In the Kingdom of Ice

by Hampton Sides

  While waiting for Nindemann, Melville and La Kentie looked around in the snow. They found a medicine chest, a hatchet, and a tin cylinder, nearly four feet long, in which were stored a large collection of charts and drawings from the Jeannette’s voyage.

  A few feet from the exposed hand, Melville found a small notebook. He picked it up and immediately recognized the handwriting. It was the “ice journal” Captain De Long had kept since the day the Jeannette sank. The leather-bound volume was tattered and water-stained, but the entries were legible. In their descriptions, and in the details Melville was able to tease from the scene before him, a vivid picture of De Long’s movements and trials emerged. Melville glanced at the last entry first. The wind rippled the pages as he flipped back through the journal and started to read.

  ON OCTOBER 9, the day Nindemann and Noros had left on their separate sojourn to the south, De Long and his men had enjoyed a turn of good luck. That day, Alexey shot three ptarmigans, from which they made a warm soup. Somewhat fortified by this, the eleven men stumbled southward a few miles, following in Nindemann’s and Noros’s footsteps. By the river’s edge, they found a rotten canoe and used it for a shelter that night.

  The next day, October 10, Alexey spotted more ptarmigan tracks in the snow, but he could not flush out any game. The men camped in a crevice in a snowbank with nothing to eat but a spoonful each of glycerin, a colorless, flavorless paste from Dr. Ambler’s medicine chest. Unsatisfied by this, some of the men began to chew on scraps of their deerskin clothing. “All hands weak and feeble,” De Long wrote. “God help us.”

  For the next two days they could not move; they were too fatigued to walk against the fierce wind. Growing hungrier, they harvested tufts of lichen and Arctic willow from the ground and boiled it into a tea. “Everybody getting weaker and weaker,” De Long said. “Hardly strength to get firewood.”

  On October 13, De Long noted that it was the 123rd day since the Jeannette had sunk. He had begun to despair. They had nothing to eat but more willow tea. De Long kept looking toward the south, in the hope that Nindemann would reappear with help from the natives, but no one came. “We cannot move against the wind, and staying here means starvation,” he wrote. “No news from Nindemann. We are in the hands of God, and unless He intervenes we are lost.”

  They managed to drag themselves another mile or two, then realized they were missing Walter Lee. They found him a few hundred yards back, lying in the snow, pleading to be left alone. He said he just wanted to die. He was listless and seemed confused. Everyone gathered around him and recited the Lord’s Prayer. They were able to get him on his feet and moving again, then made their camp across a stream in the protection of a snowbank. Soon a gale began to blow, assuring another “horrible night.”

  The following day brought a little luck once again: Alexey shot a ptarmigan, and that night they had some soup to complement their willow tea. In the morning, October 15, they boiled two old boots for breakfast and gnawed on the leather as best they could. Alexey was not faring well. He was “broken down,” wrote De Long, and refused to hunt. Everyone kept looking for signs of Nindemann, and at twilight De Long thought he could see campfire smoke on the southern horizon.

  The next morning, Ambler announced that Alexey was dying. The doctor could do nothing for him. His pulse was weak, his pupils dilated. Ambler baptized the Inuit, and De Long read prayers over him.

  By sunset, Alexey was gone. Ambler listed the cause of death as “exhaustion from hunger & exposure.” De Long draped a Navy ensign flag over him, and the next day they laid him out on the river and covered him with slabs of ice. Thoughts turned to Alexey’s wife and little boy, who’d come aboard the Jeannette in St. Michael, Alaska.

  De Long understood that Alexey wasn’t alone—life was ebbing from everyone now. Shivering constantly, they were sloppy and their hands uncoordinated as their circulatory systems shunted blood from their extremities to their vital organs. In the throes of starvation, their bodies had begun to metabolize their own muscles and connective tissues. They were consuming themselves from within.

  By October 19, the ten men could not move. They had exhausted their stamina cutting up a tent to improvise footgear—an exercise made necessary by their steady consumption of their own boots and sealskin mukluks.

