In the Kingdom of Ice

by Hampton Sides

  At times, his adventuring style had been a little odd. Once, while skirting the floes in Baffin Bay, Young had captured a live polar bear, chained it to the quarterdeck, and, after feeding it a cocktail of chloroform and opium, tried to tame the beast and make it his ship’s mascot. (He also kept a pet pig aboard ship for a while.) For his gallant and colorful services to his country while sailing the Pandora, Young recently had been knighted.

  Sir Allen had ventured along the east coast of Baffin Island in pursuit of that age-old obsession of the British Admiralty: finding a Northwest Passage across the top of Canada to the Bering Strait. Predictably, thick ice had foiled his efforts, as it had all previous Northwest Passage expeditions. But the Pandora had performed impressively well while trapped in the grinding pack. At one point during the voyage, the ship became “hopelessly beset,” as Young described it. He could hear the vessel’s timbers groaning and cracking. The pressure became so great that he had his crew blast the surrounding pack with gunpowder, yet “the floe still pressed sadly on our poor little ship. We were all ready to leave the Pandora should she show any further signs of succumbing. I felt that she was in her icy tomb, and that escape was hopeless.”

  But the Pandora had held firm. Young later found that despite the “severe battle she had endured,” the ship had suffered nothing more serious than a bent propeller blade. It was as though this happy little yacht had a guardian angel. “We were all in good health,” Young boasted to the secretary of the Admiralty about his voyage. “We rode in perfect safety and comfort.”

  During those adventures in Greenland, the owner had formed a seemingly permanent and inseparable bond with his ship. Although De Long offered him a fair price, Sir Allen would not sell. He had no particular use for the Pandora now; he wanted to hold on to her—for sentimental reasons.

  Or so he said. A year later, on an impulse, Young decided that he did want to sell and contacted Bennett immediately. Bennett came over from Paris and bought her then and there, for a sum of $6,000. Allen soon regretted his rash decision and reapproached Bennett, attempting to buy the Pandora back. Bennett wouldn’t budge.

  AS SOON AS he could obtain an extended leave of absence, De Long, who had spent the year engrossed in Arctic reading while serving in New York on Navy duty, returned to England to supervise the Pandora’s cleaning and refitting. This time, De Long brought Emma and their five-year-old daughter, Sylvie. They rented a room in a modest hotel at 15 New Cavendish Street in London’s West End. Every day for nearly four months during the spring and early summer of 1878, De Long went down to the Thames, where the Pandora was in dry dock at a place called Walker’s yards in Deptford. He wanted to oversee every detail of the ship’s overhaul. “A small omission now,” De Long wrote, “may cost us the success of the expedition in the end.” To improve the ship, Bennett cannibalized parts and fixtures from his own racing yacht, Dauntless. De Long was, said Emma, “unremitting in his attentions to the Pandora’s preparations,” and she, too, found herself “drawn into the maelstrom” as plans for the expedition began to accelerate.

  The late spring saw a whirlwind of dinner parties and gatherings that had the feeling, to the De Longs, of an extended send-off. De Long considered himself an ingénue in the Arctic department, and yet during his final weeks in London, he was treated like a VIP. He met with the Royal Geographical Society, as well as all manner of British scientists and explorers. Veteran polar adventurers inundated him with requests to join his expedition. A relative of England’s greatest Arctic martyr, Sir John Franklin, held a gathering to fete De Long’s coming journey—during which De Long promised to keep a lookout for any tidings of the long-lost explorer and his large expedition (who at this point had been missing for thirty-three years). Sir Allen Young also entertained the De Longs and donated a large part of his Arctic library and maps to be kept on the Pandora.

  With so much discussion about the expedition, little Sylvie could tell that something big was afoot, but she was too young to understand what it was about.

  “Where is Papa going?” she asked at one point.

  “To the North Pole,” Emma replied. But Sylvie shrugged her shoulders, thinking it was a joke, as though her father were going off to some mythic storybook place—like the center of the earth or the surface of the moon.

  The Times of London took notice of the activity along the Thames. “The Pandora is being thoroughly refitted in Walker’s yards,” the paper announced, “and may be said to be almost a new vessel. She will be ready for sea in a short time.”

