In the Kingdom of Ice

by Hampton Sides

  “Boys!” the engineer barked in his boldest voice. “Captain says we’ve made twenty-one miles the past week—and we now have a current in our favor.” No longer was the ice shifting north faster than they were marching south, neutralizing all forward movement. At long last, they were making real progress.

  A lusty shout went up from the men, and they took to their trudge with what Melville called “renewed vigor,” picking their way through the fog.

  It was during this bright but uncertain time that Dr. Ambler happened upon a live butterfly, bouncing among the floes. It was such a beautiful, incongruous thing to see out on the pack that the men could only smile in admiration. A butterfly—they had not seen any variety of this fluttering creature in more than two years. It could not be a “habitué” of the ice, De Long wrote, “and was certainly blown from the land”—a land that surely must be close by now, and had to offer some measure of warmth and stability to nurture such improbable life.

  With this delicate inspiration, the men marched on.

  AS THEY STAGGERED toward the island, one man returned to the sick list. It was Danenhower—his syphilitic eye kept worsening. Dr. Ambler had to turn more and more of his attention to the problem. The eye was, the surgeon jotted in his notes, “engorged … inflamed … flushed up.” Ambler thought it might require surgery again, but most of the instruments the doctor would need to perform the procedure had gone down with the ship. All he could do was treat it with quinine and anti-inflammatory ointments and flush it out from time to time. Still, the eye would not improve.

  What made Danenhower’s condition even worse was that he categorically denied that it was a problem. He said he could see just fine—and apparently believed it. But on the march, he kept falling into crevices and tripping over the merest obstacle. With his bad eye bandaged and his other eye darkened by a snow goggle, and with neurological conditions caused by his syphilis that may have impaired his balance, the navigator had become, in Ambler’s words, “an encumbrance.” Danenhower’s pride, however, and his wish not to let his fellows down, would not allow him to admit it. He insisted that he could haul—and that, indeed, he was one of the strongest men on the ice.

  After a few days of quarreling between Ambler and Danenhower, De Long had to intervene. He summoned the navigator to his office tent. “You cannot see,” De Long said. “It’s evident from the way you stumble in the snow.”

  Danenhower protested. On the contrary, he said, he was strong and healthy and could see as well as the next man.

  De Long cut him off: “Danenhower—you are an impediment! You would be a hindrance to anything you attempted to assist.”

  Then what will you have me do? the navigator asked.

  “I refuse to assign you any duty until Dr. Ambler discharges you from the sick list. For now, you shall ride in the hospital sled.”

  When Danenhower tried to explain himself, De Long cut him off again: “You are dismissed.”

  Danenhower emerged from the tent devastated and resentful. He reported to Ambler once more and climbed aboard the hospital sled, to be hauled by others like so many pounds of pemmican. The doctor looked at Danenhower with disgust. He recalled that in Washington he had strongly recommended to De Long that Danenhower not be allowed to join the expedition in the first place. He hoped that his syphilitic patient now felt “great mortification” for coming to the Arctic when he’d known perfectly well that “he was diseased, and that he was liable to be laid up.” Perversely stubborn, Danenhower had “concealed it as long as possible.”

  Now Danenhower’s deceit endangered not only himself but all the other men. Said Ambler: “I do not think a man was ever cursed with … such [a] patient before.” But Ambler was soon absorbed in other thoughts. Back in Virginia, he realized, it was his fiancée’s birthday. He wrote in his journal, “The Little Lady … must be twenty-one. We had a pleasant time 3 yrs. ago to-day.” Sitting alone at supper, Ambler “drank to her health in the best I had, a tin cup of tea.”

  THE MEN STRUGGLED onward through the fog. Several times the clouds opened to reveal the island, but the refractions were so strange and capricious that it was impossible to judge how far away it was—or the condition of the intervening ice. De Long scrutinized these kaleidoscopic changes with his glass. “The more I looked, the more confused I became,” he said. Ambler jotted in his journal, “Island seems to recede as we approach.” First it appeared to be surrounded by ice; moments later, it seemed to rise up from an open sea. Then it disappeared, only to return again. “I sat and studied this thing for an hour, watching every change,” De Long wrote. “I was fairly staggered.”

