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

by Hampton Sides

Although Henrietta was an ancient place—volcanic rocks on the island date back five hundred million years—Melville and his men were by all evidence the first human beings ever to set foot on it. Knowing this ignited a complicated range of emotions in the engineer; he seemed to find the moment of discovery both beautiful and haunting. This was what explorers lived for, what animated and drove them. This was the joy that saw them through the hardships. At the same time, Melville was spooked. No one had ever been here. Perhaps no one was ever meant to be here. “We stood lost in the contemplation,” he wrote. “The silence was awful.” They had landed on “a black monster” whose steep headlands loomed “as they had for ages, like sentinels, challenging our strange advent.”