Hell on Ice
The Saga of the Jeannette
TO
EMMA WOTTON DE LONG
STILL WAITING AFTER SIXTY YEARS TO
REJOIN THE MAN WHO SAILED AWAY
IN COMMAND OF THE “JEANNETTE”
“… a truer, nobler, trustier heart,
More loving or more loyal, never beat
Within a human breast.”
CHAPTER I
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 steamed into Hampton Roads our battlefleet, sixteen salt-crusted veterans of an unprecedented adventure—the circumnavigation of the globe by an entire fleet. There they were, back from the distant seas, guns roaring in salute to our president, flags flying everywhere, whistles from craft of all kinds shrieking them a welcome home.
Roosevelt, unafraid as always, had sent them out in the teeth of unnumbered critics who foresaw our battleships with broken-down machinery rusting in every foreign port from Valparaiso to Gibraltar, but instead with engines smoothly turning, the blunt noses of those sixteen battleships plowed back sturdily into Hampton Roads.
I had never had any fears. I had watched the machinery of every one of those sixteen ships grow on the drafting tables of the Bureau of Steam Engineering—pistons, cranks, connecting rods, boilers, pumps, condensers. My life went into the design of those engines and boilers on every ship, and from the flagship Connecticut proudly leading the long line down to the distant battleship bringing up the rear of the column, there wasn’t a boiler, there wasn’t a steam cylinder, that wasn’t part of George Wallace Melville. Under my eyes, under my guidance, they had grown from ideas on the drawing board to the roaring kettles and the throbbing engines before which panting coalheavers and sweating oilers toiled below to drive those beautiful white hulls round the world and safely home to Hampton Roads.
But now I can foresee the day of those ships is done, and I think I have discernment enough left to see that mine is also. Here in this year 1909, hardly six years since my retirement as Engineer-in-Chief of the Navy, I look upon the vast fleet the machinery of which I designed, and I see its passing. Last year the Lusitania, turbine-driven, speeding across the Atlantic to a new record, sounded the knell of the huge reciprocating engines I designed for all those battleships. And practically completed, waiting to join her older sisters, was the Delaware, our newest ship, a “dreadnought” so they call her now, a huge ship of 20,000 tons, but—fired by oil! Her oil fires spell the doom of the romance of the fireroom—the stokers, the grimy coalpassers, the slice bar—that pandemonium, that man-made inferno, with forced-draft fans roaring, with the clang of coal buckets trolleying from bunker to fireroom floor, with the glare of the flames on sweating torsos as the furnace doors swing back and brawny arms heave in the coal! They’ll all go soon, flying connecting rods and straining coalheavers, driven out by the prosaic turbine and the even more prosaic oil burner.
But so it goes. We marine engineers dream, design, and build, to send forth on the oceans the most beautiful creations man turns out anywhere on land or sea—but soon our ships fade from existence like a mist before the sun. For sixteen years I was Engineer-in-Chief for the Navy, and the machinery of that battlefleet the nation watched so proudly steaming home through the Capes was my creation, but I’ve seen enough in the fifty years since I entered the Navy when the Civil War broke out to doubt that ten years more will find a single ship of that armada still in active service. Turbines, oil burning boilers, bigger guns, heavier armor—they are crowding in fast now, and soon my ships will go to the wreckers to make way in the fleet for the bigger and faster vessels sliding down the building ways in the wake of the huge Delaware.
Odd how one’s perspective changes with the years! As a young engineer, I would have believed with those cheering thousands last month in Hampton Roads that to have had a guiding hand in creating that fleet would be the high light in my life—but now I know better. In the end it is how men lived and died, not the material things they constructed, that the world is most likely to remember. That is why in my mind a stone cross in Annapolis Cemetery looms larger and larger as the years drift by. Years ago, hewn from a driftwood spar, I set up the original of that cross in the frozen Lena Delta to stand guard over the bodies of my shipmates; that stone replica in Annapolis, silent marker of their memory, will loom up in our history long after there has completely vanished from the seas every trace of the ships and the machinery which the world now links with the name of Melville.
We were seeking the North Pole back in 1879 when I came to set up that cross. Today, exactly thirty years later, they’re still seeking it. At this very moment, unheard from for months, Peary is working north from Greenland. I wish him luck; he’s following a more promising route than that one through Behring Sea which we in the Jeannette found led only to disaster.
It’s strange. The roar of guns in battle, machinery, boilers, hot engine rooms and flaming firerooms, have made up most of my life since that day in 1861 when as a young engineer I entered the Navy to go through the Civil War, but now at sixty-eight, what sticks most in my mind is still that cruise of long ago when for two years our boiler fires were either banked or out, our engine never made a revolution, engineering went by the board, and with only the Aurora Borealis overhead to witness the struggle, with me as with all hands on the Jeannette existence settled into a grim question of ice versus ship, and God help us if the ship lost!