  De Long and Bennett had decided that further refitting work would be done in Le Havre, where the Pandora would dock for another month—and where the ship would be formally rechristened and placed under American registry. Bennett, who had returned to Paris, was trying to come up with a new name for the vessel, one that was not freighted with so much ominous mythology. He felt he could not in good conscience send a full crew of men to the Arctic in a ship that was named after a Greek story about a box containing all the world’s evils and plagues.

  De Long had decided that he himself would sail the Pandora from England to France, and then all the way around South America to San Francisco, where still further repairs would be undertaken at a U.S. Navy yard. Emma and Sylvie would accompany him in the Pandora as far as California, with a small crew. In midsummer of the following year, the expedition would commence in earnest, aiming for the Bering Strait—and the North Pole.

  On a fine bright morning in late June, the Pandora, which had been briefly docked in the heart of London to take on supplies, eased away down the Thames. Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s slid from view as she turned downstream. In high spirits, George and Emma made for the place of her youth, the place of their courtship, and the place where they had been wed—Le Havre, France.

  10 · THREE YEARS, OR ETERNITY

  James Gordon Bennett paced alongside his ship, studying her lines in the bright salt air. The Pandora wasn’t as sleek or as fast or as big as the several yachts he had owned, and not nearly as beautiful. But she was a “staunch” little ship, he thought—and one that enjoyed the advantage of having already survived several odysseys in the ice. There was still more work to be done on her. Yet Bennett, who liked to think he could sniff out nautical flaws with the most casual of inspections, felt confident that his new acquisition was nearly ready for the High North. What he saw in this sturdy yacht can only be guessed, but he knew this: Her voyage was going to make headlines.

  It was July 4, 1878. The Pandora lay moored in a slip safely tucked behind the jetty in Le Havre, in precisely the same place where the Shenandoah had been moored the night George and Emma De Long were married upon her decks. Today, in effect, was the last day of the Pandora’s existence—she was to be rechristened in a ceremony that afternoon.

  Bennett had decided to rename her the Jeannette, after his sister. He had chartered a train from Paris and brought along his usual entourage of fashionable rogues and sportsmen, plus a few newshounds from the Herald to cover the proceedings. Jeannette had come as well, and traveling with her—or as close as Victorian courtship protocols would allow—was her beau, Isaac Bell, a wealthy New York cotton broker and investment tycoon.

  The best-known guest in the group, however, was Henry Stanley, the Welsh-American explorer who had tromped across the jungles of Africa as a Herald correspondent and had become even more famous for his book about that adventure, How I Found Livingstone.

  Everyone met for a luncheon at Frascati’s, a resort hotel and casino on the waterfront. It was a place of languid luxury on the coast of upper Normandy, where wealthy Parisians came to escape the city’s summer heat. On the strand, little cabanas of striped canvas billowed in the sea breeze. Musclemen in unitard bathing suits dipped into the cold Atlantic, while children erected sand castles and women in bloomers drowsed beneath sun parasols (public swimming then being generally considered an ill-advised activity for the fairer sex).

  Inside Frascati’s reception hall,
Bennett sat at one end of a long banquet table, De Long at the other. The publisher suffered through many toasts and testimonials, watching the proceedings with cool assessing eyes, his trim mustache bristling, a mischievous grin growing across his face as the alcohol took hold.

  But he did nothing, said nothing. It was as though he were following the festivities from afar. Bennett was strangely bashful around large groups of people and uncomfortable with the spotlight even when the spotlight was manifestly his. He was like a disinterested watchmaker, the sort of man who preferred to set situations in motion—and then sit back and amuse himself with the results.

  De Long and Stanley sat next to each other and “kept up a running fire of conversion all through the luncheon,” Emma later recalled. De Long was a very different sort of person from the flamboyant, egomaniacal, and sometimes ruthless explorer, yet he and Stanley had much in common, and much to talk about. The poles and the African interior—the Frigid and the Torrid Zones, as they were sometimes called—remained the two great geographical mysteries left on the planet, and both men had the same curious patron to sponsor their probes into the unknown regions.

