by Donovan Hohn
35 In 1884, anyone who read the newspaper, even a Danish newspaper, would have heard of the USS Jeannette. In 1878, James Gordon Bennett, owner of the New York Herald, had approached the U.S. Navy with an extraordinary offer. If the navy would organize a sea voyage to the North Pole, Bennett would finance it. All previous attempts to reach the pole by sea had approached it from the east, by way of the North Atlantic, and for this reason, Bennett believed, those attempts had failed. This expedition, unlike the others, would approach the pole from the west, by way of the Bering Strait. In theory, Bennett’s plan was a good one. The icy currents of the Arctic, we now know, do tend to flow in an easterly direction, and ships entering from the North Atlantic have to sail or steam against them.The voyage wouldn’t cost the federal government a dime, Bennett promised. Not surprisingly, both Congress and the navy were happy to accept the gift, and on July 8, 1879, while crowds in San Francisco waved their hats and handkerchiefs from shore, the Jeannette, a three-masted steam yacht that Bennett had purchased from the Royal Navy, sailed through the Golden Gate (not yet spanned by the famous red bridge) under the command of George De Long. In the last surviving portrait taken of him, De Long, thirty-five, is wearing an ascot and a pair of pince-nez spectacles, from the right corner of which drips a silver chain. With his walrus mustache and puffy cheeks, he looks a bit like a cross between Teddy Roosevelt and Marcel Proust.
After three uneventful weeks at sea, the Jeannette stopped in Unalaska to stock up on fur and coal. Ten days later, at the island of St. Michael’s in St. Lawrence Bay, it stopped again to take on forty sled dogs, three dogsleds, and two dogsledding Inuit, bringing the ship’s hominid company to thirty-three. Along with the officers and enlisted men and the dogsledding Inuit, the company included two civilian scientists, the naturalist Raymond Newcomb and the meteorologist Jerome Collins, the latter having agreed to serve as the New York Herald’s correspondent. From St. Lawrence Bay Collins sent, aboard the Jeannette’s southbound supply ship, the Herald, a prescient dispatch. “All before us now is uncertainty,” he wrote, “because our movements will be governed by circumstances over which we can have no control.”
On August 28, the Jeannette passed through the Bering Strait and turned west, coasting along Siberia, where, with the help of Chukchi natives, three members of the ship’s company located a camp abandoned the year before by a Swedish expedition. The Swedes had left behind a stash of tinned food and what Lieutenant John Danenhower, the Jeannette’s navigator, would later delicately call “some interesting pictures of professional Stockholm beauties.” From the natives, the foresighted Americans purchased both the Swedish food and the Swedish porn. Then the Jeannette turned north.
On September 6, southeast of Wrangell Island, having already ventured farther into the ice pack than the seasoned captains of whaling ships dared to, Captain De Long selected a lead—that is, a long, navigable, canal-like crack in the ice—and piloted the Jeannette into it. The lead tapered. Then terminated. “The ground which we are going to traverse is an entirely new one,” De Long had said in a speech to the California Academy of Sciences a few days before the Jeannette’s departure. “After reaching the seventy-first parallel of latitude we go out into a great blank space, which we are going to endeavor to delineate and to determine whether it is water or land or ice.” Already, De Long had his answer: from the lofty vantage of the crow’s nest, he trained his telescope north. All there was to see, stretching to the far horizon, was ice. What to do? Turn back? Sail home in defeat?
Perhaps De Long considered his reputation. Perhaps he considered the money James Bennett had invested in the expedition. Perhaps, like so many other Arctic explorers, he was enthralled by the object of his quest. Or perhaps, looking aft, he made a purely tactical calculation. In the wake of the Jeannette, the lead had closed. There was ice ahead, ice behind.
De Long had prepared for this eventuality. The Jeannette had three years’ worth of rations in its stores, and back in California shipwrights had fortified the hull, bracing it with oak beams. Persuaded that his ship could survive the winter frozen in, De Long gave the command to charge on, under full steam and full sail. In the memoir he would survive to write, Lieutenant Danenhower describes the moment of impact: “We met with the young ice, and forced our way through it by ramming. This shook the ship very badly, but did not do her any damage; indeed the ship stood the concussions handsomely.”
By late on that same afternoon, however, the floes had become impassable. The Jeannette was beset, and its thirty-three men and its forty dogs were now at the mercy of the currents—currents that had never been traveled, let alone charted; currents the very existence of which had previously remained in dispute.
“We banked fires, secured the vessel with ice-anchors, and remained,” Danenhower writes. “Our position was not an enviable one. At any moment the vessel was liable to be crushed like an egg-shell among this enormous mass of ice, the general thickness of which was from five to six feet, though some was over twenty where the floe pieces had overrun and cemented together and turned topsy-turvy. Pressures were constantly felt. We heard distant thundering of the heavy masses, which threw up high ridges of young ice that looked like immense pieces of crushed sugar.”
You might imagine that, faced with either imminent shipwreck or prolonged imprisonment in the icy labyrinth, De Long and his men would have despaired. Were I among them, I think I might well have helped myself to a few extra rations of rum, jumped overboard, and been done with it. But the Jeannette withstood the pressures of the ice, and its crew the pressures of light deprivation and claustrophobia and fear, passing that first winter in a paradoxical sort of perilous ease.
They went ice-skating on the floes. They hunted seal, walrus, and polar bear. They made meteorological and astronomical observations. The ship’s doctor conducted monthly medical examinations, checking for signs of scurvy. On New Year’s Day, the ship’s cook served a multicourse feast the menu of which included spiced salmon, roast seal (“Arctic turkey,” they called it), green peas, succotash, canned plum pudding, mince pie, muscat dates, sherry, stout, French chocolate, French coffee, and cigars. When the feast was done, enlisted men put on a “minstrel show.”
