In the Kingdom of Ice

by Hampton Sides

  On this evening, a Saturday, Grinnell had summoned a collection of scientists, geographers, explorers, and mariners to his fine home at 17 Bond Street in Manhattan to discuss the latest ideas in Arctic exploration. In Grinnell’s drawing room, with maps ranged all around the table, the assembled gentlemen treated De Long as a hero and the presumptive commander of America’s next foray into the Arctic. The session was meant to be a postmortem of the Hall expedition—which Grinnell himself had largely funded. What could be learned from the debacle? How would a future expedition be organized differently? And perhaps most important, what route would it take?

  The growing consensus seemed to be that Greenland was not the best portal for reaching the pole. Hall’s disastrous expedition offered only the latest evidence of that region’s treacheries. De Long, seeking a better polar route, had already done some research. Shortly after returning from Greenland, he had paid a visit to New Bedford, Massachusetts, the de facto whaling capital of the United States. There he had consulted with a number of whaling captains, a weather-wizened class of men who understood Arctic currents and winds better than anyone else. These old salts told him that by aiming for the pole via Greenland, De Long would make unnecessarily hard work for himself—it was “going uphill,” one of them said. They believed that the prevailing currents and winds around Greenland tended to push the ice pack toward the south, so that sailing that way would require constant battling against the floes.

  But, they said, if De Long were to make for the pole via the North Pacific and the Bering Strait, he would find much smoother sailing; effectively, he would be traveling “downhill.” De Long took these insights for what they were: not scientifically proven facts, merely empirical observations from practical professionals who every year ventured to the edges of the ice pack in pursuit of valuable animal oil. Still, the point the captains were making was simple: Why work against nature when you can work with it?

  In 1869, in fact, a French expedition, to be commanded by a scientist named Gustave Lambert, had planned to try for the pole via the Bering Strait, but that expedition had been called off because of the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. Two years later, during the siege of Paris, Lambert was killed in battle, and the expedition was never undertaken.

  Now the men at Grinnell’s house nursed their brandies and stroked their beards in thought. They seemed intrigued by the notion of a polar expedition through the Bering Strait. It was a route that had never been tried before—and one that would use America’s new territory of Alaska as a launching pad. On that cold night in November, in the smoky salon on Bond Street, the idea hung brilliantly in the air. Grinnell raised a glass to it: By all means, downhill to the pole!

  De Long was grateful for Grinnell’s invitation, and for Grinnell’s support of his candidacy as the next polar avatar. And he was not too shy to approach Grinnell directly: Will you underwrite the expedition? he asked.

  Grinnell surprised everyone by saying no. He was done with funding polar explorations. The polar problem still intrigued him, but he was an old, tired man with many health concerns. He’d spent enough on these expeditions. His days as a patron of the High North were over. The Hall expedition, perhaps, had scared him.

  But who would take up where he was leaving off? De Long wanted to know. Where should he turn? The Navy, he recognized, would foot only so many bills. Arctic exploration, if it was to continue, needed a new sponsor.

  When De Long trolled the room for ideas, only one answer presented itself: Bennett.

  3 · THE LORD OF CREATION

  A few months later, on the early morning of May 5, 1874, a crowd gathered at the corner of Thirty-eighth Street and Fifth Avenue in New York. Some of the city’s most fashionable gentlemen milled about, making bets with one another as they stood beside their polished coaches and hansom cabs. Waiting teams of manicured horses stamped their hooves on the muddy avenue, and a northerly wind stirred the elms that lined the misty rows of brownstone mansions. The side streets were thronged with carriages of all kinds—victorias, barouches, hackney cabs, omnibuses. It was a Tuesday morning, and a fine drizzle fell over the city. Fat beads of moisture dripped from the telegraph wires that hummed overhead. Yet the mood on Fifth Avenue was festive, and even at this early hour, some men could be seen passing around whiskey flasks and sniffing spoonfuls of snuff.

