George Melville stared at the treacherous, broken ice pack, “thrown into chaotic masses in all directions and in all forms imaginable. Great anxiety was now felt for the safety of the ship, as the whole ice-field, pack and floe, seemed in rapid motion.”
The Jeannette had drifted past the island seen a few days earlier, but ice pilot William Dunbar spotted another one from the crow’s nest that might be reachable. It was smaller and less mountainous than the first, which De Long had dubbed Jeannette Island. This new one on the horizon would be named Henrietta Island, for James Gordon Bennett Jr.’s mother.
Melville made this sketch of Jeannette Island as the ship drifted past it.
Petermann’s map didn’t show any islands within a hundred miles of the area. But that shouldn’t have been a surprise. De Long had found that Petermann was wrong about many things: Wrangel Land didn’t extend very far north and certainly didn’t come close to Greenland; the Kuro Siwo current ran out of steam well before reaching the polar region; and there were virtually no sources of drinkable water on the ice.
De Long asked Melville if he would lead an expedition to the smaller island. Most of the crewmen were doubtful that such a trek would succeed, but “there was no scarcity of volunteers.”
Melville never shied away from a challenge. On June 1, he and Dunbar, carpenter William Nindemann, and crewmen Hans Ericksen, James Bartlett, and Walter Sharvell set out with fifteen dogs. The dogs pulled a sled and the men dragged a dinghy. The island appeared to be about fifteen to twenty miles away.
They immediately ran into trouble. After traveling just five hundred yards, they reached an opening in the ice and had to ferry across the water in the dinghy. But the dogs balked at the water, and several ran back to the ship.
“The thermometers registered many degrees below freezing point; the boat was covered with ice, our clothes were wet, and our hands frost-bitten,” Melville wrote. But there was no turning back. Men who’d stayed behind on the Jeannette caught the dogs and returned them to Melville. The dogs were dragged through the water and pulled across. “It was cruel, I know, but there was no alternative,” Melville wrote. Once the dogs had crossed and were hitched to the sled, “the poor shivering brutes were soon warming themselves in the hard work ahead of them.”
The men were working hard, too. They each wore “ruy ruddies,” canvas harnesses that fastened to their waists so they could help pull the sled. They toiled for twelve hours—“making roads, filling up chasms with ‘hummocky bits,’ and jumping the team across them”—before pitching the tent and collapsing into sleep.
Melville estimated that they’d covered four miles “and made no appreciable gain on the island.”
After a breakfast of pigs’ feet and mutton broth, they struggled off again. “The condition of the ice, grinding, crashing, and telescoping, sometimes pitching and rolling in such a manner as to render foothold impossible, made our enterprise a particularly perilous one,” Melville wrote.
After three exhausting days, “the island at length loomed up before us in all its cloud-crowned majesty.” Black, serrated rocks rose straight up from the coast. Red streaks of iron added to the starkness of the cliffs, which rose four hundred feet. Snow and ice capped the higher peaks beyond.
But between Melville and the island raged an overwhelming cauldron: “great bodies of ice were incessantly fleeing, it seemed, from the mad pursuit of those behind; now hurling themselves on top, and now borne down and buried by others. And it was through this chaos of ice that we must force our way to the island.”
Impossible as it seemed, Melville decided to leave the dinghy and most of the supplies to make “a dash for the land across the broken ice, jumping from bit to bit.” He stashed the equipment and food on a high hummock (a ridge of ice), lashing a small black flag to an oar and standing it in the ice as a marker.
By then, Dunbar was suffering from severe snow blindness. He begged to be left behind to wait, but Melville said no. The men splashed through the ice and slush, dragging Dunbar on the sled.
“We waded and struggled through the posh and water, the sled wholly immersed, with Mr. Dunbar still clinging to the crossbars and Ericksen performing herculean feats of strength,” Melville wrote. “More than once, when the sled stuck fast, did he place his brawny shoulders under the boot and lift it bodily out. Indeed, we all toiled so hard that when the ridge at the edge of the ice-foot was reached, we were barely able to crawl over it and drag Dunbar from the sea like some great seal.”
As a commissioned officer, Melville was the first to set foot on the island. He planted a flag and claimed the island as a territory of the United States.
Powerful Hans Ericksen was suddenly incapacitated, too. He experienced snow blindness and a bout of painful stomach cramps. Nindemann had severe cramps as well.
The cramping mystified Melville. What he couldn’t have known was that the crew back on the Jeannette was suffering from it, too.
JUNE 1ST, WEDNESDAY
What next? The doctor informs me this morning that he is of opinion that several of our party under his treatment are suffering from lead poisoning. Newcomb is quite under the weather with severe colic [stomach pains], and Kuehne is about the same.
JUNE 2D, THURSDAY
Our lead invalids are responding to treatment, the steward [Charles Tong Sing] more slowly than the rest, as his attack was the most severe.
JUNE 3D, FRIDAY
Nothing yet to be seen of Melville and his party. Taking all things into consideration, I do not expect him before to-morrow night or Sunday morning; but though neither of these times are here yet, I cannot help the constant uneasiness which I experience.