We were an odd company there in the Jeannette’s wardroom, five naval officers and three civilians, drawn together seeking that chimera, a passage through Behring Sea to the Pole. De Long, our captain, was responsible mainly for our being there—George Washington De Long—a man as big as his namesake, scholarly in appearance, to which a high forehead, a drooping mustache, and his glasses all contributed, but in spite of that a self-willed man, decisive, resolute, eager to be the first to end the centuries old search for what lay at the Pole. Behind De Long in this affair was James Gordon Bennett, owner of the New York Herald, and an outstanding figure in American journalism. Shortly before, Bennett had won world-wide notice and acclaim for the Herald by sending Stanley on the seemingly hopeless task of finding Livingstone in the wilds of unknown Africa and then topped off that success by backing Stanley’s amazing explorations on the Congo and the headwaters of the Nile. Bennett, seeking now fresh worlds to conquer in the interests of journalism, was easily persuaded by De Long to turn his attention and his money from conquered equatorial Africa to the undiscovered Pole. It was Bennett who purchased the Jeannette and put up the cash to fit her out. But once the ship was bought, Bennett hardly figured in the actual expedition. That was De Long’s show from beginning to end. And what an end!
I joined the Jeannette as engineer officer in San Francisco in April, 1879. An uninviting wreck she looked to me then alongside the dock at the Mare Island Navy Yard, torn apart by the navy yard workmen for the strengthening of her hull and for the installation of new boilers. A checkered history the Jeannette had had before I ever saw her—originally as the Pandora of the Royal Navy; then, with guns removed, in the hands of Sir Allen Young, as a private yacht in which her owner made two cruises to high latitudes in the Arctic seas. Finally, she was bought in England from Young by Bennett on De Long’s recommendation as the most suitable vessel available for the projected polar voyage.
The most suitable she may have been—over that point experts have wrangled through the years since. So far as I am concerned, the Jeannette was satisfactory. But the naval constructors and engineers at Mare Island, California, when De Long after a passage round the Horn in her sailed his purchase into the Navy Yard, made no bones about saying they thought De Long had been badly fooled and the ship would scarcely do. But what they thought of the Jeannette was neither here nor there. Bennett had bought her, De Long was satisfied with her. The criticisms of the naval experts at Mare Island, three thousand miles away, got little attention in Washington, where with the power of the New York Herald behind him and De Long’s enthusiasm to batter down all opposition, naval or otherwise, Bennett got a bill through Congress making the Jeannette a naval vessel, and (while Bennett was still to stand all the expenses of the expedition) directing the Navy to furnish the personnel and carry the project through as a naval undertaking.
So when I joined the ship there in San Francisco, I found her torn to pieces, with Lieutenant Chipp, who was to be executive officer, and Master Danenhower, slated to go as navigator, already on the spot following up the alterations as representatives of De Long. Danenhower, soon promoted to lieutenant, had joined in Havre and rounded the Horn with her. Lieutenant Chipp had shortly before arrived from China to take the post as executive officer. And during the weeks which followed my own arrival, came the others to fill out the officers’ mess—Surgeon Ambler; Mr. Collins, meteorologist; Mr. Newcomb, naturalist; and Mr. Dunbar, ice-pilot. A queer collection we were, as I well learned months before De Long’s dying fingers scrawled the last entry in the Jeannette’s log, and Fate played queer tricks with us.
CHAPTER II
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 she lay when I first saw her, I had an excellent opportunity to get intimately acquainted with the Jeannette’s scantlings and with her machinery.
Even for that day, 1879, the Jeannette was a small ship, hardly 420 tons in displacement. She was only 142 feet long, 25 feet in the beam, and drew but 13 feet of water when fully loaded. She was a three-master, barque rigged, able in a fair breeze under full sail to make six knots, which, not to hold anything back, was almost two knots better than I was ever able to get her to do with her engines against even an ordinary sea.
Obviously, not having been built for Arctic service, the Jeannette’s hull required strengthening to withstand the ice, and when I first saw her, from stem to stern the ship was a mad-house, with the shipwrights busily tearing her apart as a preliminary to reenforcing her hull and otherwise modifying her for service in the north. Amidships was a huge hole in her deck through which her original boilers, condemned by a survey, had been lifted out to be junked. To make more room for coal (for we were outfitting for a three year cruise) the old boilers were being replaced by two smaller ones of a more efficient and compact design, by which device our coal stowage was increased in capacity nearly fifty per cent—an achievement of no mean value to a ship which, once we left Alaska, would have no opportunity to refuel on her voyage.
But this change in the fireroom, radical as it was, was trifling in comparison with the additions being made to the hull itself. To strengthen her for ramming into the ice-fields and to withstand the ice, the bow below the berth deck for a distance of ten feet abaft the stem was filled in solid with Oregon pine timbers, well bolted through and through. Outside in this vicinity, her stem was sheathed with wrought iron, and from the stem back to the forechains, row on row laid on horizontally, a series of iron straps was bolted to the outer planking to shield it from ice damage.
