By the time these devastating findings were released, De Long had sailed from San Francisco, and thus he never saw them. They called into question nearly all the scientific theories on which the Jeannette expedition was based—theories that had been endlessly reaffirmed in the popular imagination. (After the Jeannette set sail, the Herald had declared that it was “undebatable that a warm current of water from the Pacific flows into the Arctic Ocean at Bering Strait.”) But as the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey results were showing, there was no warm current tunneling under the ice cap. There was no thermometric gateway to the pole. And, likely, there was no Open Polar Sea. The theories of Silas Bent, Matthew Fontaine Maury, and the late August Petermann were resoundingly wrong.
While the Jeannette wallowed ever northward, scientists and bureaucrats in Washington slowly digested the new data. Everything they learned seemed to suggest that De Long’s voyage, before it had even begun in earnest, was a fool’s errand.
Another scientist who would closely study the survey data was a respected physician and chemist named Thomas Antisell. Dr. Antisell, in an address before the American Geographical Society in New York, was ruthless in his conclusion. The portal De Long was aiming for offered “no real gate of entrance into the Arctic Ocean,” he said. “The North Pacific Ocean has, practically speaking, no northern outlet; Bering Straits is but a cul de sac.”
17 · NIPPED
On August 12, a little more than a month after she crossed the Golden Gate and steamed out to sea, the USS Jeannette eased into the bay near St. Michael, Alaska. As she dropped anchor in Norton Sound, a lookout at the fort loaded a decrepit cast-iron cannon, dating back to Russian days, and fired a few salvos in the Jeannette’s honor.
St. Michael, a trading post established by Czar Nicholas I in 1833, was the collection point and business hub for much of America’s dealings with her raw new territory in the Far North. There was not much to the place—several crumbling storehouses, an ammunition depot, a few clusters of small houses, and an old Russian Orthodox church. But this would be De Long’s final supply stop before heading into the unknown. Here he would take on stores, replenish his coal bunkers, collect furs, purchase dogs, and send off correspondence.
The settlement was located less than a hundred miles from the northernmost mouth of the Yukon delta, where a plume of reddish-brown river sediment reached far out into the sea. St. Michael was frequented by whalers, sealers, miners, trappers, merchants, and commercial agents who sold supplies for anyone venturing into the Alaskan interior. Massive quantities of furs and skins—more than a million dollars’ worth—were said to be shipped out of St. Michael each year.
This was the season when the ships from San Francisco arrived, when hundreds of Indians and Eskimos camped outside the fort to meet with representatives of the fur companies, to trade pelts and skins and dried fish for calico and guns and rum. Clusters of Indians huddled around bonfires of driftwood that had floated down the mighty Yukon. It was a time of roistering and wrestling and tug-of-war contests under the midnight sun, a time of “mallemaroking,” as the whalers called their drunken sprees.
De Long wanted his men to savor a few days of the Arctic summer and to enjoy the festiveness of this bustling fort on the outermost, uppermost edge of the American empire. Even so, he found St. Michael to be “a miserable place.” There was an air of decay here, De Long thought, of corruption and licentiousness fueled by liquor and greed. Yet he knew that this was likely the last they would see of civilization, or of what passed for it, for several years. “We may yet look upon [St. Michael],” he wrote, “as a kind of earthly paradise.”
IT HAD TAKEN De Long thirty-five days to cover the nearly three thousand miles between San Francisco and St. Michael. The ship, overburdened with coal, had “rolled and wallowed like a pig,” he said, but for the first few days they had enjoyed mostly smooth sailing, and the mood on board was merry. At nighttime, Collins would sit at the organ and pick out tunes, and the men, some banging tambourines or plucking fiddles, would break into song.
At other times, Collins, tepidly at first, would try out a few puns on the crew. Once the floodgates opened, the waters flowed: Collins could not stop himself. “Some of them were good,” De Long judged, “and some wretchedly poor.” Just as often, his puns were incomprehensible, turning on a joke, perhaps Irish in origin, that the others just didn’t get. “For a while we steadily refused to see his puns,” De Long wrote, “and would all look at him as innocently and inquiringly as babies when he got one off, asking him to explain it two or three times over, until he finally exclaimed that our intellects must be weakening in proportion as we increased our distance from San Francisco. Now, however, we let him pun away, praise the good ones, and condemn the bad.”
