802 THE VOYAGE OF THE JEANNETTE. 



ing was equally hard. The men slipped at every step, 

 so that every mile they made was doubled in exertion. 



Their track moreover was made in great uncertainty. 

 No chart had been laid down of this desolate region, 

 and indeed it would seem impossible to make any which 

 would not be falsified by the changes which every fresh 

 season brought. The fullest chart laid down only eight 

 mouths to the Delta, but two hundred and ten have 

 been counted by those who traversed the coast in the 

 searches which followed the fateful voyage of the Jean- 

 nette. All the low land of the Delta is yearly covered 

 with ice and water when the rivers break up, and the 

 whole country is ploughed by the swollen streams of 

 the Lena as they make their way to the ocean. Thus 

 the courses of the streams are never the same in two 

 years, and the countless branches bewilder the traveler. 

 It was this that caused Captain De Long and his party 

 to move more and more to the eastward, and become 

 entangled in the wilderness. 



When Captain De Long ordered the two seamen, 

 Nindemann and Noros, on the morning of Sunday, Oc- 

 tober 9, to make a forced march to the southward to 

 Ku Mark Surka for relief, he gave to Nindemann a copy 

 of the chart by which he was working, and pointed out 

 the spot, the island of Tit Ary, where he supposed him- 

 self and his party then to be. He encouraged the men 

 by showing that there was only one river to be crossed, 

 and that the village was but twelve miles distant. He 

 hoped they could reach it in three or four days. In 

 reality, Tit Ary itself was near the point where the 

 two seamen fell in with natives a fortnight later, after 

 traveling nearly a hundred and twenty miles, and Ku 

 Mark Surka lay thirty-three miles beyond that. The 

 insufficiency of the chart wbich Captain De Long had, 



