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wheeled overhead, till at last, still wan from retching, he turned in, leaving his hook overboard. But Newcomb, whom the doctor and I (chaffing him on his Yankee accent) had nicknamed “Ninkum,” was decidedly game. It needed no more than a call from Ambler or me on sighting a new albatross eyeing from aloft that bit of salt pork, of
“Hey, Ninky, quick! Come and catch your goose!” to bring little Newcomb, aflame with scientific ardor, tumbling up from the poop to man his line hopefully.
At last an albatross measuring some seven feet in wing spread, which for this ocean is good-sized, swooped down and swallowed the bait, and a bedlam of cries from the anguished bird ensued which attracted the notice of all hands. Then came a battle, in which for a while it seemed debatable whether the albatross, flapping its huge wings frantically at one end of the line would come inboard, or whether little Newcomb, not yet wholly up to par, tugging on the other end, would go overboard to join it amongst the waves. But Newcomb won at last, landed his bird, promptly skinned it, and prepared it for mounting. And so much has the prosaic power of steam already done to kill the ancient superstitions of the sea, that this albatross, ingloriously hooked, came to its death at the hands of a bird-stuffer without objection or visible foreboding from any mariner aboard.
At last, twenty-three days out of San Francisco, with our bunkers nearly empty from fighting head winds, and anxious to make port before the coal gave out completely and forced us to rely on our sails alone, we made the Aleutian Islands, only to find them shrouded in thick fog. For Danenhower, our navigator, trouble started immediately. The only chart he had covering that coast was one issued thirty years before by the Imperial Russian Hydrographic Office, and it was quickly apparent that numberless small islands looming up through rifts in the fog were not down on the chart at all, while others he was looking for, were evidently incorrectly located.
Worst of all, Danenhower could not even accurately determine our own position, for when the sun momentarily broke through the clouds, the horizon was obscured in mist, and when the fog lifted
enough to show the horizon, the sun was always invisible beneath an overcast sky. For hours on end, Danenhower haunted the bridge, clutching his sextant whenever the horizon showed, poised like a cat before a rat-hole, if the sun peeped out even momentarily, to pounce upon it. But he never got his sight.
Between thick fogs and racing tides, with our little coal pile getting lower and lower, we had a nerve-racking time for two days trying to get through Aqueton Pass into Behring Sea, the Jeannette anchored part of the time, underway dead slow the remainder, nosing among the islands, often with only the roar of breakers and the cawing of sea birds on the rocks to give warning through the mists of the presence of uncharted islets. Finally we slipped safely through, and to the very evident relief of both captain and navigator, on Saturday, August 2, dropped anchor in the harbor of Unalaska.
Naturally our first concern on entering port was coal. A brief glimpse around the land-locked harbor showed the Alaska Fur Company’s steamer St. Paul, the schooner St. George, owned by the same firm, and the Revenue Cutter Rush, but not a sign of our coal-laden schooner, the Fanny A. Hyde, nor any report of her having already passed northward on her way to our rendezvous at St. Michael’s. So I went ashore with Captain De Long to canvass the local fuel situation. We found eighty tons of coal belonging to the Navy, the remnant of a much larger lot sent north some years before, but so deteriorated by now from long weathering and spontaneous combustion as to be in my opinion nearly worthless. Even so, that being all the coal there was I was investigating the problem of getting it aboard when the commander of the Revenue Cutter requested we leave it for his use, because it would be his sole supply in getting back to San Francisco in the fall. Naturally we in the Jeannette, anxious to get as far north as possible before dipping into what our consort was carrying for us, were not wholly agreeable to waiving our claim as a naval vessel to that coal in favor of the Revenue Service, but this difficulty was soon adjusted by the offer of the Alaska Company’s agent to refill our bunkers with some bituminous coal he had on hand, his company to be reimbursed for it in New York by Mr. Bennett. This happy solution settled our fuel question for
the moment, so while the natives took over the job of coaling ship, I turned my attention for a few hours to making myself acquainted with the island.