  Now Lee and Kaack began to slip. They were, De Long said, “done up.” De Long read the prayers for the sick, which traditionally included this passage from the Book of Psalms: “Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord … Let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications … My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning.”

  Kaack died around midnight on October 21, and Lee the next day about noon. The men tried to bury their two comrades out on the ice where they had left Alexey, but they could not summon the energy. Collins and Ambler helped the captain drag Kaack and Lee around the corner of their tent so at least the corpses would be out of sight.

  Their number had dwindled to eight. By then, everyone surely had the same faraway look that had shone in Kaack’s and Lee’s eyes. Even if they had spotted game, they had grown too weak to hold a steady aim. Their bellies had drawn up horribly. Those who were dying crawled ever closer to the fire, and some even lay in the smoldering ashes. Their thinking had become foggy, their judgment erratic, their sense of the world shrunken. By now, the heartbeats of some of the weakest probably had lapsed into arrhythmias. Some of the men were likely hallucinating.

  De Long wrote:

  October 23rd, Sunday.—One hundred thirty third day [since the Jeannette’s sinking]. Everybody pretty weak. Slept or rested all day, and then managed to get enough wood in before dark. Read part of divine service. Suffering in our feet. No foot gear.

  After that, the journal dropped off into a stark recitation of days passed and deaths noted, as though De Long were a castaway on a desert island, mindful of conserving his strength while marking only the barest of facts.

  October 24th, Monday.—One hundred and thirty fourth day. A hard night.

  October 25th, Tuesday.—One hundred and thirty fifth day.

  October 26th, Wednesday.—One hundred and thirty sixth day.

  October 27th, Thursday.—One hundred and thirty seventh day. Iverson broken down.

  October 28th, Friday.—One hundred and thirty eighth day. Iverson died during early morning.

  October 29th, Saturday.—One hundred and thirty ninth day. Dressler died during night.

  October 30th, Sunday.—One hundred and fortieth day. Boyd and Görtz died during night. Mr. Collins dying.

  There De Long’s journal ended. Melville closed it and looked out over the frozen Lena.

  WHEN NINDEMANN ARRIVED, Melville shook his head. “They’re here,” he said. Three frozen corpses lay at Melville’s feet: They were the bodies of Ah Sam, Dr. Ambler, and Captain De Long. On the basis of what Melville had read, he now believed that along the river, not far from the location of Alexey’s rifle, they would find eight more.

  Melville set two of the Yakuts to digging in the snow down along the river. For hours, they exerted themselves “to their utmost,” Melville said. Eventually they excavated the wood and ashes of an old fire pit. They found a tin drinking pot, some scraps of clothing, a woolen mitten, and two tin cases of books and papers. Suddenly the two Yakut men scurried from the pit, “as though the arch-fiend himself was at their heels,” Melville said.

  They gasped, “Pomree! Pomree! Dwee pomree!” (Dead! Dead! Two dead!).

  Melville crawled into the hole and glimpsed the partly exposed head of one corpse, then the feet of another. Reluctantly, the Yakuts resumed their work and soon excavated the back and shoulders of a third body.

  For two days, the grim work continued. Some of the bodies stuck fast to the ice and had to be pried loose with pieces of timber. Eventually, Melville and his laborers found Kaack, Lee, Iverson, Dressler, Boyd, and Görtz. For a long time they searched for Alexey, to no avail.

  They began to lay
the bodies out on the snow. Nindemann carefully went through their pockets and put everything he found in separate bags, marked with the men’s names. Melville was struck by how “natural” the corpses looked. “The faces of the dead were remarkably well-preserved,” he wrote. “They had the appearance of marble, with the blush frozen in their cheeks. Their faces were full, for the process of freezing had slightly puffed them; yet this was not true of their limbs, which were pitifully emaciated, or of their stomachs, which had shrunk into great cavities.”

  Melville also noted that their shoes had all been eaten. “There was not a whole moccasin left among them, or a piece of hide or skin,” he wrote. “The clothing of the dead was badly burnt, [because] they lay so close to the fire; and those who perished first were stripped of their rags. Boyd lay almost in the fire, his clothes scorched through.”

