in fact, it is an impossible thing—for one starting out on an expedition of this kind to say in advance what he is “going to do.” After reaching the seventy-first parallel of latitude, we go out into a great blank space. You will excuse me, therefore, from attempting to explain what we are “going to do.” If you will be kind enough to keep us in memory while we are gone, we will attempt to tell you “what we have done” on our return, which, I dare say, will be more interesting. I can only return to you my sincere thanks for the interest you manifest in our peculiar undertaking.
The scientists of the academy offered a toast, and then De Long and his officers departed the reception to a rousing ovation.
A few days later, De Long visited San Francisco’s Merchants Exchange to confer with a very different society of experts—a large group of Arctic whaling captains who happened to be in port. The meeting had been arranged by De Long’s good friend William Bradford, an acclaimed painter known for his dramatic Arctic scenes who was well acquainted with the world of the whalers. Bradford thought it would be good for De Long to avail himself “of whatever information their experience might afford and suggestions they might have to make.”
The get-together turned out to be a seminar on Arctic conditions, with Bradford serving as moderator. One by one, the whaling captains stood to speak. They were greasy, grizzled men, most of them from New England, who understood the perfidiousness of the Arctic better than anyone else. They were from the same fraternity of men that De Long had met with in New Bedford a few years earlier, when he had learned that a North Pole attempt via the Bering Strait would essentially be “going downhill.” Now the captains told De Long what they knew of the prevailing currents and the violent winds and the weird behavior of the ice around the Bering Strait. They shared their wisdom and legends and rumors, relating all that they had heard about the mysterious Wrangel Land.
De Long was grateful for their advice, and he questioned them closely. They did not mince words about the dangers of the ice pack. In the summer of 1871, thirty-two whaling vessels, carrying more than a thousand men, had entered the pack north of the Bering Sea and were destroyed. Still, many of the whalers believed that if he kept going, De Long eventually would find the Open Polar Sea. “How we envy Captain De Long,” one whaler, Captain Benjamin Franklin Homan, would write. “How beautiful and warm and pleasant it will be in that warm sea around the north pole whare thare [sic] will be found all sorts of life and sumer [sic] fruits. What a lovely vineyard to live in.”
Another whaling captain remained “ominously silent,” Bradford recalled, “not venturing an opinion or offering a suggestion.” This taciturn fellow was Ebenezer Nye, a legend among whalers. He was the wealthy captain of the Mount Wollaston and had significant stakes in many other whaling vessels. A fifty-seven-year-old man from New Bedford, Massachusetts, Nye had been a whaler since he was nine, and he had a reputation as a nearly miraculous survivor of the high seas. He had been shipwrecked three times in the Arctic and had once drifted for twenty-one days in a lifeboat across the South Pacific, losing seventy pounds of his body weight. Bradford thought Captain Nye was “one of the oldest, bravest, and best men in the service … There was no man sailing to the frigid seas who knew more of their perils than he.”
Disturbed by Nye’s reticence, Bradford finally stood up and singled him out. “Captain Nye has not given us his opinion,” Bradford announced, “and we would like to hear from him.”
Nye rose reluctantly and rendered his thoughts. “Gentlemen, there isn’t much to be said about this matter,” he began. He noted that he himself would be heading up to hunt for whales along the very same ice pack where De Long would be, not far from Wrangel Land. “Lt. De Long,” Nye asked, “you have a very strong vessel, have you not?”
Yes, De Long replied. After all the reinforcements that had been completed on Mare Island, he thought the Jeannette was “strong enough to fight her way to the Pole.”
“And she is magnificently equipped?” Nye continued.
Yes, De Long said.
“And you will take plenty of provisions, and all the coal you can carry?”
De Long said he would.
Captain Nye mulled over everything he had heard. “Well, then,” he said, “put her into the ice and let her drift, and you may get through. Or, you may go to the devil—and the chances are about equal.”