After nearly a month at sea, I found Unalaska pleasant enough, with its green hills surrounding the harbor and its small settlement, comprising mainly the houses of the Fur Company’s agents and employees, their warehouses, and last and perhaps most important just at this time, a Greek church. It seems that the steamer St. Paul, which we found in the harbor on our arrival Saturday, had just come down two days before from the Pribilof Islands loaded with sealskins, and carrying as passengers from those tiny rocks practically all the bachelor sealers of Pribilof in search of what civilization (in the form of metropolitan Unalaska) had to offer. All Thursday and Friday there was great excitement here as the native belles paraded before the eager eyes of these none too critical prospective bridegrooms. By Saturday, most choices were made and the Greek Catholic Church had a busy day as the couples passed in a continuous procession before the altar and the Russian priest tied the knots. There being no inns or dwellings to accommodate the multitude of honeymooners, the problem was simply enough solved by each newly-wedded couple going directly from the church door for a stroll among the nearby hills. By afternoon, only some few of the sealers, idealists undoubtedly, who were unable to discover among the native women anyone to suit them, were still left wandering disconsolately about the town, peering into every female face, in a queer state of indecision which the smiles of Unalaska’s beauties seemed unable to resolve.
Between coaling ship, taking aboard furs for winter clothing, and receiving some six tons of dried fish for dog food, we on the Jeannette were kept busy for the three days of our stay, while our nights were enlivened by the most vicious swarms of mosquitoes it has ever been my misfortune to encounter, and all attempts to keep them out of my bunk with the ill-fitting bed curtains were wholly futile. My bald spot was an especial attraction for them; in desperation I was at last forced to sleep in my uniform cap.
On August 6, we hoisted anchor and got underway, with the whole town on the waterfront to see us off amidst the dipping of colors and a salute from three small guns in front of the Fur Company’s office. I made out plainly enough in the crowd the Russian priest with his immense beard, but De Long and I differed sharply over the presence of any of the brides amongst the throng. So far as I could judge, there were no women there, merely a large crowd of men waving enviously after us as we circled the harbor on our way toward Arctic solitude.
With our usual luck, we bucked a head wind for all the first day out, but to our great gratification, on the second day the wind shifted to the southward and freshened so that we logged the almost unbelievable day’s run of a hundred and seventy-three miles for an hourly average of seven and a quarter knots—for the Jeannette almost race horse speed! But it was too good to last. Next day we had dropped down to a little under six knots, and then the breeze failed us altogether and we finished the last three days of our run to St. Michael’s with our useless sails furled, under steam alone at our usual speed of four knots.
CHAPTER VI
The Kuro-Si-Wo Current, the “black tide” of Japan, somewhat akin to our Gulf Stream, rises in the equatorial oceans south of Asia, flows eastward, is partly deflected northward by the Philippines, and then impelled by the southwest monsoons flows at a speed reaching three knots past Japan in a northeasterly direction, a deep blue stream some twelve degrees warmer than the surrounding Pacific Ocean. It was a commonly accepted belief that eastward of Kamchatka, it separated into two branches, one flowing southward along the west coast of North America to temper the coasts of Alaska and British Columbia, while the second branch continued northward through Behring Strait into the Arctic Ocean.
As is well known, for several centuries most of the attempts to reach the North Pole had gone by way of Baffin Bay and Greenland, where without exception they were all blocked by ice. Ours was the first expedition to make the attempt by way of Behring Sea, De Long being willing to test the theory that the warm waters of the Kuro-SiWo, flowing northward through the Arctic Ocean, might give a relatively ice-free channel to a high northern latitude, perhaps even to the Pole itself; while if it did not, the shores of Wrangel Land (of which next to nothing was yet known), stretching northward and perhaps even crossing the Pole to reappear in the Atlantic as Greenland as many supposed, would offer a base in which to winter the ship while sledge parties could work north along its coasts toward the Pole.
On these two hypotheses rested mainly our choice of route. With the Jeannette in the Behring Sea at last, it remained only to pick up our sledging outfit and put our theories to the test. So for St. Michael’s on the mainland of Alaska we headed, where six hundred miles to the northward of Unalaska on the fringe of the Arctic Circle our dogs awaited us and our rendezvous with the Fanny A. Hyde was to take place.
