The first weeks of the journey were easygoing, as the Jeannette angled southwest along the coast of Portugal and Morocco and then passed the Canary Islands before heading out into the broad Atlantic. The weather remained fair, the seas calm, and the winds so favorable that De Long never had to fire up the steam engine. “As we were under sail,” said Emma, “there was no jar, no noise, only the ripple of the water as the Jeannette cut through it.” The steward, Samuel, a Swiss-born thespian with impeccable diction, would sing beautiful arias while he fluttered about the galley. (It turned out he had spent a season with New York’s Metropolitan Opera Company.)
Emma and George had never enjoyed such a prolonged interlude of happiness. They spent a great deal of time reading from the Jeannette’s splendid library, which contained nearly every book ever published on polar travel. Sir Allen Young had donated many of his old titles, and Bennett had handed over his entire library of Arctic literature. De Long also had amassed an astonishing collection of charts and maps, many of them from Petermann’s atlas company in Gotha, including every known chart of the world north of the 65th parallel.
“We were utterly absorbed in the study of the Arctic,” said Emma, and in “the great objective ahead.” Danenhower would often join them in the chartroom for animated discussions about the best route to take through the Bering Sea, the probable winds and currents in the Arctic, and what would happen once they reached Wrangel Land. Immersed in these conversations, Emma began to realize “what a powerful thing science is and how absorbing a devotion to it becomes.”
Sometimes, George would pull Emma from her reading chair and they would saunter arm in arm along the decks, conversing in the briny mist, with Sylvie scurrying to keep up. “Though Sylvie and I were about to part with father and husband for long,” Emma wrote, “not one word—I believe not even a thought—of regret or apprehension came to us.”
11 · A BENEDICTION
On July 15, the same day the Jeannette set sail from Le Havre, the New York Herald took special note of the occasion by running a lengthy article about August Petermann. In the piece, entitled “The Unknown Arctic World: An Interview with Dr. Augustus Petermann, the Distinguished German Professor,” the writer and his subject both fairly trembled in anticipation of the discoveries the Jeannette would make in the High North. By now, Petermann had become the guiding spirit behind the expedition—its primary theoretician, its éminence grise. While neither De Long nor Bennett took Petermann’s word as gospel, the professor’s ideas had come to form the scientific and intellectual framework for the whole enterprise. Petermann had given Bennett his best Arctic charts and maps, and, to a curious degree, the Sage of Gotha had placed all his highest hopes on the success of the expedition as a way of confirming his hypotheses about the Arctic.
And so Bennett, seeing merit in publicizing Petermann’s attachment to the voyage, had sent a Herald reporter down from Berlin to spend a day with “the liberal and enthusiastic scholar of Gotha.” It was a warm summer day, market day in Gotha, and the town bustled. Farmers were selling bushels of cherries and slabs of freshly butchered veal, and trysting lovers could be seen scuffling down the shady paths. “Tow-headed children were romping in the streets,” the Herald reporter noted, and “the beer shops were filled with people, in the oddest country costumes, drinking beer and eating cheese.”
Petermann invited the reporter into his villa. He began the conversation with a discussion of his interviewer’s employer. “I am very glad Mr. Bennett proposes a Polar expedition,” he said. “From what I know of the Jeannette, she is just the vessel for such an undertaking.” Petermann stuck by his notion of an Open Polar Sea. “The central area of the Polar regions is more or less free from ice,” he said, although he conceded that it probably would not be “like the Mediterranean or the Gulf of Mexico, always passable.” Still, he said, “I am persuaded that it could be navigated by such a boat as the Jeannette.”
Petermann believed in the romance of ships, and he did not think that the North Pole would be reached by sledges. Although a dog-pulled sled might serve as a “useful auxiliary,” it should not be considered an “essential element of an expedition,” he contended. “It is not what dogs can do, but what men can do, that will gain results in the Arctic regions. I am in favor of the sea. You want a good boat and a steamer. I am disposed to pay honor to the men who bring their ships home.”
