In the Kingdom of Ice

by Hampton Sides

  When he had finished his tale, Nindemann looked at the Yakuts gathered around him and realized by their vacant expressions that while they might have been dazzled by his performance, they had no idea what he was talking about. “Sometimes it seemed to me as if they understood everything that I wanted,” Nindemann said. “Then all at once it seemed that they did not understand a word.” Some of them probably thought these were the ravings of a crazy man. Certainly the villagers of Kumakh-Surt gave no indication that they would help.

  NINDEMANN’S INABILITY TO communicate the dire straits of his shipmates—and his constant awareness that time was draining away—had brought him to the brink of a nervous breakdown. The next day, while still holed up in a hut in Kumakh-Surt, he collapsed in a fit of sorrow and frustration, sobbing uncontrollably. A Yakut woman took pity on him and sat with him long enough to understand his new request: He wanted to be taken to Bulun, the place De Long had mentioned as a larger settlement farther south on the Lena. There, Nindemann hoped to meet someone who might speak English or his native German. Perhaps in Bulun he could find Russian authorities who would understand him—and help him mount a rescue expedition.

  As the villagers made arrangements for a reindeer team and a driver, the two Americans composed a written account explaining who they were and what had happened to De Long—a note they planned to give to the authorities in Bulun.

  IT WAS THEN that a strapping and somewhat mysterious Russian man named Kuzma arrived in the village and became acquainted with Nindemann and Noros. Though he did not volunteer the information, Kuzma turned out to be an exile, a convicted thief who had been banished to Siberia for his crimes, yet he was educated and apparently well-traveled. It was unclear what Kuzma was doing in Kumakh-Surt, for he lived nearly a hundred miles away, on the far northeastern edge of the delta. Kuzma spoke neither English nor German, but he instantly kindled new hope in Nindemann and Noros. Upon seeing the two bedraggled castaways, the first thing he said was “Jennetta? Amerikanski?” Nindemann surmised that Kuzma had read something about the Jeannette expedition in a Russian newspaper or had heard about it through conversations with authorities. In any case, he seemed to know something of who they were—and this was a magnificent start.

  Kuzma nodded his head vigorously when Nindemann and Noros mentioned that eleven other shipwrecked Americans, including their captain, were still alive but suffering from their travels over the ice. It seemed as though Kuzma suddenly understood everything they were talking about. Upon seeing the note Nindemann and Noros had composed, Kuzma did something strange: He took it from them and slid it into his pocket. Nindemann protested loudly, but Kuzma refused to give it back, and soon he had absconded from the village without any explanation.

  The villagers generously gave the two Americans fresh furs and plenty of smoked fish for the journey to Bulun, and the next day, they left by reindeer team, with a competent Yakut driver. They arrived on the evening of October 29. Bulun was a snug settlement of perhaps thirty-five huts and cabins, with a tiny Russian Orthodox church. Nindemann and Noros were received warmly—and were soon met by the village priest and the Russian commandant. They were given a small hut to stay in, and they spent the next few days recovering from their dysentery and resting while awaiting word from the commandant. They were still a sad sight to behold—hobbled, frostnipped, emaciated, their beards wild and tattered. They made a few more feeble attempts to impress upon the villagers the urgent need for mounting a rescue but met with no success.

  On the night of November 2, they heard the outer door of their hut creak open. Then the inner door, with its thick insulation of felt and deerskin, cracked a few inches to reveal a stolid man in furs. The light was so dim that the two Americans could scarcely see their visitor, even when he quietly stepped inside. Nindemann was lying on what passed for a bed, while Noros stood beside a table, sawing away at a loaf of black bread with a sheath knife.

  Something about this visitor seemed odd. He just stood there by the door and lingered without saying a word. He had a strange grin on his face.

  “Hallooo, Noros!” the man said in a booming voice. “How do you do?”

  Noros looked up from the bread he was slicing and saw that the stranger was bounding toward him. The man pulled back his hood to reveal a familiar face—and a familiar bald head.

  Tears came to Noros’s eyes, and he fairly screamed: “My God, Mr. Melville—you’re alive!”

