After the Jeannette, no other Arctic explorer undertook an expedition with a serious intention of meeting an open polar sea. Yet one prominent explorer, Norway’s Fridtjof Nansen, did deliberately lock himself in the ice above Siberia in an attempt to re-create the Jeannette’s drift. He had read that in 1885, an article of George De Long’s sealskin clothing had washed up on the coast of southwest Greenland, having followed the currents of the pack on a slow, deliberate journey of four years and five thousand miles—passing over, or at least very near, the North Pole. Surmising that this relic’s
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