In way of the boilers and engines, completely covering her side framing, the inside of the ship was sheathed fore and aft with Oregon pine planks six inches thick, extending from the boiler bed timbers up the side to the lower deck shelf; and outside the ship from just above the water line to well below the turn of the bilge, a doubling of five inches of American elm had been added, so that the total thickness of the Jeannette’s side when we finally sailed was over nineteen inches, a thickness which put her in the class with Old Ironsides when it came to resisting local penetration.
But the work did not stop there. The sides might be invulnerable locally but still collapse as a whole like a nut in a nutcracker when gripped between two ice floes. To resist any such contingency, in addition to the two original athwartship bulkheads which supported the sides laterally, an athwartship truss of massive wood beams, 12 by 14 inches in section, braced diagonally against the bilges and the lower side of the main deck, was installed just forward of the new boilers to bolster the sides amidships; while just abaft these boilers there was refitted an old iron truss which the ship had previously carried somewhat further forward. The result of these additions was that so far as human ingenuity could provide, the Jeannette was prepared to resist both penetration and crushing in the ice. Certainly no steamer before her time had set out better braced to withstand the Arctic ice-fields.
My major interest, of course, was with the main machinery. On the Jeannette, this consisted of two back-acting engines, each with a thirty-two inch diameter cylinder and an eighteen inch stroke, developing a total of 200 horsepower at about 60 revolutions, which on our trials in the smooth waters of San Francisco Bay, gave the ship a speed of about five knots. Our shaft led aft through the sternpost to a two-bladed propeller, nine feet in diameter, so arranged under a well in the stern that the propeller could be unshipped and hoisted aboard whenever desired, which clearly enough was a valuable feature on a vessel subjected to ice dangers.
During our fitting-out period all this machinery was carefully overhauled, four extra blades for our propeller were provided; and at my request, two new slide valves for the main engines were fitted, in order to change the cutoff and give the engines a greater expansion, which by increasing the economy of steam consumption would conserve to the utmost our precious coal.
Aside from the above there were many minor items—the addition of another auxiliary pump (a No. 4 Sewell and Cameron); the installation of a complete distillation plant to provide us with fresh water; and the fitting on deck of a hoisting and warping winch made of a pair of steam-launch engines rigged out with the necessary gearing and drums for handling lines.
Not in my department, but of interest to all hands who were going to live aboard, were the changes made to the ship itself to increase its habitability in the north. Material for a portable deck house to cover our main deck over the forecastle was furnished us, and all exposed iron work throughout the vessel was felted over. An entrance porch was built over the forward end of the poop, leading to the officers’ quarters, and given to us in a knocked-down state, while the insides of both the forecastle and the wardroom were thickly covered with felt for insulation.
The thousand and one details in fitting out that we had to go into, I will pass over. De Long was in Washington, smoothing out difficulties, financial and otherwise, with the Navy Department, and obtaining all information on previous polar expeditions, both foreign and domestic, on which he could possibly lay a hand. Consequently all through the spring, on Chipp, on Danenhower, and on myself at Mare Island fell the task of following up the repairs and alterations; of getting the most we could done to the ship at the least expense; and as every naval officer who has ever taken his ship through an overhaul period well knows, of battling through the daily squabbles between ship’s officers and navy yard personnel as to who knew better what ought to be done and how best to do it. We did our utmost to tread on no one’s toes, but from the beginning the officers at the Navy Yard regarded the Jeannette herself as unsuitable for a serious polar voyage, and this hardly led to complete harmony between them and us; an unfortunate situation which I think may have also been aggravated somewhat by doubts on their part about what the Jeannette Expedition was really intended for—a newspaper stunt for the glorification of James Gordon Bennett, or a bona fide attempt to add to the scientific knowledge of the world? But whatever their feelings, they did a thorough job on the ship, even though the cost, about $50,000, must have been something of a shock to Mr. Bennett, who, after paying for the repairs previously made to the Jeannette in England, probably felt the vessel ready to proceed to the Pole with only a perfunctory stop at Mare Island to take aboard stores and crew. And I know, especially in the beginning of this fitting-out period, that De Long himself was on tenter-hooks for fear that the cost of all these unexpected repairs and replacements would cause Bennett to abandon the enterprise. He was constantly in his letters from Washington cautioning us to use our ingenuity and our diplomacy with the Yard’s officers to affect every practicable economy, and whenever possible within the terms of the Act of Congress taking over the Jeannette, to see that costs, especially for materials furnished, were absorbed by the Navy itself and not lodged against the expedition.
So we struggled along through April, May, and June, with my dealings on machinery mainly with Chief Engineer Farmer of the Navy Yard, while Chipp worked with Naval Constructor Much who handled all the hull work at Mare Island, and Danenhower confined himself to disbursing the funds and watching the accounts. The two new boilers (originally intended for the U.S.S. Mohican but diverted to us to expedite completion) were finally dropped into our hold, the beams and decking replaced, and the Jeannette, though life aboard was still a nightmare as the vessel rang from end to end under the blows of shipwrights’ mauls and caulking hammers, once more began to look something like a ship instead of a stranded derelict.
CHAPTER III
MEANWHILE our crew was being assembled, an unusual group naturally enough in view of the unusual nature of our projected voyage.