The passage took us six days, and many were the discussions round our wardroom mess table while we steamed on through Behring Sea approaching the real north, as to the correctness of these theories. Especially heated were the arguments with respect to the extent of Wrangel Land whose very existence some polar authorities doubted altogether, since the late Russian Admiral Wrangel (for whom it was named) in spite of a most diligent search, egged on by native reports, never himself was able to find it. As for Kellett and the whaler Long, who afterwards and some years apart claimed to have seen it and even to have coasted its southern shores, they were not everywhere believed.
Aside from these uncertainties, speculation waxed hot over a secondary object of our voyage, to us an unfortunate but unavoidable complication to our task, a search for Professor Nordenskjöld, a Swedish explorer. Attempting that sixteenth century dream, never yet realized, of the Northeast Passage from Europe to the Orient via the Siberian Ocean, he had sailed northward the year before us in the Vega from Stockholm to circumnavigate Asia. Nordenskjöld, so it was reported, had successfully reached by the winter time of 1878 Cape Serdze Kamen on the coast of Siberia only a little north of Behring Strait, where almost in sight of his goal, he was frozen in. Since then, except for an unverified rumor from the natives of that occurrence, nothing further had been heard of him or of his ship and naturally both in Sweden and in Russia there was considerable anxiety over his fate.
As a consequence, before sailing from San Francisco, we had been ordered by the Secretary of the Navy to search off Cape Serdze Kamen for Nordenskjöld, to assist him if necessary, and only after assurance of his safety, to proceed northward on our own voyage. But we were hopeful that because of the very open summer reported at Unalaska by whalers coming in from the north, Nordenskjöld had been enabled to resume his voyage southward and that we should on our arrival at St. Michael’s obtain some definite news of his safe passage through Behring Strait, thereby obviating the necessity of our dissipating what few weeks were left of summer weather in searching the Siberian coasts for him instead of
striking directly for the Pole with the Jeannette while the weather held.
So one by one, the days rolled by till on August 12 we finally dropped our mudhook in St. Michael’s. After securing my engines, I came on deck to find De Long turning from the unprepossessing collection of native huts and the solitary warehouse which made up the Alaska Company’s settlement there, to survey gloomily the empty harbor. Here he had confidently expected to find the Fanny A. Hyde waiting with our coal, but no schooner was anywhere visible.
Instead of the schooner, the only boat in sight was a native kyack from which as soon as the anchor dropped, clambered aboard for his mail Mr. Newman, the local agent, who had about given up hope of seeing us this year.
That our schooner had not arrived was evident enough without discussion. But when De Long learned from Newman that they had no tidings whatever of Nordenskjöld, that they had had so far this season no communication with Siberia, and that at St. Michael’s they knew even less of Nordenskjöld and his whereabouts than we when we left San Francisco, it was obvious from the droop of the skipper’s mustaches that his depression was complete. No schooner, no coal, and now the prospect of having to search Siberia for Nordenskjöld instead of going north!
De Long, as I joined him at the rail to greet Mr Newman, was polishing his eyeglasses on the edge of his jacket. Meticulously replacing them on his nose as I came up, he sourly scanned the settlement ashore.
“A miserable place, Melville! Look at those dirty huts. Only four white men and not a single white woman here, so the agent says.” He turned to the Fur Company agent, added prophetically, “Yet do you know, Mr. Newman, desolate as that collection of huts there is, we may yet look back on it as a kind of earthly paradise?”
Already immersed in his long delayed mail from home, Newman nodded absent-mindedly. Apparently he was under no illusions about life in the far north.
The captain shrugged his shoulders, philosophically accepted the situation, and after some difficulty in dragging Newman’s attention away from his letters from home, we got down to business with the agent, which of course was coal. It developed immediately that St. Michael’s had only ten tons of coal, which were badly needed there for the winter. This was hardly a surprise as we had every reason to expect some such condition, but it settled any vague hopes we had that we might coal and proceed before our schooner came. We resigned ourselves to waiting for the Fanny A. Hyde.
