In the Kingdom of Ice

by Hampton Sides

  DURING 1880, THE dogs had become a central part of the Jeannette adventure. They had hunted and hauled, they had entertained, they had caused countless headaches, but they were indispensable. Once, thirty of them were used to drag a colossal walrus kill back to the ship, a prize that weighed twenty-eight hundred pounds. The men had gotten to know the dogs, had named them and picked favorites. Kasmatka. Tom. Quicksilver. Jack. Prince. Smike. Bismarck. Paddy. Skinny. Foxy. Plug Ugly. Dewclaws. Snuffy. Snoozer. Joe. Jim. Armstrong. Wolf. Bingo. They ate just about anything—rotten fish, seal entrails, walrus blubber, condemned foodstuffs, slops of all kinds—and they remained surprisingly healthy. “They are fat as dumplings,” De Long said, “and as lazy as human beings in the tropics.”

  The dogs fought all the time, sometimes to the death, and yet they also observed subtle rules of kinship that allowed for many moments of extraordinary tenderness. Only Alexey seemed to understand them. He could see canine animosities brewing well before they came to a head.

  Once, he and Dunbar went out with a team on a walrus hunt. On the way, Bingo escaped from his harness, much to the jealous dismay of the other dogs, who tried to chase him down. Alexey said to Dunbar, “Bom bye, other dogs him plenty whip” (for deserting). The hunting party returned to the ship in the afternoon, having enjoyed no success. About a half hour later, Hans Erichsen reported to De Long that Bingo had been killed in a vicious dogfight.

  Alexey’s prediction had proved eerily true. Wrote De Long: “Though three or four hours had elapsed, the dogs remembered the circumstance of the desertion, and finding Bingo at a safe distance from the ship had pitched into him and chewed him so badly before Erichsen could reach them that he died within ten minutes of being carried on board. We skinned him to have his coat for future wearing apparel, and his carcass lies frozen on the deck-house roof for possible food for his murderers.”

  De Long himself had grown attached to one of the dogs, a tough survivor called Snuffy. Early in the voyage Snuffy had gotten into a fight and developed an infection that caused his head and snout to swell up hideously. What De Long so admired about Snuffy was his “most wonderful power to hold on to life,” as he put it. “Although I know that he will never be of use again, I prefer to give him all the life that he can hang on to in these uncharitable regions. Occasionally he seems to be going, as, for instance, today, when he was lying on an old mattress on the rubbish heap, seemingly at his last gasp. Being occupied with taking sights, I postponed his shooting until the afternoon, when, going out to see that he had not died in the meanwhile, I found him gone one hundred yards or so, and as frisky and far from death as ever.”

  De Long noticed that another dog, Jack, had rallied around Snuffy. “Jack watches him, protects him from the others, leads him, cleans him,” De Long wrote. The captain was touched by these tender mercies—Jack seemed to derive no tangible benefit from them. But eventually Snuffy’s condition worsened to the point that De Long felt it was cruel to keep him alive any longer. “For some days,” De Long said, “he had wasted away to a shadow. Lying on the ice, the heat from his body had thawed away a hole, and he was sinking gradually from view.”

  So Snuffy was taken to the other side of the ship and shot. “The poor brute is gone now,” De Long said, and Jack, his friend, seemed “unable to comprehend his disappearance.” Jack lingered by Snuffy’s old ice hole “in inquiring anxiety,” said De Long. “What a life this is.”

  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. Even though Dr. Ambler applied atropine religiously, the gummy substance inside the eye kept reappearing, adhering the iris to the lens.

  In January, when the pain had become too much for the navigator to bear, Dr. Ambler decided to operate. He gave Danenhower a little opium, and three burly men were brought in to hold down the patient’s arms and legs. Then Ambler, wielding a knife and a rubber probe, cut into the cornea and investigated the anterior chamber of the eye. He used an aspirator to “let out a lot of turbid fluid,” as he put it in his report. The pain was excruciating, but Danenhower endured it stoically.

  Every so often, De Long would stick his head into the room and watch the proceedings. “I hardly know which to admire most,” he wrote, “the skill and celerity of the surgeon or the nerve and endurance of Danenhower.”

  The procedure was a partial success, but over the next six months, Ambler would have to operate again, and again, to drain the “purulent matter” off the eye. All told, Danenhower underwent more than a dozen operations throughout 1880.

  By now De Long had been told the truth: that Danenhower had syphilis, that he had known it even before he signed on to the Jeannette. Ambler had tried to keep the secret as long as he could, but when the sores had appeared, it was no use. The captain was shocked and furious to learn this news. So that explained not only his eye and his skin sores but also his “brain trouble,” the bouts of depression that had cropped up in his record; it was well known that syphilis could make a man go mad. It made no difference that Danenhower had thought he was cured—there was no “cure” for syphilis at the time. In De Long’s estimation, Danenhower, by holding on to his secret, had committed an unforgivable sin of willful deception that endangered the whole expedition. Knowing what he knew, Danenhower should have recused himself from the outset.

