by Lynne Cox
No, Captain George Washington De Long. Hadn’t I heard of him? The man translated. He seemed very disappointed. But his mother put on a smile and said that I was welcome there, and welcome to join them anytime at their home.
With all that happened during the next days, and all the political challenges, and the swim across Lake Baikal, which was moved up a day and was completely successful, I forgot this conversation. It faded deep into memory, but one day when I was reading about Roald Amundsen, drawing inspiration from his life, and from the lives of other polar explorers, I kept seeing references to a ship called Jeannette. Finally I decided I needed to know more about the ship and saw that the ship’s captain was George Washington De Long. He was Amundsen’s inspiration and was one of the very first polar explorers. I had to find out about Captain George Washington De Long to understand Amundsen’s path and to gain inspiration and direction for my own.
CHAPTER 2
North
On the soft foggy gray horizon of San Francisco Bay, a brown dot bounced on navy blue waters. The dot grew in size and became the form of a ship—the USS Jeannette. She plied through the rough, salty, white-capped waters on an epic journey.
It was July 8, 1879, and Lieutenant Commander George Washington De Long and his crew were attempting a historic voyage to become the first expedition to reach the North Pole via the Bering Strait.
De Long stood at the helm dressed in full navy uniform with Emma, his wife, beside him on the bridge. His sky blue eyes behind round eyeglasses scanned the water; the colorful escort boats ablaze with signal flags and masthead flags accompanied him as he sailed past Alcatraz Island and toward the distant headlands of San Francisco Bay. The hum of the Jeannette’s engines vibrated through the De Longs as they steamed west together.
George and Emma had met in France, and he had fallen in love with her immediately. But she had another commitment, to a young man who was dying. George wrote to her and waited for her and, when her friend passed, convinced her that he loved her. Emma’s father set up conditions. He insisted that they stay apart and out of communication for two years, and if after that time they still felt the same, he would permit them to be together. They had endured and married and now had a young daughter, Sylvie.
More than anything, Emma wanted to sail with George. She had worked alongside him lobbying the U.S. Navy and James Gordon Bennett, a New York newspaper publisher—and owner of the Jeannette—and President Rutherford Hayes to provide the support to refit the Jeannette and fund this expedition.
Lieutenant Commander De Long, and the thirty-two-man crew of the USS Jeannette, a 420-ton bark-rigged wooden steamship, were attempting to become the first American ship to reach the North Pole through the rough waters of the Bering Strait. This journey was meant to be one of exploration, of scientific research, and of discovery, for in 1879 sailing north into Arctic waters toward the North Pole was like flying to another galaxy.
Thousands of people from all over the Bay Area came to see the Jeannette off. It was a day to celebrate the possibility of solving one of the world’s great puzzles, of reaching the North Pole, and of making great discoveries. The jubilant San Franciscans lined the waterfront. They stood on wide wooden piers, along the curve of Market Street, on top of Telegraph Hill. They lifted children on their shoulders so they could see above the heads in the crowd. They stretched their necks to catch sight of the Jeannette. As she sailed past, they cheered wildly, dogs barked excitedly, and roar upon roar rose from the crowd that followed the Jeannette along with a great wave of humanity on foot, bikes, and in horse-drawn carriages, as she headed west.
The Jeannette passed what would one day become major San Francisco landmarks: Alioto’s and Capurro’s restaurants and the Argonaut Hotel. She powered by what would become the South End Rowing Club and the Dolphin Club, and the Buena Vista Café and Ghirardelli Square. She sailed past what would become the beautiful St. Francis Yacht Club, and the exquisite Palace of Fine Arts Theater and the Exploratorium. She slipped toward what would become the majestic spans of the Golden Gate Bridge and the entrance to San Francisco Bay.
Cool moist gusts of wind funneled through brown bone-dry hills above San Francisco and pushed the bay into two-foot-high waves. Boats of all sizes—tugs, launches, fishing boats still smelling like fish from the morning catch, and yachts all decked out with brightly colored flags and banners from the San Francisco Yacht Club—steered toward the Jeannette. People on the boats sounded the ships’ horns and blasted the whistles. They clapped, waved, cheered, and shouted “Good luck” as the Jeannette sailed near the Presidio and Fort Mason, where the U.S. Army honored the captain and crew of the Jeannette by firing off a farewell salute.