Next came the matter of our clothing. On that at least was some compensation for our delay. Through Mr. Newman, arrangements were made to send ashore all the furs we had acquired at Unalaska and have the natives (who were experts at it) make them up for us into parkas and other suitable Arctic garments, instead of having each sailor of our crew (who at best had only some rough skill with palm and needle on heavy canvas) attempt with his clumsy fingers to make his own.
With that arranged, the while we waited for our schooner, we settled down to making the best of St. Michael’s, all of us, that is, except De Long, who chafing visibly at the delay, thought up one scheme after another of expediting matters. But each one involved ultimately burning even more coal than waiting there, so finally the baffled skipper retired to his cabin to await as best he could our coalladen tender.
But even for the seamen, making the best of St. Michael’s soon palled and they gave up going ashore. A liberty meant nothing more than wandering round in the mud and the grass, for the village had nothing more to offer a sailor. Even liquor, the final lure of such Godforsaken ports when all else fails, was here wholly absent, its sale being illegal in Alaska Territory The illegality our seamen knew about, but the absence they refused to believe till a careful search convinced them that the negligible communication of this spot with civilization made it the one place in the wide world where the laws prohibiting liquor were of necessity observed.
So every other distraction failing, we were thrown back on fishing, the sailor’s last resource. Out of curiosity, we set a seine alongside the Jeannette. The amount of salmon and flounders we caught opened my eyes—we easily hauled in enough each cast to keep the whole crew in fresh fish every meal, till our men were so sick of the sight of fish that the little salt pork or canned meat served out occasionally from our stores was a welcome change. I see now why these waters are the world’s best sealing grounds—they are literally alive with food for the seals, which by the millions swarm over the islands in these shallow seas. The steamer St. Paul which we had fallen in with at Unalaska on her way back to America, had her hold packed solid with sealskins, one hundred thousand of them in that vessel alone, a treasure ship indeed!
While the sailors fished, we in the wardroom cast about in various ways for diversion. Newcomb (whom privately the captain was already beginning to regret having brought along, for not only did Newcomb seem never to have grown up but it was now too late to hope that he ever would) went into business for himself. Reverting to the habits of his forbears in far-off Salem, he went ashore with a five dollar bill, purchased from the Alaska Company’s store a variety of needles, thread, and similar notions, carted them a mile or two up the coast well out of sight of St. Michael’s, set up a “Trading Post,” and proceeded to sell his wares to the innocent Indians at just twice what the company store was asking for them.
For this piece of sharp practice at the expense of the natives who were helpfully engaged in making up our fur clothing, gleefully related to the wardroom mess on his return aboard, Newcomb earned the immediate contempt of his fellow New Englander, Dunbar, who burst out,
“You damned Yankee pedlar!” And from that day on, our ice-pilot who himself hailed from the land of the wooden nutmegs and was therefore perhaps touchy of making New England’s reputation any worse, refused again to speak to Newcomb, though some of the rest of us, including myself, felt with Newcomb that there was at least some humor in the situation.
Tiring of fish and of St. Michael’s, I organized a duck-hunting party with Dr. Ambler, Dunbar and Collins for my companions. For a while, I hesitated over including Collins, for by now I had discovered he also had a serious flaw in his character—his sole idea of humor was getting off puns, and so far all the attempts of his shipmates in the wardroom to cure him of it had failed. But as Collins was also our best hand with a shotgun, I decided to stand the puns for a few hours on the chance of increasing our bag of game and asked him to go.
We purposely took a tent and camped ashore all night to be ready for the ducks at dawn. We got about a dozen (Collins knocked down most of them) but without blinds to work from or decoys to attract our game, it was a tough job and we tramped a long way along the marshy beaches looking for game. During this search we separated, and I with my shotgun at “ready” was scanning the beach for ducks just below a small bluff, when suddenly there came sliding down its precipitous slope on all fours, face first with hands and feet spread out in the mud in a ludicrous attempt to stop himself, our meteorologist, Collins!
The spectacle was so comical that unthinkingly I roared out to Ambler,
“Look at the old cow there, sliding down the hill!” but I soon enough regretted my outburst for it was evident that Collins, plastered with mud from his mishap and in no humor to see anything funny in his antics, was furious and took my remark as a deep personal insult. So all in all, my hunting party was no great success, and by the time I signalled our cutter to stand in and pick us up, we were all so stiff from sleeping on the hard ground, so throbbing in every muscle from our tramp, and so sullenly did Collins keep eyeing me, that I began to doubt whether a dozen ducks were worth it.