  Standing in the center of the crowd, stretching and performing light calisthenics, was a short, muscular man named John Whipple. A young patrician and a prominent member of the Union Club, Whipple was, despite his squat physique, a formidable athlete. Like most gentlemen of his station, he could shoot and sail and ride a fast horse. But Whipple’s greatest prowess was reserved for the esoteric sport of speed walking. In fact, he was a walking champion. He was reputed to be the fastest pedestrian in all the country. In walking matches held over the years, no one had bested him. This morning, attired in black breeches and a black cap, Whipple prepared to confront his latest challenger.

  A few minutes before the appointed hour of seven, the ponderous door to the double brownstone at 425 Fifth Avenue cracked open, and Whipple’s rival emerged on the stoop. He wore a tweed sport jacket, a white cap, and ankle-high leather boots. As he left his mansion behind and bounded down the wet steps, the crowd gave a cheer for James Gordon Bennett Jr.

  Bennett had never tested his mettle at the sport of speed walking. He was frankly dubious of Whipple’s talents and wanted to knock him off his pedestal. One night in early April, in the halls of the Union Club, the two men had agreed to a match. The purse was arranged at $6,000, and a ten-mile course was mapped out, starting at Bennett’s brownstone and ending at the racetrack clubhouse at Jerome Park, across the Harlem River in the Bronx. Champion and challenger then began a strenuous regimen of training. The match date was set for May 5, rain or shine.

  Now Bennett stepped into the crowded street, accompanied by his trainer. A correspondent from the New York Times stood on the curb, scribbling notes. The contrast between the rivals, he reported, was most striking: “Bennett was nearly half a head taller than his competitor. His opponent was of a more compact build, though to all appearances well endowed with muscle and wind.” Two judges, with fob watches in their hands, assumed their places beside the starting line, while the referee greeted the athletes and reviewed the match rules: No jostling, no deviation from the designated route—and, of course, no breaking into a run.

  The campanile at a church two blocks away began to chime the hour, and the contestants crouched beside each other. The church bells pealed: five … six … seven. The referee cried out, “Go!” And the walkers took off, heading north on Fifth Avenue, striding past the Croton Reservoir, past the turreted mansions of several Gilded Age barons, past the lower reaches of Central Park, which had officially opened the previous year. Sheep grazed in the park’s meadow, and occasionally the roars of the big cats could be heard coming from the menagerie near the armory at Sixty-fourth Street.

  The contestants continued north on Fifth Avenue, with their trainers jumping in front from time to time to exhort their racers or point out flaws in their technique. The “pace of both men was terrific,” said the Times reporter, “each putting his best foot foremost, evidently with an intention of tiring out the other, if possible, at an early stage of the race.” The street was so sloppy with mud that the two walkers had trouble establishing a smooth gait—the strain on the contestants was “almost pitiable.”

  Meanwhile, the crowds at the starting line scrambled for their waiting carriages and soon came “driving up the avenue at a trot, nearly abreast of the two pedestrians.” Bennett flailed his arms with each stride. “In fact,” noted the reporter, “it might be said of him that he walked as much with his arms as with his legs.” The technique seemed to be working for the Herald publisher; by the end of the first mile, Bennett had inched a few feet ahead. Whipple appeared disheartened by this, but he “kept up the same steady gait, hoping to wear out his rival in the long run.”

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p; Bennett tossed off his hat and tweed coat and “set to work with fresh energy.” Though complaining that gravel was accumulating in his boots, he continued to outdistance his opponent. Whipple “struggled manfully,” but as the two men turned left at 110th Street and then headed up St. Nicholas Avenue, it seemed possible that Bennett might pull off an upset. It appeared to the Times man that Whipple was “slowly but surely giving in.” He became so winded that at one point he had to sit down on the sidewalk.

  By the time Bennett crossed over the Harlem River at the Macombs Bridge, he had extended his lead by three hundred yards and was pressing toward the finish “with unflagging energy.” He breezed through Fordham and up Central Avenue, then passed triumphantly through the entrance to Jerome Park at 8:46:55. Seven minutes later, Whipple staggered across the finish line. When asked what had happened, the former champion could only guess that he had “over-trained.”