Bound for the north, into unexplored waters and lands that were mostly uncharted, with almost complete uncertainty about what lay ahead, the Jeannette was loaded to the gunwales with provisions, coal, and supplies in case the worst happened and the ship was lost, and the crew had to take to shore and somehow survive.
The Jeannette sailed with her hull low in the water. She lumbered almost painfully toward the entrance to the Pacific. Her own construction made her heavy. She had been reinforced with thick oak timbers and strong iron transverse beams that were meant to protect her from the deadly pressure of the sea ice in the Arctic waters. The sea ice was something the Jeannette would most likely encounter on her way to the North Pole.
The movement of this sea ice was unpredictable, frightening, and could be deadly. It snared sealing ships and whaling fleets and like an anaconda squeezed the life out of ships and sent them down to the ocean depths.
Shortly before Lieutenant Commander De Long left the port of San Francisco, he was given a new set of orders. Baron Nils Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld—the Finnish-born Swedish scientist, geologist, and explorer—had been sailing his ship, the Vega, along the northern edges of the Siberian coast, in an attempt to become the first person to find the Northeast Passage.
Finding the Northeast Passage would open new ocean freeways to the world. If Nordenskiöld succeeded, he would discover a more direct sea route from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, a route that would increase world trade and open the world to further exploration and understanding. But it had been months since anyone had heard from Nordenskiöld.
It was feared that his ship was locked in the sea ice or that it had been sunk. De Long was ordered by the U.S. Navy to alter his course. Instead of heading directly north through the Bering Strait bound for the Arctic Ocean and North Pole, De Long would first search for Nordenskiöld and, if he found him, come to the aid of him and his crew.
This change wasn’t what De Long wanted; he knew that this delay could disrupt all of his plans, plans he had worked so hard on for many years, and with the shortness of the summer season in the Arctic, the delay would increase the Jeannette’s chances of being caught in the dangerous ice and diminish their chances of reaching the North Pole. But it was his duty to help Nordenskiöld. That was what happened in those days. When ships were late returning to port, especially in waters known to be dangerous, other ships and crews were sent out to search for and rescue them.
On board the Jeannette, Emma De Long stood near the helm and watched her husband. Emma had done everything she could to help him reach this point. She had rallied and convinced politicians, and James Gordon Bennett Jr., the publisher of the New York Herald, to support this venture, and she realized De Long could succeed in reaching the North Pole, as he had dreamed of, or they could die.
The Jeannette rocked and heaved between the north and south headlands. Emma and George De Long climbed down from the ship into a small boat.
The boat carried them to a yacht, one that would receive Emma and transport her back to the harbor. When George said good-bye to Emma, she threw her arms around his neck, and she kissed him good-bye.
Her act completely startled George. Until that moment George hadn’t fully realized what was happening. Emma would not be beside him as she had been for all of those days they had wo
rked on and planned this project together. He had been so immersed in the worries of the day, this realization had completely escaped him. George was stunned.
They parted. Emma climbed aboard the yacht, and George took the small boat back to the Jeannette. The vessels were beside each other, but facing in opposite directions.
They waved good-bye and they continued waving to each other until George and Emma blended into the two different dark gray horizons.
As the Jeannette entered the Pacific Ocean, the air grew saltier, and the wind whipped the waves into reeling and rolling crests that slammed into the sides of the ship and tossed her like a toy boat to and fro. The crew was becoming seasick. Their faces first turned white, and as the waves grew to three and four feet high, and the Jeannette rolled and spun, their faces turned a grayish green.
De Long was worried. The ship was sailing so low in the water that waves were breaking over the gunwales, and sheets of water were washing across the deck. He feared that the Jeannette would capsize and toss everyone into the Pacific Ocean.
