Democratic Sentinel, Volume 6, Number 13, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 April 1882 — IN DEADLY DANGER. [ARTICLE]

IN DEADLY DANGER.

The Sfory of the how of the Jeannette— Frightful Perils Endured on the Ice. The San Francisco papers publish a letter from Dr. H. C. Ledyard, an American now in Siberia, to a friend in that city. At Irkoutsk Ledyard met Lieut Dannenhower, who gave him interesting details of the loss of the Jeannette, from which the following extracts are made: “Since the first fall, when they were caught by the ice in trying to reach Herald island, they have never taken a course but they were held as if in the jaws of death, squeezed till every timber quivered, turned this way and that, thrown floating and then caught again, and every hour in suspense, never knowing when the ice would close upon them. A little more and the deck sank beneath them. Throughout this strain they were well and trying to be cheerful, working very hard, for the engine and men were barely able to keep the water out. They had to pump for a year and a half. June 11, 1881, the crisis came. The ship showed greater straining than before, the deck quivered and inexplicable movements warned them, and they prepared their boats and made their camp beside the vessel. She rose and turned in her cradle till the yards touched the ice ; then the rieging gave way and the masts lay prostrate. All o’clock in the morning the floe parted and all went down. A cry of alarm called all to escape from tbe crevice in the ice. It opened just through the Captain’s tent. Then began the retreat. Twenty-nine days they struggled southward. Three hundred miles of broken ice were thus passed over. Four miles a day was thought good fortune. After one series of fourteen days they were twenty-seven miles further than at first. While working over the ice dragging, three boats they discovered Bennett island, to explore which they spent three weeks of their precious summer days, and expended much of the limited supply of food. To this detour those who survived attribute much of their suffering, and the deatn of the commander with nineteen men. After three months of this perilous and exhaustive work they came to blue water, and then with fair winds took a course for the mouth of the Lena river. Melville’s boat was stove against a block of ice. The Captain’s boat lost her mast and sail. The Captain landed with all well, but abandoned the boat as the wafer was shallow and would not make the channel of the river.”