In the Kingdom of Ice

by Hampton Sides

  At times, the men had to use the steam winch, with ropes and block-and-tackle pulleys attached to claws planted ahead in the ice, to jerk or “warp” the Jeannette forward. There were clanking noises and spewings of smoke and hot vapor as the Jeannette’s steam engine pushed full throttle and the steam winch cranked. Sometimes, to save on coal, De Long had the men and dogs hop onto the ice and make herculean attempts to tow the vessel. The heavy, moist air resonated with the sound of grunting and growling as man and beast tried to guide the ship through promising gaps in the floes. The men dug in their heels, straining at their ropes, and the howling dogs pulled with all their strength.

  But De Long’s options were dwindling. Ice lay in every direction now, clotting the way forward; the lanes and gaps were closing up. “Every opening in the pack with the least northing to it had been tried,” Melville said, and the “ice cut off all chances of retreat.” As soon as the ship knifed open a crack and passed through it, Melville would look astern and see the crack closing up again, snapping shut like the jaws of an enormous steel trap.

  The pressures building around the ship were terrific. Explosions detonated in all directions, as the jagged jigsaw pieces smashed into one another with brutal force, sometimes causing pressure ridges to form. Here and there, geysers of surf hissed through cracks in the ice. There were scraping sounds, too, rasping sighs and raw squeals, as a giant slab would crunch up onto another one and then, bobbing in the swells, slowly grind it to pieces.

  De Long was trying to find a lane that would lead him toward Wrangel, but it was no use. The pack kept shunting him aside, toward the northeast, farther and farther from his grail. They spotted Wrangel several more times—“a table land, with a range of peaks,” in De Long’s estimation—but it was fading out of reach. “This is the land which, two months ago yesterday, we sailed for from San Francisco, hoping to explore this winter,” De Long despaired. “Man proposes but God disposes.”

  Now the Jeannette’s hull shuddered more than ever as she banged into and caromed off ever-more-imposing slabs. The ice was now fifteen feet thick in many places. Several times the bow drove high up onto an ice floe, creaked to a point of stasis, and then, properly chastened, slid back down into the water.

  Still, through all this, the Jeannette held firm. De Long had to place his trust in the Mare Island engineers who had so painstakingly reinforced her hull; for now at least, their hard work seemed to have paid off. “She shook very badly,” Danenhower remarked, but “it did not do her any damage. Indeed the ship stood the concussions handsomely.”

  ON SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, the men felt a new pressure working on the starboard side, and then suddenly a large floe shoved the Jeannette onto a shelf of ice, causing her to list crazily. Other floes tightened around the ship. Under the pressure, her timbers began to tick and groan. Within minutes, the Jeannette was completely imprisoned. Her overtaxed steam engine wheezed, and her stack spat thick plumes of smoke, but she could not budge an inch. The ship had been “nipped,” as the old Arctic whalers put it, in their profession’s curious lexicon of understatement.

  Wrote Danenhower: “We banked fires, secured the vessel with ice anchors and remained. We could proceed no farther.” The Jeannette remained cocked at a queer angle, so that the men could not stand straight, or sit normally, or lie in their bunks without fear of rolling out. The ice was still settling, burbling, releasing bubbles of air, collapsing on its own pockets and voids. But it was turning into cement.

  De Long looked over the pack and tried to think where he could have gone so wrong. His water thermometer readings had shown no evidence of a warm-water current pushing north. Where was the Kuro Siwo? The thermometric gateway, if it existed, certainly was not here. The Open Polar Sea seemed farther away than ever. “As far as the eye can range is ice,” De Long wrote. “Not only does it look as if it had never broken up and become water … it looks as if it never would. It would take an earthquake at least to get us out of our besetment.”