De Long turned the Jeannette into the waves, so she would cut across the wave top at an angle, and this he hoped would prevent the Jeannette from being rolled over by incoming waves.
The weather did not improve, and De Long and his crew suffered as they sailed slowly all the way north along the California coast, north past Oregon, and north beyond Washington.
After twenty-three days of sailing through rough seas, the Jeannette stopped off of Unalaska, in the Aleutian Islands, and De Long was told that the Bering Strait was free of any large ice floes. Seven days later he hove to at St. Michael, a U.S. military post on the Norton Sound, about 125 miles southeast of Nome, Alaska. De Long checked with the local people to see if there was any news about Professor Nordenskiöld from sailors who had been traveling in the Bering Strait area. But there was none.
While in St. Michael, De Long decided to hire two Inuit dog-sledge drivers for the journey and brought them, their sledges, and their forty dogs on board.
De Long continued his search for Professor Nordenskiöld as he sailed west by northwest. Once De Long reached Siberia’s Cape Serdtse-Kamen, he learned from the local Siberian villagers that Nordenskiöld, who had first set out from Göteborg, Sweden, had sailed along the waters north of Siberia, and in September the Vega had reached 180 degrees longitude and became stuck in the ice. Through the long winter, Nordenskiöld traded with the local Chukchi Inuit.
In July, when the ice broke, Nordenskiöld became the first man to sail through the Northeast Passage.
Relieved by the good news that Nordenskiöld was doing well, De Long refocused on his goal to be the first to reach the North Pole, but it was early September, late in the season, and he had traveled far west to Siberia to search for Nordenskiöld instead of sailing directly north through the Bering Strait toward the North Pole.
De Long wondered if he would be able to reach the pole before the Jeannette got stuck in the winter ice pack. If that happened they would be locked in ice until the following spring or summer. There was a theory that there was a powerful warm-water current in the Pacific Ocean, called the Kuro Siwo—Black Stream. The Kuro Siwo, it was hypothesized, originated off the coast of Japan and flowed north, like the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic. Some scientists believed that the Kuro Siwo flowed through the Bering Strait and into the Arctic Ocean, warming the polar waters.
De Long sailed north; he believed that the warm current would melt the sea ice and enable him to reach the North Pole. He believed the Kuro Siwo would move through the Bering Strait and into the Arctic Ocean and warm the polar waters.
This warm current, De Long hoped, would keep the ice away, and he would be able to reach the pole before winter fell. Quickly De Long learned that this theory was horribly wrong.
USS Jeannette’s position in the ice pack, Siberia, January 24, 1880. Engraving after a sketch by expedition naturalist Raymond L. Newcomb. Copied from The Voyage of the Jeannette, published in 1884.
De Long, who had been moving along the Siberian coast, decided to turn the Jeannette and sail about two hundred miles north toward Wrangel Island. He knew whalers had observed the island, but no one had walked along its shores. It was uncharted. Some geographers believed that it was like a second Greenland, and other scientists thought that Wrangel Island was a part of Greenland, and that Greenland was attached to the North Pole.
De Long decided to get as far north as he could and sail for Wrangel Island. At first they made headway. They managed to maneuver through the light ice floes, but within hours everything changed. The Jeannette was fighting her way through the ice pack, zigzagging and forcing her way through it with as much speed as she could draw from the steam engine and sails. There was no Kuro Siwo, no help from any warm current. The onslaught of ice began.
De Long and his crew continued their maneuvers through the ice, weaving when they could into open channels, and then pushing their way through the ice. De Long felt an enormous responsibility for his crew, and he was worried. On September 6, 1879, the Jeannette was frozen into the Arctic ice pack. De Long maintained his optimism. He hoped that the ice pack would carry him and his crew of thirty-two men to the North Pole, but he also feared that the ice would crush the ship.
Crewmen from the Jeannette and their dogs return from a hunt with fresh polar bear meat. Woodcut engraved by George T. Andrew after a design by M. J. Burns.