  Bennett was casual about his victory. He was a man used to winning, a man who expected to win, and yet he also seemed bashful about being the center of attention. When the Times reporter asked him how he had pulled off his upset, he was at a loss for words. “Oh, I am always walking, you know, more or less,” he said. Bennett and Whipple shared a light meal at the Jerome Park clubhouse and then headed back to Manhattan—leaving the followers of the race to collect what was later estimated to be $50,000 in bets.

  THE MULTIMILLIONAIRE WHOM the guests at Henry Grinnell’s dinner party had advised De Long to go see was nothing if not a lover of spectacle. To James Gordon Bennett Jr., life was a perpetual escapade, a test of wits, a bravura performance. Bennett liked fast walking, fast ships, fast carriages, fast women, fast decisions, fast communications, and any bold new development or design that promised to quicken the pulse of the national blood. Therefore, when George De Long came to New York in early 1874 and paid a visit to Bennett’s white-marbled offices at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street, he found a receptive audience. De Long professed his desire to reach the North Pole. He laid out why he felt this was the time. He explained how he believed it was America’s destiny to take the lead in Arctic exploration and noted that Grinnell had grown tired of underwriting voyages. Given the anemic state of the U.S. Navy, any American-led exploration would need a benefactor to replace Grinnell. De Long understood that any professional expedition to the High North would have to be a unique hybrid enterprise—a national project backed by private largesse.

  Bennett warmed to the idea of an ambitious Arctic expedition, so much so that he even flirted with the notion of personally venturing out with De Long. An Arctic push would be good for the nation, good for science, good for sport, and, most important, good for his paper. It dovetailed perfectly with his interests.

  The playboy-publisher liked De Long, liked his persistence, the aspect of hard discipline that seemed to inform his fervor, the intensity that burned within his bespectacled eyes. After his magnificent performance in Greenland, De Long was the logical man to lead the next major assault on the High North. When he did, he would do so under the auspices of the New York Herald. It would be a story that Bennett’s paper could milk in many ways—an exploration that could trump Stanley’s accounts from Africa. De Long himself would write the main narrative, of course, but there would also be a Herald staff correspondent on board to file reports. Bennett would pay for everything.

  It was agreed that De Long would hunt for a sturdy vessel, one that could survive the Arctic crush, and begin to assemble a team of explorers. Bennett, meanwhile, would consult with the best scientists and geographers in Europe to gather the latest ideas about how to solve the Arctic problem.

  Then De Long left. He and Bennett parted not as friends, exactly, but as co-conspirators in a quest. “The two men were attracted to each other from the first, and Bennett promised to back the project to the limit,” Emma De Long later wrote. “Bennett realized at once that he had found the man he was looking for.”

  They surely made for an odd couple. Yet although various obstacles would combine to delay their mission to the High North, De Long and Bennett would never turn loose their dream.

  GEORGE DE LONG had found his Medici, but he could not have possibly imagined, in this short initial visit in New York, how spectacularly weird Bennett was. De Long could not know of Bennett’s many obsessions, his peculiar prejudices, his random gusts of spite or whimsy. Bennett may have been New York’s most eligible bachelor; he was also New York’s moodiest brat.

  He was “Bennett the Terrible, the mad Commodore, the autocrat of the transatlantic cables,” one biographer wrote; he saw himself as “one of the lords of creation.” A longtime Herald editor later remarked of his boss that he “was a ruler over a domain of romance; he himself at times a romantic ruler. If impulse called he obeyed, and no rule existed but to be broken.”

  Bennett had a habit of strolling into one of the finest establishments in Paris or New York and snatching the table linens as he proceeded down the aisle, smashing plates and glassware on the floor, to the horror of the dining patrons, until he reached his reserved table in the back. (He never failed to write a check for the damages.) Once, after a musical show in Amsterdam, he invited the beautiful lead actress and the entire cast to tour his yacht. Then he quietly slipped out to sea and for several days cruised the Atlantic, essentially holding the cast hostage and demanding repeat performances—all the while attempting to seduce the young starlet. Upon returning to shore, Bennett gladly paid an enormous sum to the Amsterdam theater to cover its losses.