  Equally baffling to De Long was the question of which island of the New Siberians they were marching toward. He opened up his charts again and now decided that it must be one of the Lyakhovsky Islands (Little and Great Lyakhovsky Islands are the southernmost of the New Siberian Islands). But if it was one of the Lyakhovsky Islands, then his maps were very crudely charted—off by more than a hundred miles. Studying the conundrum further, De Long realized that he had not considered one other possibility: Maybe this wasn’t one of the New Siberian Islands at all. Maybe this was a new island—an island that, like Henrietta, had never been mapped or even seen before. “I am again in hopes,” he wrote in a blush of excitement, “that we have made another discovery.”

  The fog grew thicker, and the men lost sight of the island for several days. Yet they could tell they were drawing near, because they could hear the relentless grinding of the ice on the shore, as well as the cackle and chatter of what sounded like millions of seabirds. Often they saw individual birds flying overhead with food stuck in their beaks.

  On July 28, the sun shone through the clouds, and suddenly the island burst before them in magnificent detail, less than a mile away. Its highest point loomed several thousand feet over the patchily frozen ocean. The island, considerably larger than Henrietta or Jeannette Island, was draped in massive glaciers. Moss grew on the capes, and in several places there were steep cliffs streaked with bird guano. Melville could see “perpendicular masses of black basaltic rock, stained here and there with patches of red lichens, and begrimed with the decayed vegetable matter of unknown ages.” All about the island were “giant rocks split and powdered by the hand of time.”

  The men removed their smoked goggles, let go of their drag ropes, and gasped. To Newcomb, it was a “land of rushing torrents, glaciers, huge, impregnable rocky fastnesses [and] crags of indescribable grandeur.” Gulls, murres, kittiwakes, and guillemots swarmed by the thousands, flying “so thickly as to darken the sun.” Just behind the deafening din of the birds’ shrieking was another sound, a steady bass tone, what Newcomb called a “buzzing sound, as if from an enormous swarm of bees.” This was the mingled drone of the birds’ nudging, cooing, tittering, and rustling in their thousands of niches and nesting places. It was the thrum of life itself.

  The men were dazzled by the spectacle; some were moved to tears. Never before had they seen or heard so many living beings crammed into one place.

  As close as it was, getting to the island, De Long could see, would still be an ordeal. The ice between them and the shore was a menacing whorl of “confusion and trouble”—riddled with enough obstacles, he thought, to “hold a Goliath back.” Ambler predicted that they would have “the devil to pay generally.” Yet everyone was so inspired by the sight of the island that De Long decided to capitalize on the renewed energy and make a prolonged dash for it.

  When they set foot on the rocky shore, on July 29, De Long gathered his bedraggled men together to make an announcement. He had to fairly yell it to make himself heard over the screeching birds. “This land toward which we have been working for so long,” he said, “is a new discovery. I take possession of it in the name of the President of the United States.”

  Three cheers went up, and the men scattered over the island to find driftwood for a bonfire. Though they were beyond exhaustion—“everybody [is] used up,” De Long said, �
��and could not possibly have gone further”—they relished the feel of terra firma under their feet. Except for Melville and the small party that had visited Henrietta Island, the men of the Jeannette had not walked on dry land for 697 days. Dr. Ambler rejoiced in the subtle sensation of what he called “renewing the electrical connections between my body and the earth.”

  Soon a fire crackled along the rocky beach. American flags flew over De Long’s proud camp—and this time, he thought, they did not seem to mock him.

  31 · EIGHT PRECIOUS DAYS

  At first, the sound failed to register on the ear at all; it was more like a low vibration, from deep within the earth. Most of the men, snuffling in their sealskin bags, were too exhausted to detect it. But then the ground “rocked and trembled,” said Melville, with “the roar of distant thunder.” This ragged rumbling gathered strength and intensity, scattering birds from their cliffside perches. Inside the tents, a few eyes cocked open, faces contorted into sleepy scowls of confusion. It was a noise, a sensation, like none they had experienced before. Many were convinced that it was an earthquake.

