Many great ships had been launched or overhauled at Mare Island—brigs, monitors, corvettes, schooners, sloops of war. But the shipyard’s most storied fixture throughout much of the nineteenth century was the old Boston-built fifty-four-gun frigate the USS Independence, which, according to one Navy historian, was for nearly seventy years “as much a part of the Mare Island waterfront as the seagulls.”
Among the warships moored beside the yard, the slender Jeannette looked fragile and unobtrusive. When Navy engineers commenced a formal study of her, they were not impressed. To withstand the ice, they thought, the Jeannette still needed a considerable amount of work—on her hull, especially. How this exploring yacht, as the Pandora, had survived three journeys in the Arctic was a mystery to them.
Of course, these men were paid to be cautious, and they knew their recommendations would carry little consequence within the Navy hierarchy, especially since Bennett would be covering all expenses. Still, the engineers’ assessment was sweeping: Decks would have to be ripped out, they declared, bulkheads constructed, new boilers installed, coal bunkers rearranged, the entire hull reinforced with additional layers of planking. They talked of adding ambitious networks of beams and braces. As their checklist of repairs and renovations kept growing, they envisioned a price tag as high as $50,000.
De Long was shocked, even though he knew many of the repairs were necessary, and even though he and his men would be the beneficiaries of the contemplated improvements. He saw deep trouble in the engineers’ recommendations. “We must stop them,” he wrote, “or they will ruin us.” While Bennett rarely blanched at a bill, De Long believed it his duty to make sure the engineers did not concoct unnecessary repairs in order to swindle the faraway—and notoriously profligate—publisher. “I consider your interest identical to my own,” De Long wrote Bennett not long after his arrival in California. “I am laboring to keep down expenses with as much zeal as if I were to foot the bills instead of you.”
The work would all be done here at Mare Island, but De Long knew that the real power behind the ship’s repairs, as well as its equipage, provisioning, and staffing, was concentrated three thousand miles away—on the East Coast. He wanted to consult with the Navy Department, with the Smithsonian Institution, with the Naval Academy, with the nation’s best scientific minds and Arctic theorists, not to mention with Bennett’s representatives at the Herald. August Petermann’s death in Gotha, which De Long had learned about shortly after landing in San Francisco, left a void in the very soul of the expedition, one he felt he needed to fill with varieties of expertise and authority that could only be found back East.
Mainly, though, De Long hated being at the mercy of political forces he could not personally confront. Here in California, he said, “I do not carry enough guns to make a noise.” Thinking Washington “undoubtedly the place to do the most good,” he wrote to the secretary of the Navy and arranged an extended cross-continental junket.
De Long would leave Master John Danenhower in charge of monitoring the day-to-day operations at Mare Island. His admiration for Danenhower had only grown since they had arrived in California. De Long advised the navigator to summon as much tact and delicacy as possible when conferring with the engineers—but also to watch expenditures like a hawk. “Little things run away with the money,” De Long told Danenhower, noting that he wished to be more careful about spending Bennett’s cash than if it were his own. “I will now leave the matter in your hands, asking you to use your best discretion to accomplish my wishes.”
During the first week of February, De Long, with Emma and Sylvie at his side, boarded a Union Pacific train in Oakland, bound for Washington, D.C.
DURING THE WEEKLONG ride east, De Long began to turn his attention to another pressing question: Who would accompany him to the pole? Thus far, he’d made fitful progress in filling out the expedition’s roster, and he hoped to spend much of his time in Washington interviewing candidates. The voyage would require about thirty men. This would include a crew of twenty seamen with various specialties, presided over by five Navy officers, plus an ice pilot, a doctor, a pair of civilian scientists, and one or two dog drivers.
But why would anyone—officer, seaman, or scientist—volunteer for such a risky and difficult mission in the Arctic? Some of the attraction was generational: Most of the applicants, like De Long, had just missed out on the greatest conflict in American history. These young men thirsted for some of the glory their fathers had won on the battlefields of the Civil War, and they yearned to test their manhood in some daunting and adventurous endeavor—if not war, then something roughly analogous to it.