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.”
From the standpoint of weather and health, he predicted, the Jeannette’s voyage would prove surprisingly easy. “So far as health is concerned the Arctic regions are a hundred times more preferable than where Stanley was on the Congo,” he said. Light deprivation might try some men’s nerves, he thought, but Arctic weather was really not as hard as people believed. “The cold you can stand and thrive under,” he said. “It is that long night that tells on the body and mind.”
“Then,” asked the Herald correspondent, “you have no doubt the Pole will some day be found?”
Petermann replied, “No more doubt than that we have found the Congo. And I hope Mr. Bennett’s expedition will find it.”
The Herald interview ended there. “These words,” the reporter concluded, “were spoken as a benediction in a cheerful way as we walked from the Doctor’s house through the garden to the gate. The afternoon shadows were falling, and as night came on the old town seemed to hum and buzz and nod and roll itself to sleep.”
ALTHOUGH PETERMANN HAD put on a good face that day, he was suffering terribly. The manic depression that had gripped him for the past two years had worsened. Several months earlier, in May 1878, he had divorced his wife, Clara, and, within days, had impulsively married a German woman, Toni Pfister, from the town of Bernburg. His friends and acquaintances thought this was an act of pure madness, for he hardly knew the woman, and within weeks, it was clear to all that the new union would fail.
He was miserable, and so was she. Petermann missed his familiar life with Clara and their daughters, who had moved back to England. “Pangs of conscience gnawed at his marrow,” said an early biographer. “An ominous melancholy cast a pall that darkened day by day.”
Petermann’s nerves were frayed. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, couldn’t concentrate. He’d lost his zest for life. He could no longer sit at the piano or follow the international news in the papers. He seemed despondent about his work, too. Berlin had begun to eclipse Gotha as a center of cartography, map publishing, and exploration debates. Petermann had a sense that he was losing his edge, that his preeminence in the field was fading.
On September 25, 1878, he was found in his villa, hanging from the end of a rope. Suicide had evidently been on his mind for some time, for he left behind a three-week-old note. In his final months, he had made a number of cryptic remarks to his friends—remarks that, in retrospect, made chilling sense.
When she received the news of his death, Clara, in London, dashed off a letter to a family friend: “I often think how things are going at Villa Petermann,” she wrote. “Oh God, it all appears to me to be like a bad dream.” Hers was an “awful fate,” Clara said, but she still considered herself “his poor little wife, whom he so seriously misjudged.”
Petermann was buried as a local hero in a shady green park at the edge of Gotha, and he was heralded, internationally, as a kind of martyr to cartography. In his final hours, there was no indication that he had been thinking particularly of the Arctic. On his desk lay a new manuscript he’d been writing that concerned some aspect of African exploration. 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.
12 · SE
COND CHANCES
As the Jeannette drew nearer to the equator, the waters became oily calm and teemed with eels, tortoises, and dolphins. One morning, several flying fish hurled themselves on board—“just in time,” said Emma, “to be served up for breakfast.”
A few hundred miles off the coast of Brazil, the Jeannette sailed into a massive tropical storm. At the height of its fury, with the swells combing over her decks, the Jeannette’s main boom snapped off. The canvas mainsail danced madly in the rigging, and the ship came dangerously close to capsizing. De Long and Danenhower eventually got the runaway boom lashed down, but the storm continued to howl all night, leaving the cabins sloshing with water.
Emma stayed in her berth, clutching little Sylvie tightly, expecting a “clean swift death.” As the ship rolled in the high seas, the potted plants Emma’s friends had given her toppled to the floor. In the pitch-dark cabin, she could hear “one flower pot after another taking a plunge.” Surveying the wreckage the next morning, Emma realized that all the mangled plants and potsherds had to be “consigned to the deep.”