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 others who made up the expedition, especially of those ranked as officers, rested with him. Good, bad, or indifferent, they were either selected by him or met his approval; no one else was to blame if, before our adventure ended, of some he wrote in the highest terms while others were at various times under arrest by his orders, and with one at least he was engaged in a bitter feud that lasted to the death of both.
Second in command was Lieutenant Charles W. Chipp, whom I have already briefly noted in connection with the repairs. He came all the way from the China Station to join the ship as executive officer. Chipp, of moderate height, who in appearance always reminded me of General Grant due both to his beard and his eyes, was a calm, earnest, reticent sort of person, serious, rarely given to smiles, and a first class officer. He was an old shipmate of De Long’s in the U.S.S. Juniata, and together they had had some previous Arctic experience when in 1873 their ship was sent north to the relief of the lost Polaris. On this mission, when the Juniata, not daring because of ice conditions to venture farther north, was stopped at Upernavik, Greenland, both De Long and Chipp cruised together for nearly two weeks in a small steam launch several hundred miles farther to the northward, searching among the bergs of Baffin Bay for the Polaris’ crew. To their great disappointment they failed to find them, a circumstance not however their fault, since unknown to the searchers, the Polaris survivors had already been rescued by a Scotch whaler and taken to Great Britain. On this hazardous voyage, covering over 700 miles in a 33 foot steam launch, amidst the bergs and gales of Baffin Bay, Chipp as De Long’s second got his baptism of ice, and in all the intervening years from that adventure, even from the distant Orient, he kept in close touch with De Long, eager if his shipmate’s dreams of a polar expedition of his own ever materialized, to take part. When early in 1878, the Pandora was finally purchased in England, Chipp was in China, attached to the U.S.S. Ashuelot. Upon learning of this concrete evidence of progress toward the Pole, he tried strenuously to secure his immediate detachment and join the renamed Pandora in England for the trip round the Horn, but in this he was unsuccessful, and it was not until late April, 1879, that by way of the Pacific he finally arrived from Foo Chow to join us in San Francisco.
The third and last of the line officers was Master John W. Danenhower, navigator, who a few weeks after we sailed, in the regular course of naval seniority, made his number as a lieutenant. Danenhower, the youngest of the officers aboard, having been out of the Naval Academy only eight years at the time, was during the summer of 1878 on the U.S.S. Vandalia, convoying ex-President Grant, then at the height of his popularity, on a triumphal tour of the Mediterranean. Here, off the coast of Asia Minor, the news of Bennett’s purchase of the Pandora for a polar expedition reached him. Whether prompted by youthful exuberance or a desire to escape the heat of the tropics, I never knew, but at any rate, Danenhower promptly got in touch, not with De Long, but with Bennett, offering his services, and shrewdly enough backing up his application with an endorsement obtained from the Vandalia’s distinguished passenger, General Grant himself!
For the owner of a Republican newspaper, this was more than sufficient. Bennett promptly accepted him, subject only to De Long’s approval. Scheduled shortly to sail from Havre to San Francisco with the Jeannette and confronted with the imperative need of finding immediately to help him work the ship some assistant in the place of the distant Chipp who was still ineffectually struggling in China to get his detachment, De Long gladly assented to this solution. Between Bennett, General Grant, and the cables, Navy red tape was rudely cut, Danenhower’s transfer swiftly arranged, and after a hasty passage by steamer and train across the Mediterranean and Europe, he arrived from Smyrna shortly before the Jeannette shoved off from Havre.
Danenhower, hardly thirty when we started, masked his youth (as was not uncommon in those days) behind an ample growth of sideburns. Unlike his two seniors in the Line, he had had no previous Arctic experience of any kind, but he was enthusiastic, impetuous, big in frame, strong and husky, and from all appearances better able than most of the rest of us to withstand the rigors of the north.
Concerning myself, then a passed assistant engineer in the Navy with the rank of lieutenant, little need be said. Of all the regular officers on the Jeannette, I was the oldest both in length of service and in years, being at the time we set out thirty-eight and having entered the Navy when the war began in 1861 as a third assistant engineer. My years in the poorly ventilated and hot engine rooms of those days had cost me most of my hair, but to compensate for this, I had the longest and fullest beard aboard the Jeannette, which I think gave me somewhat of a patriarchal appearance to which however my age hardly entitled me. Oddly enough, my first polar service was coincident with that of De Long and Chipp, for I was engineer officer of the U.S.S. Tigress, also searching Baffin Bay in 1873 for the Polaris survivors when we fell in with the Juniata’s launch, officered by De Long and Chipp, on the same mission searching off Cape York. When the launch had exhausted its small coal supply and returned to the Juniata we in the Tigress (which was really a purchased whaler and therefore better suited for the job than a regular naval vessel like the Juniata) continued the task.