  Stanley had something De Long badly wanted: lasting fame, the kind that comes from a significant achievement capped by literary success. De Long had every intention of writing a book about his Arctic odyssey. But Stanley, only half-facetiously, insisted that he would pen the definitive account of the expedition. It was an adventure scoop that Bennett dearly longed to duplicate for his newspaper—a kind of encore.

  “See here, De Long,” Stanley said, “I intend to write a companion volume to How I Found Livingstone. It will be called How I Found De Long!”

  Afterward, the party dispersed and strolled to the marina, where the Pandora lay moored. It was a warm, bright, hazy day. Sylvie, wearing a straw hat affixed with a hand-drawn legend that read “Jeannette,” ran up and down the docks, eating apricots and innocently playing along the same waterfront where her mother had grown up. As the crowd slowly gathered, Jeannette Bennett wandered off with Isaac Bell for a short while—“the lovers,” said Emma, “were very much engrossed”—until it was time for the ceremony to commence.

  FROM THE STANDPOINT of the sea gods, rechristening the Pandora could be seen as a dubious exercise. As though her original mythological name weren’t already heavy enough, a superstition had long held among some mariners that no ship should ever be renamed. Some claimed that it insulted a vessel’s very soul; others said it was just a bad idea, the epitome of tempting fate.

  But Gordon Bennett had spent his life thumbing his nose at convention. He had plenty of nautical superstitions of his own, odd crotchets and bugaboos, yet this was not one of them; Bennett would call his ship whatever he pleased.

  To be sure, Jeannette was far from a commanding name for an Arctic icebreaker. But it was in keeping with the times. There was a growing trend in those days to name ships (even ones destined for bitter hard duty) after wives and mothers and nieces and aunts—as though summoning a favorite female, however dainty or dotty or dowager-like, would somehow temper the ordeals ahead.

  Most likely, Bennett’s choice for the name sprang from a certain familial guilt. Since he had left New York for a perpetual high life in Paris, Bennett scarcely ever saw his sister. Other than covering Jeannette’s bills, he had done little to honor the pleas contained in their father’s will to look closely after her welfare. Jeannette herself did not particularly like ships and had never asked her big brother to name one after her. Yet, dutifully, she had steamed over from America and taken the train from Paris to grace the ceremony with her presence.

  De Long helped Jeannette to the bow of the ship, and a bottle of the finest champagne was produced. (Bennett, of course, had spared no expense in that department.) A ribbon was cut, and then, with a sweet, coquettish smile, Jeannette smashed the bottle across the freshly painted hull.

  The Pandora was now the Jeannette. By a special act of Congress that Bennett’s representatives in Washington had succeeded in pushing through, she had been placed under American registry, in preparation for her being declared a Navy vessel. An American flag flew proudly from her mast.

  Henry Stanley stood before the crowd and offered a toast, then coaxed De Long into saying a few words. “I would have preferred not being called upon,” De Long said. “You, Mr. Stanley, have the right to speak—you’ve accomplished your task. Mine is still before me.” As De Long had always said, he did not wish to make any promises “to achieve wonders. We have hard work ahead of us, and no romance. While we may be gone three years, we may be gone for eternity.”

  BENNETT WATCHED THE ceremony from his usual remove. He remained “in the background,” said Emma, “and it was impossible to make him come forward and take an active part.” Perhaps the publisher’s mind was already somewhere else—he was scheduled to sail for New York the next day for one of his unannounced inspections of the Herald offices.

  The small crowd left from the Jeannette and returned to Frascati’s for an evening of celebrations and toasts of brandy amid blue clouds of cigar smoke. After this night, Bennett and all his guests would disperse and return to their lives, leaving De Long more or less alone to plan and commence his voyage. Jeannette would hasten back to New York with Isaac Bell. Within a few months they would marry, and soon they would start building one of Newport’s elegant “cottages.” Stanley would return to further exploits in Africa, and to a career that would see him both knighted and demonized, his brutal adventures partly inspiring Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

  Bennett wished De Long a safe journey and said he’d see him at the Jeannette’s embarkation in San Francisco. When De Long reported that Emma was joining him for the entire eighteen-thousand-mile voyage to California, Bennett was surprised and a little shocked. Then De Long thought he detected a stab of sadness in the lifelong bachelor. “Your wife must think a great deal of you,” Bennett said. “No woman ever would do that for me.”