A few of the applicants had been to the Arctic before and had fallen in love with its strange light, its howling solitudes, its haunting and beautiful otherness. These were men who, like De Long, had been touched by a kind of polar madness and, for reasons they often could not fully explain, had to go back.
Then there was the essential allure of exploration itself. It was impossible to exaggerate how significant, how glorious, how glamorous the Jeannette expedition seemed to certain quarters of the American public. Add to all this the element of nationalism—of beating other countries to the pole—and De Long’s voyage exerted an irresistible pull on a certain kind of young man.
De Long had already received hundreds of applications from people all over America and the world, and throughout the long, jouncing train ride, he scribbled scores of letters in reply to the most promising applicants. (Many of the seekers were more than a little dubious, however. De Long was besieged with letters from a precocious teenage boy who said he would go to the Arctic for free and claimed he could “edit a newspaper and get up a variety show for the entertainment of the company during the long nights of an Arctic winter.”)
Ideally, De Long was looking for unmarried men in perfect health—candidates who were prime seamen, drank very little, and were willing to work for Navy pay. Foreigners were welcome, as long as they could read and write in English. He favored Scandinavians, but he thought Englishmen, Scots, and Irishmen acceptable. Spaniards, Italians, and, especially, Frenchmen should be “refused point blank,” he scribbled in a note—an odd bias given that De Long was married to a French-American woman and was himself descended from French Huguenot stock. He would like to have a good musician on board, to cheer up the lonely hyperborean nights. The cook must be excellent and, given the weird food he’d be forced to prepare, ever resourceful.
More than anything, though, De Long was looking for a quality of absolute fealty to naval discipline—“unhesitating obedience to every order, no matter what it may be,” as he put it—a quality that had been sorely lacking on the Polaris and so many other ill-fated Arctic expeditions.
JOHN DANENHOWER WOULD serve as the Jeannette’s navigation officer—of that De Long felt certain. Alfred Sweetman, the British carpenter, and Jack Cole, the Irish boatswain, had both performed so well on the voyage around South America that De Long had decided to take them on, too. Samuel, the Swiss thespian and opera singer who’d been such a breath of fresh air on the voyage, would not be coming to the Arctic. His days as a ship’s steward were over; he nursed ambitions to return to the New York stage. This left De Long to hunt elsewhere. Before he’d departed San Francisco, he had started to look among the city’s growing Chinese population to fill out the Jeannette’s galley staff. Danenhower would soon be interviewing candidates in Chinatown.
De Long already had decided on his executive officer and second-in-command: his old friend Lieutenant Charles Winans Chipp. De Long had not forgotten Chipp’s valiant performance and wise counsel aboard the Little Juniata. Chipp’s naval experience ran wide and deep. During his more than ten years at sea, he had served on sloops, frigates, and gunboats and had been everywhere, it seemed: not only the Arctic but Siam, Cuba, Norway, Formosa, the Levant, Korea, North Africa. Chipp was a native of Kingston, New York, a historic town on the Hudson some ninety miles north of Manhattan, and he’d graduated with honors from the
Naval Academy in 1868. Slight of build, he had thinning dark hair swept back from a blocky forehead, a magnificent full beard, and steady, deep-set eyes. His temperament was taciturn in the extreme. “He smiles rarely and says very little,” De Long wrote, but Chipp was “ever true and reliable,” an officer of consummate loyalty. It took nothing more than a cable from Bennett to the Navy Department, and Chipp, then serving in China, was promptly reassigned to the Jeannette. As De Long was on his way to Washington by train, Chipp was steaming across the Pacific for San Francisco.
