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

by Hampton Sides

THE SECOND-IN-COMMAND ABOARD the Juniata was a young lieutenant from New York City named George De Long. Twenty-eight years old, his keen blue-gray eyes framed by pince-nez glasses, De Long was a man in a hurry to do great things.

De Long’s disdain for the polar landscape soon wore off. As the Juniata crossed the Arctic Circle and pressed ever farther up the ragged west coast of the world’s largest island, something began to take hold of him. He became more and more intrigued by the Arctic, by its lonely grandeur, by its mirages and strange tricks of light, its mock moons and blood-red halos, its thick, misty atmospheres, which altered and magnified sounds, leaving the impression that one was living under a dome. He felt as though he were breathing rarefied air.

Maher said he had “never witnessed a more glorious scene … Looking abroad on the immense fields of ice, glittering in the rays of the sun, and the thousands of huge, craggy icebergs as they sulkily floated out into Baffin’s Bay, one became awed by the dreadful majesty of the elements, and wondered how it would be possible to avoid being crushed to atoms.”

The complexity of the High Arctic spread before him like a riddle. He had never felt so alive, so engaged in the moment. He realized that he was becoming what the Arctic scientists liked to call a “pagophile”—a creature that is happiest in the ice.

After a round-trip journey of more than eight hundred miles, the Little Juniata reunited with her mother ship in mid-August. Captain Braine had all but given up on the little steam launch, but now De Long was welcomed aboard the Juniata as a lost hero. “The ship was wild with excitement,” De Long wrote, “the men manning the rigging and cheering us. When I stepped over the side, so buried in furs as to be almost invisible, they made as much fuss over me as if I had risen from the dead, and when the Captain shook hands with me he was trembling from head to foot.”

JAMES GORDON BENNETT’S most original contribution to modern journalism could be found in his notion that a newspaper should not merely report stories; it should create them.

THE HERALD REPORT was written in an even tone. Its authors had peppered it with intimate details and filled the roster of victims with the names of real, in some cases quite prominent, New Yorkers. But the story was entirely a hoax.

The direction that most interested Gordon Bennett, though, was north. He sensed that the greatest mysteries lay in that direction, under the midnight sun. The fur-cloaked men who ventured into the Arctic had become national idols—the aviators, the astronauts, the knights-errant of their day.

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.

This puzzle had driven Charles Hall nearly insane with wonder. Before venturing on the Polaris expedition, he had written, “There is a great, sad blot upon the present age & this is the blank on our maps & artificial globes from about the parallel 80° North up to the North Pole. I, for one, hang my head in shame when I think how many thousands of years ago it was that God gave to man this beautiful world—the whole of it—to subdue, & yet that part of it that must be most interesting and glorious remains as unknown to us as though it had never been created.”

There was a riddle of geography to solve, and personal glory to be won. But the quest was ultimately about something even more elemental and atavistic: to reach the farthest place, the ne plus ultra, where no human had been before.

America’s desire to push north could be considered, in some ways, an extension of Manifest Destiny, the country’s pioneering surge toward the west.

When the Times reporter asked him how he had pulled off his upset, he was at a loss for words. “Oh, I am always walking, you know, more or less,” he said. Bennett and Whipple shared a light meal at the Jerome Park clubhouse and then headed back to Manhattan—leaving the followers of the race to collect what was later estimated to be $50,000 in bets.

To James Gordon Bennett Jr., life was a perpetual escapade, a test of wits, a bravura performance. Bennett liked fast walking, fast ships, fast carriages, fast women, fast decisions, fast communications, and any bold new development or design that promised to quicken the pulse of the national blood.

He was “Bennett the Terrible, the mad Commodore, the autocrat of the transatlantic cables,” one biographer wrote; he saw himself as “one of the lords of creation.” A longtime Herald editor later remarked of his boss that he “was a ruler over a domain of romance; he himself at times a romantic ruler. If impulse called he obeyed, and no rule existed but to be broken.”

America’s newest Arctic hero was a young man of myriad talents and deep contradictions. Emma De Long thought there was within her husband an “incessant friction”—a contrast between impetuosity and patient striving, between a love for adventure and a compulsion to accomplish something ambitious and sustained. De Long could be a romantic, sometimes an extravagant one. He had what Emma called “a hungry heart.” But he willingly confined himself for most of his life to a straitjacket of absolute discipline.

Throughout his career, De Long would prove to be a man unafraid to badger his superiors in order to get things done. “He got what he wanted,” Emma said, “because he dared to ask for it.”

