Hell on ice the saga of.., p.1
Hell on Ice: The Saga of the Jeannette, page 1
Hell on Ice
The Saga of the Jeannette
Rear Admiral Edward Ellsberg
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.”
PREFACE
ON the summit of a grassy hill in Maryland looking across an arm of the Severn River toward the spreading lawns and the gray buildings of the Naval Academy stands a stone cross frosted with marble icicles topping an oddly shaped granite cairn.
In the summer of 1910, a boy of eighteen fresh from the Colorado Rockies, I stood, a new midshipman in awkward sailor whites, before that monument and read the inscription to Lieutenant Commander G. W. De Long and the officers and men who perished with him in the Jeannette Expedition of 1879 in search of the North Pole. Casually I noted that no one was buried beneath that cross, and since I had never heard before either of De Long or of the Jeannette, I wandered off to study the monuments to naval heroes whose deeds shone out in the histories I had read—the officers who in the wars with Tripoli had humbled the Barbary pirates; those who in the Civil War had braved Confederate forts and ironclad rams to save the Union; and most of all to stand before the tomb of John Paul Jones, the father of our Navy and a valiant seaman, fit companion to the great commanders of all ages.
Over the next twenty years I heard again occasionally of De Long in connection with the successful expeditions to the North and to the South Poles, finally reached by Peary and by Amundsen and those who followed in their footsteps. But except as a dismal early failure, De Long’s expedition seemed to have no significance, until some seven years ago a brief article by a friend of mine, Commander Louis J. Gulliver, appeared in the Naval Institute summarizing so splendidly the history of the Jeannette that immediately that old stone cross in Annapolis for me took on a new importance and I began to study what had happened. Reading what I could get my hands on concerning it, I soon enough saw that De Long’s early failure was a more brilliant chapter in human struggle and achievement than the later successes of Peary and of Amundsen.
But in my early search, based mainly on De Long’s journals as published nearly sixty years ago, much of what had happened eluded me; first, because De Long himself, fighting for the lives of his men in the Arctic, never had opportunity to set down in his journal what was going on (the most vivid day of his life is covered by two brief lines); and second, because the published version of his journal was much expurgated by those who edited it to create the impression that the expedition was a happy family of scientists unitedly battling the ice, whereas the truth was considerably otherwise as I soon learned.
Fortunately there came into my hands the old record of the Naval Court of Inquiry into the disaster, before which court the survivors testified, from which it appeared that De Long’s struggles with his men tried his soul even as much as his struggles with the ice; and on top of that discovery, with the aid of Congressman Celler of New York, I got from the records of Congress the transcript of a Congressional Investigation lasting two solid months, a volume of nearly eleven hundred closely printed pages, from which the flesh to clothe the skeleton of De Long’s journal immediately appeared. For there, fiercely fought over by the inquisitors (Congressional investigations apparently being no different over half a century ago from what they are today) were the stories of every survivor, whether officer or man, dragged out of him by opposing counsel, insistent even that the exact words of every controversy, profane as they might be, go down in the record to tell what really happened in three years in the ice pack. And there also, never otherwise published, were all the suppressed reports relating to the expedition, the expurgated portions of De Long’s journal, and the unpublished journals of Ambler and of Collins.
From the records of these two inquiries, Naval and Congressional, backed up by what had been published—the journal of De Long appearing as “The Voyage of the Jeannette”; “In the Lena Delta,” by G. W. Melville, chief engineer of the expedition; and “The Narrative of the Jeannette,” by J. W. Danenhower, navigator—stood forth an extraordinary human story. Over this material I worked three years.
How best to tell that story was a puzzle. De Long and the Jeannette Expedition had already most successfully been embalmed and buried by loving hands in the sketchy but conventional historical treatments of the published volumes mentioned above. To repeat that method was a waste of time. It then occurred to me that since I had once narrated in the first person in “On the Bottom” the battle of another group of seamen (of whom I was one) with the ocean for the sunken submarine S-51, I might here best give this story life and reality by relating it in fictional form as the personal narrative of one of the members of the expedition.
But who should that man be?
It was of course obvious that he must be chosen from the group of survivors. That narrowed the field to three officers and eight seamen. Now as between officers and seamen, it was evident that the officers were in a far better position to observe and to know what was happening than the seamen, so the choice was limited to the three surviving officers. For reasons that will afterwards be clear, among these three there could hardly be any question—Melville patently was best. And aside from the fact that Melville was a leading light in the expedition and next to De Long himself the man who actually bore the brunt of Arctic fury, he was an engineer, and since I am also, I could most easily identify myself with him and with his point of view.
So here as it might have been told about thirty years ago by Admiral George Wallace Melville, retired Engineer-in-Chief of the Navy, blunt, loyal, and lovable, a man whose versatility in four widely dissimilar fields of human endeavor gave him at his death in 1912 good claim to being considered one of America’s geniuses, is the Saga of the Jeannette.
EDWARD ELLSBERG.
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
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.