De Long had also made up his mind about another Navy officer: George Melville would serve as the Jeannette’s engineer. Said to be distantly related to the great author, Melville was an improvisational genius with machines—a greasy-fingered savant who seemed most at home among thumping boilers and sharp blasts of steam. The engineer, thirty-eight years old, had a booming voice, a stout physique, and an enormous bald head that rose imposingly from a low scraggle of curly hair, like an egg that was too big for its nest. He was a native of New York City—like De Long, he had been raised in Brooklyn. Melville cursed in torrents but eschewed drinking, gambling, and most other vices. He had distinguished himself in both the Boston and the New York Navy yards, had become an expert on torpedoes, and had sailed on various warships, several times with De Long. All told, Melville had spent more than a third of his lifetime afloat. An autodidact, he was proficient in mineralogy, zoology, and many other subjects.
So prized were Melville’s multifaceted talents that the Navy hierarchy was quite reluctant to give him a leave of absence, as was Melville’s long-suffering wife, Hetty, who lived with their three children in Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania, a small borough near Philadelphia. Hetty was a beautiful woman, but she was also an alcoholic, with a terrible temper and a history of mental instability—which may help explain Melville’s tendency to accept long assignments that took him far away from home. “The secrets of his home and fireside hung over him like a cloud,” one acquaintance said. But like De Long, Melville had been bitten by the Arctic bug while on an assignment in Greenland and was determined to return to the High North. He had read widely into the “Arctic problem” and had his own ideas about how to solve it. De Long considered Melville “a No. 1 man and a brother.” He would be reporting to San Francisco within the month.
The only other slot De Long had devoted attention to filling was that of expedition surgeon. Inquiries throughout the ranks had produced only one name of a first-rate Navy physician who was ready and willing to go to the Arctic: Passed Assistant Surgeon James Markham Ambler. A quiet, handsome man of thirty-one, Dr. Ambler came from a prominent family (his father was also a doctor) in Virginia’s Fauquier County, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains near Washington. As a teenager, he had served as a cavalryman in the Civil War, but he had spent much of his service languishing in a squalid Union prison camp. Ambler had been educated at Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) and was a graduate of the University of Maryland medical school. He had practiced for three years in Baltimore before entering the Navy in 1874.
Among his assignments, Ambler had served on a corvette for an extended cruise of the West Indies. He had recently become engaged—and was thus, according to one historian, “conspicuously lacking in enthusiasm for an Arctic cruise.” But as a survivor of a prisoner-of-war camp, the young doctor seemed in no way daunted by whatever horrors the Arctic might bring. De Long looked forward to meeting Ambler in Washington; the doctor was on furlough in nearby Virginia, staying with his family.
THE DE LONGS arrived in Washington and checked into the Ebbitt House, a distinguished hotel at Fourteenth and F Streets that was popular among high-ranking Army and Navy figures. It was a six-story establishment with a mansard roof and a continental restaurant that served such delicacies as “broiled redhead duck with currant jelly sauce.” General William Tecumseh Sherman occupied a suite in the hotel, as did Civil War admiral David Dixon Porter. Ebbitt House would be De Long’s residence and base of operations for the next three months.
Within a few days, De Long met with the secretary of the Navy, Richard Wigginton Thompson. A country lawyer and politician from Indiana, Thompson was a gangling, apparently humorless man of seventy with white hair, bug eyes, and a huge beaklike nose. A civilian appointee who had no experience at sea, he was said to be laughably unprepared for the post of Navy secretary. A telling though possibly apocryphal story had it that soon after Thompson was hired, he conducted an inspection of a new warship; when he ventured belowdecks, the incredulous landlubber blurted out, “My God, the durned thing’s hollow!”
Clueless though he may have been, Secretary Thompson declared himself completely committed to De Long’s quest for the pole and pledged to do whatever he could to give the young captain the authority necessary to make it a national undertaking. “When you sail I intend for you to have the same power that is conferred upon admirals commanding fleets,” Thompson told De Long. “This expedition must succeed, and you shall be forearmed against all disaffection, insubordination, and disaster.” Thompson was an optimist who believed that with the Bering Strait route, De Long had “struck the gateway to the Pole.”