All in all, De Long could not have been happier with his men. They were “our little family,” he said, “as fine a crew as ever went on board of a ship. There has not been a sign of a disagreement or a suspicion of a growl.” They were a cross section of Gilded Age America—which meant an immigrant America, tough, self-reliant men who were hopeful and hungry for lives better than the ones they’d left behind in the Old World. There were Germans, two Danes, two Irishmen, a Finn, a Scot, a Norwegian, a Russian. There were French-Americans, Dutch-Americans, a few Scotch-Irish, and three Chinese.
De Long was particularly pleased with the Chinese cook, Ah Sam, and the steward, Charles Tong Sing, both of whom had been hired out of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Ah Sam’s cooking was good, De Long thought, and getting better all the time. He was a prodigious baker of breads—and though he made coffee far too weak for the men’s liking, he was getting the hang of things and seemed to be enjoying himself. Sam and Charley were “impervious to all” and “ever cheerful,” De Long thought, and seemed to have “no concern for the future, no cares for the past.”
But the third Chinese crew member De Long had hired—Ah Sing, the cabin boy—was proving to be a disaster. Nervous, uncoordinated, and clueless, Ah Sing spoke no English and was forever stumbling about the ship, spilling food and liquids over the mess-hall diners, smashing plates and cups on the floor. He was “simply waste lumber,” De Long thought. “He has already, by his stupidity, almost made me grow gray.” Ah Sam and Charles Tong Sing were constantly correcting the boy, scolding him in torrents of Chinese. Something about Ah Sing’s smile was unsettling. Sickly sweet and unchanging, it was a smile that drove everyone crazy—Melville, especially. Said De Long: “Melville would take him ashore now and shoot him if I passed the word.”
On Unalaska Island, in the Aleutian chain, De Long had briefly stopped to take on some cargo, including furs, sealskins, deerskins, blankets, six tons of dried fish, and 150 tons of coal. He’d posted some correspondence with a southbound steamer, then turned north into the foggy Bering Sea to resume the long journey toward St. Michael.
For several days, the Jeannette encountered heavy seas that plunged the less experienced hands into horrible bouts of seasickness. Ah Sing looked “like a corpse resurrected,” said De Long. “He was a shadow of his former self, his long pig-tail all in a confused mass of hair flying in the wind. I really feared he might die.” But the Irish punster had the worst time of it. “Poor Collins was so sick that he could easily have lost his mother and not have known it,” De Long wrote; though, he noted brightly, “His puns died out for a few days.” Yet much to the captain’s regret, as the Jeannette approached St. Michael, a restored Collins was “getting back to them again.”
DE LONG HAD to wait in St. Michael for nearly a week for the Francis Hyde, the supply schooner Bennett had chartered back in San Francisco, to catch up, bringing his last stores of coal. So the captain busied himself with other matters. He bought smoked fish and raw meat. He commissioned the native Inuits to sew fur suits and sealskin blankets. He bought deerskin boots and an assortment of wolf and mink pelts. He inquired among the villagers for any tidings, or even rumors, of Nordenskiöld’s whereabouts (though no one here knew anything). Representa
tives from the Alaska Commercial Company gave him more weapons and ammunition. From the Inuits, he bought forty sled dogs—“fine animals, young and active, and they took to me very kindly today when I visited them on shore.”
Bringing dogs along had always been part of De Long’s plan, but he realized that neither he nor any of his men knew how to drive or care for the animals. He went among the villagers to hire two knowledgeable hands to join the expedition. He quickly found two young men willing to sign on—Alexey, who listed himself as a hunter, and a friend named Aneguin. Though both spoke some English, the two young Inuits understood little about the expedition—where it was headed, what it was seeking to do, or the risks involved. They were mainly lured by what seemed, to them, exceedingly high pay. Alexey would receive $20 a month, plus a small stipend for his wife and child. Not only that: At the end of the expedition, he would take home the extraordinary gift of one Winchester repeating rifle with one thousand cartridges. The younger, unmarried Aneguin would receive slightly smaller wages.