JULY 8, THE day of the Jeannette’s departure, dawned with a gravity that seemed in keeping with Captain Nye’s pronouncement. All morning the skies over San Francisco churned with storms. Over at the Merchants Exchange, the skippers scowled at the gloom and predicted “dirty weather” for the Jeannette. “She’ll have it devilishly thick all the way up the coast,” one captain was heard to say. But by the forenoon, the sun had begun to burn through the clouds and the winds had settled down to a steady light breeze from the southwest, a favorable direction for the Jeannette. Soon it was crisp and clear, with only a scrim of fog over Mount Tamalpais. Said one reporter: “Nature relented.”
As church bells clanged throughout the city, crowds began to swarm along the piers and high on the flanks of Telegraph Hill, which by early afternoon looked to one observer like the “bristling back of a huge porcupine.” The decrepit Meiggs Wharf, at the end of Market Street, teetered from the weight of the throngs. On the Embarcadero, police formed barricades and wielded billy clubs to keep the crowds at bay.
The object of the public’s attentions lay at anchor, just off Yerba Buena Island, bobbing gently in the shallows, her yards squared, her stack occasionally issuing wisps of black smoke. “The taut little bark,” said the Daily Alta California, was “the cynosure of thousands of eyes.” From the Jeannette’s mainmast flew the American flag and the blue silk expedition flag Emma had sewn. The ship was freshly painted and scrubbed clean. It sat noticeably low in the water from the stores of coal and provisions she’d taken on board. Some of the expedition members could be seen walking the decks or scrambling over the rigging. Other crewmen leaned over the bulwarks, wrote a reporter, “gazing with sorrowful eyes at the city of wealth and luxury, whose streets they might never tread again.”
Dozens of yachts skimmed along the bay—sleek pleasure craft with pert names like Frolic, Magic, Lively, Virgin, and Startled Fawn. The entire fleet of the local yacht club had answered its commodore’s call to appear en masse and escort De Long to sea. Mingling with the yachts were tugs, fishing boats, and chartered steamships loaded down with well-wishers. The captains of these motley vessels were stalling, idling, circling, in anticipation of the moment of departure.
By two o’clock, the Jeannette’s officers and crew were all on board—everyone, that is, except for De Long. The captain was still in his suite at the Palace Hotel with Emma. In full uniform, he was at his desk, working on an official letter to Washington—
San Francisco, CAL, July 8th, 1879
Hon. R. W. Thompson,
Secretary of the Navy—
Sir,
I have the honor to inform you that the Jeannette, being in all respects ready for sea, will sail at three o’clock this afternoon on her cruise to the Arctic regions. While I appreciate the grave responsibility entrusted to my care, I beg leave to assure you that I will endeavor to perform this important duty in a manner calculated to reflect credit upon the ship, the navy, and the country. I desire to place upon record my conviction that nothing has been left unprovided which the enterprise and liberality of Mr. James Gordon Bennett could suggest.
Your obedient servant,
George W. De Long
Shortly after completing the letter, De Long nodded to Emma, and together they rode one of the Palace’s “rising rooms” down to a carriage waiting outside. The driver sped them to the wharf at the end of Washington Street. When the De Longs emerged from their carriage at precisely three o’clock, a roar went up from the crowds, which were estimated to number more than ten thousand people.
It was “quite a mob,” De Long said, and Telegraph Hill
was “black with people.” He turned and removed his hat in acknowledgment; then he and Emma squeezed through a press of dignitaries, making their way to the water’s edge. There, with thousands of spectators whistling and waving hats, the couple stepped into a small boat and were briskly rowed to the Jeannette. The plan was for Emma to accompany George as far as the Golden Gate, where she would finally bid her husband farewell. She and the De Longs’ close friend William Bradford, already aboard the Jeannette, would hitch a ride back to the city on one of the convoying yachts.
At around four o’clock, the Jeannette weighed anchor and her screw propeller spun in the water. The ship slowly turned toward Alcatraz. So burdened was she with coal and provisions that some skeptics questioned how De Long would outrun even the most sluggish Arctic icebergs. The ship “moved so slowly,” noted the Chronicle, “as to excite satirical remarks regarding the possibility of her escaping the slowly-closing jaws of ice-pinch in some future hour of peril.” At her present rate of speed, noted the Vallejo paper, “it will not take over ten years to reach the North Pole…if the wind is favorable.”
