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

by Hampton Sides

Running out of coal to fuel the steam engine, he was forced to improvise, burning slabs of pork in the furnace.

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.

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.

For a time, Bennett took up with a Russian mistress who went by the name “Madame A” and was said to be the “most disagreeable woman in Paris society.”

Petermann’s Anstalt had long been a kind of clearinghouse for the latest geographic knowledge. Exploration fueled his atlases; his atlases, in turn, fueled exploration. The Latin motto of his magazine was Ubique terrarum—“All around the world”—and the slogan was often accompanied by the ancient ouroboros symbol, a serpent consuming its own tail. The image reflected the kind of circular reasoning that lay at the heart of Petermann’s enterprise at Gotha: Knowledge of the world would feed ever more knowledge of the world.

He recommended, for example, that explorers kidnap at least one male and one female Eskimo from every High Arctic native tribe they encountered and bring them back, in the fashion of Noah’s ark, so that scientists might study the captives and send them on tour for the viewing public.

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. “Such notions strike the modern reader as so unlikely, so spectacularly counterintuitive, and in retrospect so wrong that they seem to border upon the deranged.”

He’d then led a study into the feasibility of using submarines to sabotage the British navy.

A fifty-seven-year-old man from New Bedford, Massachusetts, Nye had been a whaler since he was nine, and he had a reputation as a nearly miraculous survivor of the high seas. He had been shipwrecked three times in the Arctic and had once drifted for twenty-one days in a lifeboat across the South Pacific, losing seventy pounds of his body weight.

The Arctic was a peculiar place, he said. “No doubt we’ll lose our sense of proportion. Please be lenient in your judgment of us.”

By the time these devastating findings were released, De Long had sailed from San Francisco, and thus he never saw them. They called into question nearly all the scientific theories on which the Jeannette expedition was based—theories that had been endlessly reaffirmed in the popular imagination. (After the Jeannette set sail, the Herald had declared that it was “undebatable that a warm current of water from the Pacific flows into the Arctic Ocean at Bering Strait.”) But as the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey results were showing, there was no warm current tunneling under the ice cap. There was no thermometric gateway to the pole. And, likely, there was no Open Polar Sea. The theories of Silas Bent, Matthew Fontaine Maury, and the late August Petermann were resoundingly wrong.

It was New Year’s Eve 1880, and the USS Jeannette was still locked in the ice. For a brief time, in the hottest days of August, it had seemed she might break free from her prison, but then the ice closed up again, as implacable as ever. They had been trapped in the pack for sixteen months now and had drifted thirteen hundred miles—far enough to reach the pole and well beyond.

Speaking through a Chukchi translator who spoke passable “whaler English” (“three quarters profanity and nearly one quarter slang,” according to Muir),

De Long and his men understood the fragility of their predicament: Their only hope was a place with a reputation for hopelessness.

Yet in back of the desolation and despair, the men also felt a kind of relief. They had been locked in the pack for twenty-one months, but now their period of inaction, of waiting and wondering in hapless drift, of suffering the tedium of a monotone imprisonment, was finally over. They knew what lay before them. They had only a few months to save themselves. They realized they were facing an epic struggle for survival—and yet they were anxious to get going.

Wrangel was a place specially made for polar bears, Muir thought (and that remains true today—it is the largest polar bear denning ground in the world).

When the pharaohs were constructing the pyramids, elephants were walking around on Wrangel: This was the last place on earth where woolly mammoths lived. A dwarf subspecies thrived here as late as 1700 B.C.E., more than six thousand years after mammoth populations elsewhere became extinct.

The men tried to put the best face on things for their country’s birthday. American flags fluttered over the tents. A bottle of brandy came out of hiding. Lauterbach tooted his harmonica, bringing on howls from the dogs, who cowered under the lee of the upturned whaleboats.

From the place of the Jeannette’s sinking, they had covered nearly a thousand miles—though most of the men, having backtracked multiple times across the ice cap to haul belongings, actually had trekked a distance in excess of twenty-five hundred miles.

They could never be sure whether the river they were following was the river—not some subsidiary stream that might fray or peter out into an impassable bog. On Petermann’s chart, this country was labeled SWAMP OVER ETERNALLY FROZEN LAND.

In the coldest hours of the night, their breaths froze in the air and drifted to the ground in glittery clouds, which, according to local tribesmen, made a faint tinkling melody called “the whisper of the stars.” (The coldest temperature ever recorded in the Northern Hemisphere, ninety degrees below zero Fahrenheit, would later be captured at a Soviet weather station to the east of the Lena.) Nindemann and Noros moved steadily and determinedly, but they were too weak to move swiftly. They averaged about thirteen miles a day. Noros spat up blood and began to entertain ideas of shooting himself. In his lowest moments, only thoughts of his family back in Fall River, Massachusetts, kept him from taking his life.

A week into their journey, they had grown so weak that they often could not make forward progress against the force of the wind.

He could see that these two raccoon-eyed wraiths had tasted the fumes of their own death.