  De Long and his men stumbled from their tents and stared up in disbelief through the tapered light of the Arctic predawn. On the scree slopes more than a thousand feet directly above them was a tumbling landslide of rock. The debris made “its awful way toward us with irresistible speed,” said Melville.

  Fortunately, the expedition was encamped on a gravel spit that was separated from the slope by a narrow channel of water. The clattering, plummeting rocks piled up in the channel, “lashing it into foam,” said Newcomb, “and sending the spray fifty feet into the air.” Had the water not been there to stop it, observed Melville, “we would have been buried by the rushing mass.”

  A cloud of dust and grit settled over the camp—choking the men and leaving them to ponder their good fortune. They had to wonder: Was the island trying to tell them something? It was as though this pristine piece of Arctic rock, never having seen human trespass before, had objected to the expedition’s presence in the strongest possible terms. The avalanche deposited “a terrific amount of rotten rock,” said De Long. But he seemed singularly unimpressed by the near catastrophe. After all their trials so far, he wrote, “we are prepared for everything and surprised at nothing.”

  De Long was surprised by one thing: This island on which they’d landed had proved to be a considerable piece of real estate. On their first morning, July 30, he sent reconnaissance parties scattering in all directions, and the reports they brought back were impressive. They’d found capes, plateaus, volcanic cones, several glaciers, and numerous rocky outcroppings seamed with coal. His men collected a pair of bleached reindeer antlers, samples of opals, amethyst quartz, and basaltic lava, and the bones of several marine mammals. They found traces of bear, fox, rabbit, and grouse. The island stretched for many miles—it was too large to be explored in just a day or two.

  De Long, appreciating the magnitude of their discovery, decided to name the place Bennett Island. As far as he was concerned, the island was now part of the United States. “I added Bennett Island to American soil,” he wrote, and then named the high escarpment beside their campsite Cape Emma.

  Ostrov Bennetta, as the island is marked on Russian maps today, is about sixty square miles in area, by far the largest fragment in the uninhabited archipelago known as the De Long Islands. (By contrast, Henrietta Island, also considered part of the De Longs, is a mere crumb—only 4.6 square miles.) The summit of Bennett’s highest mountain reaches fourteen hundred feet, and the island has four glaciers, one of which is 560 feet thick. Though rocky and treeless, much of the island is covered in low tundra plants—forbs, rushes, mosses, and lichens. Eons ago, Bennett was a stand-alone mountain that rose from the floor of the late Pleistocene plain of Beringia, which once connected Siberia to North America, and which now lies submerged beneath the Arctic Ocean.

  During his stay on Bennett Island, Captain De Long was torn between conflicting impulses. On the one hand, he wanted to explore and map the island—this was, after all, the expedition’s first significant geographical discovery. On the other hand, he knew he was racing against the Arctic clock. His survival, and that of his men, demanded that they move quickly to the south. Yet before they could do that, they had to gain strength, mend their boats, and generally reconstitute themselves for the effort ahead. De Long agonized over this delicate trigonometry—rest, explore, keep moving—knowing that whatever decision he made, his men’s fate could hang in the balance. “A prolonged delay here,” he recognized, “would be a serious thing for us.” He could not ignore the fact that, as in a desert oasis, there was life on this island, however tenuous. But lingering here would mean sure death.

  Melville urged De Long to spend time exploring Bennett Island. “Any person with manly or heroic instincts,” he wrote, could see the value of exploration. On the other hand, Melville said, “the weak, timorous, or over-cautious person would avoid it.”

  In the end, they would spend eight precious days on Bennett Island. Their time here was, in many ways, an idyll—a “brief respite from our distressing labors,” as Melville put it. They drank sweet water from streams that purled down the mountainside, fresh from a glacier. They heated the water in the fire and bathed for the first time in months. They stayed warm, thanks to the huge amount of driftwood strewn along the beaches, often piled in logjams that looked to De Long like “dock[s] fallen to decay.” The rocky tundra was matted in beautiful Arctic flowers as well as an edible kind of spoonwort—De Long called it “scurvy grass”—which added fresh green relish to their diet.