  Still, the captain couldn’t help being moved by the uncomplaining toughness and equanimity with which Danenhower suffered his plight. “The knife and probe are regular things in his case now,” wrote De Long. “There is no improvement. He bears his confinement and the pain of the operations heroically. But he will never be of any use to the expedition and I seriously fear can never be of very much use to himself.”

  AS DE LONG thought back over 1880, what galled him most was the circularity of the voyage: For all their sufferings, they had circled back more or less to the place they’d started. It got him thinking of machines—machines that do certain repetitive tasks and will keep on functioning as long as the fuel holds out. He bemoaned what he called the “mechanical supplying of the system with food, heat, and clothing, in order to keep the human engine running.” Man, he said, “is but a superior kind of machine after all. Set him going, and keep him wound up, and he can run monotonously, like a clock.”

  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.”

  But even when he reflected in this maudlin way, De Long usually caught himself. “A man up here thinks a wonderful amount of nonsense,” he wrote, “and commits many absurdities which he will laugh at afterwards.” He was an optimist at heart, he insisted. His motto was Nil desperandum—“Never despair.” “Over this imprisonment,” he said, “a certain indefinable, inexplicable something keeps telling me all will come out right yet. Some still small voice within me tells me this can hardly be the ending of all my labor and zeal.”

  And so on New Year’s Eve 1880, when De Long stood up in front of the men, he tried to convey some of the hope that drove and animated him each day. He had never been very good at speeches, though, and he had nothing planned. He puffed his pipe for a while, drinking in the mood of the night, and he then began. “Like every event in life,” he said,

  this cruise may be divided into two parts: That which has been an
d that which is to be. We are about to turn our backs on the old year and turn our faces toward the new. During the past sixteen months we have drifted thirteen-hundred miles. Danger has confronted us each day. We have been squeezed and jammed, tossed and tumbled, nipped and pressed, until the ship’s hull would have burst had it not been as strong as the hearts it held within. We have pumped a leaking ship for a year and kept her habitable. And we are all still here. We face the future with the firm hope of doing something worthy of ourselves, and worthy of the flag that floats above us. We are not yet daunted.

  Something about his words caught fire with the crew. They made the deckhouse ring with their cheers. Nil desperandum! We are not yet daunted! At midnight, the traditional eight bells were struck for the old year, then eight more for the new. De Long said good night to the men, then lingered awhile in the wardroom with Melville and Dunbar before turning in to jot a few lines in his journal. “The year 1881 [was] officially inaugurated in the United States Arctic Steamer Jeannette, in latitude 73°48 N, and longitude 177°32 E. I begin the new year in this book by turning over a new leaf, and I hope to God we are turning over a new leaf in our book of luck.”

  My Dear Husband—I got up a Christmas tree for Sylvie and she was perfectly delighted with it. We dressed the tree that night and on Christmas morning I led her into the parlor and there stood the tree in all its glory surrounded by innumerable dolls and trinkets. We looked so few standing around the tree that bright Christmas morning, it was sad. Let us hope, next Christmas.

  This is the time of year to form good resolutions, and I am making a good many, but first and foremost I am going to give up fretting and am going to be bright and hopeful and energetic. I suppose you are in total darkness now but you will see the sun by February. How you must long for it!

  Your loving Emma

  24 · THE DISCOVERED COUNTRY

  Through the spring of 1881, the Jeannette continued her jagged drift across the Arctic pack, creeping toward the northwest. The ice showed new cracks and fissures, the first signs of the coming thaw, but offered scant promise of release.

  May 17 dawned flat and gloomy, but in the late afternoon, the leaden skies parted, offering views to the horizon. At seven p.m., the ever-vigilant Dunbar was in the crow’s nest, watching the crunching floes through his glass as the men went about their evening routines. Dunbar had been acting funny lately—something was agitating him. Some subtle change in the wind and the drift patterns of the ice engaged his mariner’s mind. For a week or more, it had seemed to him that something in the distance, to the leeward side, was obstructing the free movement of the floe, smashing and fissuring the ice into smaller pieces.

  Suddenly Dunbar issued a raspy call to the men below, one so strange and unexpected that at first they could not register its significance. “Land ho!” he cried out. “Land ho! Off the starboard bow!”

  It was just a vision in the distance, maybe fifty miles off, a nub of gray standing proud of the hummocks and pressure ridges. For several days, Captain De Long studied this curiosity, wondering if it might be an illusion—a refraction of light, perhaps, a fata morgana. He could not be sure what it was, for it was often obscured by mist and fog, and a low cloud clung to it. But a few days later, the cloud dissipated, and the island became clearly visible to the naked eye: a tall conical mass, like a volcano, riven by gulches, its steep flanks speckled with snow. There was no denying it. This was land, the first they had seen in more than four hundred days—ever since they had lost sight of Wrangel in early 1880. In his journal, De Long’s relief was palpable: “There is something, then, besides ice in this world.”

