Dr. Ambler suspected that the ship’s water had been tainted with lead, since the distiller’s joints were sealed with the metal. But a test showed that it wasn’t the water. A few grains of shot turned up in some of the birds they were eating, and that might have been another source of lead. But the true cause remained a mystery until someone bit into a pellet of solder while eating his favorite dish. “Who shot the tomatoes?” he joked.
It was the other way around. The tomatoes had been targeting the men for months. The cans were sealed with lead solder, and the acid of the contents (which was particularly high in tomatoes) had leached the lead from the sealant. The men had been eating canned tomatoes four times a week for nearly two years, so De Long suspected that the leaching had built up over time, making the tomatoes more toxic now than before.
Dr. James Ambler
After enduring so many incredible hardships, the men were in danger of dying from canned tomatoes! “What use is it to secure exemption from scurvy for two years if disabling lead poison finishes you in the third year?” De Long asked.
Back on Henrietta Island, Melville made sketches of the headlands, mountain range, and hummocks. The men shot a few seabirds—black-and-white guillemots—“which nestled among the rocks in great numbers. These were the only birds seen; indeed, we saw no other living thing.”
Melville climbed a hill and built a rock cairn. In the pile, he placed a copper cylinder containing a note from De Long describing the Jeannette’s journey so far. He also left a zinc case holding several old copies of Bennett’s New York Herald.
The men started back for the ship, but the ice had grown even more treacherous. Dunbar’s eyes had not improved, so the men and dogs again pulled him on the sled. Crossing a floe, the ice began to wobble. The men jumped aside, but the dogs slipped into the water “and dragged the sled, with Mr. Dunbar sprawled out on top, bodily through the slush and water to the firm ice, while we roared with laughter,” Melville wrote.
Melville worried that they might not find the Jeannette. Because of fog and the high hummocks, they couldn’t see the ship or their stash of provisions, and didn’t see any of their previous tracks in the snow. They were out of food.
Finally, the weather cleared slightly and Ericksen saw the oar and the flag. “From this time on, … the weather was miserable,” Melville said. Navigating by compass, “we marched forward in the face of a cruel snow and wind storm, constantly impeded by open lanes and leads of water.”
They pitched the tent to rest for the evening, freezing and worried. Dunbar winced with pain from his eye condition. Ericksen’s skin was severely chafed from the cold wind and his wet clothing. Nindemann’s stomach cramps worsened. “Poor Nindemann, drawn and doubled up, was enduring the agonies of the lost,” Melville noted.
Melville took out the small medicine box. A dose of capsicum might relieve Nindemann’s pain, and some “sweet-oil” could relieve Ericksen’s skin problem. But Melville’s fingers were too cold and sore to open the bottles, so he handed them to Ericksen to remove the corks.
“He drew them with a reckless abandon,” Melville recalled, “spilling the tincture of capsicum (cayenne pepper raised to the nth power) over his cracked and blistered hands. Then, losing his head completely, he applied the sweet-oil by means of his fiery fingers to the afflicted portions of his body.”
The pepper stung terribly. Ericksen “rolled and squirmed about in the snow like an eel.” Then he tore off his clothes to ease the burning even more.
“Nindemann laughed his cramps away,” Melville wrote, “and Dunbar found time between his groans to shout out,—‘Ericksen, are you hot enough to make the snow hiss?’”
One more day of struggle brought the men to the ship. On board, De Long heard a shot as the men announced their approach. In his excitement, De Long rushed up to the bridge to see them, and “crash! I got a terrible blow on the head” as a wing of the windmill smashed into him. “Stunned and confused I crawled back, while the blood sprinkled on the ladder and quarter deck.” Dr. Ambler stitched up the four-inch gash, “and then I resumed my scrutiny of the returning party.”
De Long was relieved to have the men back. His eyes sparkled as he greeted Melville: “Well done, old fellow.”
De Long could not have been prouder that the risky expedition had paid off. “Thank God, we have at least landed upon a newly discovered part of this earth,” he recorded, “and a perilous journey has been accomplished without disaster.”
We were all persuaded that the chances of the ship holding together, in the present state of the ice, were not one in a thousand. Yet she might, but what then? This was the supreme question which constantly presented itself to the minds of all: whether it would not be wiser to abandon the ship at once, and make for the nearest land (New Siberian Islands), instead of tarrying for the fall travel. De Long naturally wished to stay by the ship until the end, or so long as the provisions lasted, proposing that we remain until they had dwindled down to an allowance of ninety days for our retreat.
JUNE 6TH, MONDAY
Lanes and openings were forming and closing during all the forenoon, and every once in a while the sudden rearing up of some ridge of broken floe pieces, twenty and thirty feet high, showed where a lane had closed, or the sudden tumbling of a mound showed where a lane was opening…. Had our floe broken up and hurled us adrift we should have had the liveliest time in our cruise, for to have escaped destruction would have been a miracle, and to have got anything or any person out of the ship in case of accident an impossibility.
JUNE 8TH, WEDNESDAY
We are leaving Henrietta Island rapidly to the eastward of us, and before many days it may be lost to view. Inasmuch as we have passed it already, one might call it a thing of the past. (I am afraid that is a poor joke, but since the windmill struck me I can do no better.)
JUNE 11TH, SATURDAY, [1881]
At four P. M. the ice came down in great force all along the port side, jamming the ship hard against the ice on the starboard side of her, and causing her to heel 16° to starboard. From the snapping and cracking of the bunker sides and starting in of the starboard ceiling, as well as the opening of the seams in the ceiling to the width of one and one fourth inches, it was feared that the ship was about to be seriously endangered.