“Monday, October 24—­134th Day:  A hard night.

“Tuesday, October 25—­135th Day.

“Wednesday, October 26—­136th day.

“Thursday, October 27—­137th Day:  Iverson broken down.

“Friday, October 28—­138th Day:  Iverson died during early morning.

“Saturday, October 29th—­139th Day:  Dressier died during the night.

“Sunday, October 30—­140th Day:  Boyd and Cortz died during the night.  Mr. Collins dying.”

This is the last entry.  The hand that penned it, as the manuscript shows, was as firm and steady as though the writer were sitting in his library at home.  Words are spelled out in full, punctuation carefully observed.  How long after these words were set down DeLong too died, none may ever know; but when Melville, whom Nindemann and Noros had found after sore privations, reached the spot of the death camp, he came upon a sorrowful scene.  “I came upon the bodies of three men partly buried in the snow,” he writes, “one hand reaching out, with the left arm of the man reaching way above the surface of the snow—­his whole left arm.  I immediately recognized them as Captain DeLong, Dr. Ambler, and Ah Sam, the cook....  I found the journal about three or four feet in the rear of DeLong—­that is, it looked as though he had been lying down, and with his left hand tossed the book over his shoulder to the rear, or to the eastward of him.”

How these few words bring the whole scene up before us!  Last, perhaps, of all to die, lying by the smoldering fire, the ashes of which were in the middle of the group of bodies when found, DeLong puts down the final words which tell of the obliteration of his party, tosses the book wearily over his shoulder, and turns on his side to die.  And then the snow, falling gently, pitifully covers the rigid forms and holds them in its pure embrace until loyal friends seek them out, and tell to the world that again brave lives have been sacrificed to the ogre of the Arctic.

While DeLong and his gallant comrades of the United States Navy were dying slowly in the bleak desert of the Lena delta, another party of brave Americans were pushing their way into the Arctic circle on the Atlantic side of the North American continent.  The story of that starvation camp in desolate Siberia was to be swiftly repeated on the shores of Smith Sound, and told this time with more pathetic detail, for of Greely’s expedition, numbering twenty-five, seven were rescued after three years of Arctic suffering and starving, helpless, and within one day of death.  They had seen their comrades die, destroyed by starvation and cold, and passing away in delirium, babbling of green fields and plenteous tables.  From the doorway of the almost collapsed tent, in which the seven survivors were found, they could see the row of shallow graves in which their less fortunate comrades lay interred—­all save two, whom they had been too weak to bury.  No story of the Arctic which has come to us from the lips of survivors, has half the pathos, or a tithe of the pitiful interest, possessed by this story of Greely.