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Rh signaled for Melville to go ahead. Looking back he saw Lieutenant Chipp's boat founder and go down, but caught no sight of De Long's craft. Melville kept his boat head to the wind until the next afternoon, but could get no sight of his commander; and they got under way and after many privations reached their haven, the Russian village of Geeomovialocke. In one hundred and ten days with two hundred and ninety pounds of freight per man they had retreated over two thousand two hundred miles of ice and open sea. The survivors were feeble, ragged and starving. For fifteen days Melville was unable to stand on his frozen limbs. The village could furnish them as food only a limited quantity of geese and fish, and these badly decayed. It took five weeks to get supplies from Bulun, the nearest official Russian settlement; and with the provisions came a dispatch from two of De Long's seamen. Their boat had landed September 17, and these two men had been sent out for food and relief. Melville set out alone for Bulun and there met the two seamen and calculating the time and distance they determined that the De Long party could not be rescued alive. Nevertheless he considered it his duty to find the men dead or alive, and so he set out with two natives, two dog-teams and five days' food and the party traveled over one thousand miles in twenty-three days in the deadly cold of the Arctic winter with but two hours of daylight in the twenty-four. In the face of mutiny he pressed on although scarcely able to move a limb, and never losing control over the men almost as helpless physically as himself, he at last reached the Arctic ocean and there found the instruments and records left by De Long and following the tracks made by the brave commander in his retreat inland he was misled by the chart and lost his trail, and sick, worn to a shadow and dying of slow starvation, he returned to Bulun. In the spring he led a well-equipped party back to the cache where he had found the records and instruments and again getting on the trail on March 23, 1882, he found his dead shipmates. He discovered a perpendicular rock facing the frozen polar sea in the foot hills miles from where the bodies were found; and on its summit Melville built a tomb of heavy timber capped with a massive cross, then turning tenderly the dead faces "toward the East and the rising sun," as he writes, "in sight of the spot where they fell, the scene of their suffering and heroic endeavor where the everlasting snows will be their winding sheet and the fierce polar blasts will wail their wild dirge through all time—