Several of the sticks of flotsam they consigned to the flames bore what Melville called “marks of the friendly axe.” This noticeably brightened the mood around camp. Said Melville: “How eloquently such silent signs of civilization spoke to our hearts, recalling distant scenes and friends.

Yet even as he’d cinched the noose, he’d known that the vessel that carried the hope of validating his fondest dreams was en route to San Francisco—and then to the pole. The interview he gave for the New York Herald was the last public utterance August Petermann ever made.

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.

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

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.”

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

De Long realized that the winds and prevailing currents had been funneling their floe piece down into the narrow channel that separated Novaya Sibir and Faddeyevsky. Though trapped all this time, they had in fact made fair progress.

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

The Jeannette expedition had thus begun to shed its organizing ideas, in all their unfounded romance, and to replace them with a reckoning of the way the Arctic truly was. This, in turn, led De Long to the gradual understanding that an endlessly more perilous voyage lay ahead. They might reach the North Pole yet, but almost certainly they were not