Dr. Ambler, lolling back on the cushions in the sternsheets of the cutter, homeward bound, apparently took a similar view
“About once a year of this satisfies me completely, chief.” He paused, ruefully massaged his aching calves, then in his careful professional manner continued, “As a doctor, I’m convinced that
man’s an animal that must take to hard work gradually No more plunging headlong into it for me! I prescribe a day’s complete rest in our berths for all hands here the minute we hit the ship!”
The doctor, I believe, followed his own prescription, and perhaps Collins and Dunbar did too, but I didn’t have time. We had broken a pump-rod on our way to Alaska, temporarily stopping our boiler feed. In that emergency, the spare auxiliary I had installed at Mare Island was immediately cut in on the feed line, saving us from hauling fires and going back to sail alone, but it left us with no reserve pump and it was up to me somehow to provide another rod. Neither Unalaska nor St. Michael’s could help me in the least—a machine shop in those primitive trading posts had never even been dreamed of.
With the help of Lee, who was a machinist, and of Bartlett, fireman, first class, I now set about supplying a new pump-rod from our own resources. While at Mare Island, in view of the uncertainty of repair faculties in the Arctic, like prudent engineers we had acquired for the Jeannette quite a set of tools. I won’t exactly say we stole them, for after all they merely moved from one spot owned by Uncle Sam to another also under his jurisdiction, but at any rate, in good old Navy fashion during our stay at the Navy Yard everything not nailed down in the machine shop there that appealed to us and that we could carry, somehow moved aboard the Jeannette, and now all our recent acquisitions came in handy. I rigged up a long lathe. Out of some square stock once intended by the Navy Yard for forging out chain plates for the Mohican, we turned out a very favorable replica in iron of our broken rod, squared off the shoulders for the pistons, cut the threads for the retaining nuts, and long before the schooner showed up in port, had the disabled pump reassembled with the new rod and banging lustily away on the line once more, hammering feed water into our steaming boiler, thus making good my promise to the captain when the old rod broke. This particularly pleased De Long, who I am afraid, like most Line officers, underestimating the resourcefulness of Navy engineers and particularly Scotch ones, had been fearful that we might have to turn back or at least take a long delay while we awaited the arrival, on the St. Paul’s return trip, of a new rod from the United States.
For six days we waited in St. Michael’s, eyes glued to the harbor entrance, undergoing as the captain feelingly expressed it that “hope deferred which maketh the heart sick,” when at last on August 18 the Fanny A. Hyde showed up, beating her way closehauled into the harbor. She was a welcome sight not only to our careworn skipper but to all of us, who long before had completely exhausted in a couple of hours the possibilities of St. Michael’s, and in our then state of ignorance, were eager to move on into the even more barren Arctic.
In fact, so eager were we to be on our way that the captain signalled the schooner not to anchor at all but to come alongside us directly, prepared immediately for coaling.
The next three days were busy ones for all hands, lightering coal in bags up from the schooner’s holds, dumping it through the deck scuttles into our bunkers, and there trimming it high up under the deck beams to take advantage of every last cubic inch of the Jeannette’s stowage space. Most of this work of muling the coal around we had to do with our own force, for the schooner with a crew of six men only and being a sailing vessel, with no power machinery of any kind, could assist us but little. Here our deck winch, made of those old steam launch engines which I had fitted aboard at Mare Island, came in very handy in saving our backs, for with falls rigged from the yardarms by our energetic Irish bosun, I soon had the niggerheads on that winch whipping the bags of coal up out of the schooner’s holds and dropping them down on our decks in grand style.
Needless to say, however, with coal littering our decks and coal dust everywhere, with staterooms and cabins tightly sealed up to prevent its infiltration, and with our whole crew as black as nigger minstrels, we carefully abstained from taking aboard any other stores and least of all our furs or dogs from ashore, till coaling was completed and the ship washed down.