  He had known all along, of course, that the Jeannette would become locked in ice like this; he just hadn’t thought it would happen this far south, or this early in the season. He had hoped to reach the 80th parallel before winter set in, but here they were, icebound, at the 72nd. It was almost embarrassing. His plan had been to touch land somewhere along the coast of Wrangel, and there find a protected cove in which to safely anchor his ship for the winter, away from the violent crunch of the larger ice pack. But now the Jeannette was left vulnerable to much more powerful forces—subject to whims and wiles he could not begin to calculate. Now, more than ever, he cursed the delays caused by his pointless search for Nordenskiöld. De Long believed, probably correctly, that his one lost week on the Siberian coast had cost him his chance of landing on Wrangel and prevented him from accomplishing anything significant in the way of exploration, or reaching a “farthest north” record, until the following year.

  Still, the ship’s entrapment didn’t discourage the captain. He hoped that this pack was a temporary aberration, an oddity out of the usual seasonal pattern. Arctic whalers had told him that “in the latter part of September and early part of October there is experienced in these latitudes quite an Indian Summer,” he wrote, optimistically. Another blast of warm weather “will liberate us,” he felt sure. “I consider it an exceptional state of ice we are having just now, and count on September gales to break up the pack and open leads.”

  But at other times, De Long appeared to accept that he was locked in for the winter. He seemed, indeed, to embrace adversity—and to hunt for its possible meanings. “This is a glorious country to learn patience in,” he said. “My disappointment is great, how great no one else will probably know. There seemed nothing left but making a virtue of necessity and staying where we were.”

  AS THE ICE was closing around the Jeannette, an American whaling fleet was working along the southern margin of the same pack, hunting for the season’s last prizes before heading home to San Francisco. The captains of these three whaling ships spotted a vessel off toward the north, some ten miles away, not far from Herald Island. Even from a distance, Captain Bauldry, of the whaling bark Helen Mar, could see that it was a steamer, and that it was struggling.

  Bauldry studied it with a glass and tried to make sense of its movements. It was not a whaling ship, he felt sure. It was far too late in the season for a ship to be heading that way, slipping off the edge of the known world. But an ever-shifting trail of black smoke told him that the vessel was fighting her way through the pack, bumping and butting this way and that, aiming for the north and the west but apparently failing to reach her goal.

  When the Helen Mar and her companion ships, the Sea Breeze and the Dawn, returned to California, the observations of their captains were reported in the San Francisco newspapers. It was the last sighting anyone ever had of the USS Jeannette.

  18 · AMONG THE SWELLS

  That August, as De Long struggled north, James Gordon Bennett was in Newport, Rhode Island, summering with some of his cronies and visiting his sister, Jeannette Bennett Bell. He kept his yacht anchored at the marina and spent the better part of the month sailing, coach racing, and carousing with the white-flannel set. His faux pas against the May family had been forgiven, and he was once again accepted among the Newport “cottagers.” Indeed, Bennett had come to be considered the life of the party, a welcome provocateur. Noted the Newport Mercury upon his arrival on August 2: “Everyone at once looked for the opening of the festivities and sports of the season, for Mr. Bennett has the energy and push needed to give the coach of gaiety a good start.”

  Bennett was a member of the staid and proper Newport Reading Room, a club that admitted only the most prominent and affluent gentlemen. He found the place dreadfully boring, and one day in mid-August he decided to ruffle the club’s feathers. He apparently had been on a drinking binge with an old polo-playing chum from England, Henry Augustus Candy, a captain in the British cavalry. Bennett dared Candy—apparently sweetening th
e challenge with a bet—to do something guaranteed to shake up the stodgy membership of the Reading Room. Candy accepted, and a plan was hatched.

  Later that afternoon Captain Candy, dressed in full polo regalia, mounted his pony and headed over to the Reading Room’s prim yellow clubhouse on Bellevue Avenue. He rode the animal up the front steps, through the double doors, and into the front hall of the establishment itself. A white-coated steward is said to have shouted, “Sir, you cannot ride a horse in here!” But Candy paid him no mind and continued into the salon, through the bar, and in and out of other rooms, ignoring the perplexed club members who sat reading their magazines and sipping gin and tonics. Then Candy expertly wheeled his horse around, exited through the front door, and galloped off.