As the Jeannette steamed into the bay, yachts flitted around her, and people clung to the rails of chartered steam ferries, shouting farewells amid clouds of handkerchiefs. Melville, the engineer, thought it “right royal,” with so many “jolly tars huzzaing and firing guns with deafening effect.” De Long was nearly brought to tears by the “immense demonstration.”
Yet the captain couldn’t help noticing that the Navy’s presence was missing from the celebrations. “Not a sign of a naval officer was seen in the departing ovation,” De Long wrote. “It was a mortification to me.” The absence was especially conspicuous because he knew that three ships from the Pacific Fleet—the Alert, Alaska, and Tuscarora—lay at anchor only a few miles away. If this wasn’t insult enough, a Navy tug on some separate errand cut across the Jeannette’s wake and angled off for Mare Island without so much as a toot of its whistle. As far as Emma was concerned, this was “shabby treatment” from a Navy that had become jealous of the international attentions the Jeannette had received and whose entrenched political hierarchies were uncomfortable with the hybrid public-private nature of this project.
But just as the Jeannette was about to slip through the Golden Gate, the Army redeemed the Navy’s slight: The Fourth Artillery fired an eleven-gun salute from the ramparts of the Presidio. The resounding boom carried over the water, delighting the men of the Jeannette. Collins reveled in the spectacle of the big guns “belching away and the fat lumps of white smoke rolling down to the sea below.” Melville called it a “solemn amen to the godspeeds of the people … Never was a departure more auspicious.”
De Long answered the Army’s courtesy by dipping his colors, and from the “brazen throats” of the accompanying tugs came a chorus of steam whistles. “We now see the old flag waving high on its mast over the stronghold of Uncle Sam,” wrote Collins. “Farewell, brave boys, may your guns always salute friends and terrify enemies. Not a man on board has the shadow of a melancholy thought on his face. We are happy in the knowledge that millions bear us friendly wishes.”
SOON THE JEANNETTE was on the open Pacific, pitching in the swells as she turned toward the northwest. The sky ahead appeared foggy, and there was a stiff breeze. Collins tried to lighten the mood in the wardroom by sitting at the small pump organ and regaling Emma and George with stanzas from the new Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera, H.M.S. Pinafore. Around six o’clock, a yacht called the Frolic pulled up close to their stern. De Long knew its purpose: The time had come for Emma and Bradford to return to San Francisco. “The hour is at hand … time’s up,” Collins wrote. “We part company with civilization for the present.”
Emma found a private moment with Dr. Ambler, whom she had come to regard as a confidant. “Will you be a close companion to my husband?” she asked the surgeon. “You know how lonely a commanding officer must necessarily be.”
Ambler vowed that he would, but then he qualified his statement. The Arctic was a peculiar place, he said. “No doubt we’ll lose our sense of proportion. Please be lenient in your judgment of us.”
De Long intervened to say, “It’s time to go.” As a small boat was lowered from the davit, Emma shook hands with the other officers, greeting each one, thought Collins, “with a fortitude that was fairly heroic.” Then she turned to speak to some of the crew. “Stay good friends and pull together … you must succeed!” she said. “I beg you to stand by your captain.”
George and Emma climbed into the boat, with Bradford following them. As the sailors rowed away for the Frolic, there were, said Collins, “few dry eyes upon the quarter deck of the Jeannette.” Bradford found the brief trip excruciating. “The silence was oppressive,” the artist later wrote, “the only sound being the thump of the oars in the rowlocks and the swash of the water.” Reaching the side of the Frolic, De Long pressed his wife’s hand and said, simply, “Good-bye.” She put her arms around his neck, and they kissed. It was only then, De Long wrote, that “the full force of my going away struck home … I felt stunned.”
