In the Kingdom of Ice

by Hampton Sides

  Lest anyone say that the Herald had deceived its readers, the editors had covered their bases. Anyone who’d read “A Shocking Sabbath Carnival of Death” to its end (buried discreetly in the back pages) would have found the following disclaimer: “Of course, the entire story given above is a pure fabrication. Not one word of it is true.” Still, the paper contended, the city fathers had devoted no thought to what might happen in an authentic emergency. “How is New York prepared to meet such a catastrophe?” the Herald asked. “From causes quite as insignificant the greatest calamities of history have sprung.”

  Bennett knew from experience that very few New Yorkers would bother to read the article all the way to its conclusion, and he was right. That morning, as the usual clouds of anthracite coal fumes began to rise over the stirring city, people turned to their morning papers—and were plunged in chaos and confusion. Alarmed citizens made for the city’s piers in hopes of escaping by small boat or ferry. Many thousands of people, heeding the mayor’s “proclamation,” stayed inside all day, awaiting word that the crisis had passed. Still others loaded their rifles and marched into the park to hunt for rogue animals.

  It should have been immediately apparent to even the most naïve reader that the piece was a spoof. But this was a more credulous era, a time before radio and telephones and rapid transit, when city dwellers got their information mainly from the papers and often found it hard to tease rumor from truth.

  Later editions took the story even further. Now the Herald reported that the governor of New York himself, a Civil War hero named John Adams Dix, had marched into the streets and shot the Bengal tiger as a personal trophy. A much-expanded list detailed other animals that had escaped from the zoo, including a tapir, an anaconda, a wallaby, a gazelle, two capuchin monkeys, a white-haired porcupine, and four Syrian sheep. A grizzly bear had entered the St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue, and there, in the center aisle, it “sprang upon the shoulders of an aged lady, and buried his fangs in her neck.”

  The editors of rival newspapers were thoroughly perplexed. It was not the first time the Herald had scooped them, but why had their reporters failed to glean even an inkling of this obviously momentous event? The city editor of the New York Times stormed over to police headquarters on Mulberry Street to scold the department for feeding the story to the Herald while ignoring his esteemed paper. Even some staffers of the Herald fell for the prank: One of Bennett’s most celebrated war correspondents, who apparently had not gotten the memo, showed up at the office that morning armed with two big revolvers, ready to prowl the streets.

  Predictably, Bennett’s rivals excoriated the Herald for its irresponsible conduct—and for spreading widespread panic that could have resulted in loss of life. A Times editorial observed, “No such carefully prepared story could appear without the consent of the proprietor or editor—supposing that this strange newspaper has an editor, which seems rather a violent stretch of the imagination.”

  Such expressions of righteous indignation fell on deaf ears. The Wild Animal Hoax, as it came to be affectionately known, only brought more readers to the Herald. It seemed to solidify the notion that Bennett had his finger on the pulse of his city—and that his daily journal had a sense of fun. “The incident helped rather than hurt the paper,” one historian of New York journalism later noted. “It had given the town something to talk about and jarred it as it had never been jarred before. The public seemed to like the joke.”

  Bennett was enormously pleased with the whole affair—it still ranks as one of the great newspaper hoaxes of all time. The story even managed to accomplish its ostensible goal: The zoo’s cages were, in fact, repaired.

  True, it was not nearly as sensational a success as Stanley’s finding Livingstone. Bennett would have to keep looking for an encore to that lucrative saga. His reporters were out in the field, in every corner of the globe, hunting down the next blockbuster story. He had correspondents in Australia, in Africa, in China. They were covering the debauchery of faded European royals, the high jinks of Wall Street, and the gunslinging of the Wild West. They were wandering throughout the Reconstruction South, too, reporting on all its colorful frauds.

