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

by Hampton Sides

An eminent German geographer named Ernst Behm compared humanity’s ignorance of what lay at the poles to the insatiable curiosity felt by a home owner who doesn’t know what his own attic looks like.

Americans, slowly emerging from the devastation of the Civil War, yearned to prove themselves on the international stage. Polar exploration, some suggested, could help unify the divided country—it was an endeavor that everyone, North and South, could agree on. An ambitious expedition of discovery provided a way for the still-mending republic to flex her power in a quasi-military, but ultimately peaceful, way.

in the 1870s, attention was shifting away from finding the Northwest Passage and more toward the goal of reaching the North Pole itself, as an object of pure, abstract exploration.

in 1867, the United States had purchased Alaska from the czar for the paltry sum of $7.2 million, and this enormous new frontier lay untapped and largely unknown. Thus the national movement west, having reached California, had taken a right turn and become a movement north.

De Long believed in the idea with such conviction that he was prepared to risk his career and even his life on it, for he knew that if he could take it out of the realm of the theoretical and into the world of fact, he would be judged one of the greatest exploratory heroes of all time. The idea, widely believed by the world’s leading scientists and geographers, went like this: The weather wasn’t especially cold at the North Pole, at least not in summer. On the contrary, the dome of the world was covered in a shallow, warm, ice-free sea whose waters could be smoothly sailed, much as one might sail across the Caribbean or the Mediterranean. This tepid Arctic basin teemed with marine life—and was, quite possibly, home to a lost civilization. Cartographers were so sure of its existence that they routinely depicted it on their maps, often labeling the top of the globe, matter-of-factly, OPEN POLAR SEA.

Many improbable ideas had been floated to explain the Open Polar Sea.

There was a desperation in these explanations, like trying to prove the existence of God by employing elaborate teleological arguments.

Visitors from other countries were enchanted by the technological prowess marshaled in Machinery Hall—and, specifically, in the Corliss engine. Something was happening in America, some new energy, an efflorescence of native talent. An American style of manufacturing seemed to be emerging—one that relied on automation, on interchangeable parts, on machine-made machines that fed still other machines. The Times of London gushed, “The American invents as the Greek sculpted and the Italian painted: it is genius.” Other English observers struck notes of quiet despair. “If we are to be judged by the comparison with the Americans in 1876,” a prominent British engineer named John Anderson wrote in an official report on the Centennial Exhibition, “it would be to confirm … that we are losing our former leadership and it is passing to the Americans.”

The hum of George Corliss’s Centennial Steam Engine was music to the German professor’s ears. Americans, it seemed, now had the technology to produce a motor that could propel mankind to the North Pole.