One would like to imagine this scene—the virile, unwashed explorers, after months in close quarters, frozen into the ice pack, tipsy on rum and stout, entertaining each other with “magic lantern” shows and minstrel songs called “The Spanish Cavalier” and “What Should Make You Sad” and with an orientalist drama described on the playbill as follows: “The great ‘Ah Sam’and ‘Tong Sing’ in their wonderful tragic performances.”
In January, when temperatures had dropped to minus 42 degrees Fahrenheit, the ship sprang a leak. The carpenter managed to repair it, and Engineer George Melville managed to pump the water out, but the incident, in hindsight, would prove to be portentous. By February, the Jeannette had drifted, circuitously, fifty miles, on a northwesterly bearing. Some days it made three nautical miles, others, nine. On the windiest days, it made twelve. Summer came, temperatures rose, and with them, so did hopes. De Long had assumed that the summer melt would set the Jeannette free. The anticipated emancipation never came. “The surface of the floe-pieces was now of a hard, greenish blue, and flinty, being covered in many places with thaw-water,” Danenhower would recall. “There were numerous cracks near the ship, but no leads that went in any definite direction, and there was no chance to move, for the ship was imbedded in the ice so firmly that a whole cargo of explosives would have been useless.”
If the Jeannette survived, De Long and Danenhower reasoned—correctly—the northwesterly currents would carry them over the pole and out into the North Atlantic. But the Jeannette, of course, did not survive. On June 12, 1881, after twenty-one months adrift, the hull was sundered by ice. Water poured in. The ship heeled over 23 degrees to starboard. De Long gave the order to abandon ship. The following night, while most of the company was asleep in tents pitched on a floe, the Jeannette, suddenl
y released from what Danenhower called “the monster’s grip,” sank into seas thirty-eight fathoms deep, the adjacent floes snapping the spars of its masts like twigs.
Pulling sledges over the ice, the shipwrecked explorers now beat a desperate, southward retreat, toward Siberia. At the edge of the ice pack, they abandoned their sledges and took to their three boats, sailing for the mouth of the Lena River. One of the boats was lost at sea. Another, piloted by Lieutenant Danenhower, now suffering from snow blindness, eventually delivered its crew to safety. The third, captained by De Long, made it to the Siberian shallows, where it kept running aground. Carrying whatever provisions they could, De Long and his men had no choice but to wade ashore through the hypothermically cold waves. Frostbitten, already starving, they now found themselves on a wild Arctic coast bereft of inhabitants, human or otherwise. There, on the tundra, five of the seven members of De Long’s party, including De Long, died in the usual way. The two survivors? Louis Noros and F. C. Nindermann. Somewhere during the course of their retreat, the former had lost a pair of oilskin pants, the latter a woolen cap.
36 Me, I’m more inclined to attribute Nansen’s success to Nansen than to miracles, or fortune, or providence. Read his account of the voyage, Farthest North: The Epic Adventure of a Visionary Explorer, and you’ll repeatedly come upon moments of great peril and great self-doubt, moments in which I would have lost my wits and probably my life, like this one, recorded in his logbook in October 1894, after a year adrift in the ice:Personally, I must say that things are going well with me; much better than I could have expected. Time is a good teacher; that devouring longing does not gnaw so hard as it did. Is it apathy beginning? . . . Oh! sometimes it comes on with all its old strength—as if it would tear me to pieces! But this is a splendid school of patience. Much good it does to sit wondering whether they are alive or dead at home; it only almost drives one mad.
Only almost, here, are the decisive, characterological words. Nansen continues:All the same, I never grow quite reconciled to this life. It is really neither life nor death but a state between the two. It means never being at rest about anything or in any place—a constant waiting for what is coming; a waiting in which, perhaps, the best years of one’s manhood will pass. It is like what a young boy sometimes feels when he goes on his first voyage. The life on board is hateful to him; he suffers cruelly from all the torments of sea-sickness; and being shut in within the narrow walls of the ship is worse than prison; but it is something that has to be gone through. Beyond it all lies the south, the land of his youthful dreams, tempting with its sunny smile. In time he arises, half dead. Does he find his south? How often it is but a barren desert he is cast ashore on!
37 The 1957 undertaking was, in fact, called the IGY, for International Geophysical Year, since the field of study was more global in its scope. Nevertheless, it is still counted as the third such event, and the most recent IPY, therefore, as the fourth.
38 That “polar bears are rather retiring and unaggressive, especially in comparison with grizzly bears”—to which, genetically, they’re closely related, so closely related that polar bears and grizzlies can breed. Big polars standing up are twelve feet tall. The hardiest among them can live thirty years. In addition to seals and sled dogs, they eat mussels, kelp, lemmings, and blueberries. They walk about 2.5 miles per hour, though females and cubs tend to be faster than males. The female’s estrus lasts for three weeks, in April and May. The polar bear’s longest hairs—guard hairs, they’re called—are six inches long. And hollow. And clear. One forepaw, the specially adapted hairs of which muffle its owner’s footsteps, weighs around forty pounds. To dry off, polar bears roll in the snow. They get rid of excess heat through their footpads, nose, and a pair of back muscles. The liver of a polar bear is not good for your breast milk. In fact, it contains a lethal concentration of vitamin A, as certain explorers discovered the hard way.
39 A hummock is a small convexity of ice, a bummock a small concavity. In bummocks, pools of melt tend to form. Together, hummocks and bummocks create an orderly if unintentional pattern that is, like many patterns both orderly and unintentional, beautiful to behold.
