In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

George Melville would serve as the Jeannette’s engineer. Said to be distantly related to the great author, Melville was an improvisational genius with machines—a greasy-fingered savant who seemed most at home among thumping boilers and sharp blasts of steam. The engineer, thirty-eight years old, had a booming voice, a stout physique, and an enormou

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 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

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 b

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

The wood would be burned with the utmost economy—only for cooking, not for warmth. That night, as they simmered their modest dinners in crackling flames fueled by the sled wood, a few of the men wondered if they were, in effect, staring at their own funeral pyres.

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

Petermann had become the guiding spirit behind the expedition—its primary theoretician, its éminence grise.

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.