At this coaling we labored steadily until late on the twentieth of August when checking the coal we had already transferred and what was left aboard the schooner, I came to the conclusion that there
would still be twenty tons remaining on the Fanny A. Hyde for which we could find no stowage, even on our decks, and entering the captain’s cabin, I suggested to him that instead of dismissing our escort at St. Michael’s as intended, he take a chance and order her to follow us on our next leg, the three hundred mile journey across Norton Sound and Behring Strait to St. Lawrence Bay in Siberia, where that last twenty tons of coal she carried, which otherwise would go back to the United States, would just about replenish what we burned on the way over to Asia.
To put it mildly, when I sprang this suggestion on him De Long greeted it with a cheer, but he went me one better.
“That twenty tons she’ll certainly carry along for us, chief, but that’s not all! What’s left in her now, and how long’ll it take you to get her down to that last twenty tons?”
“She’s got fifty tons still aboard her, captain,” I answered. I looked at my watch. It was getting along toward evening already. “But the last thirty tons which we can take aboard from her, will go almighty slow! Trimming it down inside those stifling bunkers to top ’em off for a full due is the devil’s own job—it’ll take us all day tomorrow certainly!”
De Long, who, downcast over the non-arrival of the schooner, had not cracked a smile for a week, now stroked his long mustaches gleefully
“Fine, chief! Pass the word to Lieutenant Chipp to belay any more coaling. He’s to knock off immediately and start washing down. Here’s where we get back one of those lost days, anyway.” De Long regarded me with positive cheerfulness. “We’ll sail tomorrow! If the Fanny Hyde’s going to carry twenty tons for us to Siberia, she might as well carry the whole fifty that’s still aboard her! So instead of coaling here any more, we’ll quit right now, swing ship in the morning to check our compasses, then load furs, stores, and dogs in the afternoon, and sail tomorrow night from this God-forsaken hole! How’ll that suit you, chief?”
“Brother, full ahead on that!” I exclaimed. “You’ll never get St. Michael’s hull down any too soon for me!”
So to the intense relief of the crew, Jack Cole was soon piping down coaling gear. The schooner cast loose, shoved off, and anchored clear, and as darkness fell the hoses were playing everywhere over the Jeannette’s topsides, washing down, while from every scupper a black stream poured into the clear waters of the bay, as a welcome by-product effectively putting an end to any more fishing in our vicinity.
Our last day at St. Michael’s was perhaps our busiest.
In the morning, steaming slowly round the harbor, we swung ship for compass deviations, with Danenhower hunching his burly shoulders constantly over the binnacle while Chipp at the pelorus took bearings of the sun. By noon this essential task was completed and we anchored again, commencing immediately after mess gear was stowed to receive stores from ashore.
The display of furs we received, made up now into clothing, of seal, mink, beaver, deer, wolf, Arctic squirrel, and fox, all to be worn by rough seamen, would have caused pangs of jealousy among the ladies on Fifth Avenue, who would have lingered long over each sleek garment, lovingly caressing its velvety softness. But instead of that, disregarded by everyone in our haste, down the hatch shot our furs, our only concern being to get them aboard and weigh anchor
Following the clothing came aboard assorted cargo—forty Eskimo dogs, five dog sleds, forty sets of dog harness, four dozen pairs of snowshoes, sixty-nine pairs of sealskin boots, ton after ton of compressed fish for dog food, three small Eskimo skin boats called baideras, and numberless odds and ends; while to top off all, as a personal gift Mr. Newman insisted on presenting to the captain a very handsomely silver-mounted Winchester repeating rifle and eight hundred rounds of ammunition for it.
Last but not least important, came aboard some new members of our crew, two Alaskan Indians from St. Michael’s. This pair, Alexey and Aneguin, carefully selected on the recommendation of the entire
white population of St. Michael’s (all four of them), were after a lengthy pow-wow over terms with the headman of the native village shipped as hunters and dog-drivers. Alexey, as senior hunter, was to be paid twenty dollars a month; Aneguin, his assistant, as a hunter’s mate (to put it in nautical parlance) was to receive fifteen; and each was to draw from the company store an outfit worth fifty dollars to start with and on discharge to receive a Winchester rifle and 1000 cartridges. To the wife of Alexey and to the mother of Aneguin, thus deprived of their support, were to be issued at the Jeannette’s expense from the Alaska Company’s store, provisions to the value of five dollars each monthly until their men should finally be returned to St. Michael’s.
