In the Kingdom of Ice

by Hampton Sides

  Ambler told De Long that his unequivocal assessment was that a man who had been declared not only unstable and depressed but also suicidal had no business serving as an officer of an Arctic ship. Ambler thought that Danenhower’s symptoms—whether physical or mental—could reappear at any time. “It is my considered opinion,” he later wrote, “that the insidious disease is not unlikely to return after many years.”

  This was a bombshell for De Long, as he had grown fond of Danenhower, and had come to rely on him for everything back at Mare Island. Indeed, Danenhower knew more of the intimate details of the expedition than anyone but De Long himself. “I cannot replace him,” De Long wrote Bennett. He worried that removing Danenhower from the roster would send him into a spiral of despair from which he might never recover. “To unship him now, if he is at all shaky, might bring about the climax we all desire to avoid.” On the other hand, De Long knew Ambler was right. “My duty,” he wrote, “seems clear.”

  Uncertain how best to go about it, De Long confided in Danenhower’s brother, a prominent Washington attorney. De Long asked him to invent some family excuse for why his brother could not journey to the Arctic, some story of a “domestic nature” that would spare Danenhower any personal or professional embarrassment. De Long told the brother that he was “endeavoring to temper justice with kindness to all concerned, and that strange as it may appear to you, I have your brother’s interest quite as nearly in my heart as his family.” But the brother refused to participate in the ruse. Danenhower was “bent on going,” his brother said.

  The Danenhower family had political connections high within the Navy Department, and John’s parents began to work behind the scenes to ensure that their son was formally declared fit for Arctic duty. Within a few weeks, the Navy Department issued a notice that all doubts about Danenhower’s sanity were hereby declared “groundless, officially.” De Long was told to take “no steps to imply distrust in the ability of any officer to perform his duties when he seems in every way capable.” Reading between the lines, De Long understood this to mean that removing Danenhower from the roster would be viewed as persecuting a fellow officer—and could result in a court-martial.

  De Long’s hands were tied. Whether he liked it or not, Danenhower was coming to the Arctic.

  DURING HIS THREE months at the Ebbitt House, De Long was so immersed in minutiae that he scarcely had time to sleep or eat. “I have been working like a beaver,” he wrote, “and in such a turmoil of difficulties.” He spent long hours tracking down provisions, expedition equipment, and scientific paraphernalia for the Jeannette. He shopped for a portable observatory that could be set up on the ice pack to take astronomical and meteorological readings. He bought a small darkroom to develop the expedition’s photographs. He investigated the latest in desalination distillers. He collected magnetic and meteorological equipment and vats of chemicals to be used in preserving biological specimens.

  He ordered fifty-four thousand pounds of pemmican (a jerky-like mixture of dried meat, berries, and fat) and assorted canned goods. To combat scurvy—the classic bane of Arctic expeditions—he experimented with a concoction called koumis, made from fermented mare’s milk, which was said to be widely used by nomads on the steppes of Kazakhstan. Finding this impractical, he tested a formula for concentrating lime juice, then had a dozen barrels of the sour, viscous stuff shipped to San Francisco.

  De Long wanted the men of the Jeannette to lack nothing in the way of comfort and equipment. The ship would have a well-stocked library, a first-class infirmary, an arsenal of modern rifles and revolvers, a choice collection of games and entertainments, even a small organ for musical concerts. De Long prided himself that “everything the Jeannette might need in the polar wilderness seem[s] to have been thought of.” Emma had never seen her husband lost in such a whirl of activity. De Long’s nudgings and proddings were “incessant,” she wrote. “His watchfulness was comprehensive and minute; no detail escaped him.”

  He procured telegraph keys, batteries, and miles of copper wire, which he planned to string over the ice pack to enable his officers to communicate with parties that might be sent out far from the ship. At the suggestion of the Smithsonian Institution, De Long conferred with Alexander Graham Bell about the “telephones” that had made such a splash at the Centennial Exposition. De Long procured two of them, in the hope of aiding long-distance communication over the ice.

