Summer came on the heels of winter, but it brought no prospect of release to the wretched crew of the _Jeannette_. They had already drifted past the northern coast of Wrangel Land, and had found it to be nothing but an island of moderate dimensions, and there were no signs of that mythical continent upon which De Long had been pinning his hopes. The new year found them still held in the relentless grip of the pack. Here is the comment upon his situation which De Long penned in his diary:— “People beset in the pack before always drifted somewhere to some land; but we are drifting about like a modern _Flying Dutchman_, never getting anywhere, but always restless and on the move. Coals are burning up, food is being consumed, the pumps are still going, and thirty-three people are wearing out their lives and souls like men doomed to imprisonment for life. If this next summer comes and goes like the last without any result, what reasonable mind can be patient in contemplation of the future?” On May 16 a slight diversion was caused by the discovery of two islands, which they named Jeannette Island and Henriette Island. De Long started off on a sledging expedition to them, and, like many other Arctic explorers, had great trouble with his dogs, which, in accordance with the traditions of their race, refused to face the open water, and had to be dragged, sledges and all, through every lead that intersected their path. “There is no greater violence done the eternal cause of truth,” says the commander, “than in those pictures where the Eskimos are represented as calmly sitting in shoe-shaped sledges with the lashes of their long whips trailing gracefully behind, while the dogs dash in full cry and perfect unison across smooth expanses of snow. If depicted ‘true to nature,’ the scene changes its aspect considerably; it is quite as full of action, but not of progress. A pandemonium of horrors—dogs yelling, barking, snapping, and fighting; the leaders in the rear and the wheelers in the middle, all tied in a knot, and as hopelessly tangled up as a basketful of eels.” On Sunday June 12 the pressure became so tremendous that the ship cracked in every part. She at once began to fill, and the men set to work to remove on to the ice everything necessary for a sledge journey to a place of safety. Towards four o’clock on the following morning the man on watch suddenly burst into the tent. “Turn out if you want to see the last of the _Jeannette_,” he cried. “There she goes! There she goes!” “Most of us,” writes Melville, “had barely time to arise and look out, when, amid the rattling and banging of her timbers and iron work, the ship righted and stood almost upright; the floes that had come in and crushed her slowly backed off; and as she sank with slightly accelerated velocity, the yardarms were stripped and broken upward parallel to the masts; and so, like a great gaunt skeleton, its hands clasped above its head, she plunged out of sight.”