In the Kingdom of Ice

by Hampton Sides

  The ice was quiet, Melville said, and the ship looked “strikingly picturesque” as she dipped and bobbed in the bright sun. Melville ducked his head under the drape and took the last photograph that would ever be made of the USS Jeannette.

  A HALF HOUR later, while Melville was down in the darkroom developing the photograph, the floes began to close up again. The men heard a terrific grinding, and the ice worked on the ship as never before. The pressure resumed “with tremendous force,” De Long said, “the ship cracking in every part.” He knew the Jeannette was “in for a time” and hastily bundled up and rushed onto the deck. The sounds were horrendous, as though the Jeannette were being tortured and maimed. Newcomb distinctly felt her “groaning and shaking” and heard a “humming sound throughout the vessel, with the cracking of the deck seams and the dancing of the whole upper works.” De Long ran about the ship, chasing down every new alarming turn. “The spar deck commenced to buckle up,” he said, “and the starboard side seemed again on the point of coming in.” Two separate shelves of ice were pinching the ship with incalculable force. The hull, instead of rising above the pressure, as it had often done, was being driven down.

  De Long got on the ice with Dunbar and surveyed the situation. “Well,” the captain asked. “What do you think of it?”

  Dunbar’s tone was grave: “She’ll either be under the floe, or on top of it by tomorrow.”

  Melville was down in the darkroom while all of this was taking place, and he was reluctant to leave his work until his portrait was developed. He labored in the dark, listening to the rending and creaking sounds, while his image of the Jeannette bathed in a tray of chemicals.

  Minute by minute, the pressure intensified. Then a great fist of ice burst through the starboard coal bunker, and soon the hold was flooding. “She had been stabbed in her vitals, and was settling fast,” Newcomb wrote. “The ship is not yet built that can stand such hugging.” Some of the men, thinking this must be the end, raced to their bunks and grabbed their knapsacks, which had been packed for a catastrophe such as this.

  Finally it came, the call they had been dreading but preparing for, off and on, for many months: “Abandon ship!” De Long cried. “Abandon ship!”

  There was vigor in the captain’s voice but not panic. It was as though he had resigned himself to this moment long ago, as though he had made a solemn place for it in his mind. He stood on the bridge, surveying the mayhem, puffing on his pipe.

  Months ago, De Long had drawn up an emergency plan for what to do in this situation—detailing which equipment and provisions would be saved, and in what order. The men had studied the plan and rehearsed it many times. Each crew member had a precise job to do and a timeline to follow. Now, with De Long calmly choreographing the operation, everyone got to work.

  Large planks were angled to the gunwales to serve as ramps. The Jeannette’s logs and other official papers were wrapped in canvas and handed down to the ice. Dr. Ambler escorted the lead-poisoned invalids. Alexey and Aneguin led the dogs off the ship. Danenhower, removing the bandage from his eye, grabbed the navigation instruments and charts. Starr went down into the magazine, which was flooding rapidly, and hauled out case after case of ammunition. Cole and Sweetman, operating the davits, swung the cutters and one of the whaleboats onto the ice. Dunbar studied the surrounding pack for the safest place to make camp. Everyone else hauled food, furs, tents, stove alcohol, medicines, ropes, guns, oars, harnesses, sleds, and the small wooden dinghy.

  Hearing commotion throughout the ship, Melville gave up on his portrait of the Jeannette and left the glass plate swimming in its tray. Dashing from the darkroom, he spotted a hideous crack jigsawing across the engine room ceiling. Then he climbed up on deck and threw himself into the effort at hand.

  By eight o’clock, the Jeannette was heeled over twenty-three degrees to starboard. None of the crew could stand without clinging to something nailed down. The ice continued to strangle the ship. The wardroom was full of water. Everywhere was the sound of ripping bolts, groaning lumber, yawning metal. “Each successive shock,” Melville wrote, “was transmitted to the ship as to a centre, and resound[ed] with awful distinctness upon her sides like death strokes.” The gang ladders, Newcomb said, “jumped from their chucks and danced on the deck like drumsticks on the head of a drum.”

  De Long was satisfied that they had saved the most important belongings. Edison’s useless lights were left behind, as was the equipment Bell had provided. All the photographic plates that had been exposed during the expedition—including the portrait Melville had just taken—were stored deep inside the hull and would never be retrieved. Thinking it unsafe for the crew to climb over the foundering ship, De Long directed everyone to leave the Jeannette and remain on the ice. The water was rising so fast that the last stragglers working below could not exit by ladder but were forced to escape through a deck ventilator.

  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.

  His disappointment bordered on self-reproach. “It will be hard,” he wrote, “to be known hereafter as a man who undertook a Polar expedition and sunk his ship at the 77th parallel … I fancy it would have made but little difference if I had gone down with my ship.”