  De Long was interested in taking hot-air balloons to the Arctic, as well. This idea captivated Bennett, who was always wild for any novel contrivance or contraption. De Long speculated that a balloon attached to the Jeannette’s mast could “attain an increased height above the ship to command a larger horizon.” A lookout perched in the balloon’s basket would help De Long select the best water channels through tricky passages of ice. “One ascension,” he wrote, “may save many days’ weary work in a wrong direction.” De Long thought that balloons might also be used to supply “lifting power” to heavy sledges and thus “lessen the difficulty of dragging them over floes and hummocks.”

  But after consulting with two of the greatest “aeronauts” then living—the American balloonist Samuel King of Philadelphia and his eminent French colleague, Wilfrid de Fonvielle—De Long relinquished the idea. Both experts indicated that prohibitive amounts of coal would be required to heat enough gas to keep a balloon inflated and aloft. Disappointed, De Long wrote to Bennett that unless he were to fortuitously “strike a vein of coal” somewhere in the High Arctic, “I cannot recommend you to adopt it on either the score of usefulness or economy.”

  Balloons may have been out of the question, but what about electric lights? De Long observed that for decades, Arctic expeditions “have suffered and men have pined for light during the long winter months.” He had an idea that electric lights—then called “artificial suns”—would be a tremendously useful, at times almost miraculous, amenity for his crew. He imagined stringing a network of bright lights high up in the ship’s rigging, by which the men could work, exercise, even play ball games out on the ice.

  At that time, Thomas Edison, conducting experiments out of a ramshackle laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, was trying to work out “the bugs,” as he put it, in the incandescent lightbulb. The technology still had a ways to go, but an inferior form of illumination, arc lighting, was already in limited use, mainly in industrial settings. Arc lighting, which involved sending a high-voltage current across a small gap between two carbon bars, produced a light that was extremely bright but also extremely harsh. Robert Louis Stevenson detested the welder’s-torch glare thrown by the arc lamp. “A new sort of urban star now shines out nightly,” he wrote. “Horrible, unearthly, obnoxious to the human eye; a lamp for a nightmare!”

  Still, De Long was keen on taking lights to the frozen north. “I should like to illuminate the ship from time to time, during the Arctic winter,” he wrote Edison, “and subject the crew to the benefits morally and physically arising from [it].” Light at the North Pole—it was a romantic notion but a practical one, as well. Did the young inventor have anything that could work for De Long’s purposes?

  Edison responded enthusiastically and, of course, saw the enormous public relations benefit that might derive from sending his lamps up to the North Pole. His incandescent lightbulb was still only in a test phase, he said, but his system of arc lamps was ready to go. He wrote De Long right back and suggested that one of Bennett’s representatives from the Herald come over to the laboratory and examine his arc lights and generators for himself.

  The Herald promptly sent its chief science correspondent, Jerome Collins, and a demonstration was arranged in an upstairs lab. The arc lamps, a circuit of fifteen of them, blazed brightly—almost too brightly. They were kept illuminated by a hand-cranked mechanism Edison had devised. It would function well, Edison explained in a letter to De Long, “so long as your sailors keep their muscle. You can belt and crank the dynamo on it when you have no steam, and your crew can take a hand driving th
e machine. It will keep them warm.” Should De Long’s men tire of this hand-cranked device, Edison could provide a small, two-horsepower steam generator that would give the crew some relief.

  De Long agreed to the transaction and placed his order with the Edison Electric Light Company: four circuits of fifteen carbon lamps (that is, a total of sixty arc lights), plus all the necessary wiring, a dynamo, and other equipment. A clerk at Menlo Park noted that the “machine for lighting the North Pole has been sent away.” The arc lamp system shipped by train to San Francisco promised to produce light greater than three thousand candles. “Plants,” De Long observed, “have been made to grow by it.”

  14 · ALL THAT MAN CAN DO

  While De Long had been away in Washington, the shipwrights at Mare Island had slowly brought a new Jeannette into existence. From her insides out, she had been revamped, refurbished, reengineered.