  As they drifted toward it, De Long consulted his charts. None of the maps, not even the most up-to-date ones Bennett had procured from Petermann, showed anything for many hundreds of miles in any direction. For the past year they had been drifting across a great stretch of the Arctic through which no vessel had ever passed. A smile must have spread over De Long’s face, for the conclusion was inescapable. “We have discovered something,” he wrote. “Our voyage, thank God, is not a perfect blank.”

  De Long adopted a rhapsodic tone in his journal. “What this desolate island, standing among icy wastes, may have to do in the economy of nature, I do not know, or in fact care. It is solid land, and will stand still long enough to let a man realize where he is.”

  He christened the new terrain Jeannette Island and began to make plans for landing on it. The crewmen were ecstatic. “At once,” Melville wrote, “all the younger prophets turned out on the high hummocks to scan the discovered country. All were as elated as though a second Goshen had sprung into view.” The men, studying the island with field glasses, began to imagine that they could see live game flitting on Jeannette’s distant shores. “Some of the far-seeing enthusiasts,” said Melville, “distinctly descried reindeer moving about; and others of still greater ken could plainly distinguish the buck from the doe.”

  Then, on May 25, Dunbar sighted another piece of land. At first he surmised that it was merely an outcropping of Jeannette Island, but by May 27, it became apparent that it was another island altogether, considerably larger than Jeannette and perhaps thirty miles beyond it, to the northwest. What was more, the ship was heading directly toward it—passing little Jeannette by.

  So Captain De Long and the crew shifted their affections toward this newer, larger rock. De Long named it Henrietta Island, after both Bennett’s Irish mother and the schooner that Bennett had used to win the first transatlantic yacht race. (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.”

  The crewmen fantasized about finding safe harbor on Henrietta and setting up camp for a time—repairing the ship’s leaks, eating fresh meat, and savoring the dimly remembered pleasures of walking on terra firma. “We shall enjoy getting our foot on solid earth as much as if it were Central Park,” De Long said. “Most of us look carefully at our island before we go to bed to make sure it has not melted away.”

  By the end of May, Henrietta’s features were sharpening into bold relief. Collins and Newcomb kept themselves busy producing sketches: There were steep headlands, rocky points, discharging glaciers. It appeared to be a circular hump of land about four miles across, a plug of creation capped by eternal snow, forged by heat, whittled by wind, and gouged by ice. But De Long held out hope that the island’s interior, or hidden coves along its coast, might teem with life. Perhaps there would be bears and walruses to shoot, driftwood to salvage, fresh water to drink, rookeries from which to rob eggs. He envisioned an early summer idyll to reclaim the expedition’s energies.

  But with the unpredictable churn of the ice pack, De Long worried that the ship, while generally aiming toward Henrietta, might assume a different course and pass it by, just as she had missed Jeannette Island. On May 31, seeing his opportunity vanishing, he decided to dispatch a small detachment of men and dogs to make landfall and perform a cursory reconnaissance. It was an incredibly risky idea: With so much turbulence around them, with the ice cracking in all directions, the explorers could easily become marooned, drifting to their deaths on a detached floe. A lead could open and swallow them. A single storm or the untimely descent of fog could separate them visually from the ship just long enough to ensure that they would never be found again.

  Yet De Long thought the rewards of the reconnaissance mission far outweighed its risks—and he picked the “flower” of the crew to make the attempt on Henrietta. The ferociously competent Melville would be in charge. Dunbar
, who knew the treacherous idiosyncrasies of ice better than anyone, would serve as guide. Four of De Long’s strongest, ablest men would haul the gear: Nindemann, Erichsen, Sharvell, and the fireman James Bartlett. De Long himself hankered to lead the expedition—it was, he said, “my strong desire.” But Chipp had come down with some sort of intestinal ailment, forcing him to join Danenhower on the sick list. De Long concluded that it would be irresponsible for him to leave the ship and her crew for such a glorious errand.

  At nine o’clock, Melville and his party gathered on the ice with fifteen dogs and a dinghy to be pulled on a McClintock sled. They were equipped with rifles, ammunition, a tent, and provisions for ten days. Altogether, they had nearly a ton of equipment and supplies. The rest of the crew circled about and cheered them, firing off a few volleys of the large brass gun. It was the first time any part of their expedition had been separated from the group in nearly two years. An immense black flag was flown from the mainmast to serve as a beacon for Melville’s return.

  Melville gave the sign, and in a ruckus of scraping runners and yipping dogs, they took off for white-domed Henrietta. According to their best guess, the island was only twelve miles away, but they had to pass over what looked to be the most impossible terrain imaginable—a “wild tumult,” as Melville described it, “a chaos of ice.”

  Five hundred yards from the ship, a lead of open water halted them, forcing them to lower the dinghy into the water and ferry the sled and supplies across. But they could not coax the dogs to plunge into the freezing water—their howls of protest carried over the ice. Two of the huskies escaped from their harnesses and sprinted toward the ship. Several fleet-footed men aboard the Jeannette intercepted the canine deserters and hauled them back to Melville, who reattached them to the team.