Mostly, she entertained doubts, fed by her father (a former steamship captain himself), about the hardships of being married to a naval officer; she was not certain she could endure the long absences, the doubt-ridden interludes, the years of hypothetical companionship. She saw for herself a life of waiting.

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.

Arguments supporting the Open Polar Sea were “all so obviously fabulous,” Markham scoffed, “that it is astonishing how any sane man could have been found to give credit to them.” But Markham’s naysaying was a minority view; the Open Polar Sea was a collective obsession, an idée fixe that tickled the human fancy. It had to be true.

The confluence of these two mighty oceanic currents, Bent argued, was what kept the Open Polar Sea warm and ice-free. As Bent saw it, the Kuro Siwo and the Gulf Stream reflected a graceful planetary symmetry; they were dual strands of a massive distribution system that transferred heat from the tropics to the northern regions, from the Torrid Zones to the Frigid Zones. The earth, Bent reasoned, was like a rarefied organism, with its own exquisitely designed circulatory system.

THE THEORIES OF Silas Bent and Matthew Fontaine Maury, while buttressed by the science of their day, tapped into wellsprings of myth, fable, and belief. Variations of the Open Polar Sea idea had existed since prehistoric times. The notion of a safe, warm place at the roof of the globe—an oasis in a desert of ice, a polar utopia—seems to have been deeply embedded in the human psyche.

In the 1820s, a colorful crank from Ohio named John Cleves Symmes Jr. toured the United States, arguing that there were large holes at the North and South Poles that connected to networks of probably inhabited subterranean cavities. Scientists scoffed, but his “holes at the poles” concept, encapsulated in his best-selling book Symmes’ Theory of the Concentric Spheres, struck a chord with large audiences and eventually helped influence Congress, in 1836, to appropriate $300,000 for an ambitious voyage toward the South Pole.

“Who shall say,” Putnam’s concluded, “that within the Arctic circle, there may not yet be found some vestige of humanity—some fragment of our race, wafted thither by these mighty currents we have heard of, whose cry of welcome is yet to greet the mariner who finds them, and amongst whom there may be found some of God’s elect?”

Bennett was unlike any other publisher in the world. A playboy, a breakneck sportsman, and an absolute autocrat, he had a high-wire management style that drove reporters crazy but often spurred them to find extraordinary stories under impossible deadline pressures.

THE BENNETT-MAY AFFAIR has been called the last formal duel fought in the United States. If that claim seems doubtful, certainly it was one of the last, and, because of the prominence of the individuals involved, it drew a great deal of scrutiny across the nation and the world.

Yet there was something wacky about August Petermann. Many of his views on the Arctic were, we now know, absurdly off base, or just odd. 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.”

If Petermann was an Anglophile at heart, England had nonetheless rejected him. This had partly to do with burgeoning nationalism and xenophobia in England after the rise of Bismarck and the Franco-Prussian War. It also had to do with style: The leading explorers and Arctic thinkers in Great Britain didn’t like Petermann.

De Long liked the fact that the Pandora was a former Royal Navy ship. Up until that time, most of the exploration in the Arctic had been undertaken by the Admiralty. De Long was fairly in awe of the English legacy in this arena, and as an officer in a weakling navy, he felt a certain reverence toward a nation that had long exerted such a sweeping and sophisticated command of the seas. He found something satisfying about the notion that he, an American, might command a former Royal Navy gunship in the High Arctic—as though the exploration torch were being handed off, across the Atlantic, to a younger, hungrier aspirant.

Bennett was strangely bashful around large groups of people and uncomfortable with the spotlight even when the spotlight was manifestly his. He was like a disinterested watchmaker, the sort of man who preferred to set situations in motion—and then sit back and amuse himself with the results.

FROM THE STANDPOINT of the sea gods, rechristening the Pandora could be seen as a dubious exercise. As though her original mythological name weren’t already heavy enough, a superstition had long held among some mariners that no ship should ever be renamed.

“I would have preferred not being called upon,” De Long said. “You, Mr. Stanley, have the right to speak—you’ve accomplished your task. Mine is still before me.” As De Long had always said, he did not wish to make any promises “to achieve wonders. We have hard work ahead of us, and no romance. While we may be gone three years, we may be gone for eternity.”

