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

by Hampton Sides

What Collins could see was that Melville had usurped his role. Hurt and resentful, Collins increasingly withdrew to his room, and he began to flout De Long’s rules. He would not go out and exercise, and he refused to let Dr. Ambler examine him for the monthly medical report. He would sleep late, smoking through the midmorning, dawdling with his chores. With each passing day, he became more marginalized.

A new era was at hand. De Long had missed it by only a few months. When a reporter from Bennett’s Herald asked Edison how long his bulbs would last, the inventor, his mouth full of chewing tobacco, replied, “Forever, almost.”

“I think the night one of the most beautiful I have ever seen,” De Long wrote after one of his strolls. “The heavens were cloudless, the moon shining brightly, and every star twinkling; the air perfectly calm, not a sound to break the spell. The ship and her surroundings made a perfect picture. The long lines of wire reaching to the tripod and observatory, round frosted lumps here and there where a dog lay asleep. The Jeannette standing out in bold relief against the sky, every rope and spar with a thick coat of snow and frost—simply a beautiful spectacle.

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. Yet the route they’d taken was so convoluted, so full of jagged backtracks, that their present location was only three hundred miles northwest of the place where they’d first entered the floes.

If they had not really gone anywhere, they had journeyed into regions of the psyche where few men had ever been, interior spaces that brought out aspects of themselves they’d never known existed. In ways few could imagine, the true grain of their characters had been revealed.

Nindemann was also oblivious to cold. His circulation appeared to be different from other men’s. On freezing winter hunts, he wore hardly any clothes. He kept his cabin colder than everyone else’s. His feet were inured to frost. He was a polar creature, through and through. As Collins said in one of his pieces of doggerel, “Not since Adam sinn’d e’er lived a man / Who lov’d the Arctic like our Nindemann.”

Nindemann and Sweetman, meanwhile, didn’t stop working. Once they’d reduced the leak to a few hundred gallons per hour, they began constructing an extra-watertight bulkhead in the forward-most hold, the forepeak. All told, they worked for sixteen straight days, almost without stopping, sleeping in shifts of no more than a few hours, often skipping meals. When the new bulkhead was finished and thoroughly caulked, it stanched the leaks further. After the crisis was over and the ship had been saved, Nindemann and Sweetman collapsed in exhaustion. De Long made a special notation in his logs, recommending the two men for Congressional Medals of Honor.

DANENEHOWER WAS ANOTHER kind of scrappy survivor. The navigator had spent the entire year of 1880 confined to his darkened room. His advanced syphilis had begun to manifest itself in other symptoms, including lesions on his legs and inside and around his mouth. It appeared that he would indeed lose the sight of his left eye.

He also thought of farm animals and other beasts of burden, who plod along a narrow course and never go anywhere. “I have often wondered if a horse driving a saw-mill had any mental queries as to why he tramped over his endless plank, and what on earth there was accomplished by his so doing. The saw was generally out of his sight, he perceived no work accomplished, and ended his day in identically the same place at which he began it. And, as far as equine judgment could forecast, he would do the same thing tomorrow, and every other day thereafter. If that horse had reasoning faculties, I pity him and appreciate now his thoughts and feelings.”

(It was, like Jeannette, a soft and effeminate name for such a hard trophy, but then again, these men had not been in the company of women for twenty-three months.) They couldn’t stop looking at the island. Henrietta was, said De Long, “the cynosure of all eyes … as pleasing as an oasis in the desert.” It became their talisman, their fetish. “We gaze at it,” De Long said, “we criticize it, we guess at its distance, we wish for a favoring gale to drive us towards it, and no doubt we would accept an assertion that it contained a gold mine which would make us all as rich as the treasury without its debts.”

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.”

They had reached the end of the earth. For more than a thousand miles to the east, and nearly a thousand miles to the west, Henrietta was the northernmost mote of land, a lonesome satellite in the High Arctic. In this part of the world, no scrap of terra firma was so close to the earth’s apex.