  The direction that most interested Gordon Bennett, though, was north. He sensed that the greatest mysteries lay in that direction, under the midnight sun. The fur-cloaked men who ventured into the Arctic had become national idols—the aviators, the astronauts, the knights-errant of their day. People couldn’t get enough of them. They were a special breed of scientist-adventurer, Bennett felt, their quest informed by a kind of dark romance and a desperate chivalry. Bennett, who took reckless risks in his own sporting life, expected his reporters to do the same while pursuing their assignments. In this heroic age of exploration, the Commodore was adamant that his best correspondents should head for the ice zones to follow the gallant and obsessive characters who now were aiming for the ultimate grail.

  2 · NE PLUS ULTRA

  The North Pole. The top of the world. The acme, the apogee, the apex. It was a magnetic region but also a magnetic idea. It loomed as a public fixation and a planetary enigma—as alluring and unknown as the surface of Venus or Mars. The North Pole was both a physical place and a geographer’s abstraction, a pinpointable location where curved lines met on the map. It was a spot on the globe where, if you could stand there, any direction you headed in would be, by definition, south. It was a place of perpetual darkness for one half of the year and perpetual sunlight for the other. There, in a sense, chronology stood still, for at the pole all the time zones of the world converged.

  These things the experts understood, or at least believed they understood. But nearly everything else about the pole—whether it was ice or land or sea, whether it was warm or cold, whether it was humid or desert, whether it was desolate or inhabited, whether there were mountains or labyrinthine tunnels that fed into the earth, whether the laws of gravity or geomagnetism even obtained there—remained a terrific puzzle.

  This puzzle had driven Charles Hall nearly insane with wonder. Before venturing on the Polaris expedition, he had written, “There is a great, sad blot upon the present age & this is the blank on our maps & artificial globes from about the parallel 80° North up to the North Pole. I, for one, hang my head in shame when I think how many thousands of years ago it was that God gave to man this beautiful world—the whole of it—to subdue, & yet that part of it that must be most interesting and glorious remains as unknown to us as though it had never been created.”

  The “polar problem,” as it was sometimes called in the press, had taken on a quality of nagging, gnawing obsession. People had to know what was Up There—not only scientists and explorers but the general public. The North Pole was, said the London Athenaeum, the “unattainable object of our dreams.” An eminent German geographer named Ernst Behm compared humanity’s ignorance of what lay at the poles to the insatiable curiosity felt by a home owner who doesn’t know what his own attic looks like. “As a family will, of course, know all the rooms of its own house,” Behm wrote, “so man, from the very beginning, has been inspired with a desire to become acquainted with all the lands, oceans, and zones of the planet assigned to him for a dwelling-place.”

  A New York Times editorial at the time echoed Behm’s sentiment: “Man will not be content with a mystery unexplored, will not rest with a perpetual interrogation point at the end of the earth’s axis, whose query he cannot answer.”

  By the 1870s, no greater mystery existed on the face of the earth. (Antarctica was, of course, equally mysterious, but the South Pole was considered a less obtainable goal for the leading exploring nations, all of which happened to be located in the Northern Hemisphere.) It was hard to comprehend how profoundly the world needed to scratch the Arctic itch. Speculation about what lay at the North Pole permeated popular culture and world literature, from the books of Jules Verne to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (whose scientist-protagonist pursues his monster across the floes all the way to the North Pole). Many pract
ical considerations were floated as justifications for pursuing the polar grail—landmasses that might be claimed, minerals seized, shipping routes discovered, colonies founded, new species described. There was a riddle of geography to solve, and personal glory to be won. But the quest was ultimately about something even more elemental and atavistic: to reach the farthest place, the ne plus ultra, where no human had been before.

  “Within the charmed circle of the Arctic,” argued the Atlantic Monthly, “lay the goal of geographical ambition … the final solution of the polar problem. And it may be said that long years of fruitless effort and frightful suffering seem only to have whetted the appetite for discovery; and the more we know of our planet the more ardent becomes the desire of geographers to view the mysterious extremity.” An 1871 article in the journal Nature characterized the search for the pole as the paramount scientific and geographical riddle of the age: “The immense tract of hitherto unvisited land or sea which surrounds the northern end of the axis of our earth, is the largest, as it is the most important field of discovery that remains for this or a future generation to work out.”

