In the Kingdom of Ice

by Hampton Sides

  It was as though the doctor had sentenced him to an indefinite period of solitary confinement. Ambler tendered Danenhower a favor, though: He promised that he would not tell De Long about the syphilis—at least, not now. Ambler reported to the captain’s cabin and informed him only that Danenhower had been placed on the sick list and that his left eye had “broken down.” Venereal disease was not mentioned, but Ambler did tell De Long that the navigator might lose the sight of his left eye.

  De Long was shocked by this development, and he despaired for his friend and fellow officer. “He is now shut out from all participation,” De Long wrote, “and we can do nothing but go down occasionally to sit and talk with him in the dark. He is cheerful enough, however, and having great force of character, has made up his mind to accept the situation and fight it out.”

  CHRISTMAS MORNING BEGAN black and bleak, the winds howling, the temperatures outside so cold that the contracting bolts and metal fasteners throughout the ship snapped and cracked in their timbers. Overnight, a sleeping dog curled up on the pack had become so firmly adhered to the ice that it had to be removed with a shovel. It was impossible to take observations because the lenses of the instruments could not be cleared of frost and vapor. Inside the ship, a green scum of long-accumulated condensation clung to the walls, ceilings, bulkheads, and nearly every other interior surface.

  “This is the dreariest day I have ever experienced,” De Long wrote, “and it is certainly passed in the dreariest part of the world.” On this Christmas morning, he felt he had nothing to celebrate. He was unaware that in Washington that very week, the Navy Department had promoted him to the rank of lieutenant commander. As he thought of Emma and Sylvie and the comforts of home, he could hardly drag himself out of bed.

  De Long’s spirits lifted when some of the men came aft to distribute a bill of fare they’d secretly printed on the Jeannette’s small press. A Christmas feast was to be held at three p.m., with entertainment afterward. De Long’s mouth watered when he read the sumptuous menu—

  SOUP.

  Julienne.

  FISH.

  Spiced salmon.

  MEATS.

  Arctic turkey (roast seal). Cold ham.

  VEGETABLES.

  Canned green peas. Succotash.

  Macaroni, with cheese and tomatoes.

  DESSERT.

  English canned plum pudding, with cold sauce. Mince pie.

  Muscat dates, figs, almonds, filberts, English walnuts, raisins, mixed candy from France direct by the ship.

  WINES.

  Pale sherry.

  BEER.

  London stout.

  French chocolate and coffee.

  “Hard tack.”

  Cigars.

  ARCTIC STEAMER JEANNETTE.

  Beset in the pack, 72 degrees north latitude

  The Christmas feast proved powerfully good, so good it brought tears to the men’s eyes. Afterward, toasts were proposed, and everyone sipped a dram or two of what De Long called “a fine compound” that Melville had concocted from Irish whiskey and a few secret ingredients. Following the meal, Alexey did a native Alaskan dance, and then there was clog dancing as Adolph Dressler sawed the fiddle and Albert Kuehne worked his accordion. The festive mood had a curing effect. There was only one sour note: Collins refused to attend. He was holed up in his room, brooding. Since the failure of the Edison lights, Collins had slipped into a funk and could not be coaxed out of it. On this day, especially, he was in no mood to be merry.

  But the men somehow managed to persuade Collins to take charge of a minstrel show being planned for New Year’s Day. Collins loved the idea. He would choreograph the show, write the scenes and intervening narrations—and sprinkle the thing with all the puns he wanted.

  At midnight on the thirty-first, the New Year was announced by a rapid ringing of the ship’s bell by the man on the watch. Officers and crewmen assembled on the quarterdeck and sang out three cheers for the Jeannette. The next morning, a printed program was circulated by a crewman done up in blackface, announcing a performance that night of “The Celebrated Jeannette Minstrels.” Among other acts, it promised an orchestral overture, a violin solo, a jig dance by the ever-energetic seaman Jack Cole, and a performance by “the world-renowned Aneguin, of the Great Northwest, in his original comicalities.”