  De Long lingered a few more moments in silence. The grisly concussions of dismemberment had quieted, leaving only the sound of inrushing water. De Long waved his bearskin cap in sad salute and called out, “Goodbye, old ship.” Then he jumped to the floe, issuing a stern command that no one else was to board her.

  THEY SPENT THE night on the ice, thirty-three men and their dogs, watching their former home slowly slip away. They organized their belongings into long neat rows and set up tents. The weather was mild—twenty-three degrees Fahrenheit—and the mood was surprisingly jovial. Melville went so far as to call it “merry”—but merry in the way that little boys might whistle past a graveyard to keep up their courage. Alexey declared that he felt “plenty good.” George Lauterbach played his harmonica, and the men sang songs and told jokes, anything to distract them from what was happening a few hundred yards away.

  By midnight, the Jeannette was heeled all the way over, like a mortally wounded animal lying on its side. Her lower yardarms rested on the ice. De Long, seeing no point in staring at the ship’s final agonies, ordered the men to turn in for the night.

  Once inside their tents, they laid rubber mackintosh blankets against the ice and crawled into their bags. An hour later, the camp was roused by a loud cracking sound. A massive vent had opened up directly beneath the captain’s tent, beneath the exact spot where De Long was sleeping. Had there not been numerous men lying on either side of him—holding the rubber blanket in place with their weight—De Long, and probably Erichsen as well, would have fallen through to freezing water.

  Planks were placed over the crack to make sure no one fell in. Dunbar reassessed the condition of the ice around the camp and declared it treacherous. So, at De Long’s command, they marched a hundred yards away, to a safer spot—relocating their food, boats, sleds, and dogs—and set up camp all over again. It was well past three o’clock when they finally piped down.

  By this point, the Jeannette was almost gone. The tip of the smoke pipe was nearly awash. Still lying on her side, she gently swayed with the shifting of the ice. Every now and then a sigh or a groan issued from the innards of the ship, but the fight was over.

  At four o’clock, at the change of the watch, something remarkable happened. With a loud rattling of timbers and ironwo
rk, the Jeannette suddenly sprang up again, like a marionette, floating upright for a few long moments. It was as though she had come back to life. But then she began to sag straight down into the water, gathering velocity as she dropped. Kuehne, the watchman, called out, “If you want to see the last of the Jeannette—there she goes!”

  As the ship sank, the yardarms snapped upward, parallel to the masts, resembling, as Melville put it, “a great, gaunt skeleton clapping its hands above its head.”

  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.”

  They were almost a thousand miles from the nearest landmass—the Arctic coast of central Siberia. Even if they could reach it, dragging all their stuff and their boats behind them, their destination was one of the most remote and unforgiving landscapes on the planet. Little was known of central Siberia’s sparse settlements, and its coastline and rivers were insufficiently mapped. Siberia was notorious chiefly as the place where the czar banished criminals and political exiles—forever. De Long and his men understood the fragility of their predicament: Their only hope was a place with a reputation for hopelessness.

  Yet in back of the desolation and despair, the men also felt a kind of relief. They had been locked in the pack for twenty-one months, but now their period of inaction, of waiting and wondering in hapless drift, of suffering the tedium of a monotone imprisonment, was finally over. They knew what lay before them. They had only a few months to save themselves. They realized they were facing an epic struggle for survival—and yet they were anxious to get going. “We were satisfied,” Melville wrote, “since we knew the ship’s usefulness had passed away, and we could now start at once, the sooner the better, on our long march to the south.”

  The night was still and the pack eerily quiet, as though the ice were contentedly digesting the morsel it had eaten. The men stared at the hole where the Jeannette had been. Nothing was left of her but a wooden chest floating upside down in the water. Their ship’s requiem, said Newcomb, was “the melancholy howl of a single dog.”

  27 · ALL MUCKY

  Throughout the month of June, the rescue ship Corwin had zigzagged through the Bering Sea, calling at forts and villages on both sides of the strait. Creeping through fog and ice, Captain Calvin Hooper had pursued his usual rounds of errands as he waited for the sledge expedition to return from the Siberian coast with further news of an American shipwreck somewhere to the north. The Corwin encountered a number of American whaling ships—most of them New Bedford and Nantucket concerns—whose captains indicated they were having a banner year; after an unusually mild winter, the ice was receding farther and faster than expected, and already many of the ships had filled their holds with oil and bone. Sometimes, from a distance, Hooper could see the long black plumes of fat-fed smoke from the whalers’ tryworks, as they boiled out the blubber and rendered it into barrel upon barrel of oil.

  The mild winter and fast-shrinking ice gave Captain Hooper cause for optimism concerning De Long’s fate. If he was trapped somewhere to the north, this was surely the year he would break free. “If the Jeannette is still in existence,” Hooper wrote, “there can be no reason why she should not come to open water this year, as it will undoubtedly open farther than it has for years.”

