England, of course, still had the most expertise in the field of polar exploration, but he had deep misgivings about the Brits. Petermann had a love-hate relationship with the United Kingdom. Although he had been born and raised in nearby Bleicherode and schooled in Potsdam, Petermann had worked in London throughout the first part of his career, and he remained infatuated with English culture. He had moved back to Germany in the mid-1850s, but he still read the London papers every day, drank English tea every afternoon, and closely followed the bulletins of the Royal Geographical Society. His wife, Clara, was British, and they spoke English in their home. Their three daughters had been raised as proper English girls.
If Petermann was an Anglophile at heart, England had nonetheless rejected him. This had partly to do with burgeoning nationalism and xenophobia in England after the rise of Bismarck and the Franco-Prussian War. It also had to do with style: The leading explorers and Arctic thinkers in Great Britain didn’t like Petermann. They found him increasingly fanciful and stubborn. The Times of London had taken to snubbing him, as had the Royal Navy. On the subject of the Arctic, Petermann had a horrible temper and tangled with anyone who disagreed with him. The officers of the Royal Geographical Society, where he had long been a leading member, had blackballed him. Petermann, it seemed, had become an unwanted child.
Petermann’s staunchest enemy in Great Britain was Clements R. Markham of the Royal Geographical Society. Markham had come to regard Petermann as a charlatan and a windbag. “Dr. Petermann has done serious injury to the cause of Arctic exploration,” Markham had argued. He thought Petermann’s favorite subject, the Open Polar Sea theory, was pure rot. (The Brits, through hard experience, had begun to abandon the idea of sailing to the pole; thinking there was nothing but ice up there, Markham and other leading British advocates of exploration believed sledges and supply depots, not ships, would provide the way to the top.)
“All experience,” Markham wrote, “seems to prove that the polar basin, when not covered with compact, unbroken ice, is filled with closely-packed, unnavigable drift-ice, in which some apertures may be found.” Markham warned that Petermann’s notion of smoothly sailing to the North Pole would send young sailors to their deaths. Petermann, he scoffed, thinks sailors can “penetrate through the belt or girdle of ice which encircles the open polar basin of his imagination … and then sail across it. All very easy to write at Gotha.”
Sherard Osborn, a Royal Navy admiral and explorer, and another distinguished member of the Royal Geographical Society, had piled on: “I think it utterly mistaken to try to penetrate with ships to the North Pole,” he wrote, “and I would be part of an expedition sent out to this goal only if Herr Dr. Petermann personally came along for the journey.”
Feeling spurned by the adopted nation he’d once loved, Petermann clung to his wizardly world in faraway Gotha and all but ignored the Arctic doings of the Brits.
But the Americans intrigued Petermann more than ever. They had a most peculiar and interesting way of doing things, he thought. The Americans seemed to ignore hierarchy and the stifling weight of ages. In supple and energetic ways, they could combine national interest with commercial interest, government sponsorship with private funding, military glory with civic pride. The Americans, with their dazzling inventions and their organizational élan, would reach the North Pole, he felt sure. Petermann was impressed by how quickly the United States had bounced back from its Civil War and thrown its efforts into the polar game. “The world will not fail to recognize,” he had written, “that the Americans, after they have ended and paid for a costly war, have had something left over for science.”
Petermann, of course, was well aware that Bennett had sent Stanley to Africa. He understood that it was a stunt to sell newspapers, but still, Stanley’s trek had produced sound knowledge while whetting the public appetite for further discovery. Afterward, Stanley had met with Petermann in Gotha, and the professor had incorporated knowledge the explorer had gleaned on the ground to create the latest maps of the African interior. Bennett had made a real and lasting contribution to science, for which Petermann was grateful.
Petermann felt that Bennett and De Long should approach the North Pole with the same directness and can-do pragmatism that had characterized Stanley’s tromp through the Dark Continent. “Some day,” Petermann told the Herald reporter, “the Pole will be found by a navigator who goes to his work with the common sense and determination Stanley showed in Africa. I look at the Arctic explorations in the general interest of science. All expeditions raise new questions. The more we see the more we want to see and know. Success is only relative.”