The most famous, or soon to be famous, scientific eminence on board the Corwin was a Scottish-born botanist who had lately been studying the role that glaciers had played in the sculpting of Yosemite Valley. A wiry man with a shaggy red beard and the burning blue eyes of a half-crazed bard, he regularly wrote for the San Francisco Evening Bulletin—although, in his deepest soul, he was a poet. His name was John Muir.

Muir would write at length about the Chukchis—of their smiles and laughter, of their trusting nature, of small moments of tenderness between a father and son. He was heartened to see a way of life that, though fragile, still held an ancient integrity.

Captain De Long seemed to want a few moments alone with his dying ship. He staggered over her slanting decks, clutching ropes and bollards, anything to give him a steady hold. He had been the Jeannette’s first, last, and only captain, and he hated to leave her. The ship had been his life for the past three years. He’d found her, had sailed her around the Horn, had been the father of her rebirth in San Francisco. He’d taken her thousands of uncharted miles, farther than any vessel had ever penetrated into this region of the Arctic. The Jeannette, in every emotional sense, was his. And his to lose.

Then, in a final whirl of water, the Jeannette plunged out of sight. Nothing remained, said Danenhower, “of our old and good friend, the Jeannette, which for many months had endured the embrace of the Arctic monster.” She had sunk at latitude 77°15 N, longitude 155° E, a little more than seven hundred miles south of the North Pole.

The feeling was indescribable. The men were completely alone, Melville said, “in a sense that few can appreciate. Our proper means of escape, to which so many pleasant associations attached, [was] destroyed before our eyes. We were now utterly isolated, beyond any rational hope of aid.”

The numbers across the island were staggering: More than one thousand people—two-thirds of the population—had perished in 1879, the same year the Jeannette had set sail and cruised right past this island on her way to the pole. The conventional explanation addressed only part of the mass starvation. Alcohol and the severe winter were certainly factors—alcohol, especially. But something far larger had been taking place that made this colossal famine a certainty: Over the previous decade, American whalers in the Arctic, seeking to augment the value of their cargo, had turned to harvesting walruses in astoundingly high numbers.

It was the Arctic version of a story already well known to Americans, the story of the buffalo and the Indians of the Great Plains. Here, as there, the wholesale slaughter of a people’s staple prey had led, in a few short years, to ruinous dislocations, terrible dependencies—and a cultural apocalypse.

JOHN MUIR WAS haunted by what he experienced on St. Lawrence Island. “The scene was indescribably ghastly,” he wrote, noting its stark juxtapositions. “Gulls, plovers, and ducks were swimming and flying about in happy life, the pure salt sea was dashing white against the shore, the blooming tundra swept back to the snow-clad volcanoes,” yet the village lay “in the foulest and most glaring death.”

The systematic introduction of just a few things—repeating rifles, booze, money, industrial methods of dismantling animal flesh—had caused the native cultures of Alaska to collapse at record speed.

ONE OF THE other things that made Bennett Island such a pleasant refuge for De Long was that he no longer had to keep his attentions so firmly clamped on the matter of discipline. He told Chipp to “give all hands all the liberty you can on American soil.” During their eight days on Bennett, De Long issued the men light assignments—to study the tides, to collect animal artifacts or gather geological specimens. But otherwise he viewed the situation almost as though they had arrived in port and were taking a brief leave of duty. This was vitally important, he felt, for everyone’s morale and sanity—including his own. They all needed a respite.

Adding to this good news, Nindemann, on a survey of the southern coast of the island, had seen significant patches of open ocean. As he described it to De Long, there were “large lanes of water making to the southwest, and the ice was constantly separating to form new ones.” Offshore from their campsite, smaller lanes were beginning to clear. De Long understood that this was their chance. The icy world was finally opening up, just a little—and just in time for the closing weeks of the Arctic summer.

It was the time of the skeleton pack. The time of tapered pools of meltwater and cul-de-sac canals, of aquatic riddles nearly impossible to solve. The floes were too soft and hole-ridden to allow the men to make any reliable progress by sledging, but neither was there enough open water to advance by sail. So they probed and threaded among these icy labyrinths, sometimes rowing their three boats, sometimes towing them, from cake to melting cake. “So winding and intricate” were these endless channels, De Long thought, “that I am reminded of the maze at Hampton Court.”