My first acquaintance with De Long had come however several years earlier than this, when in the sixties, we were shipmates on the U.S.S. Lancaster on the South Atlantic Station, where in spite of the fact that he was on deck and I in the engine room, we got to know each other well. It was as a result of this friendship and the interest in polar research I had myself acquired on the Tigress that at De Long’s suggestion, I volunteered my services for the Jeannette. I had some difficulty getting the berth, however, for the Bureau of Steam Engineering, being hard pressed for personnel, was loath to let anyone in the Bureau itself go.
So far as her operation as a ship went then, these four of us, three officers of the Line, De Long, Chipp, and Danenhower, and one officer of the Engineer Corps, myself, made up the commissioned personnel of the Jeannette.
We had with us one more officer of the regular navy, Passed Assistant Surgeon James M. Ambler, a native of Virginia and a naval surgeon since 1874. Upon the recommendation of the senior medical officers of the Navy, Ambler was asked by De Long to take the berth, and gladly accepted.
I met Ambler for the first time on the Jeannette. Quiet, broad of brow, dignified in manner and bearing, of amazing vitality, he impressed me from the first both as an excellent shipmate and as a competent surgeon to whose skill, far from hospitals and resources of civilization, we might safely trust our health in the Arctic. And in this belief, the hazards of the months to come proved we were not mistaken.
These five mentioned, regularly commissioned in the Navy, comprised the whole of those technically entitled to be considered as officers, but in the wardroom mess we had three others, Collins, Newcomb, and Dunbar, who came into that category in spite of the fact that they were shipped as seamen. The Act of Congress taking over the vessel authorized the Secretary of the Navy to detail such naval officers as could be spared and were willing to go, but as for the rest of the crew, it permitted only the enlistment of others as “seamen” for this “special service.” To some degree this created a dilemma which from the beginning had in it the seeds of trouble, for as a scientific expedition, Bennett desired to send along certain civilians. These gentlemen, who obviously were not seamen, and who felt themselves entitled to consideration as officers (in which belief the rest of us willingly enough concurred) were nevertheless informed by the Navy Department that legally they could go only as “seamen for special service” or not at all. How they were to be considered aboard ship and what duties they might be assigned, would rest with the commanding officer. This fiat of the Department, a bitter pill for the men concerned to swallow, was soon ameliorated by De Long’s assurance that those affected were to be treated as officers, and on this understanding Collins, Newcomb, and Dunbar were accordingly shipped as “seamen for special service.” And then and there was laid the basis of a quarrel which long after those involved were stretched cold in death, mercifully buried by the snowdrifts on the bleak tundras of the Lena Delta, still raged in all the unbridled malevolence of slander and innuendo through naval courts and the halls of Congress, venomously endeavoring to besmirch both the living and the dead.
Jerome J. Collins, of the staff of the New York Herald, was appointed by Mr. Bennett as meteorologist of the expedition, but was obviously aboard mainly as a newspaper man. Collins, a big man with a flowing mustache but no beard, was active, energetic, eager in a news sense to cover the expedition, often in trouble with the rest of us, for the usual naval temperament, taught to regard the captain’s word as law, was wholly missing in this newspaper man’s ideas of the freedom befitting a reporter. Collins’ appointment as meteorologist was natural enough for he ran the weather department of the Herald, though scientifically his knowledge of meteorology was superficial. But he plunged whole-heartedly into the subject, and aided by De Long who got him access both to the Smithsonian Institution and to the Naval Observatory, he absorbed all he could on meteorology in the few months which elapsed while we were fitting out.
Still, shipping as a “seaman” rankled in Collins’ soul; a small thing to worry over perhaps, but he was overly sensitive and often took offense when none was meant. Many times since have I wondered whether Collins, the only one amongst the wardroom mess not born an American, may not, like many immigrants, have been unduly tender on that account and therefore imagined subtle insults in the most casual comments of his shipmates about his birthplace, Ireland.
Our other civilian scientist was Raymond Lee Newcomb of Salem, Massachusetts, naturalist and taxidermist of the expedition. Newcomb, serious, slight in build, small as compared to the rest of us, seemed at first glance ill adapted to stand the gaff of a polar voyage, but technically he was a good naturalist and that settled his appointment, in spite of his boyish manner.
Last of all those comprising the wardroom mess was William Dunbar, ice-pilot, who hailed from New London and had been a whaler all his life, had commanded whalers in the Behring Sea, and of all those aboard, had had the longest and the most thorough knowledge of ice, ice packs, and the polar seas. By far the oldest man aboard, either in the wardroom or in the forecastle, Dunbar’s grizzled face, gray hairs, and fund of experience gave his words on all things Arctic an air of authority none of the rest of us could muster, and on his knowledge and sagacity as ice-pilot, we rested mainly our hopes of navigating the Jeannette safely through the ice-fields.
These were the eight that made up the Jeannette’s wardroom mess, each in his own way looking to the ice-fields and the mysterious regions of the Pole as the path to knowledge, to adventure, or to fame. Instead, even after thirty years, my heart still aches when I recall what the ice did to us and where for most of us that path led.
CHAPTER IV
THROUGHOUT May and June we were busy loading stores, coaling ship, running our trials, cleaning up the odds and ends of our alterations, and signing on the crew.