  In her hold, the Navy designers had placed a network of double trusses and iron box beams to withstand the crush of the ice. The Jeannette’s bow was filled in with solid timber and strengthened outside with new planking of the stoutest American elm. Her bilge was reinforced with strakes of Oregon pine six inches thick. Hot pitch was squeezed into every flaw and crevice. New decks were laid. The cabins were rearranged and berths installed to accommodate thirty-three men. Her bunkers were significantly enlarged to carry more than 132 tons of coal. Heavy-duty pumps were added. Engines were overhauled. A fresh suit of sails sewn. New rigging strung. The entire ship painted and caulked.

  On the spar deck, the engineers installed a steam-powered winch that, in times of heavy ice, could hoist the rudder and propeller out of harm’s way. The winch could also be used to “warp” the ship—that is, to advance the vessel, by means of ropes or chains attached to ice anchors, through leads in the pack. The Mare Island machinists built two new state-of-the-art boilers and installed a desalination apparatus that could distill more than five hundred gallons of fresh water a day.

  The Jeannette’s living quarters were thoroughly retooled for cold weather. Her cabin and forecastle were insulated with thick felt. Carpenters built new overhangs and porches, and the poop deck was layered with multiple sheets of thick painted canvas. A new heating system was installed. Orders were placed ahead in Alaska for a full complement of fur suits, boots, mittens, and blankets. Sleds were procured, as well as alcohol stoves and eight warm tents, designed for camping in the Arctic.

  The Jeannette had become, according to one naval historian, “more sturdily fortified for ice encounter than any previous exploring ship.” When De Long arrived in California with Emma that May, he went straight down to the yard and feasted his eyes on 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.”

  De Long had to congratulate Danenhower on a job well done. “He has attended to everything with which I charged him,” the captain said. As ambitious as her overhaul was, the final tally would come in under $50,000. De Long attributed this largely to Danenhower’s vigilance, and he now felt guiltier about having considered removing the navigator from the ship’s company.

  In June, De Long, accompanied by a board of officers from the shipyard, took the Jeannette into San Francisco Bay to test her new engines and her turning power. She had been rebuilt with an eye toward structural integrity, not agility or speed. Though she was quite sluggish, the Jeannette passed her trials beautifully.

  Through the months of May and June, the merchandise and provisions De Long had purchased on the East Coast began to arrive at Mare Island. Edison’s arc lights were brought on board, as were Bell’s telephones and telegraph equipment. The portable observatory was partially assembled. A darkroom was delivered, along with boxes of glass plates and other photographic paraphernalia. Stevedores hauled the Jeannette’s weapons on deck—Remington rifles and shotguns, Winchester repeating rifles, English self-cocking revolvers, two whale guns, ten muzzle-loading rifles, twenty thousand cartridges of ammunition, five hundred percussion caps, six kegs of blasting powder, and seventy pounds of shot. Next came the navigational and scientific equipment: chronometers, hydrometers, ozonometers, magnetometers, aneroid barometers, transits, sextants, pendulums, zenith telescopes, microscopes, test tubes, Bunsen burners, theodolites.

  The possibilities for Edison’s invention notwithstanding, De Long knew that the primary source of illumination during the expedition’s long winters would be lamplight. So the Jeannette took on 250 gallons of sperm oil, hundreds of pounds of tallow, thousands of wicks, and all manner of lamps—bull’s-eye lanterns, globe lanterns, bunker lanterns, hand lanterns.

  Last to be loaded was the food, drink, and medicine—enough provisions to keep thirty-three men alive and healthy for three years. Anyone closely observing the manifests could tell there was drab eating ahead: The Jeannette took delivery of 2,500 pounds of roast mutton, 3,000 pounds of stewed and corned beef, 3,000 pounds of salt pork, and 100 pounds of tongue. Mostly the men would be drinking coffee, tea, and consommé, as well as daily rations of lime juice. But lovers of more ardent spirits could take heart: One of the ship’s storerooms had been filled to the ceiling with barrels of brandy, porter, ale, sherry, whiskey, and rum, plus cases of Budweiser beer.

