendered the animal’s path of escape unmistakable.

  Chipp and Dunbar hastily returned to the ship to report their find and to gather supplies for a full-scale bear hunt. Melville and De Long joined them, and soon the four men were dashing over the ice. After an hour of following the bloody trail, they began to see the tracks of two other bears, one on either side of the injured animal. To De Long, it appeared “as if two friends had remained by him to encourage him in his retreat.”

  For six miles they tramped across the ice, puffing and sweating in their heavy furs. Finally they came to a low place in the ice and saw their quarry, still entangled in the trap, growling in pain. It was a young male; only a small part of his left forepaw had been snagged. One of his companions remained with him—a young she-bear. “The female made no attempt to desert him,” said De Long, in admiration, “but ran ahead and back to him as if to coax him on. Upon sighting us, both rose on their hind legs and howled dolefully.”

  Melville said the bears dashed across the floe “with the ungracefulness of a cow but the speed of a deer, causing the snow to fly like feathers in a gale.” Sometimes the male bear’s “curiosity [would] get the better of his judgment, and he [would] stop to inspect these strange creatures that dare put him to flight, for he is the monarch of the polar regions.”

  When the trapped bear and his companion turned to make their final stand, Dunbar and Chipp opened fire with their Winchesters, and Melville took a crack with his Remington breechloader. De Long’s shot proved the coup de grâce, and, as he put it, “the thing was soon over.”

  Chipp and Dunbar were sent back to the ship to fetch men and sleds for hauling their prizes. A few hours later they returned, with nearly the entire crew of the Jeannette in tow. Everyone wanted in on the blood sport, it seemed, and the afternoon soon “turned into a holiday,” wrote De Long. The men rigged up scales and weighed the two animals: The female was 422 pounds, the male 580.

  They were small bears, in fact—Dunbar, a month later, would kill one that tipped the scales at half a ton—but these were the Jeannette’s first bear kills, and so would be remembered fondly. Collins, who had brought his photographic equipment, captured images of the hunters and their trophies. Then the bears were skinned and dressed, and the meat and furs piled upon the sledges. By afternoon, everyone was a greasy, gory mess. But “all hands were jubilant,” said De Long, “as after a victory,” for they knew that fresh meat was in store for dinner that night.

  Newcomb, the serial bird killer, was not to be outdone by the big-game hunters. A little ways off by himself, out on the ice, he shot “seven beautiful young gulls,” he proudly noted, and added them to his growing collection of carcasses to be stuffed.

  BY MID-OCTOBER, as the Arctic darkness steadily descended over the crew, De Long decided it was time to try out Edison’s electric lights. He looked forward to the morale boos
t they would provide—blazing over the ship at night, a dazzling novelty of American ingenuity.

  The task of making Edison’s lights work was tremendously important for Jerome Collins. His title was chief scientist of the expedition. He was the one who had conferred with Edison at Menlo Park, and he had personally ordered the arc lamps, the dynamo, and other equipment. Collins, even more than De Long, believed in the restorative powers the lights would have on the men.

  But De Long had started to entertain doubts about Collins. Among his other duties, the Irish meteorologist was supposed to be the official expedition photographer, and indeed he had exposed numerous plates with his American Optical Company double-swing cone bellows camera—like the ones he had taken on the day of the bear kill. A problem had presented itself, however: Collins had brought the exposed plates to the darkroom, but no finished images had ever emerged. The reason was embarrassing for Collins, almost mortifying: He couldn’t find the developing chemicals he had ordered in San Francisco. He searched frantically in the holds, ransacking the boxes in which the photographic plates had been stowed. Apparently, they had never made it aboard ship. This oversight, he knew, was entirely his fault.

  Luckily, Melville had thought to bring his own photographic equipment, including developing chemicals. In the future, it was Melville who would take most of the expedition photographs.

  Another task specifically assigned to Collins was the erection of an “observatory” on the ice—a portable canvas structure, stabilized by ice anchors, that would be kept full of meteorological instruments. At De Long’s request, Collins and Lieutenant Chipp had strung telephone wire so the ship could stay in regular communication with whoever might be in the observatory. But when Collins connected Bell’s new inventions, they worked only briefly before the signal flickered out. The brittle copper wire wouldn’t conduct properly once it got wet, and it was constantly snagging and breaking on the crusty ice. Evidently, the bare No. 24 wire that Bell’s lab had provided was the wrong gauge. In any case, the telephones were a bust. The blame for this could not rightly be put on Collins, but somehow it registered with De Long as yet another illustration of the chief scientist’s general fecklessness.