In the Kingdom of Ice Quotes

“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.”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“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.”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“The Vikings spoke of a place at the world’s northern rim, sometimes called Ultima Thule, where the oceans emptied into a vast hole that recharged all the springs and rivers on the earth. The Greeks believed in a realm called Hyperborea that lay far to the north. A place of eternal spring where the sun never set, Hyperborea was said to be bordered by the mighty River Okeanos and the Riphean Mountains, where lived the griffins—formidable beasts that were half lion and half eagle. The notion that Saint Nicholas—a.k.a. Kris Kringle or Santa Claus—lives at the North Pole seems to have a much more recent vintage. The earliest known reference to Saint Nick’s polar residence comes from a Thomas Nast cartoon in an 1866 issue of Harper’s Weekly—the artist captioned a collection of his Yuletide engravings “Santa Claussville, N.P.”Still, the larger idea behind Nast’s conceit—of a warm, jolly, beneficent place at the apex of the world where people might live—had ancient roots, and it spoke to America’s consuming fascination with the North Pole throughout the 1800s.”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“Muir now could see that this icy wilderness was as vulnerable as it was vast—marked by fragile rhythms of migration, interdependencies of population, and patterns of habit many thousands of years in the making.”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“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.”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“As the Jeannette drew nearer to the equator, the waters became oily calm and teemed with eels, tortoises, and dolphins.”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“a sense that history had passed them by, that their brothers and fathers and uncles had participated in something momentous while they had not.”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“stitched it up, but the German went about his work without a whimper, refusing to go on the sick list even for a day. “Nindemann is hardworking as a horse,” said De Long, and “seems to know no such thing as fatigue.” 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”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“a curious gizmo that a bearded Scotsman named Alexander Graham Bell was calling his “telephone.” (Bell would read from Hamlet’s soliloquy at one end of the hall, and attendees at the other could plainly hear the inventor’s voice issuing from a little speaker. “My God, it talks!” exclaimed one prominent visitor, Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil.)”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“most viable path toward the North Pole, Petermann insisted. “Perhaps I am wrong,” he told the Herald reporter, “but the way to show that is to give me the evidence. My idea is that if one door will not open, try another. If one route is marked with failures, try a new one. I have no ill will to any plan or expedition that means honest work in the Arctic regions.” But make no mistake, Petermann said, an Arctic voyage was dangerous work. He always underscored that point. “A great task must be greatly conceived,” he had written before one of the German polar expeditions. “For such tasks, one must be a great man, a great character. If you have doubts or scruples, back out now.” Petermann pledged to give Bennett’s expedition a full set of charts and maps of the Arctic and to help the expedition any other way he could. But beneath his enthusiasm for Bennett’s new”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“A stagnant navy,” noted one maritime scholar, “was no place for a man on the make.”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“The notion that Saint Nicholas—a.k.a. Kris Kringle or Santa Claus—lives at the North Pole seems to have a much more recent vintage. The earliest known reference to Saint Nick’s polar residence comes from a Thomas Nast cartoon in an 1866 issue of Harper’s Weekly—the artist captioned a collection of his Yuletide engravings “Santa Claussville, N.P.” Still, the larger idea behind Nast’s conceit—of a warm, jolly, beneficent place at the apex of the world where people might live—had ancient roots, and it spoke to America’s consuming fascination with the North Pole throughout the 1800s.”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“Muir observed many of the same baneful American influences here that he’d seen on St. Lawrence Island. The introduction of the repeating rifle, in particular, had altered the rhythms of native hunting. A few years earlier, the hills around St. Michael had been home to thousands of wild reindeer. Now, armed with buffalo rifles, the Eskimos and other natives would slaughter caribou by the hundreds and leave them, said Muir, “lying where they fell, not even the hides being taken.” The hunters would “simply cut out their tongues and leave the rest to be eaten by wolves.”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“cheers. Nil desperandum! We are not yet daunted!”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“We are not yet daunted.”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“city’s most notorious grump, and he certainly looked the part: Prematurely gray, he was a slouching, badly cross-”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“sheathed”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“We live in weary suspense," DeLong wrote. "Wintering in the pack may be a thrilling thing to read about alongside a warm fire, but the actual thing is sufficient to make any man prematurely old.”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“Not by such calculation is human endeavor measured. Sacrifice is nobler than ease, unselfish life is consummated in lonely death, and the world is richer by the gift of suffering.”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“Nature is my God. I don’t believe in the hereafter. This world is where we get all our punishment.”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“Is it said that too high a price in the lives of men was paid for this knowledge? Not by such calculation is human endeavour measured. Sacrifice is nobler than ease, unselfish life is consummated in lonely death, and the world is richer by the gift of suffering.”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“Siberia! The mainland of Asia … the delta of the mighty Lena River.”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“Farewell, brave boys, may your guns always salute friends and terrify enemies.”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“But why would anyone—officer, seaman, or scientist—volunteer for such a risky and difficult mission in the Arctic?”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“A few days later, Dr. Ambler told De Long of a curious dream he'd had about Edison's lamps. In the dream, Sir John Franklin, the long-lost British explorer, had come aboard the Jeanette for a tour. Dr. Ambler led Franklin all over the ship and told him excitedly about Edison's electric lights, an invention that, of course, wasn't even dreamed about in Franklin's day. But Franklin bluntly interrupted him. "Your electric machine," he said, "is not worth a damn.”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“OVER THE NEXT century and a half, Barrington’s cause was taken up by a long procession of rogues, explorers, scientists, pseudoscientists, and outright kooks. 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. Two years”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“The privilege isn’t given to everyone.… You must have suffered first, have suffered greatly, have gained some miserable knowledge. In that way your eyes are opened to it. —Henry James, 1881”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“When De Long arrived in California with Emma that May, he went straight down to the yard and feasted his eyes upon his new ship. He was smitten by the transformation that had taken place during his absence. "I am perfectly satisfied with her," he wrote. "She is everything I want.”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“to plan for a return to the Arctic. One”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“I felt as we floundered aimlessly about in the snow that it made little difference to me whether I lived or died. It seemed to me that the terrible journey would have no end. I was awake and aware of all that was transpiring around me, but had lost all feeling and power of speech, and existed like an animated dead man.”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette