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

by Hampton Sides

Late at night, sometimes fueled with brandy, he would take out his four-in-hand carriage and careen wild-eyed down the moonlit turnpikes around Manhattan. Alert bystanders tended to be both puzzled and shocked by these nocturnal escapades, for Bennett nearly always raced in the nude.

It was Bennett who, in 1870, had sent Henry Stanley to find the missionary-explorer David Livingstone in remote Africa. Never mind that Livingstone had not exactly needed finding.

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.”

an idée fixe that tickled the human fancy. It had to be true.

The notion of a safe, warm place at the roof of the globe—an oasis in a desert of ice, a polar utopia—seems to have been deeply embedded in the human psyche. 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. The Greeks believed in a realm called Hyperborea that lay far to the north. A place of eternal spring where the sun never set, Hyperborea was said to be bordered by the mighty River Okeanos and the Riphean Mountains, where lived the griffins—formidable beasts that were half lion and half eagle.

The notion that Saint Nicholas—a.k.a. Kris Kringle or Santa Claus—lives at the North Pole seems to have a much more recent vintage. The earliest known reference to Saint Nick’s polar residence comes from a Thomas Nast cartoon in an 1866 issue of Harper’s Weekly—the artist captioned a collection of his Yuletide engravings “Santa Claussville, N.P.” Still, the larger idea behind Nast’s conceit—of a warm, jolly, beneficent place at the apex of the world where people might live—had ancient roots, and it spoke to America’s consuming fascination with the North Pole throughout the 1800s.

James Gordon Bennett Jr. liked to give the impression that he had sprung fully formed into the world—an original creature, with no past, no allegiances, indebted to no one. But to understand his extraordinary place in the social milieu of New York, as well as in the rough-and-tumble world of American newspapers, one has to reach back and recognize the equally extraordinary career of his father, James Gordon Bennett Sr.

He was fearless, and he loved playing the role of a bothersome Jeremiah.

While the financial pages of rival papers often turned a blind eye to shenanigans on Wall Street, Bennett Sr.’s Herald regularly published investigations into the latest stock market frauds and scams.

Standing beside the grand piano, he unbuttoned his trousers and, in plain view of the guests, began to relieve himself, arcing a stream into the innards of the instrument.

What business was it of anyone else’s how and where James Gordon Bennett Jr. chose to empty his bladder?

Fifth Avenue hostesses decided that they “did not care to entertain a fellow who apparently had not been housebroken,” said one Bennett biographer.

Yet he grew only more stubborn in the face of contrary evidence provided by men who had been to the Arctic.

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.

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.

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.”)

Arc lighting, which involved sending a high-voltage current across a small gap between two carbon bars, produced a light that was extremely bright but also extremely harsh. Robert Louis Stevenson detested the welder’s-torch glare thrown by the arc lamp. “A new sort of urban star now shines out nightly,” he wrote. “Horrible, unearthly, obnoxious to the human eye; a lamp for a nightmare!”

Here was a cool man sitting on a warm pot of money.

In the summer of 1871, thirty-two whaling vessels, carrying more than a thousand men, had entered the pack north of the Bering Sea and were destroyed.

“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.”

Then, too, Collins had an Irishman’s well-honed sense of persecution—once slighted, he could not easily shake it off.

The food that might save you could be stored in a container that might kill you.

“One touch of nature makes all the world kin,

WHAT, PRECISELY, HAD happened on St. Lawrence Island? Many whalers suspected an epidemic of some kind, but others believed the mass death was caused by the complete failure of the Yupiks’ hunt in the summer and fall of 1878—which, in turn, was caused by an abundance of rum and whiskey illegally sold to the St. Lawrence Islanders by American traffickers. With alcohol around, Yupik life had ground to a halt—“as long as the rum lasts,” wrote Hooper, “they do nothing but drink and fight.” Drunkenness, said Muir, had “rendered them careless about the laying up of ordinary supplies of food for the winter.” Indeed, near one of the huts, Hooper counted eight empty whiskey casks. Then an extremely severe winter followed, with far more ice than usual, which made it harder to find seals and whales. By early 1879, the Yupiks all over St. Lawrence Island had begun to starve.

Over the previous decade, American whalers in the Arctic, seeking to augment the value of their cargo, had turned to harvesting walruses in astoundingly high numbers. Throughout the 1870s, American whaling vessels had taken as many as 125,000 walruses from the Bering Strait region. The slaughter had proved to be a lucrative sideline to the whaling business. The whalers cooked the animal’s blubber into oil and hacked off the tusks to sell in ivory markets as far away as England and China. In a single season in 1876, more than 35,000 Bering walruses were killed. Compared to the risky rigors of Arctic whaling, “walrusing” could be ridiculously easy. Rather than wielding lances and harpoons from tippy open boats, the whalers had discovered that they could simply clomp onto the ice with rifles and shoot large numbers of walruses point-blank in the head. Then the butchering, flensing, and boiling could begin. Firing up their try-pots aboard ship, the whalers could render more than twenty gallons of oil from the blubber of a single mature bull. In less than a decade, this industrially efficient slaughter had largely destroyed the Yupiks’ primary source of food and the seasonal hunting life upon which it was based. 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 stapl...

JOHN MUIR WAS haunted by what he experienced on St. Lawrence Island.

The systematic introduction of just a few things—repeating rifles, booze, money, industrial methods of dismantling animal flesh—had caused the native cultures of Alaska to collapse at record speed.

This system of smaller crews would be the defining idea for the long march home. Each team hauled together, rested together, cooked together, ate together, slept together, and, if necessary, would die together. De Long was quite deliberate about the arrangement. He hoped to inject an element of esprit de corps, of group loyalty, into this great effort: A man wouldn’t want to let his fellows down, and he’d want his own gang to outperform the other gangs. Clever in its simplicity, it was a system that tapped into pride of person but also pride in the group.

Melville found Newcomb “neither useful nor ornamental.”

“You have the whole Russian nation at your back.”

“Will you be a close companion to my husband? You know how lonely a commanding officer must necessarily be.” The surgeon had said he would, and he made good on his vow to the end. De Long and Ambler had died side by side.

She would need to console the loved ones of those who had died, and to fight for medals, commendations, and pensions. Whether she liked it or not, she was, she realized, the public face of the Jeannette expedition. Perhaps for the rest of her life, she would play the role of Explorer’s Wife.

“as long as I have a piece of ice to stand on.”

Melville presided over an expansive redesign of the fleet, largely completing its conversion from wood to metal, and from wind to steam power. When he retired, in 1903, the U.S. Navy boasted one of the most powerful modernized fleets in the world.