Some days were calm, and magical, and the Jeannette was frozen in an exquisite world of crystalline beauty. Her masts, rigging, and decks were covered in frost that shimmered in the moonlight, and the sky swirled with phosphorescent light of green, blue, or rose and charged the air with energy and a crackling sound. But there were days and nights when the ice smashed into the Jeannette with so much force that the energy waves reverberated through the ship and jolted De Long and his crew. The sled dogs howled, and pinned their tails between their legs. When the ice pressure increased with the speed and force of the wind, the ice pack smashed together so hard that it sounded like bursts of artillery fire.
For twenty-one months, the Jeannette drifted slowly northeast toward the North Pole, and then on June 12, 1881, ice floes closed in on the ship with such force that its hull was crushed. Huge hummocks—hills and ridges of ice and snow—formed up to ten feet high. Nerves were frayed. No one could sleep. The ice pack slammed into the Jeannette’s hull over and over again like a giant car door. The wood used to fortify her was resilient at first—the ice bounced off the hull—but as the ice pressure grew, like nature’s vise, it wrenched the planks open.
The crew worked frantically, pumped the frigid water out of the hold, and filled the spaces between the planks with a mixture of moss and oatmeal. For a time this kept the Jeannette afloat, but on June 13, 1881, the ice pack dramatically shifted. The ice squeezed the Jeannette with so much force that it popped the pins and plugs that held the planks together, wrenched the wood apart, and split her hull. They removed everything they could—the sledges, whaleboat, two cutters, equipment, journals, diaries, and provisions—and on the morning of the thirteenth, the Jeannette sank.
For the next three months, the men trudged across the sea ice, with the hope of reaching the open waters off northern Siberia. They dragged the three heavy boats and their equipment on sledges, up over massive hummocks, across broken ice and constantly moving ice floes, and covered about one mile a day.
The sinking of the USS Jeannette after being crushed by Arctic ice, June 1881. Engraving by George T. Andrew after a design by M. J. Burns.
They endured great and relentless hardships: they fell through the ice into the frigid water, cut themselves on large ice shards, wrenched their backs and their bodies, and in the wet shredded clothes, with icy winds and blowing snow, their skin and muscles and the blood in their feet froze. The blood crystallized, and the cells ruptured. The nerves in their feet died, but when their feet warmed the pain was so intense that they wanted to shake them loose from their bodies. Their feet tur
ned black from the frostbite. The muscles died, and chunks of their feet, cut by ice, fell off. They hobbled forward. Their provisions dwindled. Unable to feed both themselves and the sled dogs, they shot the dogs, except for Snoozer, the ship’s mascot.
When the ice gave way to water, they divided into three crews and climbed into the small overladen boats. One group went with Lieutenant Commander De Long and Snoozer in the first cutter, the second group joined Lieutenant Charles Chipp in the other cutter, and the remaining men climbed into the whaleboat with Chief Engineer George Melville. The men jumped into the overladen boats, rowed when they had to, and sailed when they could toward the Lena River. This was the closest landfall. They hoped to find food and shelter there, but the Lena River delta was uncharted. It was a labyrinth of multiple river mouths and fingerlike projections of land that divided the water into confusing inlets and bays. There were constantly shifting sandbars and strong, unpredictable currents where ships were lost forever.
Winter comes early to the high latitudes. On the moonless evening of September 12, 1881, an Arctic front descended upon the ocean and De Long’s men. The winds grew to gale force and roared. As waves grew larger they broke in all different directions. There was no way to tell where the waves would hit them, and there was no way out of the storm.
De Long signaled to his men and tried to keep them and their boats close together, but the waves kept crashing into the boats, and the men were frantically bailing out the frigid water and rowing as fast as they could to gain a position and find some kind of a balance before the next wave hit.
When Lieutenant Commander De Long and Chief Engineer Melville looked back to check on Lieutenant Chipp, they realized that he and his crew were gone; the sea had taken them.
For more than two days, the storm raged on. De Long’s boat and Melville’s were separated, but both groups managed to find the Lena River delta and headed inland for help. Most of the men in De Long’s crew were injured to the point where they could not move. They were starving. They ate the soles of their shoes and shot and ate Snoozer.
