Dall’s report on the Black Current was unequivocal. “The Kuro Siwo sends no recognizable branch northward, between the Aleutians and Kamchatka,” he wrote. “No warm current from Bering Sea enters Bering Strait. The strait is incapable of carrying a current of warm water of sufficient magnitude to have any marked effect on the condition of the Polar

De Long understood what happened when men under extreme duress were given the latitude to express their dissatisfactions unchecked—how quickly a wrong, real or imagined, could magnify in men’s minds, how a single misconstrued incident or comment could make its way through the ranks.

It was obvious what De Long had to do. And yet it was a terrible gamble to have to make. In their expeditionary metamorphosis, they would have to commit to becoming entirely aquatic—which is to say, no longer travelers of the ice. They would have to dismantle the sleds and use them for firewood, with the idea that all travel hereafter would be by

To struggle like a spavined mule yet advance only a mile or two a day was “rather discouraging,” De Long admitted. But he seemed to rise to the suffering—to thrive on it. His capacity for pain, his disdain for any kind of languor, his steel-cut work ethic—where did it come from? It was a masochism that was nevertheless warmed by sanguinity. He was

Unbeknownst to De Long, there was one large village close to the coast, on the northwestern edge of the delta. It was called North Bulun, a settlement of a hundred people situated on ground high enough to avoid the Lena’s seasonal flooding. If De Long had landed only eight miles farther to the west, he would have struck a clear branch of the river

But the next morning, De Long emerged from his tent and was stunned by what he saw: To the south, there was nothing but ice. Overnight, a powerful shift in the winds had brought the ice fields down from the north and driven them against Novaya Sibir. The way to the island was now completely blocked. There were no lanes, no channels, just a churning

The Sage of Gotha was excited by the possibility that De Long would find human civilization at the North Pole. “I should not be at all surprised,” he said, “if Eskimos were found right under the Pole. It is not at all unlikely.

De Long tried to hug the floes but not too closely, for they often had sharp tongues projecting underwater that could ground the boats—or rip a hull apart. The waves constantly gnawed at the ice, honeycombing it with tunnels and hidden voids. “The ice was very much wasted,” De Long wrote, “and had numerous holes extending through to the sea.”

De Long had effectively consigned another myth to the scrap heap: the thermometric gateway. The ice in which they were so stubbornly locked had certainly caused De Long to doubt Silas Bent’s celebrated theory, but it was the Jeannette’s slow and careful accumulation of scientific data that clinched the captain’s opinion. Every day, his men had gone