Melville winced as he looked around the filthy hut where Nindemann and Noros rested. “Both were so sick as to be barely able to walk, vomiting and purging violently,” he recalled.
Melville pried whatever information he could from his emaciated shipmates. They told him that a well-equipped dogsled team could reach De Long and the others in three days. But they tearfully added that more than three weeks had passed since they’d left their starving companions. It would have taken a miracle for them to survive that long. On the other hand, they’d all survived against incredible odds already. So there was hope.
Melville made immediate plans to search, even though his legs were swollen and blistered from frostbite. There was no way Nindemann and Noros could join him. Both were near death. Melville found them a larger hut and made arrangements for better food and care, insisting that the U.S. government would eventually pay the villagers for the food and shelter.
Melville organized a team of Tungus guides and dogsled drivers. He wrote notes to the U.S. minister in St. Petersburg, the London office of the New York Herald, and the secretary of the Navy in Washington, D.C. In his notes, Melville promised to conduct a “vigorous and constant search” and demanded funding for the trip. He sent the notes off with a messenger to have them telegraphed.
The nearest telegraph station to Bulun was three thousand miles to the southwest in the small Siberian city of Irkutsk. That’s as far as New York City is from Los Angeles. The trip by dogsled would take at least six weeks.
Melville wouldn’t wait a day. He prepared to head into the Lena Delta in search of De Long with the help of the Tungus men.
By then, the rest of the whaleboat crew had also arrived in Bulun. Melville ordered James Bartlett to stay there in case Melville himself needed to be rescued later. He sent the rest of the crewmen to the larger village of Yakutsk.
Melville was welcomed by Siberian Natives and spent several nights in villages like this one while searching for De Long.
On November 9, Melville reached a hut where Nindemann and Noros had slept after leaving De Long. But the dogsled drivers refused to go farther. “Soak, soak,” one said. No, no.
“Why not?” Melville asked.
“Cushat soak” was the reply. Nothing to eat.
How could that be? Melville had purchased ten days’ worth of frozen fish. They’d only been traveling for four!
The dogsled drivers insisted on returning to their village. Melville fired his rifle over their heads. No one is going back, he shouted.
“They explained that there had been a famine and I had taken all the fish in the village,” Melville wrote. Eighty village dogs had already died of starvation and the people were in danger, too. So the villagers had taken most of the fish back after loading it on the sleds.
Melville threatened to eat the dogs if he faced starvation. “And after they are eaten, I will eat you!”
He ordered the Tungus guides to continue through the snow. Because Melville had the only gun, they obeyed the weak, surly man, who was confined to a sled. “I was now so badly lamed as to be utterly unable to stand up without assistance,” Melville wrote.
They ate “deer bones with tendons and a little ragged meat attached” that they found in huts, and also some deer hooves, which grew soft when roasted. The dogs ate rotten geese skins and feet.
Melville forced the guides to take him to the nearest village to get more food. The village was far out of the way, but the detour paid off. Villagers showed Melville three notes they’d collected in huts along the river. All were written by De Long, noting the group’s progress and state of health. Melville pieced together a trail from De Long’s information. One note told where De Long had stashed some of the logbooks, navigation equipment, and other items. Melville ordered the sled drivers to take him there through a driving blizzard. He found the cache.
Melville vowed to search for his shipmates “until I found them dead or alive.” The drivers rebelled again—the weather was too harsh to continue.
Melville knew the snow had obliterated the landmarks Nindemann and Noros had sketched for him. There was just too much snow and wind. “The natives were wise in admonishing me that I should die too if I persisted in searching at that season of the year,” Melville wrote. So he returned to Bulun, arriving on December 30, 1881. He estimated that he’d covered more than one thousand miles in his search.
Melville was surprised to find not just Bartlett but Nindemann, Noros, and three other crewmen still in Bulun. They hadn’t found transportation so had stayed behind while Danenhower and the others traveled to Yakutsk. Melville made travel arrangements, and before long, he and the others were all in Yakutsk, where they spent part of the winter in relative comfort.
While recuperating there, Melville received responses to his earlier telegrams. Bennett pledged money for the search. He’d also sent a Herald reporter to Siberia, although he didn’t tell that to Melville.
When Melville received this telegram from the secretary of the Navy, he made immediate preparations for his second attempt to find De Long:
OMIT NO EFFORT, SPARE NO EXPENSE, IN SECURING SAFETY OF MEN…. LET THE SICK AND THE FROZEN OF THOSE ALREADY RESCUED HAVE EVERY ATTENTION, AND AS SOON AS PRACTICABLE HAVE THEM TRANSFERRED TO A MILDER CLIMATE. DEPARTMENT WILL SUPPLY NECESSARY FUNDS.
HUNT, SECRETARY.
Nindemann was back on his feet, so Melville brought him and Bartlett along when he returned to Bulun in mid-February. In the meantime, Bennett’s reporter caught up with Danenhower in Yakutsk and spent several days interviewing him “off the record.” In other words, Danenhower did not expect his words to be published in newspapers around the world.
Danenhower complained that he’d been mistreated by De Long and Ambler, claiming that he’d been perfectly able to work all the time. His eye trouble, he lied, was caused by a cold virus, and the glare from the ice had aggravated it. Danenhower also questioned many of De Long’s other decisions, and he objected to being under Melville’s command in the whaleboat.
The Herald published long excerpts from the interviews. The paper also printed a false article that said the entire crew of the Jeannette had been found alive. And Bennett sent a telegram to Emma De Long with the blatant lie that “Commander De Long has reached the mouth of the Lena safely and is now well and looking after the sick members of the expedition.”
Thirteen survivors of the Jeannette gathered in the Siberian village of Yakutsk for the winter. Shown here, back row, from left: Raymond Newcomb, Herbert Leach; center row: John Lauterbach, George Melville, Aneguin; bottom row: William Nindemann, Frank Mansen. (The others in Yakutsk were Louis Noros, Henry Wilson, Charles Tong Sing, John Danenhower, James Bartlett, and Jack Cole.)
Emma was suspicious. “If George was safe why had he not telegraphed me himself?” she wondered. She wrote her husband a letter, not to “nowhere” this time but via the U.S. minister in Moscow. She offered to travel to Siberia if George was sick and needed her help. “It seems so unnatural for you not to speak for yourself,” Emma wrote to her husband. She soon realized that Bennett “entirely misled me.”
Bennett apologized that his telegram had “raised false hopes,” but he insisted that De Long would be found safe. While rival newspapers speculated that all of De Long’s group was dead, the Herald continued to paint a rosier picture about the Jeannette and its commander:
After cleaving her poleward way through more than a thousand miles of the frozen ocean she has succumbed to its resistless forces, perhaps at the very time when leaving her winter quarters, her commander was about to make a still further advance toward the extreme north. However deplorable the disaster which arrested the movements he returns home with tidings of a large area of the polar ocean never before seen by man.
Other papers reported the truth: that, on De Long’s command, Nindemann and Noros had left the others freezing and starving, with Ericksen already dead.
“All this forms a dreadful picture for me to dwell upon,” Emma wrote, “and I do not know whether I will ever see my own dearest husband again or not.”