  38 · INCUBUS OF HORRORS

  It had been fifty-one days since the three boats separated in the gale—fifty-one days since the men of De Long’s cutter had lost sight of Melville’s whaleboat in the storm-tossed Laptev Sea and resigned themselves to the loss of the other two crews. Nindemann and Noros now welcomed Melville into their cabin as a man already mourned. They could scarcely contain their joy at seeing one of their shipmates alive, hearing English spoken again, and learning that they were not alone in this strange land.

  “Melville,” cried Noros, “we thought we were the only two left! We were sure the whaleboat’s crew was all dead, and the second cutter’s, too.”

  Melville removed his furs and embraced his two friends in the wet warmth of the dim cabin. He was scabbed and weather-beaten, his stout face flecked with a few empurpled lesions of frostbite, but he was in far better shape than Nindemann and Noros. Melville’s eyes welled with tears at the sight of his comrades—tears of delight and relief but also of sadness, for it pained the engineer to the depths of his soul to contemplate the sorry state to which they had fallen. He could see that these two raccoon-eyed wraiths had tasted the fumes of their own death.

  The tale that Melville had to tell bore many resemblances to what had befallen Nindemann and Noros. His, like theirs, was a story of privation and strife and wandering in the wilderness. The ordeal had been, he said, “an incubus of horrors.” Yet Melville had had luck on his side.

  ON THE AFTERNOON of September 12, the eleven men in the whaleboat—Melville, Danenhower, Newcomb, Leach, Bartlett, Cole, Charles Tong Sing, Henry Wilson, Frank Mansen, Lauterbach, and Aneguin—had pulled away from De Long’s cutter “at a spanking rate,” as Melville put it. But as the gale grew in fury, part of the rudder was carried away, crippling the vessel. The men in Melville’s boat debated whether they could survive the massive swells. Scanning the empty seas, they felt sure they were now the expedition’s only survivors. “The general feeling,” Melville said, was “that ours was the only boat which outlived the gale.”

  Melville turned the bow into the wind and, much as De Long had done, constructed an elaborate sea anchor from a mishmash of canvas, oars, and tent poles weighted down with copper kettles attached to a line. The contraption was far from elegant, but it was a bit of genius that worked beautifully, allowing Melville and his crew to ride out the storm.

  Still, throughout the night, they were constantly “pumping and bailing with might and main.” The waves came in sets of three, and the men timed their bailing so they could brace for the next sequence of incoming sea. The best bailers turned out to be Aneguin and Charles Tong Sing—they crouched together in the bottom of the boat, scooping up water with desperate efficiency. But the lulls between the sets were always too short, and soon “the cruel spray would dash and freeze upon us.… It changed to slush the moment it tumbled in.” Then the frenzied bailing would begin all over again. Daylight, Melville realized, “did nothing but enhance our misery, since it enabled us to witness each other’s wretchedness.” Melville was stiff as a mannequin, his hands “swollen, blistered, and split open by the cold and stagnation of my blood.” No land was in sight, just an endless roil of pewter-gray sea. The ribbed bottom of the boat, which had been carefully stuffed with clean snow for potable water, was now deluged with ocean spray, so they had nothing fresh to drink.

  Lacking instruments, Melville and Danenhower guided the whaleboat toward the delta using nothing more than the sun and stars. Melville had veered off on a very different course from the one De Long’s cutter took. The
engineer angled the whaleboat almost due south and was approaching the southeastern fan of the delta, whereas De Long had vectored far to the west, making for the more obscure—and less inhabited—reaches of the delta’s northern discharges. As the two parties drew near to land, they had grown several hundred miles apart.

  On September 14, the whaleboat came aground on a muddy shoal, yet still Melville could see no land. They backed up from the shallows and worked their way east by southeast, threading through mires of sandbars, until they debouched into an open channel, which proved to be a major arm of the Lena, extending like a brown plume far out into the sea and pulsing with a strong flow. Here they turned due west and alternately rowed and sailed against the current, the brackish water becoming sweeter by the hour. Then, on the morning of September 17, they sighted two spits of land in the distance—marking the true entrance to this mighty branch of the river. At long last, they had reached Siberia.

