Smike, Snoozer, Bismarck, Plug Ugly. Life on a frozen ship wasn’t easy for men or dogs, but the forty dogs always made the best of it. “They seem perfectly oblivious to all surroundings, utterly indifferent whether the sun shines or does not shine, so long as they are fed,” De Long wrote. “From the liberal diet of bear meat and seals’ entrails they have remained as fat as dumplings.”
The men, of course, had their favorites. The dog named Paddy received special treatment on St. Patrick’s Day. He wore a green ribbon and earned an unusually warm bed alongside an engine.
But the dogs weren’t pets. They worked hard, and their lives sometimes took a brutal turn.
Bingo died first. He’d been part of a team that dragged a sled over the ice while the men searched for a walrus they’d killed the day before. Somehow, Bingo slipped out of his harness and ran off, “much to the disgust of the other dogs,” De Long wrote, “who attempted to chase him. Alexey in his peculiar language remarked, ‘Bom bye, other dogs him plenty whip’ (for his desertion).”
Alexey was right. After Bingo returned to the ship, the other dogs attacked and killed him.
The rowdy dogs were often fighting.
The dogs scavenged the ice for cast-off cans and other scraps.
It was a sad moment, but there wasn’t much room for sentimentality. A dead animal could supply nourishment and clothing. “We skinned him to have his coat for future wearing apparel, and his carcass lies frozen on the deckhouse roof for possible food for his murderers,” De Long wrote.
Hard-Working Jack perished, too. Like most of the dogs, he spent time scavenging for bones and other castoffs on the ice. His “premature demise” was caused by eating mutton bones, two sharp pieces of a tin can, a bit of cloth, and a hunk of rope.
But the most damage occurred when a large pack of dogs went after a relatively small bear. The bruin “came up from astern … and when about five hundred yards distant was sighted by the dogs, about twenty of whom made for him and brought him to,” De Long wrote. The bear climbed a hummock and the dogs charged him, while William Nindemann and another crewman raced over with rifles.
The bear fought desperately, flinging the dogs left and right. Charles Chipp, watching the battle from the deck, reported that “when the dogs charged the fur would fly, and then a dog would be sent through the air, torn and repulsed.”
Nindemann finally got off a shot, which passed through the bear, glanced off a bone, and killed Plug Ugly.
“When injuries came to be examined, we found it a very costly bit of bear,” De Long wrote. Plug Ugly was dead; Prince, Wolf, and Snoozer were bleeding badly; and others had been gashed by the bear’s claws and teeth.
The bear, which turned out to be a female, weighed 374 pounds. “Ordinarily they do not fight much, generally jumping around and around to keep face to the dogs,” De Long wrote. But that bear was ready for war.
Poor Plug Ugly lost his life to a bear.
APRIL 30, FRIDAY
Chipp observed a flock of about twenty ducks (eiders) flying high and steering west. No doubt they were bound for some land in that direction, but though we strained our eyes and glasses as the sun got around there we could see none of it.
MAY 7, FRIDAY
Each day finds our coal pile diminishing, and no sign yet of weather which would make it safe to stop our fires on the berth-deck and in the cabin. A temperature of 32 would be as acceptable as possible, although it is the freezing point of fresh water. This day commences with a temperature of minus 3.7…. The weather is gloomy, depressing, and disagreeable.
JUNE 3D, THURSDAY
As to there being any warm current reaching to a high latitude, I very much doubt. We have found none…. I pronounce a thermometric gate-way to the Pole a delusion and a snare. Of course if any warm current came through Behring Strait it would be the Kuro Siwo, and our sea temperatures indicated no such fact.
JULY 10TH, SATURDAY
A day of almost steady rain and fog, and to my sensation, more disagreeable in temperature than the coldest weather of winter. The thermometer ranged between 30 and 34.5, but the dampness and moisture seemed to pierce to the bone and marrow.