  Candy had won his bet with Bennett and demonstrated impeccable equestrian skills, but the Reading Room membership promptly censured him and vowed that neither he nor Bennett would ever enter the clubhouse again. The Reading Room’s icy reaction to the prank, while predictable, threw a switch in Bennett’s curious circuitry. In a pique of indignation, he decided to build a rival clubhouse, one that would be decidedly sportier, rowdier, and less hidebound by tradition. He would call it the Newport Casino.

  Bennett bought a big piece of land just down Bellevue Avenue from the Reading Room. The Newport Casino, he decided, would be an immense palace of fun—a rebuke to anyone who called Newport stuffy. It would have a bowling alley, a billiards parlor, lawn courts, a theater, a restaurant, several bars, and a ballroom. He hired the best architect he could find: the young Stanford White, from New York’s famous firm of McKim, Mead, and White. Blueprints were drawn up, and ground breaking commenced within months. A grand opening was planned for the following summer.

  An idea began to take shape in Bennett’s mind: The Newport Casino would hold competitive tennis tournaments. Having successfully introduced polo to the United States, he would now introduce the nation to England’s hottest new racket sport. As he envisioned it, his casino would become the cradle of American tennis.

  Bennett spent the rest of the year immersed in blueprints. He was almost giddy with excitement. He would show the killjoys of the Newport Reading Room. Bennett’s thoughts seemed to race in every direction that summer, but they were a million miles from the Arctic.

  19 · IF BY ANY MISCHANCE

  After the Jeannette left San Francisco, Emma De Long knew she had to “steel myself,” as she put it, “for a long, long vigil.” That day, she had returned to her room at the Palace Hotel and had fallen into a stupor. She had no energy, no willpower, no interest in the world. “I did not want to do anything,” she wrote, “or even to think.” She had no pressing responsibilities, since Sylvie was staying with her sister in the Midwest. Her parents, who had been in Australia, were supposed to have met her in San Francisco in time for the departure, but their steamer had been delayed, and they were not due for another week. For several days, she turned her room into a dark cave and wouldn’t come out.

  William Bradford, the De Longs’ close friend who had escorted her back to shore from the Golden Gate the day the Jeannette set sail, lived in San Francisco part of the year and kept a studio there. One day he checked in on Emma and saw that she was suffering. So he proposed a diversion: How about a trip to Yosemite?

  Emma brightened immediately. She had never been there, and had never seen any of the magnificent country of California. He would bring along his paints and his photographic equipment, and while his wife and Emma picnicked and toured the valley, he would look for landscapes to capture.

  Emma always found comfort in the company of William Bradford. He was a serene man with a kind face, curly ginger hair, and extravagantly frizzy sideburns. Fifty-six years old, he had made nine trips to the Arctic, mostly around Greenland, and had safely returned home from each, not only healthy but exhilarated. He was one of the most eloquent and convincing evangelists of the frozen world. His Arctic paintings, meticulous in detail, had sold well on both sides of the Atlantic. Queen Victoria had commissioned one of his works. He was also an esteemed member of the American Geographical Society of New York, and his lectures all over the world had done much to fire the public imagination about the High North. Bradford made the Arctic seem exotic and adventurous, a domain touched with a particular grandeur. The way he described it, and depicted it in his paintings and photographs, the Arctic had an aesthetic all its own; even when it was terrible, it was transcendent.

  “There is no phenomenon … more sublime in its aspects than a storm spending its fury on the edge of the ice-pack,” Bradford had written. “The water, breaking with terrific weight and power, wave after wave, is hurled against the pack which it breaks, and tears, and rips up, throwing huge blocks upon the stubbornly resisting surface. It is a tremendous war of the elements, never to be forgotten.”

  At its essence, Bradford’s work was concerned with man’s yearning for the unknown. He was an explorer at heart, and he shared and appreciated George De Long’s northing impulse. A native of a little town near New Bedford, Massachusetts, and a devotee of the Hudson River school, Bradford was known for his pictures of stranded whaleships, freakishly shaped icebergs, furred men confronting polar bears, and glacial fjords lit by the midnight sun. Though the scenes were lonely and sometimes desperate, he managed always to instill wonder and beauty in them.

