In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

by Hampton Sides

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.”

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.”

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.’

The Vikings spoke of a place at the world’s northern rim, sometimes called Ultima Thule, where the oceans emptied into a vast hole that recharged all the springs and rivers on the earth.

But the most extraordinary thing about Machinery Hall was the great motor that powered everything else. The Grand Central Engine, sometimes simply called the Centennial Steam Engine, was the largest engine in the world. Weighing more than 650 tons, constructed by the brilliant American engineer George Corliss, it supplied free steam power, via a network of underground shafts totaling a mile in length, to the more than eight thousand smaller machines on display throughout the hall.

Walt Whitman sat down in front of the elegant monstrosity and stared at it for a half hour without uttering a word.

Sacrifice for the sake of discovery was infinitely more rewarding to humanity than sacrifice in battlefield trenches. “I hardly believe that this great work will be brought to its conclusion without the loss of ships and human lives,” he wrote. “[But] why should thousands of noble lives be slaughtered only in inhumane wars? Is not such a great affair also worth a few lives?”

In 1869, he came up with the idea of sending a reporter to search for David Livingstone in Africa, and he is said to have dispatched young Henry Morton Stanley with an almost laughably laconic command: “Find Livingstone.” Stanley did, of course, and the exclusives he sent back expanded the Herald’s circulation even further.

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.

The North Water

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.

On the spar deck, the engineers installed a steam-powered winch that, in times of heavy ice, could hoist the rudder and propeller out of harm’s way. The winch could also be used to “warp” the ship—that is, to advance the vessel, by means of ropes or chains attached to ice anchors, through leads in the pack. The Mare Island machinists built two new state-of-the-art boilers and installed a desalination apparatus that could distill more than five hundred gallons of fresh water a day.

“He never imagined that he was to win a high reputation by some happy turn of fortune. He belonged to the men who have cared for great things, not to bring themselves honor, but because doing great things could alone satisfy their natures.”

“Well, then,” he said, “put her into the ice and let her drift, and you may get through. Or, you may go to the devil—and the chances are about equal.”

Captain Nye

time of “mallemaroking,” as the whalers called their drunken sprees.

They were a cross section of Gilded Age America—which meant an immigrant America, tough, self-reliant men who were hopeful and hungry for lives better than the ones they’d left behind in the Old World. There were Germans, two Danes, two Irishmen, a Finn, a Scot, a Norwegian, a Russian. There were French-Americans, Dutch-Americans, a few Scotch-Irish, and three Chinese.

Syphilis was a strange and pernicious disease that manifested itself in countless maladies of the body and mind. It often masqueraded as some other disease—and did it so well that doctors often called it the Great Imposter.

Ambler treated Danenhower with a shot of mercury in his buttocks, a standard, if dubious, treatment for syphilis at the time that had numerous deleterious side effects. (A dictum common among doctors went: “One night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury.”)

The most famous, or soon to be famous, scientific eminence on board the Corwin was a Scottish-born botanist who had lately been studying the role that glaciers had played in the sculpting of Yosemite Valley. A wiry man with a shaggy red beard and the burning blue eyes of a half-crazed bard, he regularly wrote for the San Francisco Evening Bulletin—although, in his deepest soul, he was a poet. His name was John Muir.

By the 1880s, the walrus was nearly extinct in large swaths of the Bering Sea. It was the Arctic version of a story already well known to Americans, the story of the buffalo and the Indians of the Great Plains. Here, as there, the wholesale slaughter of a people’s staple prey had led, in a few short years, to ruinous dislocations, terrible dependencies—and a cultural apocalypse.

repeating rifles, booze, money, industrial methods of dismantling animal flesh—had caused the native cultures

They were headed, said Muir, for the “top-most, frost-killed end of creation.”

When the pharaohs were constructing the pyramids, elephants were walking around on Wrangel: This was the last place on earth where woolly mammoths lived. A dwarf subspecies thrived here as late as 1700 B.C.E.,

Melville found Newcomb “neither useful nor ornamental.

the raven, the dark bird of winter, cleaves the somber sky with slow-laboring wing, and marks the track of his solitary flight by a long line of thin vapor.”

“Is it said that too high a price in the lives of men was paid for this knowledge?” she asked. “Not by such calculation is human endeavor measured. Sacrifice is nobler than ease, unselfish life is consummated in lonely death, and the world is richer by the gift of suffering.”

Today, the George W. Melville Award is the Navy’s highest honor for accomplishments in nautical engineering.

AFTER WINNING MEDALS and Navy commendations, Charles Tong Sing turned to a life of gambling and crime, resulting in several prison terms. As the head a powerful Chinese criminal syndicate in New York, he was said to be responsible for at least six murders; he became known as Scarface Charley, in reference to a five-inch facial scar from an injury he sustained aboard the Jeannette. An 1883 article in the New York Times noted, “Recently he gained an unenviable notoriety in Chinatown through his ferocity and physical prowess, and has been suspected of a number of bold and very adroit robberies.” Later in life, Charley Tong Sing went clean and reportedly ran a Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles, worked as a court interpreter, and briefly served as a policeman in Portland, Oregon. The circumstances of his death are unknown.