  But as they passed into the Lena and navigated upstream for another day, Melville became more and more puzzled. His chart, which had been copied from Petermann’s Geographische Mitteilungen, showed numerous places marked WINTER HUTS OF NATIVES. But as the men scanned both banks of the river, they could see no signs of habitation of any kind—just a swift, broad, musky river, more than four miles across, its sandy banks littered with driftwood. Said Melville, “Bitterly we cursed Petermann and all his works which had led us astray.”

  They had been huddled together in the cramped whaleboat for more than one hundred twenty hours and were in abject condition. “The cold,” Melville later wrote, “had robbed us of our vitality, and produced a dullness of mind, movement, and speech.” Newcomb complained of aching gums—a telltale sign of scurvy—while others suffered from varying degrees of blindness and a shrill ringing in their ears.

  But it was their extremities that plagued them the most. “The cracks in our bleeding hands were in a frightful condition,” wrote Melville. “The blisters and sores had run together and our flesh became sodden and spongy to the touch. Our feet, legs, and hands were now entirely bereft of feeling.” Leach’s feet were especially horrible (almost as bad as Erichsen’s had been upon coming ashore); when he pulled off his boots, Leach saw that his toes were turning blue-black, the skin and nails curling backward, said Melville, like feathers singed by a flame.

  Not only were the men miserable, some were going insane. Cole could be seen muttering to himself and at times seemed to have lost touch with reality. Danenhower, still incensed by De Long’s decision to give Melville command of the whaleboat though the navigator enjoyed higher rank, had fallen into weird ravings and violent outbursts. (It is unclear whether Melville knew that Danenhower had syphilis, but the illness did seem to be manifesting itself in the form of episodic madness.) Once, when Newcomb committed a trivial offense, Danenhower snapped and began to choke the life out of the hapless naturalist, yelling, “If you don’t obey me, I’m going to kill you!” The others in the boat had to pull him off Newcomb.

  Only one thing held the men together through these nadir moments, enabling them to overlook all transgressions and failings: It was the camaraderie of suffering, the conviction that what they had already been through outweighed everything else. The magnitude of their struggle had forged a forgiving brotherhood. “Our common dangers and miseries had bred a closer fellowship among us,” said Melville, “a bond which bound us all.”

  WHEN IT SEEMED their ordeal had reached its extremity, a blessing came their way: On the morning of September 19, they spotted a collection of huts in what appeared to be a fishing camp. “Our joy,” Melville said, “was almost as great as though we had suddenly chanced upon a modern metropolis.” They landed and built a roaring driftwood bonfire beside the slatternly, weather-scabbed structures. The welcome warmth of the fire nonetheless put some of the men in agony, as though a million electrified needles were prodding and pricking their extremities.

  Although the camp looked to be abandoned for the season, within a few minutes three natives, paddling three dugout canoes, nosed around a sandbar. They were heading off in another direction and appeared to ignore the men and their plaintive cries—or perhaps they were simply shocked and frightened by these eleven wild-looking trespassers now squatting in their fishing camp.

  As they retreated across the Lena, Melville ordered a few of the men to jump into the whaleboat with him to give chase. They soon pulled alongside the dugouts, but the natives, “shy of us in evident fear or suspicion,” slid away to a safer remove. Melville hailed them in English, then in German, then French, but it was no use. “We all smiled and laughed at my successive fruitless attempts to open up a conversation in every crooked tongue of which I had the slightest smattering,” he later recalled.

  After much coaxing, one of the natives, younger and less timid than the others, paddled a little closer. Through repetition and gestures, Melville was able to establish that his name was Tomat. He bore himself like a proud warrior and was something of a dandy, with tobacco pouches and a ceremonial pipe dangling from his person, his fur leggings decorated with copper ornaments, and a knife lashed to his thigh. But he was just a teenager—an unlikely savior for a shabby group of shipwrecked sailors from the other side of the planet. Inside his boat were fishing nets made of white horsehair, a recently caught fish, and a goose carcass. Melville told the men to grab hold of Tomat’s boat so that he could not get away. The young man seemed momentarily alarmed by this entrapment, but after a bit more gesturing, Melville was able to persuade him and his companions to join the Americans by the bonfire.