  It was difficult to keep track of all of Bennett’s fiercely held likes and dislikes. For breakfast, he insisted on plover’s eggs. He would not allow facial hair to be worn by any man serving on his yachts. He owned hundreds of thermometers and barometers and was fascinated by the slightest changes in the weather. He had a doting love for Pomeranians—he kept dozens of them and served them only Vichy springwater to drink. Bennett believed his yappy little pooches were such astute judges of human character that he would sometimes hire editors, or choose not to, purely on the basis of his dogs’ reactions when the prospective employee walked into the room. (Some job candidates, having learned of Bennett’s odd deference to his dogs, would arrive at interviews with their coat pockets stuffed with morsels of raw meat.) Bennett also had a fetish for owls—he kept them everywhere: living owls, pictures of owls, busts of owls, owls on cuff links, owls on stationery. They decorated his brownstone, his yachts, his country houses. Something about their winking, swivel-headed, nocturnal ways struck his deepest fancy.

  What all of these eccentricities added up to was hard to say, and might not be worthy of recounting were it not also true that James Gordon Bennett was, in his own incomparable way, a brilliant publisher with electric sensibilities and a profound intuition for what moved and mesmerized the American public. He was one of the fathers of the communications age, and though he was a terror to work for, he created one of the great institutions in American journalism.

  De Long would never understand his patron, but he was lucky to have him. He had found a man who possessed not only a limitless reserve of cash but also a bottomless appetite for a story that could usher in the modern world.

  4 · FOR YOU I WILL DARE ANYTHING

  America’s newest Arctic hero was a young man of myriad talents and deep contradictions. Emma De Long thought there was within her husband an “incessant friction”—a contrast between impetuosity and patient striving, between a love for adventure and a compulsion to accomplish something ambitious and sustained. De Long could be a romantic, sometimes an extravagant one. He had what Emma called “a hungry heart.” But he willingly confined himself for most of his life to a straitjacket of absolute discipline. He knew what he wanted with nearly perfect clarity, and he pursued it with unswerving conviction—resistance only intensified his resolve.

  De Long was a lover of opera, symphonies, and fine novels, an exacting correspondent who wrote beautiful letters in a delicate, florid hand. He doted on his baby gir
l, Sylvie, and hated the assignments that took him away from the daily joys of their family life. Letting Emma supervise the details of the household and most of their finances, De Long was casual about his domestic affairs. When in command of a ship, however, he could be a harsh disciplinarian with a granite disposition. One historian called his commanding style “monolithic.” Though a complete creature of the Navy, he hated nothing in the world more than naval hierarchies, naval politics, and naval rules, all of which he found an aggravation and a bore.

  De Long blamed the Navy for some of his worst traits. He once wrote, “Ship life is a hard thing on the temper. Mark Twain in his Innocents Abroad says that going to sea develops ‘all of man’s bad qualities and brings out new ones that he did not suppose himself mean enough for.’ I wonder if that accounts for all the rough edges of my character.” He admitted that he could be “hard on men,” but such was the nature of a naval officer’s life. “I can only say I never allow any argument,” De Long once wrote. “It is my office to command and theirs to obey.”

  The United States in the 1870s was, De Long knew, far from being a world-class naval power. Although the U.S. Navy was slowly making advancements, many European nations viewed the tiny, antiquated American fleet as a joke. According to naval historian Peter Karsten, it was “a third-rate assemblage” of “old tubs” in “various states of disrepair … the laughingstock of the world.” Far from an adventurous existence, life in the American Navy was marked by cramped quarters, low pay, draconian discipline, and jealous competition for rank in a promotion process that could be stultifying and slow.

  Most of the assignments consisted of “showing the flag” in foreign ports and performing mind-numbingly dreary tasks aboard ship. It was a life of “crushing hopelessness,” said a junior officer at the time. “The most aspiring years of our lives” were consumed by “the dullest, the most uninteresting, the most useless duties.” Like many young officers, De Long often felt that he was wasting away his brightest days. “A stagnant navy,” noted one maritime scholar, “was no place for a man on the make.”