  Bennett had supplied three men to join De Long for the journey; if all went well, they were eager to sign on to the expedition to the pole. Two of them, Alfred Sweetman and John Cole, had worked for years on Bennett’s yachts. Sweetman was a gangling British carpenter and mechanic, reliable but almost drearily precise. (He reported his age to De Long as “38 and 5/6 years.”) Cole, an Irishman, was an agile boatswain scarcely over five feet tall who, it was said, could scramble over rigging like a monkey. Cole, who was known as Jack, had been at sea since he was thirteen. “You’ll find Cole one of the best sailors you ever had,” Bennett told De Long. “In times of danger, he’s worth his weight in gold.”

  For navigator, Bennett had suggested a peculiar but perspicacious fellow named Danenhower. Master John Wilson Danenhower was twenty-nine years old, a Chicago-born graduate of the Naval Academy who came highly recommended by none other than former president Ulysses S. Grant, who’d recently gotten to know him while cruising around the Mediterranean on the USS Vandalia. Danenhower was a tall, formal man of dashing good looks, with thin, elegant hands, a full trim beard, and a thatch of dark hair that stood up on end. His face quivered with an intelligent sensitivity; his large, scooplike ears and piercing dark eyes contributed to the impression that he was a man who missed nothing. Danenhower had long burned with an ardent desire to reach the pole. He told De Long that he wanted to go to the Arctic “with all my heart.”

  De Long liked him immediately. Danenhower was a brilliant conversationalist with a sardonic sense of humor. He’d read widely in astronomy, magnetic phenomena, physics, and Arctic exploration history. His navigational knowledge seemed unimpeachable. Among other assignments, he had done a stint at the United States Naval Observatory, in Washington. Still, there was something in his manner that gave De Long pause. One day in Le Havre an American officer told him a juicy piece of gossip: Danenhower, he’d heard, had once suffered some “brain trouble” and had been pronounced insane. When De Long shared this disturbing report, Bennett replied, blackly, “If anyth
ing might make a man insane, it would be a freezing up in the Arctic.”

  Even so, De Long had decided to hire Danenhower as navigator for the trip around South America—and let the voyage serve as a test. De Long thought that if Danenhower’s mind was still “disordered,” the long sail to San Francisco would surely reveal “any lurking effects of his old complaint.”

  Bennett agreed with the plan. In parting, his only request for De Long was, as usual, strange: When he and Danenhower sailed from Le Havre in the Jeannette, it was imperative that no one ever leave her, even for a moment, until they reached San Francisco. Although the voyage might take more than two hundred days, under no circumstances was anyone to set foot on dry land until the Jeannette passed through the Golden Gate.

  Bennett offered no reason for this odd command. It was one of his kooky notions—and, of course, he expected it to be obeyed.

  THE JEANNETTE WAS set to sail from Le Havre on July 15. That morning, a large send-off party of Emma’s childhood girlfriends came out to the docks, with assortments of French cheeses and other delicacies, to wish her bon voyage. “They wondered at my daring,” she recalled, noting that most Frenchwomen “love their homeland too much to leave it without great hesitation.”

  As a going-away present, her friends gave her an array of flowering potted plants to enliven her quarters at sea. She placed them all around the mizzenmast that penetrated her cabin—turning the room, in effect, into a miniature tropical jungle—and lashed together the dozens of terra-cotta pots with ropes.

  The first weeks of the journey were easygoing, as the Jeannette angled southwest along the coast of Portugal and Morocco and then passed the Canary Islands before heading out into the broad Atlantic. The weather remained fair, the seas calm, and the winds so favorable that De Long never had to fire up the steam engine. “As we were under sail,” said Emma, “there was no jar, no noise, only the ripple of the water as the Jeannette cut through it.” The steward, Samuel, a Swiss-born thespian with impeccable diction, would sing beautiful arias while he fluttered about the galley. (It turned out he had spent a season with New York’s Metropolitan Opera Company.)