  To be sure, nationalism also drove the obsession. Americans, slowly emerging from the devastation of the Civil War, yearned to prove themselves on the international stage. Polar exploration, some suggested, could help unify the divided country—it was an endeavor that everyone, North and South, could agree on. An ambitious expedition of discovery provided a way for the still-mending republic to flex her power in a quasi-military, but ultimately peaceful, way.

  It was a British naval officer, William Parry, who in 1827 led what is widely regarded as the first serious expedition specifically aiming to reach the North Pole. Ever since then, the British Admiralty had led most of the cutting-edge polar explorations. This was largely due to the nearly evangelical zeal of Second Secretary of the Admiralty John Barrow for all things Arctic, and to the fact that after the defeat of Napoleon, the Royal Navy had had few major wars to fight throughout much of the 1800s. The great ships of the world’s mightiest navy were rotting away largely unused, and many officers had been relegated to half wages with little to do, yet with ambitions still burning in their breasts. The British primarily focused their efforts on finding a navigable sea route across the top of Canada—and on searching for previous English expeditions that had disappeared while looking for this elusive Northwest Passage.

  But now, in the 1870s, attention was shifting away from finding the Northwest Passage and more toward the goal of reaching the North Pole itself, as an object of pure, abstract exploration. Not only England but France, Russia, Sweden, Germany, Italy, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire had mounted, or were now proposing, expeditions to reach the pole first. The United States considered herself a viable contender in this grand chase, and many Americans fervently wished to see the Stars and Stripes planted at the top of the world.

  America’s desire to push north could be considered, in some ways, an extension of Manifest Destiny, the country’s pioneering surge toward the west. With the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, the western frontier was closing—or at least its conquest was reaching a different phase, one that consisted less of adventurous exploration and more of the messy backfill work of occupation and settlement. But in 1867, the United States had purchased Alaska from the czar for the paltry sum of $7.2 million, and this enormous new frontier lay untapped and largely unknown. Thus the national movement west, having reached California, had taken a right turn and become a movement north.

  In 1873, the country was still digesting this acquisition, was still trying to learn about the immensity of what America owned in her Far North and why she owned it. The money spent on Russian America remained controversial—Alaska was still widely referred to as “Seward’s Icebox” and “Seward’s Folly” and “Seward’s Polar Bear Garden,” in derision of former secretary of state William Seward, who had championed and then negotiated the purchase. Yet the American people also wanted to know what might lie beyond the country’s new northern borders—and they were hungry for a hero to personify the country’s northern tilt.

  George De Long was beginning to think he might be that person. Ever since he’d experienced the Arctic firsthand, the worm of his imagination had started to turn on the polar problem. He sought to add his name to the pantheon—though some might call it a rogues’ gallery—of explorers of the Far North. His goal became nothing less than solving the supreme mystery: reaching the North Pole itself. “If I do not succeed,” he wrote, “it will be a grand thing to add my name to the list of those who have tried.”

  The quest first engaged his intellect, and then, little by little, his emotions. He would not relax his grip on the question for the rest of his life.

  EVEN BEFORE HE arrived in New York, De Long had become a celebrity for his exploits aboard the Little Juniata. Martin Maher, the correspondent for the New York Herald, had transmitted lengthy dispatches via telegraph from St. John’s, and the paper’s editors had run them prominently in serialized form. Maher cast the Little Juniata’s eight-hundred-mile round-trip journey along the Greenland coast as a heroic voyage of nearly historic proportions. De Long’s volunteering for a dangerous mission to save people he did not even know resonated with the public—as did his willingness to keep pushing northward even as the ice began to entomb his tiny steam launch.