These terms being finally settled to the satisfaction of all, Alexey and Aneguin reported aboard at 5 . ., both for the first time in their lives dressed in “store clothes” which they had just drawn from Mr. Newman’s stock, and proud as peacocks in shiny black Russian hats, topped with flaming red bands. Alexey (who to the best of my knowledge, aside from our captain, was the only married man aboard) was accompanied by his Indian wife, a small, shy, pretty woman in furs oddly contrasting with her husband’s stiffly worn civilized raiment, and by his little boy. Tightly holding each other’s hands, this tiny Alaskan group drifted wonderingly over the ship, children all in their open-mouthed curiosity; while Aneguin, accompanied by his chief and a delegation of natives come to see him off, was just as naive in exclaiming over everything he saw, and the excitement of all reached a high pitch when Captain De Long presented to Alexey’s shrinking little wife a china cup and saucer with “U.S.N.” in gold on it, and to her little boy, a harmonica.
As evening drew on and the hour for departure approached, Alexey and his wife, seated on a sea chest on the poop, clung silently to each other, till at the hoarse call of the bosun, “All visitors ashore!” accompanied by significant gestures toward the rail, they parted affectionately—and forever.
For a few minutes there was a grand scramble of Indians over our bulwarks into native boats. Then to the rattling of the chain links in the hawsepipe, our cable came slowly in and with a blast of our
whistle in salute, we got underway for St. Lawrence Bay, on the Siberian side of Behring Sea.
CHAPTER VII
Through a light breeze and a smooth sea we steamed out in the darkness. The Fanny A. Hyde, ordered to follow us at dawn, we expected to reach port in Siberia even ahead of our own arrival since she was now very light while we, heavily laden once more, were nearly awash.
A new note in seagoing came into our lives upon departing from St. Michael’s—our forty dogs. They quickly proved to be the damnedest nuisances ever seen aboard ship, roaming the deck in carefree fashion, snarling and fighting among themselves every five minutes, and unless one was armed with a belaying pin in each hand, it was nearly suicide to enter a pack of the howling brutes to stop them. They fought for pure enjoyment so it seemed to me, immune almost from any harm, for their fur was so thick and tangled, they got nothing but mouthfuls of hair from snapping at each other. In spite of fairly continual fighting, we got the ship along for after all my engines drove her on, but how we should ever fare under sail alone I wondered, unless each seaman soon got the knack of disregarding half a dozen pseudo-wolves leaping at him each time he rushed to ease a sheet or to belay a halliard or a brace. Meanwhile we let the dogs severely alone, it being the duty of Aneguin and Alexey to feed and water them, and apparently also to beat them well so that their fighting was not one continuous performance.
We had expected to make the three hundred miles across Behring Sea to St. Lawrence Bay in Siberia in two and a half days, but we did not. Our second day out, the wind freshened, there was a decided swell from the northward, and all in all the weather had a very unsettled look. With most of our sail set, we logged five knots during the morning, but as the seas picked up, the ship began to pitch heavily, and in the early afternoon a green sea came aboard that carried away both our forward water-closets, fortunately empty at the
time. At this mishap, we furled most of our canvas and slowed the engines to thirty revolutions, greatly easing the motion.
But as the night drew on it became evident we were in for it. The ocean hereabouts is so shallow that an ugly sea quickly kicks up under even a fresh breeze, and we were soon up against a full gale, not a pleasing prospect for a grossly overloaded ship. There was nothing for it, however, except to heave to, head to the wind, and ride it out under stormsails only. Accordingly in the first dog watch, I banked fires, stopped the engines, and the Jeannette lay to on the starboard tack under the scantiest canvas we dared carry— stormsail, fore and aft sail, and spanker only, all reefed down to the very last row of reef-points.