WHAT BENNETT REALLY wanted to consult with “His Doctorship” about was the angle of attack: How should De Long approach the pole? What was the best route for smashing through the ice and reaching the Open Polar Sea?
Predictably, Petermann had elaborate theories on the subject. First of all, he said, give up on Greenland. The route through Smith’s Sound had produced nothing but heartache. Charles Hall’s expedition had been only the latest example of what would befall any expedition headed in that direction. Explorers there would always encounter what Petermann and others called the Paleocrystic Sea, the ring of hopelessly impassable ancient ice encircling the pole.
“Smith’s Sound has become a habit,” Petermann said. “People believe in it because twenty or thirty years ago they were told to believe in it. Franklin went in that direction, and so did Kane and Hall and Hayes, and other glorious, famous names have thrown a romance over all that region. So the illusion has grown that if the Pole cannot be reached over this route, it cannot be reached at all. There was the same illusion about African discovery. Think of the expeditions that have gone into Africa, following old and beaten tracks, to come to the same end—destruction and death.”
Most assuredly, it was time for an entirely new route. Petermann had read Silas Bent’s treatises on the Kuro Siwo and was familiar with his ideas about a “thermometric gateway.” Petermann agreed with Bent. The place to strike for the pole was the Bering Strait, just as De Long had been thinking. Not only had the route never been tried before, but the Kuro Siwo was likely to be a warm-water current powerful enough to soften up a pathway through the ice that would lead to the Open Polar Sea.
But there was another compelling reason for going by way of the Bering Strait, Petermann suggested. Lying off the coast of northeastern Siberia, not far from the Bering Strait, was a mysterious landmass marked on some maps as Wrangel Land. For centuries, it had existed as little more than a rumor, a mirage, a fog-gauzed dream. People weren’t sure what it was. Perhaps it was an island, perhaps a continent, perhaps a magical portal to the pole. Perhaps it didn’t exist at all. Before it came to be called Wrangel Land, it had gone by a succession of other names scrawled on whaling charts: Tikegan Land, Plover Island, Kellett Land.
In 1822, Chukchi natives on the northeast Siberian coast told the Russian-financed explorer Ferdinand von Wrangel about a land to the north that could sometimes be seen when atmospheric conditions were just right. The Chukchis had never been there, but once every few years, on sharp, clear days when the mists and fogs opened up, and when the vagaries of Arctic refraction were favorable, a mountainous land seemed to rise up from the sea like a dream. The Chukchis called it the Invisible Island, and they spoke of legends of a forgotten people who lived there. They had seen herds of wild reindeer clomping north from the Siberian mainland across the ice, presumably to graze on the strange land during their seasonal migration. Flocks of geese and seabirds, too, had been seen aiming in that direction. The animals seemed to know something the humans did not.
Enticed by what he heard, Baron von Wrangel sailed for the mythic land, but he was thwarted by ice and failed to snatch even a glimpse of it. Nearly thirty years later, the captain of an English vessel searching for Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition thought he spotted a large Arctic island in the distance. Later, various whaling captains insisted they’d seen it, though
their claims were disputed. A German whaler, Eduard Dallmann, was even said to have briefly landed on it in 1866.
Something was there—Petermann was convinced of it. And this land, he believed (on the basis of anecdotes from Arctic whalers and ancient reports from Russian explorers), was surrounded by open water. “It is a well-known fact,” he had written, “that there exists to the north of the Siberian coast, and, at a comparatively short distance from it, a sea open at all seasons.”
Now Petermann drove home his point: Bennett and De Long should utilize that open sea and make Wrangel Land the target of their expedition. What a contribution to science it would be to finally learn what this land was about! On their way to the pole, he said, Bennett’s party should try to land on Wrangel, explore it, and claim it for the United States.
