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

by Hampton Sides

“If I do not succeed,” he wrote, “it will be a grand thing to add my name to the list of those who have tried.”

They had a most peculiar and interesting way of doing things, he thought. The Americans seemed to ignore hierarchy and the stifling weight of ages. In supple and energetic ways, they could combine national interest with commercial interest, government sponsorship with private funding, military glory with civic pride.

As would later be revealed, he also had an incorrigible weakness for puns.

So it begins...

At other times, Collins, tepidly at first, would try out a few puns on the crew. Once the floodgates opened, the waters flowed: Collins could not stop himself. “Some of them were good,” De Long judged, “and some wretchedly poor.” Just as often, his puns were incomprehensible, turning on a joke, perhaps Irish in origin, that the others just didn’t get. “For a while we steadily refused to see his puns,” De Long wrote, “and would all look at him as innocently and inquiringly as babies when he got one off, asking him to explain it two or three times over, until he finally exclaimed that our intellects must be weakening in proportion as we increased our distance from San Francisco. Now, however, we let him pun away, praise the good ones, and condemn the bad.”

But the Irish punster had the worst time of it. “Poor Collins was so sick that he could easily have lost his mother and not have known it,” De Long wrote; though, he noted brightly, “His puns died out for a few days.” Yet much to the captain’s regret, as the Jeannette approached St. Michael, a restored Collins was “getting back to them again.”

Collins truly was an expert on weather, but what he seemed to care most about was the “science” of puns, and by now he had exhausted his repertoire. The men had grown sick of his wordplay—“You give me an earache!” Newcomb had cried at one point—and yet Collins wouldn’t quit.

But the men somehow managed to persuade Collins to take charge of a minstrel show being planned for New Year’s Day. Collins loved the idea. He would choreograph the show, write the scenes and intervening narrations—and sprinkle the thing with all the puns he wanted.

Collins began the show with a prologue in which he read some “conundrums,” as he called them. They were groaners of the first order, but his crewmates were so glad to see him back in action that nobody cared. “Why,” said Collins, “is that stanchion like Mr. James Gordon Bennett?” Why? “Because it supports the house.” “And why do you suppose it is that the USS Jeannette will never run out of fuel?” “Because we have Cole on board!” Collins went on in this vein, ignoring the guffaws, eventually incorporating every member of the Jeannette into a riddle or a rhyme.

At least in his lonesome misery, Collins had stopped making puns.

Oh no...

“He’s as tough as well-tanned leather,” Collins had written in one of his rhymes, “and worth any common three men rolled together.”