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 capacities, diplomatically solved his difficulty by rejecting each claim in about the same letter to all:
“I have room in the Jeannette for nobody but her officers and crew. These must be seamen or people with some claim to scientific usefulness, but from your letter I fail to learn that you may be classed with either party.”
And then, having thus disposed of the undesirables, from Washington he wrote the Jeannette, carefully instructing Chipp as to the essential requirements for the seamen he desired to have signed on:
“Single men, perfect health, considerable strength, perfect temperance, cheerfulness, ability to read and write English, prime seamen of course. Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes preferred. Avoid English, Scotch, and Irish. Refuse point-blank French, Italians, and Spaniards. Pay to be Navy pay. Absolute and unhesitating obedience to every order, no matter what it may be.”
De Long’s instructions with respect to nationalities were based mainly on his assumptions with regard to their supposed abilities to withstand the rigors of the north, but they seemed to me to a high degree humorous when I consider that I, of Scotch descent, fell in the class to be “avoided,” while De Long himself of French Huguenot parentage, came in the group “to be refused point-blank.”
How little the average American of that day went to sea may be inferred from the fact that it did not even enter De Long’s mind to mention “Americans” among the various categories to be considered for his crew, though not forty years before in the heyday of wooden ships, the sails of Yankee clippers manned by Yankee seamen, whitened every ocean.
In early June, De Long came west and at Mare Island joined us to witness the final completion and trial of the ship. Completely satisfied with the changes made in the ship, he had nothing but praise for the manner in which we, his three subordinates, had carried on in his absence, and waved aside the gloomy prognostications of the Navy Yard officers and their comments about inadequate spars and sails, improper shape of hull, and (to put it briefly) the Jeannette as a whole, which they damned euphemistically in their official trial report:
“So far as practicable, we are of the opinion that she has been repaired and placed in condition for service in the Arctic Ocean.”
But on one thing, securing an escort as far as Alaska, De Long had firmly set his heart. He was anxious to get from San Francisco into the Arctic as rapidly as possible to take advantage of what summer weather he could in working his way north. The weather at sea to be expected being mostly head winds, speed meant proceeding under steam rather than under sail on the long trip to Alaska. This of necessity would use up most of our coal, forcing us to start the Arctic part of our journey with our bunkers either empty or what was almost as bad, full of such inferior and almost unburnable coal as was available in Alaska; unless an escort ship accompanied us as far as the Arctic Circle to replenish our bunkers then with the excellent anthracite obtainable in San Francisco.
Regardless, however, of all his arguments and his persuasions, De Long was unable to get the commandant at Mare Island to approve the detail of any naval vessel for this duty; nor, with Bennett unfortunately abroad, did he have, in spite of his most urgent telegrams, any better luck in forcing the Navy Department itself to order one. In this dilemma, at the last minute Bennett saved the situation by a cable from Paris, authorizing the charter of a schooner, the Fanny A. Hyde, to carry the coal north. De Long, relieved of his worry but exasperated beyond measure by the controversy, eased his mind by wiring back to the Herald,
“Thank God, I have a man at my back to see me through when countries fail!”
On June 28, the Jeannette was commissioned as a ship of the Navy. Thirty years have passed since then, but still that gay scene is as fresh and bright in my memory as only yesterday. Our entire ship’s company was mustered on the poop for the ceremony, officers in the glitter of swords, gold lace, and cocked hats to starboard, seamen in sober navy blue to port. Between those lines of rough seamen about to dare the Arctic ice, Emma De Long stepped forth, as fresh and lovely on that June day as summer itself, the very embodiment of youthful feminine grace if ever I have seen it in any port on this earth. With a dazzling smile that seemed to take in not only our captain but every member of his crew as well, she manned the halliards and amidst the hoarse cheers of the sailors swiftly ran aloft our flag, a beautiful silken ensign lovingly fashioned for her husband’s ship by the slender fingers which for the first time now hoisted it over us. And then with a seagoing salute as our new banner reached the masthead, she passed the halliards to the quartermaster, stepped back to De Long’s side, and clung proudly to his arm while he read the orders detailing him to the command, and the commandant of the Navy Yard, Commodore Colhoun, formally (and no doubt thankfully) turned the ship over to him.
A few days later, under our own steam we moved from Mare Island to San Francisco and there, away from the din of the yard workmen finally, we finished in peace loading stores in preparation for departure.
At last, on July 8, 1879, with the North Pole as our destination, the Jeannette weighed anchor, and gaily dressed out in all her signal flags, slowly steamed through the harbor, escorted by all the larger craft of the San Francisco Yacht Club, while as an indication of the esteem of Californians generally, Governor Irwin himself accompanied us to sea aboard a special tug.