The Francis Hyde finally arrived with the much-awaited coal shipment, and De Long set a departure date of August 21. That morning, the two Inuit dog drivers came on board and acquainted themselves with the Jeannette. An Inuit girl also boarded the ship for a short while. She was Alexey’s wife—a stout, shy young woman whose broad smile could not mask the worry she felt for her husband. Their young boy came along, too. The scene of their farewell moved all the men of the Jeannette, many of whom were no doubt lovesick for their own wives or girlfriends. The couple held hands as they sat on a pile of potato sacks near the cabin door.
Collins, who caught the moment in a dispatch for the Herald, thought Alexey’s wife “behaved with great propriety under the circumstances,” showing “stolidity tempered by affection for her spouse.” They lingered for a while, speaking softly to each other, tears pooling in their eyes. Seabirds wheeled overhead, and the ship banged and rattled as the last pieces of cargo were hoisted aboard. As the Inuit couple “exchanged vows of eternal fidelity,” said Collins, “I was greatly touched.”
De Long, perhaps thinking of his own farewell with Emma, was similarly moved. He tried to find something he could give the Inuit woman as a memento of the ship on which her husband would live for the next two or three years. The best he could scrounge up was a china saucer and teacup marked UNITED STATES NAVY in gilt letters. De Long also gave a harmonica to their boy. Alexey’s wife accepted the gifts with gratitude. She “seemed overpowered with emotion at the possession of such unique treasures,” Collins wrote, “and at once hid them in the ample folds, or rather stowage places, of her fur dress.”
When De Long announced that it was time for all visitors to leave the ship, Alexey was reluctant to let his wife go. “Clinging together hand in hand, they wandered and wondered about the ship,” said Melville, “until at last with many doubts and fears, they affectionately parted.”
BEFORE DE LONG could head north in earnest, he had one more errand to accomplish: He still had to solve the mystery of the whereabouts of the Scandinavian explorer Adolf Nordenskiöld. He didn’t necessarily have to find Nordenskiöld, but he did have to turn up convincing evidence that his ship, the Vega, had wintered safely and was in no need of assistance. De Long still chafed at this assignment, but since it had been issued by the secretary of the Navy himself, he could not shirk his responsibility. Of course, De Long didn’t know that the mystery had already been put to rest. He feared he would have to waste weeks, maybe months, on this wild-goose chase. On the evening of August 21, the Jeannette weighed anchor and, with the Francis Hyde following behind, headed west, toward the Siberian coast, in search of tidings of the “lost” explorer.
While the Jeannette was crossing the Bering Sea in a heavy gale, a huge wave broke on board and struck the front of De Long’s cabin. Instantly, the window was smashed, and his room flooded. “I was sitting dozing in my chair,” he wrote, “when suddenly I was buried by the sea, covered with broken glass, and everything I had was afloat.”
They approached Russia’s St. Lawrence Bay, where De Long sent a party ashore to inquire about Nordenskiöld. The Chukchi natives there seemed to know something about a foreign ship that had spent the winter in an ice-locked bay farther up the coast. Some of the other natives recalled seeing a steamer working its way south along the coast in July.
Not wasting any time, De Long turned north, sailing toward the Diomede Islands and the strait. On August 27, somewhere in the open waters near the Bering Strait, the Jeannette and her coal tender, the Francis Hyde, prepared to part ways. De Long took on a last load of coal, then transferred his correspondence—including his final letter home to Emma—to the other ship. He had also decided to send Ah Sing, the hopeless cabin boy, back to San Francisco. There was no use keeping him. “I discharged the Chinese boy,” De Long wrote. “He went on board the schooner with the same childlike and bland smile that has ever characterized him, accepting the inevitable as a philosopher.”
Then the Jeannette turned north, and the Francis Hyde turned south. In the bundle of mail that the Francis Hyde carried was a dispatch Collins had written for the Herald, in which he concluded, “Feeling that we have the sympathy of all we left at home, we go north trusting in God’s protection and our good fortune. Farewell!”