It was obvious what De Long had to do. And yet it was a terrible gamble to have to make. In their expeditionary metamorphosis, they would have to commit to becoming entirely aquatic—which is to say, no longer travelers of the ice. They would have to dismantle the sleds and use them for firewood, with the idea that all travel hereafter would be by boat until they reached the coast of Siberia.

Throughout the day, all they could do was bob helplessly on the cold gray swells and wait for a break in the weather. At around six in the evening, it seemed to come. With a strange suddenness, the winds abated, and De Long’s spirits warmed. But the seas refused to lie down; indeed, they seemed as menacing as ever. So the men were forced to spend yet another night cowering in the boat, rolling on the huge sea, their nerves tensed by the frequent smack of the spray. “Utter misery,” Collins wrote. “Hopeless except in the mercy of Almighty God, we sat jammed together.”

“No sleep for 36 hours,” Ambler wrote. “God knows where we went during the night.” At least they had something to turn their gaze heavenward. The clouds had scudded away, and in their place the moon and stars shone crisp and bright. From time to time, auroras billowed across the blue bowl of the sky.

Siberia! The mainland of Asia … the delta of the mighty Lena River. How many times over the past three months had they doubted that they would ever reach it? For the first time since they had begun their retreat, they had a visible reason, a reason right in front of them, to believe that they might be saved.

One by one, the twelve others hobbled in from the tidal flats to join them. Sending up exhausted cheers, they assembled on the beach—dazed, elated, relieved to have crossed this remarkable threshold. They were now standing on the continent of Asia. 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. Their odyssey had ended one phase and was now beginning an entirely new one. Whatever obstacles might lie ahead, salt water and ocean ice pack would not be among them. Their metamorphosis was complete. Having been creatures of the ice, then of the sea, they were now creatures of the land.

With only a few days’ worth of food left, De Long knew they had to find a way out of this quagmire of mud and sand and water and locate the main channel of the Lena. He read to the men a passage from the Gospel according to Matthew: “Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? Or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed … But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

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.

“I need hardly say how great the relief was to my overstretched mind,” the captain wrote of Alexey’s bounty. “Had [Alexey] failed, our provisions would consist of poor Snoozer.” De Long had come to see the hand of God behind these timely encounters with game and shelter: “If ever Divine Providence was manifested in behalf of needy and exposed people, we are an instance of it. All that I need to make my present anxiety nil is some tidings of the two boats and their occupants.”

De Long found himself in the midst of a horrible reckoning. Erichsen’s survival, it seemed to him, was now pitted against the survival of the whole group. “If we could move on,” De Long wrote, “it would probably shorten his life; if I remained here and kept everybody with me, Erichsen’s days would be lengthened a little at the risk of our all dying from starvation. This is a crisis in our lives.” In the end, De Long went with his better instincts: No man would be left behind. Erichsen would be dragged along, no matter the hardships.

Hans Erichsen, the thirty-three-year-old career mariner and North Sea fisherman from Ærøskøbing, Denmark, was dead. “Our messmate has departed this life,” De Long wrote. “What in God’s name is going to become of us?”

To an editorial writer in the New York Herald, the swell of goodwill surpassed the response seen in the aftermath of Franklin’s disappearance. “For a second time in the history of polar research, a great expedition is probably lost in the Arctic,” the Herald said. “There is to be another Franklin search, with this difference—that was an English and American search of a limited segment of the polar circle; this will be a universal search of the whole border of the ‘unknown region,’ participated in by nearly all the civilized nations of the earth.”

The cold had become a physical presence, silently snatching the life from the delta in the way that a fire consumes the oxygen in a room. 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.”

Someone handed Nindemann a toy boat, which he used to tell the story of the Jeannette. All the villagers gathered around as he related the woeful tale: How the ship had left America and sailed the ocean. How it had become trapped in the ice and drifted for two years. How it had been crushed and had sunk far to the north. How thirty-three men had traveled for three months over the ice, hauling three boats behind them until they came to open water. And then how the three boats had become separated in a storm.