  One of Hooper’s responsibilities was to patrol the capes and islands of Alaska in search of rum merchants, whose illicit trade in alcohol was proving disastrous to the natives. It was in the service of that responsibility that in late June, Captain Hooper stopped at St. Lawrence Island, an ice-gouged crescent of volcanic rock set in the middle of the frigid sea, directly west of the mouth of the Yukon River. Part of America’s Alaskan territory, St. Lawrence Island was nearly a hundred miles long and some twenty miles wide. Three years earlier, the island had had a population of more than fifteen hundred Yupiks, living in a dozen well-established villages scattered along the coast. Theirs was an ancient, thriving culture built principally on the walrus hunt. But then, in a single winter, the populace had been nearly extinguished by some sort of disease or famine.

  Around six o’clock on the evening of June 24, 1881, Hooper anchored the Corwin along the south coast of the island, beside a small Eskimo village. The captain, along with Muir, Smithsonian naturalist Edward Nelson, and the ship’s physician, Irving Rosse, rowed toward shore in a small boat, scanning the terrain with their field glasses. The island, said Muir, was a “cheerless-looking mass of black lava, dotted with volcanoes, covered with snow, without a single tree.” Landing the lifeboat, they strode across a gravel beach and then a spongy surface of snow-dusted lichen and moss. Here and there, blooming heaths and other bright wildflowers peeked through the snow. But when the men approached the village, there was no one to be seen. “We began to fear,” said Muir, “that not a soul was left alive.”

  They were startled by a noise. Several Eskimos cried out from a cluster of summer huts on a high hill overlooking the village and came down to greet the Americans—they were, thought Muir, “quite glad to see us.” Hooper asked them where all the villagers had gone. They smiled a strange broad smile and replied, “All mucky—all gone.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yes, dead!”

  Hooper asked where the deceased villagers had been laid to rest. The natives led the Americans behind one of the houses, to a place where eight still-decaying bodies were set out on the rocky slope. Their hosts, wrote Muir, “smiled at the ghastly spectacle of the grinning skulls and bleached bones appearing through the brown, shrunken skin.”

  As they stumbled about this village, Hooper and the others began to comprehend the extent of the famine. Muir counted some two hundred bodies, most “with rotting furs on them,” though other corpses had been “picked bare by the crows.” Many lay “mixed with kitchen-midden rubbish where they had been cast out by surviving relatives while they yet had strength to carry them.”

  So many corpses lay on the ground or were piled inside the houses that, said Hooper, “it was almost impossible to get around without stepping over them.” Muir counted thirty inside one house alone—“about half of them piled like fire-wood in a corner, the other half in bed, seeming as if they had met their fate with tranquil apathy.”

  It was to avoid this macabre sight that the few survivors—about a dozen—had retreated to live in the summer huts high on the hill.

  WHAT, PRECISELY, HAD happened on St. Lawrence Island? Many whalers suspected an epidemic of some kind, but others believed the mass death was caused by the complete failure of the Yupiks’ hunt in the summer and fall of 1878—which, in turn, was caused by an abundance of rum and whiskey illegally sold to the St. Lawrence Islanders by American traffickers. With alcohol around, Yupik life had ground to a halt—“as long as the rum lasts,” wrote Hooper, “they do nothing but drink and fight.” Drunkenness, said Muir, had “rendered them careless about the laying up of ordinary supplies of food for the winter.” Indeed, near one of the huts, Hooper counted eight empty whiskey casks.

  Then an extremely severe winter followed, with far more ice than usual, which made it harder to find seals and whales. By early 1879, the Yupiks all over St. Lawrence Island had begun to starve. They ate their own sealskin clothing, and the walrus-skin coverings of their huts, and the walrus-skin membranes of their boats. This temporarily satisfied their cravings but made them violently ill. With nothing else left to eat, they butchered their dogs until they ran completely out of food. In twos and threes, the villagers of St. Lawrence Island began to die.
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  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. Throughout the 1870s, American whaling vessels had taken as many as 125,000 walruses from the Bering Strait region. The slaughter had proved to be a lucrative sideline to the whaling business. The whalers cooked the animal’s blubber into oil and hacked off the tusks to sell in ivory markets as far away as England and China. In a single season in 1876, more than 35,000 Bering walruses were killed.

  Compared to the risky rigors of Arctic whaling, “walrusing” could be ridiculously easy. Rather than wielding lances and harpoons from tippy open boats, the whalers had discovered that they could simply clomp onto the ice with rifles and shoot large numbers of walruses point-blank in the head. Then the butchering, flensing, and boiling could begin. Firing up their try-pots aboard ship, the whalers could render more than twenty gallons of oil from the blubber of a single mature bull. In less than a decade, this industrially efficient slaughter had largely destroyed the Yupiks’ primary source of food and the seasonal hunting life upon which it was based. By the 1880s, the walrus was nearly extinct in large swaths of the Bering Sea.

  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.