PETERMANN HAD HIS own unorthodox theory about Wrangel Land. He thought it was an extension of northern Greenland—that Greenland wrapped across the Arctic, forming a massive transpolar continent. Petermann had produced a rather preposterous-looking map that showed this fancied piece of real estate, which he liked to call Transpolarland. As Greenland stretched north into the unexplored High Arctic, it tapered and became a long proboscis that extended for more than a thousand miles, up and over the pole, ending at Wrangel Land. This exceedingly long, thin peninsula, with an open polar sea lapping at both sides of its apparently ice-free coastline—this elephant’s trunk of hypothetical land—looked absurd on the map. But Petermann stuck to his theory all the more zealously for the ridicule it invited.
Petermann’s idea was for Bennett’s explorers to work their way up the Wrangel coast and see where it led. They could overwinter on the landmass if they had to and hunt for reindeer or any other game that might be living on it. They could use Wrangel Land as a kind of ladder to climb toward their ultimate goal. If they reached the Open Polar Sea, they could dash for the pole in their ship. If they didn’t, they could sprint toward it with dogs, sleds, and small boats. Either way, they were sure to make a major contribution to science—proving or disproving his Transpolarland hypothesis. And while doing so, they would likely go farther north than anyone had ever been before.
This was the most viable path toward the North Pole, Petermann insisted. “Perhaps I am wrong,” he told the Herald reporter, “but the way to show that is to give me the evidence. My idea is that if one door will not open, try another. If one route is marked with failures, try a new one. I have no ill will to any plan or expedition that means honest work in the Arctic regions.”
But make no mistake, Petermann said, an Arctic voyage was dangerous work. He always underscored that point. “A great task must be greatly conceived,” he had written before one of the German polar expeditions. “For such tasks, one must be a great man, a great character. If you have doubts or scruples, back out now.”
Petermann pledged to give Bennett’s expedition a full set of charts and maps of the Arctic and to help the expedition any other way he could. But beneath his enthusiasm for Bennett’s new endeavor, an undertow of sadness pulled at Petermann, a sense of resignation. It was as though he were in mourning—and in a way, he was. Two years earlier, one of his three daughters had died of an unspecified condition, brought on, according to one account, “from mental overexertion.”
His daughter’s death had upset the equilibrium of his existence. His mood had grown dark. Manic depression ran in his genes; several male members of his family—reportedly his father and a brother—had taken their own lives. Now Petermann and his wife, Clara, were on the verge of separating. He had thrown himself into his work as though it were the only thing he had left. Petermann held on to his Arctic dreams with a frantic desperation; Bennett’s proposed expedition, Petermann realized, might be his last chance to vindicate his polar theories in the public eye. He longed for Bennett and De Long to succeed.
As soon as Bennett returned to Paris, he dashed off a spirited note to De Long. “I have just returned from a hurried trip to Gotha, on a visit to Dr. Petermann. You have no doubt heard of him by reputation. I can assure you the three hours I spent with him fully repaid me for the tiresome journey. He told me he had been studying the North Pole problem for the last thirty years and that he feels certain it can be reached.”
The Bering Strait, Bennett reported, was the way to go—De Long had been right all along. “Petermann says it can be done in one summer … with a suitable vessel and a commander experienced in ice navigation.”
Petermann had made it sound so tantalizing, and so easy, that Bennett had contracted the Arctic bug himself. It was just a passing fancy, but now he was thinking of going to the pole, in his own ship. In closing, Bennett must have given De Long a start when he wrote, “I have been seriously thinking of getting another vessel in addition to the one you will have and starting myself by Dr. Petermann’s route.”
9 · PANDORA
From Gordon Bennett’s first meeting with George De Long, the publisher’s desire to sponsor a North Pole attempt had only grown keener. Throughout 1876 and 1877, he had kept in close communication with De Long by mail and cable, seeking reassurance that the young officer’s ambitions had not changed. “He is more than ever disposed to carry the affair through,” De Long wrote Emma. In the fall of 1876, Bennett persuaded De Long to seek a leave of absence from the Navy Department and come to England to hunt for just the right ship in which to voyage to the Arctic. Bennett, of course, would pay for everything.