  At eight-thirty that night, everyone assembled in the deckhouse, where a stage had been erected with a drop curtain and lanterns serving as footlights, the whole proscenium decorated with flags. Danenhower, his left eye covered with a thick bandage, sat in the back. Collins began the show with a prologue in which he read some “conundrums,” as he called them. They were groaners of the first order, but his crewmates were so glad to see him back in action that nobody cared.

  “Why,” said Collins, “is that stanchion like Mr. James Gordon Bennett?”

  Why?

  “Because it supports the house.”

  “And why do you suppose it is that the USS Jeannette will never run out of fuel?”

  “Because we have Cole on board!”

  Collins went on in this vein, ignoring the guffaws, eventually incorporating every member of the Jeannette into a riddle or a rhyme. Then the show began in earnest—with songs, skits, and dances. The acts were interspersed with “Tableaux vivants,” as Collins called them, silent scenes depicting such themes as “Sailors mourning over a dead marine” (two men mute with grief over an empty brandy bottle) and “Our good Queen Anne” (Aneguin dressed in drag). The acts were silly and amateurish, and everyone loved them. De Long judged Kuehne’s violin solo “fine indeed, especially when one takes into consideration the fact that a seaman’s life does not render the fingers supple and delicate.” Ah Sam and Charles Tong Sing recited a Cantonese ballad, then broke into a sham knife fight. Then, said De Long, “Mr. Cole gave us a jig with all the gravity of a judge.”

  Not since the day they left San Francisco had such mirth and fellow feeling run through the ranks. “We broke up at eleven o’clock,” said De Long, “and we all felt satisfied with the ship, the minstrels, ourselves, and the manner in which we had celebrated the first day of the year of our Lord, 1880.”

  My dearest husband—

  I am beginning to feel as if it were about time to hear something of you. I am in hopes you have left letters behind that may be found and brought back. I am longing for the sight of your handwriting, and what wouldn’t I give for the joy of seeing you in person!

  At five o’clock every afternoon I have a feeling that you will soon be home and I must be all ready to receive you. I often imagine you in your room on board the ship, seated in your big chair, smoking your pipe after dinner, all alone in your glory, and I wish I could be with you to share it.

  Good-by for a whole year; this is the last Arctic mail for 1880 and my last chance of sending you any news. Let us hope that joy will not be too long deferred and that I will not have grown old and weary waiting.

  Emma

  23 · ON THE LONE ICEBOUND SEA

  GRAND OPENING

  of the

  NEW JEANNETTE OPERA HOUSE!

  Corner Forecastle Ave. and Bowery

  Tickets at the popular price of $0.00

  Performance to commence at 8:30 p.m.

  Sledges may be ordered at 10 p.m.

  The best liquors may be had at Lee’s Distillery,

  within a few steps of the Theatre

  A full year had passed, but everything was the same: The same gaslit stage, the same sun-starved actors, the same musicians playing the same instruments. The same dreary weather outside, the same stomachs stuffed on the same holiday feast, the same cracked lips sipping the same watered-down rum. Collins was again in charge, inflicting his wordplay on an audience that sat receptive for another festive night. Cole danced his furious jig, the Inuits performed their native dances, Sam and Charley sang their Cantonese ballads. Nothing had changed.

  It was New Year’s Eve 1880, and the USS Jeannette was still locked in the ice
. For a brief time, in the hottest days of August, it had seemed she might break free from her prison, but then the ice closed up again, as implacable as ever. They had been trapped in the pack for sixteen months now and had drifted thirteen hundred miles—far enough to reach the pole and well beyond. Yet the route they’d taken was so convoluted, so full of jagged backtracks, that their present location was only three hundred miles northwest of the place where they’d first entered the floes.

  Of course, they were grating on each other’s nerves, but they were all alive and, for the most part, healthy. Though their coal supply had dwindled alarmingly, the ship remained snug and warm. A few of the dogs had died, but otherwise the Jeannette retained her full complement of living souls—an ark inching across the frozen sea.