  Eventually the excavators found Collins. The Irishman’s face had been covered with a piece of red flannel cloth. He had a rosary in one of his pockets and a bronze cross around his neck. Also on his person were various papers and a notebook. Nindemann studied Collins for quite a while. Something about him seemed different from the others. For most of the expedition, Collins had been a miserable man, and perhaps he had carried his grievances against De Long to his grave. “He was lying on his back,” Nindemann said, “with his fists clenched, and his expression was very bitter. There wasn’t a man in the party [who] had such an expression on his face as he had. His teeth were clenched, and his expression was hard, as if he had died very hard.”

  Kaack and Lee had had their clothes picked from their bodies, but otherwise none of the remains had been tampered with. There was no sign of cannibalism—although Melville must have considered that possibility with respect to Alexey, since the Inuit’s corpse was never found. Had De Long’s men eaten him, the camp surely would have borne the telltale evidence, but Melville’s laborers scoured every inch of the area and found nothing to support this hypothesis. Melville and Nindemann reached a far simpler conclusion: Alexey’s grave site had collapsed through the ice and his body had been swept away by undercurrents of the Lena.

  SAVE FOR ALEXEY, Melville had now accounted for all eleven of the men who were supposed to be in De Long’s party. The engineer considered De Long, Ambler, and Ah Sam separately, for their location was nearly a thousand yards from the site where all the other bodies had been found.

  Now Melville began to discern the logic of the scene. Since the shipmates had been coming from the north, Alexey had died first, and they had buried him out on the ice not far from the place where they had erected his rifle. Melville reasoned that the marker was meant to be a cairn for any future searchers who might pass this way but it might also have been intended as a memorial to their fallen hunter. After Alexey died, they had camped a hundred yards upriver and built a fire. This is where seven men had died—Kaack, Lee, Iverson, Dressler, Boyd, Görtz, and finally Collins.

  At this point, only Ah Sam, Dr. Ambler, and Captain De Long were left. Now Melville thought he understood their logic. De Long had decided to move to higher ground, in part to build a signal fire, in a last-ditch effort to attract the attention of natives. But by then the captain knew that in all likelihood, they would soon follow their comrades in death. He feared that all the bodies, as well as all the Jeannette’s records, would wash away in the spring floods, forever expunging all memory of the expedition. So the three men had exhausted their last bit of energy attempting to make a camp on the bluff. They hauled wood up there, and a cake of river ice for drinking water. They brought up the cylinder of nautical charts, Ambler’s medicine chest, the teakettle, and a hatchet. Next, they would have gone for the records and books, and perhaps for the bodies, too, but they were too feeble to drag so much stuff uphill through the deep snow.

  Wrote Melville: “They must have lost all strength and were not equal to the task, so they sank down from the effort, leaving the records to their fate. They built a fire and brewed some willow tea; the kettle when I found it was one quarter full of ice and willow shoots. The tent-cloth they set up to the southward of them to protect their fire, but the winter winds had blown it down.”

  Ah Sam was probably the first of the trio to die. When Melville excavated him from the snow, the Chinese cook lay faceup with a serene expression and with his arms folded across his chest, as though they had been carefully placed in that position.

  De Long was likely the next one to go. He had not written anything more in his journal after October 30—“Mr. Collins dying”—although Melville did notice that a page had been ripped from the book, and he considered the possibility that De Long had begun a private note to Emma. If so, it was never found.

  De Long lay on his right side with his right hand under his cheek, his head pointing north. His feet were drawn up slightly; his left arm was upraised, sharply bent at the elbow, and his hand was bare. By the positioning of things, it seemed to Melville that De Long, in his final act, had raised his left arm and flung his journal behind him in the snow, away from the embers of the fire. His arm had frozen in that odd position—it was the rigid object Melville had almost tripped over when he’d first begun searching the bluff.

