James and Mary Ford, eds. Every Day in the Year. 1902.
October 30De Long
By Andrew E. Watrous (d. 1902)
N
Hath buoyed so much of all most priceless freight
As this, since first a Spanish galleon
Turned South from San Francisco’s golden gate.
But—how they cheered from wharf and yard and deck!
The costliest cargo that those roads hath crost
Was when to face want, famine, fever, wreck,
To battle with the forces of the frost,
The craft, whose light name hence shall holy be,
Steered for the Northern death across that windless sea.
Ye watched that lonelier vessel as she passed;
Saw ye his face grow gladly satiate
Of peril as he neared the ice-fields vast?
For not the salvo’s roar, the cheering town,
Nor Summer voyage o’er soft Pacific’s swell
Delight such souls—nay, Nature’s sternest frown
Sign of her fierce moods and implacable.
So, where gray meeting seas the world divide
With moaning wastes of chill and bitter foam,
Methinks his step grew lighter as he eyed
The confines of his all too narrow home.
Northward—the night received them, and the ice
Chill shining bergs and chiller shining stars
Mocked them to whom one world would not suffice
With toils and dangers, pestilences, wars.
Northward—and East—the raving Arctic wind
Stabbed at their hearts, pierced bone and marrow through,
And vaster streamed the trackless tract behind,
Nor nearer at their goal nor larger grew,
And o’er their heads strange birds of omen flew.
Then—stayed and stopped—the hungry ice beneath
Gnawed ravening at the vessel’s groaning sides;
And shut were they in horror as a sheath,
’Twixt the thick darkness and the frozen tides.
And they became a memory to men
Who said: “Lo! these, too, meet the ancient fate!”
And weeks grew months and months grew years—and then
Behold the dead raised from their lodging strait!
And some are dead—the missing of the roll
Doth their sepulture, awful, riteless, sad,
Swell the dread trophies of the Northern pole?
Answer from out Siberia’s lifeless waste,
Answer from ’neath Siberia’s leaden skies,
Though none shall know the desperate ills they faced,
Till at the crack of Doom the dead arise;
Found—like a gunner lying by his gun—
They found the strong Republic’s strongest son:
Her eagle at his crest, her stars his shoulders on.
From proudest minster, darkest catacomb;
From where the Asian sunshafts scorch and scathe
Judean deserts—ritual of Rome,
All ages have thy prayers and pæans heard,
But ne’er in all the measure of thy time,
More faithful flock received thy weightful word
From lips of holier priest—or more sublime—
Than when beside the frost-sealed Lena he
Read in unchanging voice thy changeless liturgy.
What echoes hast thou waked—of Afric night,
When St. Arnaud the Legion—unto fear
Most Foreign—hurled into the flaming fight;
And those that roused on Alma’s blood-soaked height
At sunset of that red September day;
And those that taught the Rhine the Scottish might;
And those that beat the walls of Monterey!
But the breath failing in the feeble shout
That gave their envoys God-speed through the snow,
Despair showed vanquished, and the sinking doubt
Of famine born in slow and sickening throe;
Aye, showed each hero, where were heroes all
Ready with Death to grip in certainty to fall!
But as th’ Aurora’s signet on their sky,
So on the tablets of enduring fame,
Transcribed in fire the letters of each name
Of those who on our streets but now we saw,
Nor paled, oh, blindness, with presaging awe.