Alfred Sweetman, the dour carpenter, jury-rigged a new boom from a spare piece of timber, and soon the Jeannette was limping along nicely. Later in the morning, a pair of songbirds that evidently had blown in on the storm circled the ship and landed on the deck. They were probably from Brazil, two beautiful passerine birds of a species no one aboard recognized. One of them perched right on Danenhower’s thick crew cut. “It must think it’s in the brush!” Emma said with a laugh. Obviously exhausted, beaten up by the storm, the birds likely had flown many hundreds of miles.
The two “little visitors” became mascots of the ship—the focus of everyone’s affections, embraced as an augury of some kind. Emma tried to nurse them back to health in her cabin. She offered them grain, bread, and condemned cheese to eat, but the birds would not touch a morsel. One soon died, presumably of hunger and exhaustion. Samuel, the steward, penned a poem to “its melancholy fate.” After a solemn ceremony, he sealed the verses and the dead bird in a bottle, which he threw overboard.
The other bird seemed to improve. But a few days later, it flew out of Emma’s cabin, the door having inadvertently been left ajar. The crew scrambled over the decks trying to catch it, but the bird eventually soared off the ship and out to sea. “It made three attempts to get back on board and we thought it would succeed,” wrote Emma. “But its strength soon gave out and it fell into the water and was drowned, much to our sorrow.”
ONE DAY, AS the Jeannette was approaching the southernmost coast of Argentina, not far from Tierra del Fuego, Master Danenhower pulled De Long aside to say there was something he needed to confess.
Danenhower said he had once suffered a bout of “melancholy.” It had occurred three years earlier, when he was sailing aboard the Portsmouth near Hawaii. He could not definitely say what had triggered his depression, but he had been having “domestic troubles” back home in Washington. While at sea for six months, calling at various ports, he had not received an important letter he had been expecting. It sounded to De Long like a matter of the heart; Danenhower struck him as someone who, like himself, possessed a certain romantic streak.
In any case, Danenhower’s melancholy had deepened. The ship’s surgeon placed him on the sick list. When he did not improve, he was eventually sent home to Washington, where he agreed to put himself under the care of a physician at the Government Hospital for the Insane.
Danenhower committed himself with the understanding that he would not be detained in any way. However, once the asylum door slammed shut, he was treated as a lunatic—confined, isolated, his complaints ignored, his letters to the outside world tossed away. He tried to escape but was overpowered and thrown into a padded cell. He probably would be there still, Danenhower thought, but for the fact that his parents, in Washington, personally knew the secretary of the Navy—who, upon learning of Danenhower’s detention, had had him immediately released.
“I thought you ought to know the whole truth,” Danenhower told De Long. “I believe I’m as sound as any officer in the Navy. I was never out of my mind for a moment.”
This was a lot for Captain De Long to take in, but he appreciated Danenhower’s candor, and the fact that he had come forward and told his story of his own volition. “I believed him,” De Long wrote. Because Danenhower’s troubles had happened three years earlier, and had apparently not recurred, De Long was inclined to give the navigator the benefit of the doubt. Almost to a fault, De Long believed in the principle of giving a man a second chance. Besides, Danenhower had come so highly recommended: If he was good enough for President U. S. Grant, he was good enough for the Jeannette.
Danenhower had acquitted himself well on the voyage so far, and he always made for spirited and interesting company. He seemed far from depressed. “He is bright and cheerful,” wrote De Long, “attentive to his duty … a good seaman and a correct navigator.” Unless De Long learned something different in San Francisco, he was settled in his thinking: Danenhower would accompany the Jeannette to the North Pole.
AFTER EIGHTY DAYS at sea, the Jeannette headed into the Strait of Magellan. For several weeks, De Long and Danenhower negotiated the treacherous crosscurrents that flowed through this extended tangle of fog-shrouded islands, until the Jeannette finally passed into the heaving Pacific. Cruising along the coast of Chile, De Long knew he needed to go ashore somewhere to repair his jury-rigged boom, but Bennett’s insistence that no one touch land stuck in the captain’s mind. He would keep heading north without stopping, much to Emma’s chagrin. “We had been out of sight of land for so long now,” she wrote, “that my desire to touch the soil was almost uncontrollable.”