  De Long and his Little Juniata were the toast of the nation. “Her famous trip to Cape York,” proclaimed Maher,

  was by far the most daring and brilliant feat of the whole expedition. Bold in conception and masterly in its execution, the plan was such as few would have attempted to carry out. But the case was urgent and the call for volunteers was answered with a will. It is unnecessary to reiterate the unprecedented struggle of the little craft through the fast-gathering ice; how, even when the fuel was more than half expended, the gallant commander determined to push ahead, in the very teeth of a furious tempest; how, beaten back again and again, his cry was still “Onward!”; how entering what is known in Arctic parlance as a false lead, the launch was held as if in an iron vise, and not until she had butted against the solid ice with might and main was she at length set free, only to encounter the steadfast and impassable barrier that finally foiled all further efforts to progress. Call the experiment foolhardy if you will, [but] the heroism of Lieutenant De Long and his brave associates must ever remain a sterling tribute of self-sacrifice and devotion in the noble cause so cheerfully undertaken.

  De Long was embarrassed by all this attention. He “abhorred public acclaim,” Emma said, “and avoided it diligently. He had done his duty and did not see any reason for enlarging upon it.” At the same time, he perceived publicity’s power and recognized that his celebrity could be useful as he began to plan for a return to the Arctic.

  One of the reasons the newspapers lavished so much praise on De Long was that all the other Polaris news that trickled in that autumn was so uniformly dark and depressing. Here was an expedition that had fallen into disarray even before it left the United States. The voyage lacked discipline and a clear sense of mission. Cliques had formed, feeding intrigue and distrust—for example, a large contingent of Germans on board the Polaris scarcely even spoke with the Americans. The expedition leader, Charles Hall, had been belittled, then challenged, then apparently murdered.

  When he died, the others breathed a sigh of relief, only to plunge into demoralization and anarchy. The expedition’s logbooks, records, and scientific instruments had all been lost. The men who had stayed on board the Polaris apparently made no effort to find their comrades when the ice floe on which they were encamped broke away and began to drift from the ship. The castaways, meanwhile, had lived in perpetual fear and suspicion of one another, often contemplating cannibalism. A naval inquiry later dredged up all sorts of unsavory behavior. The entire expedition was a grim and gothic story all around—a story with few heroes that emphatically cast America in a negative light. Noted the Times of London: “Death, in
a hundred ghastly shades, dogs the shadow of this phantom ship.”

  For a sensible person, the voyage of the Polaris would have served as a cautionary tale about the perils of ever going into the Arctic. But not for George De Long. De Long was already analyzing the Hall expedition and determining how he would have done it differently, more efficiently, more scientifically. If he were captain of a polar expedition, De Long vowed, he would make better use of cutting-edge technology. His vessel would be staffed with Navy officers who would enforce a rigid code of discipline, so that mutiny would never rear its head. He would pick his crew more carefully—there would be no cliques, no imbalances of rank or nationality. He would more staunchly reinforce his ship for the ice, and equip it with more plentiful stores of food, medicine, and scientific instruments.

  De Long felt a need to redeem Hall’s mistakes and claim a prize for the Navy—and for the United States.

  AS A RESULT of his new fame, De Long found himself moving in new social circles. On the night of November 1, 1873, he was invited to a dinner party at the home of Henry Grinnell, a well-known New York philanthropist and a wealthy shipping magnate. Grinnell was an Arctic enthusiast who, over the previous few decades, had funded numerous expeditions—both British and American—to the High North. He was a dignified, white-bearded man of seventy-four years, an elegant dresser with bulging glassy eyes and a probing mind. One of the founders of the American Geographical Society, Grinnell had the most extensive collection of Arctic books, maps, and charts in America. His name was indelibly imprinted on the Arctic—a large section of Ellesmere Island had been called Grinnell Land in his honor. No one in the United States had devoted more thought or monetary might toward solving the polar problem.