  And they were never in want of meat. Seabirds were everywhere, darkening the sky, and their rookeries were full of eggs. De Long sent parties up to the cliffs to kill birds by the score. Most of them were so trusting that all one had to do was ease up to them and smash them with a rock. Their flesh was rubbery in consistency, but when fried in bear fat, it could be tasty. Melville loved their “savory stews of loon, gorney, gull, murre, and other sea-fowl,” and De Long wrote that a “more luxurious meal I do not recollect having had.”

  Others at first found the birds too rich for their constitutions. “Their effect after being eaten was like that of young veal,” said Danenhower, “and pretty nearly every one of the party was made sick, the doctor included.” As Ambler succinctly put it: “Bird diet—old ones tough, young tender.” Newcomb, a bird lover, would only say that these winged creatures were “acceptable” as food. Yet when liberally cut with salads of scurvy grass, the rich stews went down easier.

  Finding this island, De Long realized, had been a godsend, a stroke of pure luck that had come just when he’d thought his men could go no farther. Now, with each passing day, he could see their spirits reviving, a new spark in their eyes. “It seems as if Providence were directing our movements,” he wrote. “There is much to be thankful for; everybody is in excellent health, in spite of our terribly hard work; the appetites are something wonderful to think of, and our sleep is sound and unbroken.”

  ONE OF THE other things that made Bennett Island such a pleasant refuge for De Long was that he no longer had to keep his attentions so firmly clamped on the matter of discipline. He told Chipp to “give all hands all the liberty you can on American soil.” During their eight days on Bennett, De Long issued the men light assignments—to study the tides, to collect animal artifacts or gather geological specimens. But otherwise he viewed the situation almost as though they had arrived in port and were taking a brief leave of duty. This was vitally important, he felt, for everyone’s morale and sanity—including his own. They all needed a respite.

  Collins was free to socialize with the group again and could move about the island as he wished, so long as he brought his notebook and made detailed sketches of the topography. Danenhower, too, had freedom to do as he liked, the only caveats being that he keep his eye bandaged and try his best not to endanger himself by walking on the precarious slopes above the camp. Newcomb was fully
restored to the title for which he’d been hired. He was, after all, the expedition’s naturalist, with a specialty in ornithology—and here was a wild, unexplored island crowded with birds, many of them rare or little-known species.

  Each morning Newcomb grabbed his notebook and his shotgun and took off on all-day “tramps,” as he referred to them, usually by himself. At long last, he had arrived in his kind of heaven. This was why he’d signed on to the expedition in the first place; this was the first time his expertise had been called upon in any direct way.

  One day, he crawled far up a valley of pinnacled rocks that “arose like some great castle of old.” He was both exhilarated and daunted by the thought of being the first person ever to walk over the ancient rocks. “Probably mine was the first human foot ever there,” he wrote, “and as I stood looking, I almost expected to see some gigantic knight appear and ask how or by what right I dared invade his realm.”

  Another day Newcomb climbed twelve hundred feet up what he called “very treacherous disintegrated rocks” to observe a colony of murres—a large species of auk. Newcomb could have lingered with the birds all day. He sat engrossed for hours, watching them from a high ledge covered in red lichen and splotched with their droppings. “I fairly envied these beautiful creatures their cozy home,” he said. The murres “sat in long rows like citizens at a town meeting, and were very noisy, their voices echoing from crag to crag.” It was “the most extensive breeding ground I have ever seen of any bird.”

  On his way down the precipitous slope, Newcomb had to bury his sheath knife to the hilt into the scree with each stride to keep from tumbling to his death. Suddenly, he heard someone crying up to him from below: “Look out, sir!” It was Sharvell, in a panic. When Newcomb turned around, he saw an avalanche of “huge rocks and earth coming for me.” His own movements had apparently dislodged something far above that had set the mass in motion. “Seeing a chance of safety behind an outcropping, I hastily availed myself of it and barely in time, as these missiles of death hurtled down,” Newcomb recalled. He pronounced it “a narrow shave” and continued his happy studies of seabirds.