Something about this visitor seemed odd. He just stood there by the door and lingered without saying a word. He had a strange grin on his face. “Hallooo, Noros!” the man said in a booming voice. “How do you do?” Noros looked up from the bread he was slicing and saw that the stranger was bounding toward him. The man pulled back his hood to reveal a familiar face—and a familiar bald head. Tears came to Noros’s eyes, and he fairly screamed: “My God, Mr. Melville—you’re alive!”

It had been fifty-one days since the three boats separated in the gale—fifty-one days since the men of De Long’s cutter had lost sight of Melville’s whaleboat in the storm-tossed Laptev Sea and resigned themselves to the loss of the other two crews. Nindemann and Noros now welcomed Melville into their cabin as a man already mourned. They could scarcely contain their joy at seeing one of their shipmates alive, hearing English spoken again, and learning that they were not alone in this strange land.

Only one thing held the men together through these nadir moments, enabling them to overlook all transgressions and failings: It was the camaraderie of suffering, the conviction that what they had already been through outweighed everything else. The magnitude of their struggle had forged a forgiving brotherhood. “Our common dangers and miseries had bred a closer fellowship among us,” said Melville, “a bond which bound us all.”

The women of the village were especially empathetic, Melville noted—“they examined our frozen limbs, shaking their heads in compassion, and even weeping over our miseries.” (Said the half-blind Danenhower: “The native women were always very kind in spite of their ugliness.”)

Having secured dog teams, a Cossack guide, and several Yakut scouts, Melville departed for the Lena delta on November 5. In Nindemann’s hut, he left a message for Danenhower, instructing the navigator to lead the party to Yakutsk. “I have a pretty good chart to search for the missing,” Melville said. “If time and weather permit, I will go to the north coast for the ship’s papers, chronometer, etc. I may be gone a month. Fear not for my safety. I will see the natives take care of me.”

Melville bid his shipmates farewell and prepared to head back into the icy barrens of the Lena. It must have taken every ounce of his resolve, for he, too, was frostbitten, exhausted, and starved, his system ravaged by months of half-rancid food. He was returning to the delta at a deadly time of year—as the Siberian winter was enveloping the land, bringing gale-force blizzards, perpetual darkness, and temperatures that would plunge to more than fifty degrees below zero.

FOR DAYS AND DAYS, they cut across the white gloom. It was a dreamworld, shrouded in fog, piled in snowdrifts, with few markings of animals or man—“a barren and desolate region,” said Melville, “devoid of sustenance.”

“I regretted my failure to find my lost comrades,” he said, but felt “satisfied that I’d done all that was possible for me to do. If De Long and his party were alive and in the hands of natives, they were certainly as well off as myself; if dead, then the natives had been wise in admonishing me that I should die too if I persisted in searching at that season of the year.”

Over the course of his search, Melville had at least been able to produce something of value: an accurate chart of the Lena delta, no doubt the most accurate one then in existence—and certainly far better than Petermann’s flawed rendering. Had De Long had the benefit of this improved map at the time of his landing, he and his men would have been spared most of their hardships.

Yakutsk was widely considered the coldest city on earth—a designation it still holds today—and the world’s largest city built entirely on permafrost.

“My son, you may have anything you want,” Tchernieff assured Melville. “You have the whole Russian nation at your back.”

It was astonishing how much mammoth ivory there was in this part of the world—the permafrost kept the massive tusks in pristine condition. The Yakuts used the ivory to make jewelry, buttons, utensils, combs, figurines, and all manner of work implements. According to their tribal legends, the mammoth was an animal that lived in the earth and burrowed like a mole, and it died when it came into contact with fresh air.

Already heavily populated with exiles, Yakutsk was seeing an almost daily influx of new arrivals. They came from all over the Russian Empire, from Moscow, from the Crimea, from Poland. Many of them were well educated, and most did not know what they had done to earn their term of banishment—which, often as not, was for life. Seldom had they even been charged with a crime; they had simply been issued an “administrative order” and sent east to live out their lives in a prison without bars. The land itself was harsh and vast enough to detain them. Their stories were beyond tragic, and they made Melville realize that the Jeannette’s tale of woe was all but swallowed in a land of limitless sorrow.