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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Hell on ice
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
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eBook.

Title: Hell on ice

The saga of the "Jeannette"

Author: Edward Ellsberg

Release date: January 14, 2024 [eBook #72716]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1938

Credits: Bob Taylor, Steve Mattern and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book
was produced from images made available by the
HathiTrust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HELL ON ICE

***
 HELL ON ICE
THE SAGA OF THE “JEANNETTE”
 Books by

COMMANDER ELLSBERG
ON THE BOTTOM
PIGBOATS
S-54

THIRTY FATHOMS DEEP

OCEAN GOLD
SPANISH INGOTS
 HELL ON ICE
THE SAGA OF THE “JEANNETTE”

by
COMMANDER
EDWARD ELLSBERG

DODD, MEAD & COMPANY

NEW YORK 1938
 Copyright, 1938,
By EDWARD ELLSBERG
AND
LUCY BUCK ELLSBERG

All rights reserved—no part of this book may be

reproduced in any form without permission in
writing from the publisher.

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.
 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.
 HELL ON ICE
THE SAGA OF THE “JEANNETTE”
 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
stern was filled in solid with Oregon pine timbers, well bolted through
and through. Outside in this vicinity, her stern was sheathed with
wrought iron, and from the stern 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.