De Long leapt at the opportunity. He was growing concerned about a new effort recently floated before Congress by a U.S. Army Signal Corps officer named Henry Howgate to establish an American colony somewhere in the High Arctic, from which an assault on the North Pole could be a staged. The idea that a North Pole attempt could be land-based, as opposed to nautical, worried De Long. In such a scenario, the Army would likely lead the effort, not the Navy, and De Long’s leadership role would thus be supplanted. For his own sake, and for the Navy’s, he felt tremendously motivated to find a ship—and find it soon.
De Long took a steamer to England in December, and found polar exploration circles there in an uproar about a British-led Arctic expedition that had recently returned from a nearly disastrous attempt to reach the North Pole via the west coast of Greenland. Led by British naval officer George Nares, the expedition had achieved a new “farthest north” record but had developed scurvy and a host of other problems before retreating home. The Nares debacle was much on De Long’s mind when he met with Bennett at Somerby Hall, a classic country mansion the publisher owned in Lincolnshire, but the two men agreed to forge ahead with their proposed mission. Then De Long set to work. He roamed up and down the length of England in search of a vessel, sending teams of hired agents ahead of him to snoop around the country’s major ports and make confidential inquiries. For three weeks, De Long traveled almost constantly, catching occasional naps or snacks on the train. “I have astonished my stomach with tea,” he complained to Emma, “and what with that and the loss of sleep I am as nervous as a cat.”
He particularly focused his efforts on the ports of Scotland, where, with that country’s well-established whaling and sealing industries, he felt certain he could find a craft that was “adequate for battling the ice.” He prowled the docks in Dundee and Peterhead and hobnobbed with captains—trying, at times, to loosen them up with a little whiskey. But he could find no owners who were prepared to turn loose their ice-proven ships. “The demand for whalebone is something fabulous,” De Long wrote in disgust, and “everything that can be put together is going this spring and summer to hunt whales.”
De Long had planned to travel on to Hamburg and other major ports in Europe. But first he made a stop at Cowes, the prominent yachting capital on the Isle of Wight, in the English Channel. There he got word of a certain vessel called the Pandora that had successfully returned from a difficult voyage to the Arctic—a voyage, in fact, which Bennett had helped fund, and on which one of Bennett’s Herald correspondents had tagged along to write dispat
ches. The little ship was not currently being used, De Long was told, and might be for sale. On a “fearful day,” with a gale blowing rain and snow, De Long promptly went to the marina and nosed around until he found the craft in question.
De Long loved the Pandora as soon as he laid eyes on her. She was, he thought, a “tidy” ship. A three-master, but also equipped with a steam engine that powered a screw propeller, the Pandora was 146 feet long, with a beam of 25 feet. Fully loaded and rigged, she drew 15 feet of water. She was bark-rigged and carried eight boats, including a steam cutter and three whaleboats. She had a sharply pointed bow—reinforced for the ice—and a narrowly rounded stern. The Pandora could sleep thirty comfortably, which was precisely the number of men De Long thought he should take to the Arctic. Her displacement was 570 tons.
What most impressed De Long about the Pandora was her felicitous history: She seemed to be a vessel imbued with good luck. Built in Devonport, England, and launched in 1862, she had ably served as a Royal Navy gunboat off the coast of Africa for four years before passing into private hands. Then, stripped of her guns, the Pandora had been outfitted for the Arctic and had made two trips to Greenland, where she had acquitted herself magnificently as a survivor of the ice.
De Long liked the fact that the Pandora was a former Royal Navy ship. Up until that time, most of the exploration in the Arctic had been undertaken by the Admiralty. De Long was fairly in awe of the English legacy in this arena, and as an officer in a weakling navy, he felt a certain reverence toward a nation that had long exerted such a sweeping and sophisticated command of the seas. He found something satisfying about the notion that he, an American, might command a former Royal Navy gunship in the High Arctic—as though the exploration torch were being handed off, across the Atlantic, to a younger, hungrier aspirant.