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October 5 - November 9, 2025
With the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, the western frontier was closing—or at least its conquest was reaching a different phase, one that consisted less of adventurous exploration and more of the messy backfill work of occupation and settlement.
Bennett may have been New York’s most eligible bachelor; he was also New York’s moodiest brat.
The magnitude of the previous generation’s sacrifice made young men like De Long feel inadequate—and irredeemably green. If De Long could not win glory on fields of battle, then perhaps he could earn it in fields of ice.
Layer by layer, decade by decade, scientists and thinkers had contributed to the plausibility, the probability, and finally the certainty of this chimerical notion. No amount of contrary evidence could dislodge it from the collective imagination.
There was a desperation in these explanations, like trying to prove the existence of God by employing elaborate teleological arguments.
It was extraordinary how much energy had been expended over the centuries in attempts to explain a thing that, although widely believed, had never been seen.
But Markham’s naysaying was a minority view; the Open Polar Sea was a collective obsession, 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.
Yes, exactly like belief in imaginary deities.
It was here, at the Centennial Exhibition, that the American masses were introduced to a new condiment called Heinz ketchup, to a fizzy sassafras concoction sold under the name Hires Root Beer, and to the perfect novelty of a tropical fruit, served in foil with a fork, known as a banana.
When it came to the Arctic, Petermann was a man “with an undeviating affinity for the wrong guess,” noted David Thomas Murphy, a historian of German Arctic exploration.
(The Brits, through hard experience, had begun to abandon the idea of sailing to the pole; thinking there was nothing but ice up there, Markham and other leading British advocates of exploration believed sledges and supply depots, not ships, would provide the way to the top.)
The portal De Long was aiming for offered “no real gate of entrance into the Arctic Ocean,” he said. “The North Pacific Ocean has, practically speaking, no northern outlet; Bering Straits is but a cul de sac.”
The maps could now be altered: WRANGEL LAND had been demoted; it was now just WRANGEL ISLAND.
Said the captain: “I pronounce a thermometric gateway to the North Pole a delusion and a snare.”
The Jeannette expedition had thus begun to shed its organizing ideas, in all their unfounded romance, and to replace them with a reckoning of the way the Arctic truly was. This, in turn, led De Long to the gradual understanding that an endlessly more perilous voyage lay ahead. They might reach the North Pole yet, but almost certainly they were not going to sail there.
On another day, a huge flock of eider ducks, estimated to be more than five hundred, arrowed across the sky, flying low toward the north.
the Paleocrystic Sea. It was the product of millennia’s smashing churn of the elements acting on freezing and frozen and thawing and refreezing ice. One could stare at it all day and never see coherence. Needle ice gave way to striped puddles, to thick driven snow, to rippled pockets of new ice, to mires of goop, to lagoons of open water, to ruined battlefields of shards and bricks, to spectral blue sculptures of ancient ice, and to the wind-whipped corrugations of snow that the Russians called sastrugi.
De Long was able to chalk up another one in the long tally of August Petermann’s dangerously wrong ideas: The late cartographer’s theory that the ice pack was a limitless source of fresh water, De Long said, “has been thoroughly exploded.”
Seldom had they even been charged with a crime; they had simply been issued an “administrative order” and sent east to live out their lives in a prison without bars. The land itself was harsh and vast enough to detain them. Their stories were beyond tragic, and they made Melville realize that the Jeannette’s tale of woe was all but swallowed in a land of limitless sorrow.