For thirty hours while the gale howled, we rode it out thus, the overloaded Jeannette groaning and creaking, submerged half the time, with confused seas coming aboard in all directions. Every hatch on deck was tightly battened down; otherwise solid water, often standing two and three feet deep on our decks, would have quickly poured below to destroy our slight buoyancy and sink us like a rock.
But even so, in spite of lying to, we took a terrific battering, and time after time as we plunged into a green sea, it seemed beyond belief that our overloaded hull should still remain afloat.
In the middle of this storm, worn from a night of watchfulness, with Chipp on the bridge temporarily as his relief, Captain De Long sat dozing in his cabin chair, not daring even to crawl into his bunk lest he lose a second in responding to any call. Suddenly a solid sea came over the side, with a wild roar broke on board, and in a rushing wall of water carrying all before it, hit the poop bulkhead, smashed in the windows to the captain’s stateroom, and in an instant flooded the room. Our startled skipper coming out of his doze found himself swimming for his life in his own cabin, all his belongings afloat in a tangle about him!
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. For once there was no fighting, each dog being solely absorbed in keeping his nose above water, and when possible on that heaving deck, in keeping his claws dug into the planking to save himself from being flung headlong into the lee scuppers.
But the gale finally blew itself out, and thankfully spreading our reefed canvas, we arrived four days out of St. Michael’s in lonely St. Lawrence Bay, to find the little Jeannette, a tiny symbol of civilization, dwarfed in that vast solitude by snow-capped mountains rising precipitously from the water, a magnificent spectacle of nature in her grandest mood.
But our isolation was broken soon enough by two large baideras which pushed out to meet us, crowded with natives who without leave clambered over our rails, eagerly offering in broken English to engage themselves as whalers, which naturally enough they assumed was the purpose of our cruise.
But we welcomed them gladly enough for another reason. What did they know of Nordenskjöld?
From their chief, a tall, brawny fellow calling himself “George,” after much cross-examination De Long elicited the information that a steamer, smaller even than the Jeannette, had been there apparently three months before, and that during the previous winter he, Chief George, had on a journey across East Cape to Koliutchin Bay on the north coast of Siberia, seen the same ship frozen in the ice there. This seemed to check with our last news on Nordenskjöld’s Vega. If indeed she had reached St. Lawrence Bay and passed south, she was of course safe now and we need no longer concern ourselves. But was it really the Vega?
Patiently, like a skilled lawyer examining an ignorant witness, De Long worked on George to find that out. Who was the Vega’s captain? An old man with a white beard who spoke no English. Who then had George conversed with? Another officer, a Russian, who
spoke their tongue, the Tchuchee dialect, like a native. Who was he? On this point, George, uncertain over nearly everything else, was absolutely positive, and answered proudly,
“He name Horpish.”
But to De Long’s great disappointment, on consulting the muster roll of the Vega with which we had been furnished, no “Horpish” appeared thereon. Again and again, Chipp, De Long, and I pored over that list of the Swedish, Danish, and Russian names of the men and officers accompanying Nordenskjöld, while George, leaning over our shoulders, repeated over and over, “Horpish, he Horpish,” obviously disgusted at our inability to understand our own language.
Finally De Long put his finger on the answer. There, a few lines down from Nordenskjöld on that list was the man we were looking for
“Lieutenant Nordquist, Imperial Russian Navy.”
I pronounced it a few times—Nordquist, Horpish—yes, it must be he. Phonetically in Tchuchee that was a good match for Nordquist.
And this was all we learned The steamer, whatever her name, had stayed only one day, then departed to the southward, loaded according to George with “plenty coals.”
With some bread and canned meat in return for this sketchy information, we eased George and his followers, greatly disappointed at not being signed on as whalers, over the side before we lost anything. For while these Tchuchees appeared dirty, lazy, and utterly worthless, their unusual size made them potentially dangerous enemies when in force, and we posted an armed watch on deck as a precaution.
Our schooner arrived soon after we did, and we finished hoisting out of her all the coal down to the last lump, ending up with 132 tons stowed in our bunkers, which was their total capacity, and with 28 tons more as a deckload, giving us a total of 160 tons with which to start into the Arctic, nearly twice the amount of coal the Jeannette was originally designed to carry.
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