  Tomat and his companions were members of the Evenk tribe, another group of seminomadic hunter-fishermen widely scattered around north-central Siberia. Of Mongol extraction, and known for their hardy stock of shaggy Arctic horses, the Evenks were at least partly Christianized and spoke a completely different language from that of the Yakuts. Melville and his men sat by the fire with the three natives, who offered up the goose and fish to be cooked.

  Over a hastily prepared stew, the Americans tried to communicate with the three Evenks, but they soon gave up and contented themselves with showing each other their belongings. Tomat was especially impressed by the Americans’ rifles—and by a small family photograph that Newcomb was carrying. Never having seen a photograph before, Tomat kissed the magical picture over and over again and crossed himself, apparently thinking it was the image of a saint.

  Tomat and his companions were friendly enough, but after a time it became clear to Melville that these impoverished natives could not really help his party; they appeared reluctant to lead them to their village, wherever it was. Eleven starving Americans were too many mouths to feed for a people already living on meager Arctic fare. Tomat seemed to think that Melville and his men were supernatural beings who had risen from the ice somewhere far to the north. Melville began to “discern in their manner a certain fear of us.” He suspected from their actions that they “contemplated stealing away and leaving us in the lurch.”

  Melville now fully realized that although he and his men had made human contact, they were far from being saved. They somehow had to penetrate farther into the Lena delta and reach a settlement substantial enough to accommodate a party as large and needy as theirs. Repeatedly, Melville asked about Bulun, which was clearly marked on his Petermann chart. Tomat, by shutting his eyes and snoring, indicated that Bulun was “many sleeps” from this place and suggested that getting there would be dangerous.

  Instead, Tomat led them to his home, a forlorn speck of a place called Little Borkhia that had many more graveyard crosses than living souls. For several nights, the Americans were put up in a yurtlike structure that was “wondrously dirty,” as Melville put it, and “pungent [with] the odor of ancient fish and bones; yet we were very glad to be so comfortably housed, for outside a wild snow-storm raged in the night.”

  From Little Borkhia, Melville and his men worked their way up the “serpentine windings of the river,” continually busting through
the young ice that was fast forming over the surface. On September 25, they reached a collection of huts known as Arrhu. Four days later, they arrived at the settlement of Zemovialach, which was built on a marshy island in the river. With a population of perhaps thirty Evenks and a few Yakuts, it was the first place they had encountered that might reasonably be called a village.

  Melville’s intention was to push on quickly for Bulun, but they had arrived in Zemovialach precisely on the cusp of winter—too late for any more boat travel, yet too early for safe ice travel. It was the transition period between navigation and sledding. By grunts and emphatic gestures, the villagers insisted that it was too dangerous to attempt a journey to Bulun until the river thoroughly froze over.

  Melville demanded that someone at least take him to Bulun, but he could not find any natives willing to risk the perilous journey. To push on without a guide, Melville believed, would be suicidal—“a game of mock heroics.” There weren’t enough dogs around Zemovialach to assemble a team; the few Melville saw were “miserable, low curs.” Certainly Melville’s explorers were in no shape to travel. “I glanced at my men—weak, hungry, and hollow-eyed,” Melville wrote. “Looking around at the miserable objects about me, the scant and tattered clothing, crippled feet and legs, I determined the risk too great.”

  So they dragged the whaleboat from the river and out of the ice’s reach and then set up housekeeping on the periphery of the village in a couple of balagans—pyramidal wooden structures with earthen roofs, fur-lined floors, and slabs of ice for windows. They would have to wait two or three weeks, maybe longer. This detention was infuriating—“inaction was worse than death by the roadside,” said Melville—but they could not avoid it. They were stuck there, on an island in the middle of the Lena as the ice slowly closed in around them. With no prospect of communicating with the outside world, they believed that they were the only survivors of the USS Jeannette.