  But facing their second year in the pack was a sentence so crushing that it could be borne only by some stirring of levity. And so, to usher in 1881, another round of entertainments had been staged. Upon entering the “opera house,” the guests were handed boutonnieres fashioned from crinkled colored paper. After a musical overture, Collins opened with a poem—

  On the lone icebound sea we gather here

  To greet the dawning of another year

  Now for merriment we all unite

  And make the deckhouse ring with joy to-night,

  How quickly our fleet thoughts wing

  To distant lands and scenes, to bring

  A mystic spell upon our friends, who ask each other

  “How fares our absent ones—son, husband, brother?”

  Then the pageant began. The costumes were a little livelier than the year before, the sets a little more elaborate, but otherwise the performance was surreally familiar. Among the acts, the standout by far was the young British coal heaver Walter Sharvell, who had transformed himself into what De Long described as “a very comely young miss,” complete with a wig, white stockings, and a prodigious bust stuffed into a shapely calico dress. This popular drag queen flirted and danced coquettishly, and was all too convincing to a crew of lonely men who had not seen a woman in nearly five hundred days.

  The men closed the show with “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and De Long rose to say a few words to ring in the New Year. As the captain surveyed the past twelve months, he could not stifle his bitterness and disappointment. They were hardly any nearer to the North Pole than when they’d first met the ice. They had been “drifting about like a modern Flying Dutchman,” noted De Long in his journal, “thirty-three people wearing out their hearts and souls.” The year 1880 had been a blank. It had been a year of languor, of monochrome monotony—a year frozen in time. Everything, it seemed, was the same.

  AND YET THAT wasn’t quite true. When he looked back on it, De Long could see the highs and lows. The moments of heroism, the small delights, the work well done. There had been ingenious mechanical inventions and atmospheric spectacles too weird and wonderful to adequately describe. There had been rousing bear hunts—including one that brought home a prize male weighing 943 pounds. There had been days so warm the men had turned lobster red from the sun, and yet at one point, in February, the temperature had reached fifty-eight degrees below zero. They had played a thousand games of checkers and poker, backgammon and chess. When the warm weather came, they had scraped and repainted nearly every surface of the fair Jeannette. On the Fourth of July, they had dressed her up with flags and bunting and fired their guns in the nation’s honor. When the short Arctic summer passed again into winter, the ice “began its horrid screeching and grinding,” said De Long, “as if in celebration.”

  The novelty of life on the ice had long since worn off, Melville noted. “Our supplies of jokes and stories were completely exhausted, and their points had been dulled by much handling,” he wrote. “The ship’s company, fore and aft, had found their affinities; and congenial spirits began to walk, talk, and hunt together in couples. In the cabin there was more reading and less conversation, and the senior officers seemed daily bound by a closer band.”

  If they had not really gone anywhere, they had journeyed into regions of the psyche where few men had ever been, interior spaces that brought out aspects of themselves they’d never known existed. In ways few could imagine, the true grain of their characters had been revealed. In his Sunday devotionals, the captain’s thoughts had inevitably run toward the story of Job. “He is recorded to have had many trials and tribulations which he bore with wonderful patience,” De Long had written. “But so far as is known, Job was never caught in pack ice.”

  In his lowest moments, De Long had considered quitting the Jeannette and heading for Siberia or Alaska. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. “I abhor the idea—we have come through so much,” he said. “We shall stick to the ship as long as she sticks to us.”

  THE LOWEST MOMENT of all had happened on January 19, 1880. From the bowels of the ship, a dread cry had gone up from Lieutenant Chipp: “Man the pumps!” The Jeannette had finally succumbed to the cumulative wrenchings and shudderings of the ice. She was leaking badly—at a rate later estimated to be more than four thousand gallons per hour. When the trouble was discovered, her hold was already hip-deep in seawater. But it was so cold—the ambient temperature outside hovered around thirty degrees below zero—that the water turned to slush as soon as it seeped in.