That was a gala day for San Francisco, climaxing a week of banquets and farewell parties given for us in the city. Telegraph Hill was black with cheering crowds; on every merchant vessel in the bay as we passed flags dipped and impromptu salutes rang out. From the Presidio, a national salute blazed from the fortifications as we passed, the Army’s godspeed on our mission to their brothers of the Navy. It was well the Army saluted us, for that was the only official salute we received on our departure. De Long, much chagrined, noted as I noted, that not a single naval vessel, not a single naval officer, took part in the ovation at our departure, and that though three warships, the Alaska, the Tuscarora, and the Alert, lay at the Navy Yard only twenty-six miles away, and one of them at least might have been sent for the purpose. And as if to emphasize the point, the navy yard tug Monterey, which that very morning had brought the commandant down to San Francisco on other business, not only lay silently at her wharf while we steamed by her, but fifteen minutes later crossed our wake hardly a mile astern of us and without even a blast of her whistle as a farewell, steamed off in the direction of Mare Island.
From the machinery hatch where I was keeping one eye out for my clumsy engines and the other out for my last long glimpse of home, I watched in puzzled surprise as the Monterey silently disappeared astern, then looking up at the bridge nearly overhead, caught a glimmer of a wry smile on De Long’s face as he watched the Monterey. A navy expedition, we were sailing without the presence of a single naval representative in that vast crowd of men and ships cheering us on; worse perhaps, for it seemed as if we were being studiously ignored. Why? I have often wondered. Not enough rank on the Jeannette, perhaps.
But this was the only cloud on our departure, and I doubt if overwhelmed in the roar of the guns from the Presidio, the cheers from the citizens of San Francisco, and the shrieking of whistles from the flag-decorated vessels we passed, others, especially civilians, ever noticed it.
Slowly, under engines only, we steamed out the Golden Gate and met the long swells of the Pacific. Astern, one by one the escorting yachts turned back. On the starboard wing of the bridge at her husband’s side stood Emma De Long, a sailor’s daughter, and after a hectic courtship terminating finally in a sudden shipboard marriage in the far-off harbor of Le Havre, for eight years now a sailor’s wife. Silently she looked forward through the rigging, past furled sails, past yards and mast and bowsprit, across the waves toward the unknown north. Occasionally she smiled a little at De Long, rejoicing with him on the surface at least that at last his dream had come true, her eyes shining in her pride in the strength and the love of the man by whom she stood. But what her real feelings were, I, a rough seaman, could only guess, for she said nothing as she clung to the rail, her gaze riveted over the sea to the north into which in a few brief hours were to disappear forever her husband and her husband’s ship.
We stood on a few miles more. The coast line astern became hazy, our escorting fleet of yachts dwindled away to but one. Then a bell jangled harshly in the engine room below me, the engines stopped. For a few brief minutes the Jeannette rolled in the swells while to the shrilling of the silver pipe in the mouth of Jack Cole, bosun, our starboard whaleboat was manned, lowered, and shoved off, carrying toward that lone yacht which now lay to off our quarter, Emma De Long and her husband. There in that small boat, tossing unevenly in the waves a shiplength off, was spoken the last farewell. A brief embrace, a tender kiss, and De Long, balancing himself on the thwarts, handed his wife up over the low side of the yacht.
Another moment, and seated in the sternsheets of the whaleboat, De Long was once more simply the sailor. Sharply his commands drifted across the waves to us,
“Shove off!”
The bowman pushed clear of the yacht.
“Let fall!”
In silence, except for the steady thrash of the oars, our whaleboat came back to us, rounded to under the davits, was hoisted aboard. Again the bell jangled below. Our engines revolved slowly, the Jeannette sluggishly gathered speed, the helmsman pointed her west northwest. Off our quarter, the yacht came about, swiftly picked up headway, and with the two ships on opposite courses, she dropped rapidly astern. For a few minutes, with strained eyes I watched a white handkerchief fluttering across the water at us, then it faded in the distance. The bosun secured the whaleboat for sea, piped down, and without further ceremony, the sea routine on the Jeannette commenced. I took a final look at the distant coast and went below to watch the operation of my engines at close range.
CHAPTER V
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 re-enforcements and the excessive amount of stores and coal aboard, was so grossly overloaded she had hardly two feet freeboard left amidships, and she labored so heavily in the seas as a consequence that for seagoing qualities, I do her no injustice when I say that as a ship she was little superior to various of Ericsson’s ironclad monitors with which I fell in on blockade duty during the late war. Indeed, had it not been for our masts and spars, our nearly submerged hull would no doubt have pleased even John Ericsson himself as affording a properly insignificant target for enemy gunfire.
From our second day out, when the breeze freshened a bit from the northwest and De Long, easing her off a few points to the southward, spread all our canvas to take advantage of it, we were under both sail and steam, but with the seas breaking continuously over our rail and our decks awash most of the time. With our negligible freeboard, we lifted to nothing but took all the seas aboard as they came, rolling heavily and wallowing amongst the waves about as gracefully as a pig in a pen.
In this wise, we discovered a few things, among them the fact that we were burning five tons of coal a day and making only four knots with our engines, which gave us hardly a hundred miles for a day’s run. Lieutenant Chipp, an excellent seaman if there ever was one but who had not before been out in the Jeannette, was certain he could do as well under sail alone as I was doing under steam, with a consequent saving of our coal, and persuaded the captain to let him try. So below we banked our fires, while the sailors racing through the rigging loosed all our square sails in addition to the fore and aft rig we already had set.
