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

by Hampton Sides

The North Pole. The top of the world. The acme, the apogee, the apex. It was a magnetic region but also a magnetic idea. It loomed as a public fixation and a planetary enigma—as alluring and unknown as the surface of Venus or Mars. The North Pole was both a physical place and a geographer’s abstraction, a pinpointable location where curved lines met on the map. It was a spot on the globe where, if you could stand there, any direction you headed in would be, by definition, south. It was a place of perpetual darkness for one half of the year and perpetual sunlight for the other. There, in a sense, chronology stood still, for at the pole all the time zones of the world converged.

The North Pole. The top of the world. The acme, the apogee, the apex. It was a magnetic region but also a magnetic idea. It loomed as a public fixation and a planetary enigma—as alluring and unknown as the surface of Venus or Mars. The North Pole was both a physical place and a geographer’s abstraction, a pinpointable location where curved lines met on the map. It was a spot on the globe where, if you could stand there, any direction you headed in would be, by definition, south. It was a place of perpetual darkness for one half of the year and perpetual sunlight for the other. There, in a sense, chronology stood still, for at the pole all the time zones of the world converged.

up … We have a good crew, good food, and a good ship, and I think we have the right kind of stuff to dare all that man can do.

“He never imagined that he was to win a high reputation by some happy turn of fortune. He belonged to the men who have cared for great things, not to bring themselves honor, but because doing great things could alone satisfy their natures.

“Like every event in life,” he said, this cruise may be divided into two parts: That which has been and that which is to be. We are about to turn our backs on the old year and turn our faces toward the new. During the past sixteen months we have drifted thirteen-hundred miles. Danger has confronted us each day. We have been squeezed and jammed, tossed and tumbled, nipped and pressed, until the ship’s hull would have burst had it not been as strong as the hearts it held within. We have pumped a leaking ship for a year and kept her habitable. And we are all still here. We face the future with the firm hope of doing something worthy of ourselves, and worthy of the flag that floats above us. We are not yet daunted.

As far as Muir could see, the native Aleuts had been virtually ruined by their contact with “civilization,” first Russian and now American. Whalers, sealers, and representatives of the fur companies had introduced them to new vices while sapping the vitality from their old ways of doing things. “After paying old debts contracted with the Companies,” Muir wrote, the Aleuts “invest the remainder in trinkets, in clothing not so good as their own furs, and in beer, and go at once into hoggish dissipation, hair-pulling, wife-beating, etc. In a few years their health becomes impaired, they become less successful in hunting, their children are neglected and die, and they go to ruin generally.

“One touch of nature makes all the world kin,