CHAPTER XLI
Atop a rocky promontory looking to the north, towering four hundred feet above the great bay of the Lena Delta and far beyond the reach of any possible flood, I prepared for my captain and his crew their final resting place. Excavating from the solid rock a foundation, I built in the form of a huge cairn, a monumental rectangular stone structure visible easily twenty miles in all directions, making its sides of the thick planking torn from that wrecked flatboat near the last fatal camp, and covering the stout planking with rough stone quarried on the mountain top. Above that rocky cairn, I raised a massive cross twenty-five feet high, hewn from a driftwood spar salvaged from the bay below, and upon the spreading arms of that cross, I cut the names of those who were to rest beneath it.
When all was ready, on April 6, 1882, on that gale-swept mountain top overlooking the Lena, we buried them. Composed wholly of sledges, the long funeral procession of straining dog teams wound across the snow-covered tundra and up the ice-coated slopes of that mountain, the dark sledges bearing the silent seamen standing starkly out against the whiteness of the driven snow, with the one bit of color there the _Jeannette’s_ silken ensign draping the cold figure of her captain. On foot the three survivors present, Bartlett, Nindemann, and I, trudged sadly along. Arrived at the cairn, we three lifted the thin bodies from the sledges, tenderly laid them out on a bed of snow inside the tomb, Captain De Long at one end, then the others in order of rank: Surgeon Ambler, Mr. Collins, Lee, Kaack, Görtz, Boyd, Iversen, Dressier, and last at the other end, Ah Sam. Then reverently removing the ensign from the captain’s body that I might return it to her hands who fashioned it, we took our long last look at our dead comrades.
In that deep Arctic solitude with no unhallowed lips droning out unfelt phrases, we who had lived with them in toil and peril and nearly died with them in anguish, stood with bowed shoulders and bared heads in the freezing wind before our dead, and with choking voices murmured our heartfelt farewell,
“Good-by! Sleep well, shipmates!”
And then sorrowfully sealing up the cairn, we left them to their rest. Never had heroic explorers a more fitting tomb. Amidst the Siberian snows, looking out over the Lena’s great bay at the desolate cape below which had witnessed their last agony, and northward across that Polar Sea which he had valiantly given his life to conquer, De Long and his men of the Jeannette lay at last beneath the huge cross on that rocky cairn, with the fierce Arctic gales they had so often bravely faced mournfully wailing their eternal dirge.
[Illustration: Cross on mountain]
EPILOGUE
EPILOGUE
I am an old man now, looking forward soon to joining those shipmates of long ago. Many honors have come my way, and for sixteen years as an admiral in the Navy, I have had charge of designing and building the throbbing engines which drive our every warship. That mighty fleet which so proudly showed the American flag in every ocean on the globe and has just returned to confound the doubters at home and abroad who foresaw those ships with broken-down machinery cluttering every port from Rio to Yokohama, was my design. The engines and the boilers which so sturdily drove the _Oregon_ twelve thousand miles around South America under forced draft in time to take her place in the forefront of the battle-line at Santiago and deal the death blows to Spanish sea power, were my creation.
From that day in 1861 when as a young engineer officer I joined the Navy, until the day forty-two years later when I retired full of honors as its Engineer-in-Chief, machinery had been my life and I had hoped that my name might as a result find its place with that of Ericsson as one who had done much to advance the application of power to our warships. But as the years since my retirement weigh me down, and I see my proud _Oregon_ already vanished from the fleet, and that fleet itself ere long destined to disappear before the creations of newer and better engineers than I, more and more do I realize that it is the men themselves and how they lived and died, rather than their puny handiwork, which those who come after us will ever have reason to cherish as the true measure of any man.
And so that huge cross I reared in the Lena Delta amidst the polar snows looms larger and larger in my mind and now I only humbly hope, as approaching the end of my long days I look back over my life, that the name of George Wallace Melville may be a little remembered as one of those who served on that far-off cruise in the _Jeannette_, when my science and machinery faded from all importance, engineering went wholly by the board, when first with only our stout ship to shield us and then without her, face to face with Nature in her fiercest mood for endless months we battled the Arctic ice beneath the banner of George Washington De Long, and in his life and death I learned what truly makes the man.