It was interesting to watch Chipp’s disillusionment. With all canvas spread up to the fore and main topgallant sails (the Jeannette carried nothing above these) Chipp started bravely out on the starboard tack, but in the face of a northwest breeze, he soon found that like most square riggers, she sailed so poorly by the wind, he had to pay her off and head directly for Hawaii before we began to log even four knots. That was bad enough but worse was to come. Having spent most of the afternoon watch experimenting with the trim of the sails, Chipp finally arrived at a combination to which we logged about four and a half knots, though in the direction of our destination, Unalaska Island, we were making good hardly three. Thus trimmed we ran an hour while the seagoing Chipp in oil skins and boots sloshed over our awash deck from bowsprit to propeller well, his beard dripping water, his eyes constantly aloft, studying the set of every sail from flying jib to spanker in the hope of improving matters.
In this apparently his inspection gave him no cause for optimism, for after a final shake of the head, he decided to come about and try her on the port tack, to see if by any chance she sailed better there, as is occasionally the case with some ships owing to the unsymmetrical effect of the drag of the screw. Stationing himself amidships, Chipp gave the orders.
Down went the wheel. Then came the final shock. To his great discomfiture, Chipp was wholly unable to bring the lumbering Jeannette into the wind and come about! Twice he tried, only to have the ship each time hang “in irons” with yards banging and sails flapping crazily till she fell off again and picked up headway on her old tack. After two failures, De Long tried his hand at it, then Danenhower made an attempt, but in spite of the nautical skill of all her deck officers and the smart seamanship of her crew, the Jeannette simply could not be made to tack. For all they could do under sail, the Jeannette might still be on that starboard tack headed for Honolulu, if the captain had not finally given up in disgust and roared out to his executive officer in the waist of the ship struggling with the sheets to square away for another attempt,
“Belay that! Leave her to me, Chipp! I’ll tack this tub!” and reaching for the bell pull, he rang the engine room,
“Full speed ahead!”
Knowing De Long’s impetuous nature, I had for some time been suspecting such a result and in the engine room, I had both coalheavers and engineers standing by, so I was ready with both boilers and machinery. I yanked open the throttle myself, and our back-acting connecting rods began to shuttle athwartships. Quickly our shaft came up to fifty revolutions. Above I heard the captain bellow,
“Hard a’ lee!”
This time, driven by her screw, the Jeannette maintained her headway, came obediently up into the wind, fell off to starboard, and quickly filled away on the port tack. When I poked my head above the machinery hatch coaming to observe results, there was the crestfallen Chipp just outboard of me, busily engaged in securing all on his new course, and I could not resist, a little maliciously, suggesting to him,
“Hey, brother! You want to stay at sea? Well, while you’re still young enough to learn, take my advice and study engineering. Sailing ships? In a few years, they’ll all be as dead as triremes! Better start now. Let me lend you a good book on boilers!”
But Chipp, still hardly willing to believe that he was beaten, seized a belaying pin, waved it in my direction, retorted hotly,
“Get below with your greasy machinery and sooty boilers! They’re the ruination of any vessel! Sails dead, eh? Unship that damned propeller of yours and I’ll tack her!” He jammed his sou’wester viciously down over his ears and ignoring my offer strode forward to check the set of the jibs.
De Long, leaning over the bridge, peering down at me over his dripping glasses, took my gibe at sails more philosophically.
“Well, chief,” he observed, “she handles now like nothing I ever sailed in before, but I suppose it’s my fault, not hers, she’s so low in the water. When we’ve burned some of this coal and lightened up, perhaps she’ll do better.” He puffed meditatively at his pipe while he turned to examine the compass. We were hardly within six points of the wind. In dismay De Long muttered, “Heading north! This course will never do if we want to get to Alaska this season. I guess we’ll have to douse sail, stick to the engines, and lay her dead into the wind, west nor’west for Unalaska, till the breeze shifts anyway.” He cupped his hands, shouted after his first officer,
“Mr. Chipp!”
Chipp, just passing the fore shrouds, turned, looked inquisitively up at the bridge.
“Mr. Chipp, furl all sail! We’ll proceed under steam alone till further orders!”
For three days we kicked along with unfavorable weather through rain, mist, and head seas. The Jeannette labored, groaned, and with no canvas to steady her, rolled and pitched abominably. Our two scientists, Newcomb and Collins, at the first roll went under with seasickness, and as the weather grew worse their misery passed description, though as is usual in such cases, they got scant comfort from the rest of us. What queer quirk of the seagoing character it is that makes the sailor, ordinarily the most open-hearted and sympathetic of human beings, openly derisive of such sufferings, I know not, but we were no exceptions, and towards Collins in particular, whose puns had occasionally made some of us in the wardroom self-conscious, we were especially barbed in our expressions of mock solicitude.