Surprisingly, Alexey was the second man to die, on October 17. He’d continued to hunt every day as his strength faded. “Exhaustion from hunger & exposure” was Dr. Ambler’s final verdict.
Heinrich Kaack and Walter Lee both passed away on the twenty-first. De Long read “prayers for [the] sick” as the surviving men huddled in a hole in the snowbank.
De Long recorded the passing of the days, making occasional notes like “Suffering in our feet” and “A hard night.” When they moved a few hundred yards up the riverbank, the men dragged along the two metal cases that held most of the Jeannette’s records. Nelse Iversen, Adolph Dressler, George Boyd, and Carl Görtz died there before the end of October.
Only the captain, the doctor, Jerome Collins, and Ah Sam remained. They had no food, very little clothing, and part of a tent to cover them in the bitter cold. Barely able to stand but still restless, De Long had Ambler and Ah Sam help him move the Jeannette’s records thirty feet up the bank to protect them from flooding.
Then they huddled together to wait.
Nindemann and Noros trudged for days through deep snow and ice in an effort to reach a settlement.
Nindemann and Noros had made slow progress, crossing shallow, ice-filled streams. They killed one ptarmigan, a bird about the size of a pigeon. They also ate a pair of sealskin pants.
The nights were desperately cold and stormy, and the two could only dig holes in the snow for shelter. “Noros now and then would fall off asleep,” Nindemann said later. “I let him sleep for about five minutes, then called him, telling him to knock his feet together to keep them from freezing.”
The men saw few signs of life, but finally they reached a hut with a mound of rotten fish. The fish was the texture of sawdust and a moldy blue, but they hadn’t eaten anything for days. They filled their stomachs. The fish made them sick with severe diarrhea.
By then, they worried “that we were the only two men alive out of the whole expedition,” Noros said. They knew they couldn’t last much longer.
A crow flying overhead gave Nindemann a glimmer of hope. “This was always a sign up in the Arctic that when you see a crow … you generally find natives.” A few days later, they did.
Their sickness had kept them confined to the hut with the moldy fish. They were surprised when the door opened, and their Native visitor was just as shocked to find the hut occupied. Communication proved difficult, but eventually the man and some others helped Nindemann and Noros get to the village of Bulun. The villagers also provided food, boots, and deerskin clothing.
Bulun was nothing more than “a lot of huts and some large boats,” according to Nindemann. They met the village “commandant,” and asked him for a pen and paper. Nindemann dictated a note to Noros, with the intention that it would be telegraphed to the American minister in St. Petersburg.
“At Bulun we tried to get a telegram sent, but could not make them understand,” Noros said. There was no telegraph station in the village anyway.
The commandant said he would take care of sending the telegram. Nindemann and Noros found a “dirty and miserable” hut to recuperate in. They were still weak from diarrhea.
Several days passed. “On the evening of November the 3d, I was laying in bed; Noros was sitting on the table looking toward the door,” Nindemann recalled. “I heard the door open, and looking round I saw a man coming in the door that was dressed up in fur clothes.”
Nindemann paid little attention until he heard the visitor speak. “Hello, Noros,” the man said, “you are alive.”
Nindemann jumped up. He might as well be seeing a ghost.
Their visitor was George W. Melville.