It was now spring in the Southern Hemisphere, but still freezing cold along the snow-dusted tip of the South American continent. George and Emma spent much of their time huddled around a fumy open-grate stove, reading by its flickering light. Gales were so frequent that Samuel had to string up guide ropes between the galley and the mess—and even then, he would often stagger “and dishes and all would go sprawling on the deck, and we would be minus that course for dinner.”
Farther up the Chilean coast, a squall suddenly enveloped the Jeannette. The Pacific swells “reared themselves mightily,” Emma wrote, and the Jeannette would “quiver when the waves struck her.” In a horrible instant, the ship heeled over so dramatically that her starboard gunwale skimmed the sea. “The horizon had tilted crazily and the squall was black all around us. We simply hung on and trusted to the ship.” The Jeannette began to take on water and seemed on the brink of swamping.
Then, within a minute, the squall passed, the wind eased, and the Jeannette returned to an even keel. In the mess, Samuel served the nervous crew nuts and coffee, and an unperturbed De Long came down from the bridge and acted as though nothing had happened. “Of how close we had come to eternity,” Emma wrote, “no one said a word.”
Off the coast of Peru and Ecuador, the weather moderated, and the temperatures warmed. Emma and George whiled away most of their evenings on deck, luxuriating in the tropical air. She would never forget those October nights spent together—“the brilliant southern constellations, the ship sailing along smoothly, the steward whistling so softly we scarcely dared to breathe lest we break the spell.” There was only the quiet creak of the timber, the groan of taut ropes, and the wind singing through the rigging. George De Long and his bride had never been happier. For so many years, his powerful relationship with sailing had been an abstraction to Emma, an obstacle to their togetherness. Now, for this one sojourn, it united them.
The Jeannette cruised past the Mexican mainland, then Baja, then on toward the rugged coast of California. Two days after Christmas, she passed through the Golden Gate, with only a single bucketful of coal left in her bunker.
The eighteen-thousand-mile voyage from Le Havre had taken 166 days. The Jeannette had performed magnificently, De Long thought, as had Master Danenhower. True to Bennett’s weird wishes, no
one had set foot on dry land.
13 · THE U.S. ARCTIC EXPEDITION
Captain De Long scrutinized his weather-beaten ship in the golden California light, going over every valve and fitting, every strake of her long hull. He wondered where her weaknesses lurked. Were there rotten timbers? Leaky seams? The smallest flaw could mean his death, and the deaths of the men who would serve with him in the Arctic. The Jeannette had survived the trip—had performed admirably, in fact—but he knew she was not ready for the coming battle with the ice. There was still much work to be done, and only a few months in which to do it. To withstand the pressures of the pack, the Jeannette would have to be reinforced in a way that no Arctic-bound vessel had ever been reinforced before.
For most of the month of January 1879, the ship lay moored at the Mare Island Navy Yard, near San Francisco, awaiting inspection from a specially appointed board of naval engineers. Mare Island was the only Navy shipyard on the West Coast, a place where new vessels were sometimes constructed and where the existing ships of the Pacific Squadron routinely came in for maintenance and inspection. It was a complex of foundries, pipe shops, machine shops, pitch houses, sawmills, smokestacks, and derricks clustered around a floating dry dock, all of it set on a marshy island where the Napa River emptied into a remote estuary of San Francisco Bay.
Each morning, the bell announced the start of the shift, and the crews of tradesmen—carpenters and coppersmiths, tinsmiths and teamsters, plumbers and painters, caulkers and coopers—went about their smoky, cacophonous work. Mare Island was the western outpost of America’s burgeoning might, the well-equipped repair shop of her still tiny but soon to be ascendant Navy, which was slowly converting from canvas to steam, and from wood to metal. Perched atop the headquarters building was a copper-sheathed statue of an American eagle, the huge bird cocked at an angle toward the water, as if to bid farewell to the nation’s ships as they ventured to the far reaches of the Pacific.