In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette
By Hampton Sides; Doubleday; 2014; 454 pages; $28.95 hardcover (paperback release in May).
Within the tremendous literature of polar exploration, it's surprising that the story of the USS Jeannette has been so little told or appreciated. It finally has found a masterful chronicler in historian and journalist Hampton Sides, who has delivered an extraordinarily well-researched and compelling narrative full of amazing characters and feats of endurance.
"In the Kingdom of Ice" is a riveting account that will keep any reader turning pages deep into the night — while imagining, from the comfort of her bed, nearly unimaginable hardship and human capacity for hope.
Back at the beginning of the Gilded Age in the 1870s, America was ready for nearly any challenge — and what was more challenging than conquering one of the last unmapped parts of the world, the North Pole? Such was the enthusiasm for solving "the polar problem" that newspapers claimed success would be "the event of the century," before which "the discovery of America by Columbus would pale."
The prevailing Arctic theory at the time held that ice barriers in northern waters were simply a "girdle" that, if broken through, would lead to an Open Polar Sea. In open water surrounding the North Pole, explorers might discover verdant new lands, people of a new race and all sorts of wealth. An additional theory held that a warm current flowing north through the Bering Strait would make that the weakest spot in the ice barrier. These features were optimistically placed on maps of the day by theoretical cartographers.
Along Siberian coast
Thus began, in the summer of 1879, Jeannette's journey. An official U.S. Navy expedition, it was led by a young officer named George Washington De Long (memorialized today by the De Long Mountains in Northwest Alaska) and financed by the eccentric newspaper millionaire, James Bennett.
En route to the Arctic from San Francisco, the Jeannette stopped at Unalaska to load up with coal, dried fish and other supplies, then touched Alaska again at St. Michael, on the south side of Norton Sound, where the ship took on more supplies, 40 sled dogs and two local young men to handle the dogs. The ship was through the strait and into the Chukchi Sea by the end of August.
Not surprisingly, the crew's water temperature recordings failed to find the mythical warm current that would lead to the Open Polar Sea. The broken-ice route along the Siberian coast brought the Jeannette within sight of Wrangel Land — thought to be a continent reaching to Greenland and found to be merely an island. By early September, the ship was locked in ice.
Imagine being one of 33 men trapped in ice on a 146-foot ship — not only for one dark and freezing winter, but right through the next summer and the winter after that. During this time, the ship drifted with the ice, north and west. It's a tribute to De Long's positive attitude and leadership that the crew not only survived, but did so with purpose and considerable harmony. As the ice closed around the ship, De Long wrote in his journal, "This is a glorious country to learn patience in." Later he reasoned, "If life within the Arctic Circle were perfect comfort, everybody would be coming here."
And then, in June of 1881, the ship floated again, briefly, before being crushed by the moving ice. When it sank, the men and dogs, with the supplies they'd off-loaded onto the ice, were a thousand miles from the Siberian mainland.
Cruelly inaccurate maps
The next harrowing weeks were spent crossing the "mess" of rotten and shifting ice and then open water (in three small boats the men and dogs sledged across the ice) to the Lena River Delta. Northern Siberia, "a land of limitless sorrow," delivered its own horrors. Once again, the theoretical maps in the men's possession were cruelly inaccurate, marked with nonexistent villages. Eventually native Yakuts and Evenki provided essential help, but it was winter again before some of the men reached a substantial community from which a rescue for others could be attempted.
Meanwhile, letters and dispatches took forever to move around the globe, informing authorities and the public about the expedition's fate and the three searches that set off in 1881 to find the Jeannette. One of those searches was by the revenue cutter Thomas Corwin, on which naturalist John Muir was a passenger. The Corwin's own story, involving a visit to St. Lawrence Island after a famine killed a majority of the population and, later, its landing on Wrangel Island, make for a disturbing and fascinating side trip.
Correspondence and journals, as well as the ship's records (carried by De Long and his men all the way to safety), are crucial to Sides' narrative, bringing the life of participants to the fore. Particularly affecting are the interspersed letters to De Long from his wife, Emma; although these never reached their intended recipient, they were sent in multiple copies to places Emma thought the ship might eventually reach, including Greenland. (Wreckage from the Jeannette was, in fact, discovered in 1884 near the southern tip of Greenland, confirming the movement of Arctic sea ice.)
This "grand and terrible" story, besides being such a terrific read, has much to teach us about human ambition and hubris. Among other things, we might be impressed by how little we (humans) knew of the Arctic as recently as 1879, and how we mythologized it to fit our fantasies and desires. We might consider that, while the Jeannette and other explorations of its day led us into a new scientific age, it took another hundred years (to 1978) before satellite photos allowed us to see the coverage and seasonal change in Arctic sea ice. We might wonder to what degree we, like our forebears, bring to our actions the stories we most want to believe.
In 2015, how many of us look at the loss of sea ice from climate change and anticipate not danger but an Open Polar Sea of easy sailing and new riches?
Nancy Lord is a Homer-based writer and former Alaska writer laureate. Her books include "Fishcamp," "Beluga Days" and "Early Warming."