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
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