  Up on deck, De Long initiated emergency procedures to abandon ship. But in the hold, a crew member named William Nindemann stepped forward and exerted the full force of his personality. A thirty-year-old immigrant from Rügen Island, Germany, William Friedrich Carl Nindemann was listed as an ordinary seaman, but there was nothing ordinary about him. He had already suffered enough in his lifetime to set him apart from everyone else on board. Nindemann was a survivor of Hall’s Polaris expedition in Greenland and had drifted with Tyson all those eighteen hundred miles on the ice floe, only to return to the Arctic to search for his lost mates. Even before the Polaris tragedy, Nindemann had made a name for himself as a shipwreck survivor: Three years earlier, he had been among the crew of a private American yacht that sank off the coast of North Africa. Nindemann was rescued by Tunisian Arabs, who took him hostage and demanded $15,000 ransom. Nindemann, it seemed, was a preternaturally lucky man who was not only addicted to the Arctic but was apparently impervious to hardship at sea. He had become a naturalized American citizen just a few months before setting sail on the Jeannette. Nindemann was signed on as the ship’s quartermaster.

  Practically from the day the Jeannette set sail, Nindemann had risen above the other seamen; he was the hardest working, the least complaining, the most resourceful, the quickest to volunteer for dangerous duty. The second day out of San Francisco, a ponderous hatchway cover had fallen on his hand and nearly severed one of his fingers. An alarmed Dr. Ambler stitched it up, but the German went about his work without a whimper, refusing to go on the sick list even for a day. “Nindemann is hardworking as a horse,” said De Long, and “seems to know no such thing as fatigue.”

  Nindemann was also oblivious to cold. His circulation appeared to be different from other men’s. On freezing winter hunts, he wore hardly any clothes. He kept his cabin colder than everyone else’s. His feet were inured to frost. He was a polar creature, through and though. As Collins said in one of his pieces of doggerel, “Not since Adam sinn’d e’er lived a man / Who lov’d the Arctic like our Nindemann.”

  Now Nindemann waded into the flooded hold. For more than twenty-four hours, he labored in the freezing gloom, cramming whatever materials he could find—felt, oakum, tallow, plaster, cement, ashes—into the frames where the water appeared to be rushing in. Much of that time he was joined by another stalwart, the British carpenter and mechanic Alfred Sweetman. The two men seemed not to notice the freezing slush that came up to their knees; others who tried to pitch in were driven away within minutes, their feet throbbing and blue.

  As they labored, Melville devised a system of steam pumps and siphons, and other men worked hand pumps around the clock. Melville cannibalized
Edison’s generator for spare parts to make the system run. Then he designed a windmill to bring up even more water, its turning blades improvised from old tin cans. The contraption soon “rattled off in fine style,” De Long remarked, and was “worthy of being handed down to posterity.”

  Nindemann and Sweetman, meanwhile, didn’t stop working. Once they’d reduced the leak to a few hundred gallons per hour, they began constructing an extra-watertight bulkhead in the forward-most hold, the forepeak. All told, they worked for sixteen straight days, almost without stopping, sleeping in shifts of no more than a few hours, often skipping meals. When the new bulkhead was finished and thoroughly caulked, it stanched the leaks further. After the crisis was over and the ship had been saved, Nindemann and Sweetman collapsed in exhaustion. De Long made a special notation in his logs, recommending the two men for Congressional Medals of Honor.

  Though their work was a success, the leaks would never be entirely fixed. The rattle and clunk of pumps would be a constant agitation for the rest of the voyage—a reminder that catastrophe was always just a few mechanical strokes away.

  De Long tried to get to know Nindemann better. There was something remarkable about him, something about the ferocity of his work ethic, that the captain wanted to understand. He was a splendid masochist, a man who seemed to speed up in extreme cold. He had no rank, but in De Long’s estimation, Nindemann had already moved to the forefront of the expedition.

  Nindemann did not respond to praise, and he kept his distance. Seemingly emotionless, he had a black mustache and leathery skin and spoke forcefully in a thick German accent—a man of action, not words. He wouldn’t attend De Long’s divine service on Sunday, either. “I believe in nature,” he said. “Nature is my God. I don’t believe in the hereafter. This world is where we get all our punishment.”