Hell on ice

This year, 1909, deserves remembrance for one thing at least aside from the retirement into private life of President Roosevelt. A few weeks ago through the Virginia Capes steam...

Naturally, as her engineer officer, I scanned with deep interest every detail of the vessel to which I was to trust my life in the Arctic, and I may say that torn wide open as s...

Of Lieutenant De Long, captain of the _Jeannette_, originator of the enterprise, and throughout its existence the dominant spirit in it, I have already spoken. The choice of the...

De Long in Washington, deluged from all over the country with requests from young men, old men, cranks, and crackpots of every type, eager to go along in all sorts of ridiculous...

Of our passage to the Alaskan Peninsula, there is not much to record. It was a shakedown cruise literally enough. The _Jeannette_, between the newly added weight of her hull ree...

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...

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...

For the first time, ice now began to be a factor in our cruise. We had noted a little along the Siberian shore churned by the surf when the whaleboat attempted a landing off Ser...

We struck with a shivering crash that shook the _Jeannette_ from keel to main truck, and hung there with yards banging violently. Lucky for us now, that nineteen inch thickness...

That freezing into immobility of the _Jeannette_ in so low a latitude, fell like an icy shower on the spirits of our wardroom mess, and from that day sociability vanished. Alrea...

On the _Jeannette_, we settled down to spending the winter in the ice pack. The first step was to turn loose on the ice all our dogs—a proceeding greeted with yelps of joy from...

September passed, and the hoped-for gales which might break up the pack and allow us to escape, or at least to work into a winter harbor in distant Wrangel Land, failed to mater...

On November 6, two months to a day of our being trapped in the pack, came the first break in the monotony of our imprisonment. About four in the afternoon Collins, trudging perh...

Nothing else happened that day. Our dogs, which in the face of disaster we had rounded up and penned inside the bulwarks, where they relieved themselves by staging a continuous...

I had thought that our experiences so far had sufficiently numbed my nerves to enable me to stand anything further with comparative calm, but I had underestimated the ice pack.

December, 1879, our fourth month in the pack, came in with crisp cold weather; and as the days passed with the ice about us thickening and the pack showing signs of some stabili...

Continuing his program for dodging scurvy, De Long followed up his exercise order by another calling for a thorough monthly medical examination of all hands. In this I believe h...

Monotonously the dreary days drifted by. In darkness we ate our food, took our exercise, thawed out our frozen noses afterward, and vaguely wished we could “go somewheres.” Dece...

The _Jeannette_ sinking? Sharvell must be crazy. The ship had gone through far worse squeezes before without a leak. Nevertheless, forgetting our encounter, I raced down the lad...

Our immediate battle was won, but the war thus opened that 19th of January, 1880, between us and the Arctic Sea for the _Jeannette_ dragged along with varying fortunes till the...

January dragged away, followed in dreary succession by February, March, and April, and the _Jeannette_ drifting aimlessly with the pack, was still solidly frozen in. Our lives w...

June 21st came, the longest day in the year. Further south, to ordinary people, that meant more daylight; to us, with daylight twenty-four hours every day, it meant only that th...

September 1st came, and winter fell on us like a blanket. Snow, low temperatures, and the prompt freezing over of all stray pools with a coat of ice that failed to melt again ga...

December was notable mainly for continued low temperatures, down around -50° F. We thankfully saw it slip away with nothing to remember it by save a minstrel show given by the c...

April drew toward its close, leaving us as a parting gift in latitude 76° 19′ N., longitude 164° 45′ E. Over 76° North, and with our drift increasing in speed weekly! We were on...

On June 5, 1881, a Sunday morning, we got back to the _Jeannette_. In the early afternoon, in honor of our safe return. De Long with his eyes hardly visible through his bandages...

Our situation was now truly desperate. There we were, thirty-three men cast away on drifting ice floes, our whereabouts and our fate, whether yet alive or long since dead, total...

Twenty-five miles further north than when we started! Coming on top of all else, that was a knockout blow. With sagging knees, I leaned against the gunwale of the whaleboat, loo...

When we got underway that night on June 25th, we headed southwest instead of south. Burning in my breast were De Long’s words _Nil desperandum!_ and my faith in him from his fai...

De Long was left with the problem of how to make Collins and Newcomb useful members of our primitive community. While Collins, before the captain noticed him, had done useful wo...

At 7:30 on the morning of Monday, September 12, 1881, ninety-two days since the loss of the _Jeannette_, we shoved off from Semenovski Island for Cape Barkin on the Lena Delta,...

After four harrowing days in the whaleboat, the first two in the gale, the second two fighting our way through offshore shoals in the open ocean, we finally sighted land. Hungry...

In the smoky light of the rude interior of that Yakut hut, I saw at first only Louis Noros, clothed in ragged woolen underwear, bending over a rough table, sawing away with his...

Before the steadily rising Arctic gale, the _Jeannette’s_ three boats in broken formation were scattering in the storm. Dismayed at this sight, De Long who had the only navigati...

“Come on, boys; we go back now for the rest of the load and the captain,” ordered Nindemann, who with his rating of quartermaster was senior in the group ashore. “Shake a leg; w...

With some old tea leaves and two quarts of grain alcohol as their entire food supply, the thirteen survivors gloomily resumed their southward trek on October 7th. The snow was d...

“And that was on October 9th, Mr. Melville,” sobbed Nindemann. “But Ku Mark Surk wasn’t twelve miles away like the captain thought; it was over seventy miles! His chart was bad,...

All winter long, while endeavoring to recuperate my frozen arms and legs, I gathered supplies and sledges from Bulun, from far-off Yakutsk, from all the villages between, for an...

Last half ounce alcohol at 5:30; at 6:30 send Alexey off to look for ptarmigan. Eat deerskin scraps. Yesterday morning ate my deerskin footnips. Light S.S.E. airs. Not very cold...

And there on October 30th, the pitiful record ended. Before he could put a period to that final tragic sentence, the pencil dropped from De Long’s nerveless fingers, with his la...

Atop a rocky promontory looking to the north, towering four hundred feet above the great bay of the Lena Delta and far beyond the reach of any possible flood, I prepared for my...