  Brushing away the snow, Melville found that De Long was wearing a begrimed ulster overcoat on top of his Navy uniform jacket. He had a chronometer around his neck. Nearby was the blue silk flag Emma De Long had sewn for the Jeannette expedition, the flag that was to be flown over the North Pole. In the captain’s pockets, Melville found a silver watch, five twenty-dollar gold pieces, two pairs of spectacles, and a silk pouch, which appeared to be a keepsake. Inside it, he found a lock of hair and a golden crucifix inlaid with six pearls.

  Only Dr. Ambler was left. Melville could not determine for certain that Ambler had died last, but the doctor held De Long’s Colt Navy revolver in his right hand. Probably he had removed it from De Long when the captain died.

  When he examined Dr. Ambler closely, Melville could see blood on his mouth and beard and in the snow around his head. His first thought was that Ambler had ended his agonies by committing suicide. But Melville could find no wounds, and when he inspected the revolver, there were three loaded cartridges in its chambers: The gun had not been fired.

  The engineer looked more closely and soon discovered the source of the blood: Ambler held his left hand close to his lips, and Melville noted a deep bite mark in the flesh between his forefinger and his thumb. The doctor, near the very end, had gnawed at his own hand—perhaps seeking warmth or fluid, or perhaps with no conscious thought at all.

  Melville tried to picture Ambler’s final moments—one hand holding the revolver, the other hand providing him this strange comfort. “In that desolate scene of death,” wrote Melville, Ambler waited, “doubtless in the hope that some bird or beast might come to prey upon the bodies and afford him food. There he kept his lone watch to the last, on duty, on guard, under arms.”

  Emma De Long, just before she left the Jeannette in San Francisco, had pleaded with Dr. Ambler: “Will you be a close companion to my husband? You know how lonely a commanding officer must necessarily be.” The surgeon had said he would, and he made good on his vow to the end. De Long and Ambler had died side by side.

  Tucked under the waistband of Ambler’s trousers, Melville found a journal the doctor had been keeping since the day the Jeannette sank. It was mostly a technical log, detailing medicines dispensed, ailments treated, and procedures performed. But near the back, Melville came upon a letter Ambler had penned to his brother in Virginia. He had written it on October 20, the day before Kaack and Lee had died, and two days before Nindemann and Noros were saved by the Yakut natives at Bulcour, 120 miles south of here. Dr. Ambler, already seeing how it would end for him, wanted to wish his family good-bye.

  On the Lena

  Thursday, Oct. 20, 1881

  To Edward Ambler, Esq.,

  Markham P.O. Fauquier Co., Va.

  My Dear Brother:

  I write these lines in the faint hop
e that by God’s merciful providence they may reach you at home. I have myself very little hope of surviving. We are growing weaker, and for more than a week have had no food. We can barely manage to get wood enough now to keep warm, and in a day or two that will be passed.

  I write to you all, my mother, sister, brother Cary and his wife and family, to assure you of the deep love I now and have always borne you. If it had been God’s will for me to have seen you all again, I had hoped to have enjoyed the peace of home living once more. My mother knows how my heart has been bound to hers since my earliest years. God bless her on earth and prolong her life in peace and comfort. May His blessing rest upon you all.

  As for myself, I am resigned, and bow my head in submission to the Divine will. To all my friends and relatives, a long farewell.

  Your loving brother,

  J. M. Ambler

  MAY 5, 1882

  IRKUTSK

  1:20 P.M.

  The following dispatch has just reached here by special express from Yakutsk:

  I have found Lieutenant De Long and his party; all dead.

  All the books and papers have also been found.

  I remain to continue the search for the party under Lieutenant Chipp.

  Melville

  42 · A WILD DIRGE THROUGH TIME

  The ten bodies were carefully wrapped in tent canvas and loaded onto sleds. A funeral procession was organized, and Melville led the way south for twelve miles, a dozen dog teams steering across the tundra toward a small mountain, known locally as Kuyel Khaya, that rose four hundred feet above the floodplain. This rocky bluff was as “cold and austere as the Sphinx,” said Melville, and it “frowns upon the spot where the party had perished.” The Yakuts generally stayed away from this mountain—it was said to be inhabited by witches—but it was the most dominant feature in the northern delta, a place so high it would never wash away.