Emma climbed aboard the yacht, then turned and gave George a look that seemed to Bradford a “devout silent prayer for his safety.” Bradford could see that the “pang of separation was heightened by her regret that she could not share his trials.” De Long seemed to hesitate, “as if for a moment unnerved.” Then, regaining his composure, he turned to the sailors and said, in a sure voice, “Pull away, men.” Then he returned to his ship.
Emma watched the Jeannette until it was merely a gray dot on the horizon. When it was gone from sight, she went belowdecks, as the Frolic turned back toward San Francisco. “I craved only solitude,” she wrote. “A complete apathy took possession of me. It seemed … the end of everything.”
Aboard the Jeannette, De Long sat at his desk. The U.S. Arctic Expedition, he was pleased to write in his log, finally had commenced. He noted, “The ship is now beginning her voyage to that unknown part of the world lying north of Bering Strait. May God’s blessing attend us all.”
The Jeannette, a Chronicle reporter wrote, became a “long dark pencil of shadow standing up straight against the vivid sunset.” Then she was gone. “Three years hence, De Long will probably announce his return. For the present he is lost to the world. He is sailed out into the dark, and the world can only watch the edge of the darkness for the first glimmer of the Jeannette’s whitening sails.”
16 · A CUL-DE-SAC
Even while the Jeannette steamed north toward the Bering Strait, another world-renowned vessel was steaming south out of it, and down the North Pacific coast of Russia. It was the Vega, Adolf Nordenskiöld’s exploring ship. The world didn’t know it yet, but the Finnish-Swedish scientist and explorer had emerged, a month earlier, from his winter quarters in northeast Siberia and was well on his way to Japan, where he would announce his considerable accomplishment: Nordenskiöld had become the first navigator to make a complete Northeast Passage—that is, a journey across the top of the entire continent of Eurasia. Hugging the land for the most part, the Vega had successfully worked its way along the eight-thousand-mile coastline of the Russian Arctic.
De Long had guessed from the start that Nordenskiöld was safe—that, indeed, he had never really been in any danger. The Scandinavian didn’t need to be “found,” any more than Livingstone had needed to be hunted down in Africa. But Bennett had wanted his “De Long meets Nordenskiöld” moment, and that was the end of it.
But the timing of Nordenskiöld’s emergence from the ice was particularly bad for De Long. He had missed Nordenskiöld by only a week. By the time De Long approached Alaskan waters, the Vega was making for the Kuril Islands of Japan. As one Arctic historian put it, “Somewhere in the fog-wreathed Bering Sea between the Aleutian Islands and Norton Sound, the USS Jeannette and the ship she was supposed to look for passed each other on opposite courses.”
Meanwhile, another bit of rotten luck was brewing in Washington. Earlier in the
summer, a schooner commissioned by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey had made its way out of the Arctic after an ambitious multiyear study of the North Pacific and the Bering Sea. The hydrographers and meteorologists hired by the geodetic survey had been conducting painstaking analyses of oceanic currents, depths, salinities, temperatures, and prevailing windpatterns. Specifically, the survey was interested in learning about the Kuro Siwo—the Black Current of Japan. Much of the data had yet to be analyzed, but already clear patterns were starting to emerge.
The Kuro Siwo, the findings suggested, was not nearly as strong or as warm or as reliable as the Atlantic’s Gulf Stream. As it swept up from the coast of Japan and out into the open ocean, the Kuro Siwo frayed into numerous subsidiary currents, and its power steadily waned. If anything, the prevailing tendency at the Bering Strait was that of cold-water currents flowing south.
The survey’s final report would be written by an eminent Harvard-trained naturalist, William Healey Dall. Dall was a scientist of wide-ranging interests—he had published papers in the fields of ornithology, anthropology, oceanography, and paleontology and had conducted numerous meteorology studies for the Smithsonian Institution. Dall had traveled extensively in Alaska, and his name would become well known throughout the region.
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 Basin just north of it. Nothing in our knowledge of them offers any hope of an easier passage toward the Pole, or, in general, northward through their agency. Nothing yet revealed in the investigation of the subject in the least tends to support the widely spread but unphilosophical notion, that in any part of the Polar Sea, we may look for large areas free from ice.”