  DE LONG, MEANWHILE, had made much progress filling the remaining positions for the Jeannette. From all quarters, the various officers, scientist specialists, and seamen had begun to arrive at Mare Island to get acquainted with one another—and with the reinforced ice ark they would call home for the next several years. Among the crew were three young Cantonese men Danenhower had hired in San Francisco to serve as cook, steward, and cabin boy. Officers Charles Chipp and George Melville had reached California a month earlier, and they had been helping Danenhower at the shipyard with the final improvements on the Jeannette.

  Now other key players were making their way to Mare Island. De Long had known he would need an “ice pilot,” someone intimately familiar with the behavior of the pack and the harsh peculiarities of the Arctic Ocean. Prowling the San Francisco wharves, the captain had eventually found his man. He was an experienced whaling captain, originally from New London, Connecticut, named William Dunbar. Forty-five years old, his leathery face cured by sun, wind, and salt, Dunbar was a grave, dutiful man who kept his prematurely white hair clipped close and bristly. He had been at sea since he was ten. As a sealer and whaler, Dunbar had spent much time in the treacherous waters around the Bering Strait, where he had developed “great tact in dealing with the frozen foe,” said one newspaper account, “and a most valuable fertility of resource.”

  Dunbar had been to the frigid waters off Antarctica and all over the South Pacific, where he’d once had to be rescued from a deserted coral island after his vessel wrecked on a reef. Though Dunbar was the oldest member of the expedition, Melville described him as “hale and hearty and a fine example of a seasoned Yankee skipper.” Dunbar would be the eyes of the ship—he was expected to spend much of his time perched in the crow’s nest, scouring the icy seas. De Long felt lucky to have found him.

  To serve as the expedition’s naturalist, De Long had hired a civilian scientist from Salem, Massachusetts, named Raymond Newcomb. A shy, pasty, gnomelike man of twenty-nine years with a scruff of chin hair that gave him an adolescent look, Newcomb came strongly recommended by the Smithsonian Institution. He had worked for the United States Commission of Fish and Fisheries and described himself as “a student of natural history, ornithology, and zoology—the lower orders.” He was descended from a distinguished New England family (his grandfather was a Revolutionary War hero who fought in the Battle of Lexington). De Long found Newcomb an agreeable, if mousy, sort of man who possessed a meticulous intelligence. The naturalist had traveled very little, though, and had spent almost no time at sea. He seemed most at home working among the scalpels, glycerin pastes, and fumy acids of the taxidermy trade. He would have much to prove in the Arctic.

 
The other civilian scientist who had signed up, an Irishman named Jerome Collins, cut a more formidable figure. Trained as an engineer in Cork, Collins was a big, voluble raconteur who served as the chief meteorologist for Bennett’s Herald. He was the science correspondent Bennett had sent to Menlo Park to confer with Edison about the electric lights. A pioneer in weather forecasting, Collins had done much to advance the science of international meteorology and the understanding of prevailing wind patterns. From New York, he would analyze storm fronts as they headed east over the Atlantic and then cable alerts to the Herald’s offices in London and Paris so readers in Europe could prepare for the coming weather. His improvements in weather prediction had earned him accolades at the Meteorological Congress in Paris.

  Collins was no staid weather nerd. As a younger man, he had been a prominent Irish Republican activist, one of the founders of the militant secret society Clan-na-Gael. Before coming to New York, he had lived briefly in England, where he’d hatched a plot to spring several incarcerated Fenian comrades from a London prison—an operation that had gone awry, forcing him into hiding for a time. He’d then led a study into the feasibility of using submarines to sabotage the British navy.

  Collins’s politics apparently had mellowed, and his career had taken many turns. Prior to his work as a meteorologist, he had been involved in harbor construction, bridge building, railway surveying, and an ambitious land reclamation project in the New Jersey salt marshes near Manhattan.

  It was Bennett who had suggested Collins for the voyage. The Irishman would serve as the expedition’s meteorologist, photographer, and “chief scientist” and would also be a “special correspondent” for the Herald. Collins was a droll, versatile man who could sing and play the piano—and could converse intelligently about almost any subject. As would later be revealed, he also had an incorrigible weakness for puns.