By now, Petermann had become the guiding spirit behind the expedition—its primary theoretician, its éminence grise. While neither De Long nor Bennett took Petermann’s word as gospel, the professor’s ideas had come to form the scientific and intellectual framework for the whole enterprise.

Emma and George whiled away most of their evenings on deck, luxuriating in the tropical air. She would never forget those October nights spent together—“the brilliant southern constellations, the ship sailing along smoothly, the steward whistling so softly we scarcely dared to breathe lest we break the spell.” There was only the quiet creak of the timber, the groan of taut ropes, and the wind singing through the rigging. George De Long and his bride had never been happier. For so many years, his powerful relationship with sailing had been an abstraction to Emma, an obstacle to their togetherness. Now, for this one sojourn, it united them.

But why would anyone—officer, seaman, or scientist—volunteer for such a risky and difficult mission in the Arctic? Some of the attraction was generational: Most of the applicants, like De Long, had just missed out on the greatest conflict in American history. These young men thirsted for some of the glory their fathers had won on the battlefields of the Civil War, and they yearned to test their manhood in some daunting and adventurous endeavor—if not war, then something roughly analogous to it.

One night the De Longs were invited to meet with President Rutherford B. Hayes and the First Lady. Emma thought the president a “quiet, pleasant gentleman who did not impress me very much”—a description that more or less mirrors what everyone said about the milquetoast Ohioan. A Civil War hero, wounded five times, he had been elected—some said “appointed”—in one of the most acrimonious presidential elections in American history, losing the popular vote but winning the White House only after Congress awarded the Republican candidate twenty disputed electoral votes. (Because of this, many Democrats refused to consider his presidency legitimate, calling him “Rutherfraud.”)

The Jeannette had become, according to one naval historian, “more sturdily fortified for ice encounter than any previous exploring ship.”

What De Long failed to see was that Bennett’s need for aloofness and mystery lay at the very heart of his personality. He yearned for the shadows, like the owls that decorated his villa, his yachts, his newspaper offices. He was incapable of doing anything directly or earnestly. Bennett really was a phantom—and an impossible patron for a straightforward man like De Long to figure out.

Her husband’s dream of reaching the pole was his and his alone. His obsession with the Arctic was clear and constant, like a steady flame. Everything he had done for the past five years, all his efforts and travels and preparations, came down to this week. “For years, his mind had been turning to this point,” she wrote. “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.”

“I’ve been thinking,” he said, “what a pretty widow you would make.” Emma’s heart skipped a beat.

Jeannette carried the aspirations of a young republic burning to become a world power; the hubris at the heart of the endeavor was a quality of the times.

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.

While the Jeannette wallowed ever northward, scientists and bureaucrats in Washington slowly digested the new data. Everything they learned seemed to suggest that De Long’s voyage, before it had even begun in earnest, was a fool’s errand.

Bradford made the Arctic seem exotic and adventurous, a domain touched with a particular grandeur. The way he described it, and depicted it in his paintings and photographs, the Arctic had an aesthetic all its own; even when it was terrible, it was transcendent.

Emma was happy to reunite with her family and tour the hilly city together. Then they took a train to Burlington, Iowa, where Emma’s sister lived with her husband, General S. L. Glasgow. Sylvie had been staying at their home for the past few months, and now the Glasgows invited Emma and Sylvie to live with them for the duration of the Jeannette voyage. This steamboat town, built on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, was where Emma would spend much of her “long, long vigil.”

Petermann’s idea of a transpolar landmass was wrong. “Dr. Petermann’s theory was no longer tenable,” Danenhower wrote, “for its insularity was evident.” Wrangel had nothing whatsoever to do with Greenland. (So much for “the much-boasted continent,” Melville scoffed.) The maps could now be altered: WRANGEL LAND had been demoted; it was now just WRANGEL ISLAND.

De Long had effectively consigned another myth to the scrap heap: the thermometric gateway. The ice in which they were so stubbornly locked had certainly caused De Long to doubt Silas Bent’s celebrated theory, but it was the Jeannette’s slow and careful accumulation of scientific data that clinched the captain’s opinion.

De Long was even starting to doubt the cherished concept of the Open Polar Sea. This implacable ice did not appear to be a mere “girdle,” or an “annulus,” that one could simply bust through. It seemed to stretch out forever, and the pressures locked up within the pack suggested unimaginably huge expanses of even thicker ice. “Is this always a dead sea?”

If the daily routines and rituals ran smoothly, the credit for that belonged to one man: Lieutenant Charles Chipp, the ship’s executive officer.