At Thompson’s urging, Congress acted promptly, on February 27 passing a bill that formally declared De Long’s voyage an American enterprise, while acknowledging that a private citizen, James Gordon Bennett, would be paying for nearly everything. The bill noted that every man serving aboard the Jeannette would be “subject in all respects to the Articles of War and Navy Regulations and Discipline.” De Long, while technically only a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, would serve as the expedition’s captain and head for the Arctic under naval orders, flying naval colors, and he would be given full authority to hold his crew “in subordination in the event of any insurrection among them.” The project, now fully cloaked in the Stars and Stripes, was given a new official name: the U.S. Arctic Expedition.
For weeks, De Long would continue to hound various figures within the chambers and corridors of the Navy Department—“prodding them up all the time,” as he put it—and he seemed to win everything he wanted. In regular contact with Danenhower via telegraph, De Long oversaw every detail of the Jeannette’s reconstruction from afar, while also communicating almost daily with Bennett in Paris. “A word from San Francisco is enough to enlighten me and I immediately open fire on the Department,” he wrote the publisher. Bennett, in turn, cabled back that he was pleased that “you are getting your way in Washington.”
All in all, De Long was tremendously pleased with his efforts. Secretary Thompson promised to intervene when necessary to prevent the Mare Island engineers from making frivolous or exorbitant repairs on the Jeannette. Thompson also said the Navy would provide a man-of-war to haul extra coal and other provisions as far as Alaska, “if there is a suitable ship at San Francisco at the time.”
In short, everything De Long had sought by traveling east was coming to pass. Washington, it seemed, was opening up to him and his expedition—not only the Navy Department but Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, even the White House. One night the De Longs were invited to meet with President Rutherford B. Hayes and the First Lady. Emma thought the president a “quiet, pleasant gentleman who did not impress me very much”—a description that more or less mirrors what everyone said about the milquetoast Ohioan. A Civil War hero, wounded five times, he had been elected—some said “appointed”—in one of the most acrimonious presidential elections in American history, losing the popular vote but winning the White House only after Congress awarded the Republican candidate twenty disputed electoral votes. (Because of this, many Democrats refused to consider his presidency legitimate, calling him “Rutherfraud.”)
The De Longs’ meeting with President Hayes was largely a pro forma affair. “He knew nothing about Arctic exploration,” Emma said, “and was only doing his duty in having us.” If the evening seemed dreary, it may have been partly the result of First Lady Lucy Hayes and her alcohol-free pol
icy—a policy that had earned her the sobriquet “Lemonade Lucy.” (It was said that in the Hayeses’ temperate White House, “water flowed like wine.”)
Given how bored President Hayes seemed by the coming polar expedition, Emma hoped that the marginally more vivacious Mrs. Hayes would rescue their little soiree, “but even she did not manage to make the evening very exciting.” As the De Longs took their leave, Lucy presented them with a large formal bouquet, a gesture that Emma appreciated but found extremely “stiff.”
A FEW DAYS later, De Long finally met the man who would serve as the Jeannette’s physician, James Ambler. The Navy doctor came over to the Ebbitt House and introduced himself. De Long liked him immediately, but Dr. Ambler, it turned out, had bad news to report: He had discreetly done some medical sleuthing into the case of John Danenhower’s “disordered intellect,” and the situation appeared much more troubling than De Long had realized.
Ambler had visited the Government Hospital for the Insane, where he’d interviewed physicians who had treated Danenhower for “melancholia.” They seemed to think it highly likely that Danenhower’s insanity would recur, especially in an environment as harsh as the Arctic.
Then Ambler had dug a little deeper. At the Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, he’d found Danenhower’s medical logs from his time aboard the Portsmouth, the ship on which he’d been serving, near Hawaii, when his condition first emerged, in 1875. These records indicated that Danenhower had been declared “unfit for duty,” noting that in addition to suffering from a debilitating depression, he was also afflicted with neck abscesses. (These unsightly lesions, Ambler thought, could possibly be an indication that Danenhower had syphilis—and, in fact, the Portsmouth’s physician noted that their genesis was “not in the line of duty.”) The physician went on to note that the “gloomy” and “despondent” Danenhower “repeatedly expressed to me that he had a strong inclination to jump overboard and end his misery.”
In the Kingdom of Ice Page 13