  Emma took solace in being with a friend who found a land so severe also so inviting. She tried to think of George as heading for the romantic realm Bradford described. The tranquility in his paintings, and in his demeanor, made her more tranquil, too.

  So Emma joined the Bradfords and, by rail and horse carriage, they headed east toward the High Sierra. They ambled among the sequoias of the Calaveras Forest—one of the giant redwoods would be named Jeannette in the expedition’s honor. They made their way to Yosemite and reveled in the waterfalls and the immense scallops of granite: El Capitan, Half Dome, Sentinel Rock. The excursion was just what Emma needed. “Although at first I felt so apathetic,” she said, “I gradually fell under the spell of the scenery.” It was “good for my deadened state of mind, and I began to enjoy myself again.”

  BY THE TIME she returned to San Francisco, Emma was restored. Her parents had arrived from Australia and were waiting at the Palace Hotel. Emma was happy to reunite with her family and tour the hilly city together. Then they took a train to Burlington, Iowa, where Emma’s sister lived with her husband, General S. L. Glasgow. Sylvie had been staying at their home for the past few months, and now the Glasgows invited Emma and Sylvie to live with them for the duration of the Jeannette voyage. This steamboat town, built on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, was where Emma would spend much of her “long, long vigil.” She diligently wrote letters to George, knowing that they probably would never reach him; she called them her “letters to nowhere,” and they became a therapeutic ritual. She penned them in triplicate so that they could be sent to multiple Arctic locations at once—whaling and trading outposts in Alaska, Greenland, and Spitsbergen, Norway. She included the latter two destinations on the hopeful premise that the Jeannette, after reaching the North Pole, might sail across the Open Polar Sea and pop out of the ice on the other side of the Arctic.

  Soon after she set up quarters at the Glasgow house in Burlington, Emma contracted a mysterious virus that kept her bedridden for several weeks. So far, she had heard no reports from the Arctic, and she was starting to worry. But just as she grew well enough to sit up in bed, a sheaf of correspondence arrived from Alaska. Finally, George’s letters to her had gotten through.

  In one of them, he mentioned that he had hung a photograph of her, as well as a portrait of Sylvie, at the head of his bed. After their long voyage together around South America, George was so used to having them both on board the Jeannette that he kept imagining they were still around. “Half a dozen times a day I blunder into the port stateroom,” he wrote, “with what a disappointment at finding you are not there! I wonder if I will ever get used to yo
ur not being with me.” On August 9 he wrote: “Sometimes I make the calculation that all the glory of all the Arctic expeditions in the world is not worth the happiness of having you with me for five minutes.”

  George still had the gift Emma had given him during their courting days in Le Havre, the little memento he had carried with him, as a bachelor, for all those years at sea. “I came across the little blue bag with a lock of your hair and the cross,” he wrote, “and now I carry it around in my pocket, as lovesick as I was eleven years ago.” In one of the envelopes was a picture of himself, with a note that said, “For my wife to look at when she is wondering where I am.”

  Mostly, the letters were brusque and businesslike, filled with minutiae about the voyage—which was natural, for George had come to regard Emma as a fellow officer of the expedition. But in the last letter, dated August 27, his tone softened. Included in the season’s final batch of Arctic mail, it was the very last letter he would write before entering the ice.

  August 27

  We are now hoisting the last of the supplies and shall leave at seven o’clock this evening. The weather is beautiful—light southerly breeze and smooth sea, and I am anxious to be off. And yet it seems like saying good-by once more. However, I am in this thing, and I am going to see it through.

  Good-by, with a thousand kisses. With God’s help I shall yet do something to make you proud of bearing your husband’s name. Do not give me up, for I shall one day or another come back to claim my wife and child. May God keep and bless you, wherever you are, and save your love for me.