De Long made straight for East Cape—now called Cape Dezhnev—the easternmost point on the Eurasian continent. There, employing his new dog driver Alexey as a translator, De Long learned from an old woman in a local village that an exploring ship had indeed wintered at a place called Kolyuchin Bay, farther up the coast.
After crossing the Arctic Circle, the Jeannette next touched land at a place called Cape Serdtse-Kamen. The natives there led some of De Long’s men on a hike over mossy tundra for several hours, until they came to a protected spot where, according to them, the foreign party had safely spent the winter. There, in tents, De Long’s men rummaged among some tin cans marked STOCKHOLM, as well as through scraps of paper scribbled in Swedish. The men also found what Danenhower described as “some interesting pictures of Stockholm professional beauties.” The Chukchi natives showed the crew some engraved navy buttons that had been given to them—which proved to be Swedish, Danish, and Russian. The Chukchis conveyed through sign language and pantomime that the foreign steamer had passed safely out to the east as soon as the ice had melted.
As far as De Long was concerned, all of this constituted evidence compelling enough to call the mystery closed—and to absolve him of any more detective responsibilities. “I believe all our hearts were thankful,” he wrote, “that at last we knew Nordenskiöld was safe, and we might proceed on our way toward Wrangel Land … we will go on our way rejoicing.”
So De Long was finally free to push north. On August 31, he turned the Jeannette out of Kolyuchin Bay and aimed in the presumed direction of Wrangel. He had to make up for lost time, using the last of the summer window to achieve as high a latitude as possible. At long last, said Danenhower, “we felt that our Arctic cruise had actually commenced.”
FOR THE FIRST two days, they made good headway under sail, moving through ice-free seas. But then they began to encounter larger and larger pieces of drift ice. The weather turned sharp and cool, with the temperature ranging around twenty degrees Fahrenheit. A squall blew over the ship and left the rigging coated in a slick white film—a sudden harbinger of what was to come. “It was one mass of snow and frost,” De Long said, “a beautiful sight.” The snow didn’t worry him, but the ice did. “We observe a gradual closing in of large floes around us,” he noted. “The pack surrounding us seems to have a uniform thickness of about seven feet.”
This unexpectedly early buildup of ice was offset by a turn of good news: On September 4, Dunbar, standing in the crow’s nest, sighted Herald Island, a tiny crag in the Chukchi Sea well known among whalers. (Unrelated to Bennett’s newspaper, the island had been named in 1849 by the man who first sighted and landed on it, Sir Henry Kellett, captain of the HMS Herald.) He
rald Island was clearly marked on De Long’s sketchy charts, but he knew that just beyond it, some fifty miles in the fog to the west, was supposed to be Wrangel Land, Petermann’s elusive transpolar continent. It was the literal and figurative goal De Long had been aiming for, yet still he could not see it.
The next day, the men did snatch a glimpse of Wrangel—or at least they thought so. “During the forenoon,” De Long said, “there were several occasions when we distinctly saw land beyond and above Herald Island, to the southwest. I should at first have been inclined to think [it] was a kind of false island made by mirage; but as it was in the shape of high snow-topped mountains with clearly defined edges, such as could not have been caused by mirage, I am strengthened in my belief that we really saw [Wrangel].”
After several more sightings, everyone was convinced: Wrangel Land! They rejoiced at the thought that they were so near the place where they could find winter quarters and begin exploring terra incognita.
The celebration was short-lived, however, for now the ship was thudding into ever-larger cakes of ice, sending them spinning sluggishly off to the sides. De Long, who had moved up to the crow’s nest, tried to read the swirling patterns as best he could and pressed ahead, threading through the shrinking leads. “Our sides are scraped and scratched and cut,” he wrote, “but they are the scars of honorable wounds received in action with the ice.”
DE LONG FOUND the navigating reminiscent of his time aboard the Little Juniata off Greenland. He often had to push into a lead and ram the ice again and again until he had finally snubbed his way into a little crevice. The butting of the ship would often shoot elaborate spiderweb patterns of cracks well ahead of the bow. The Jeannette was usually able to “shove the floes apart enough to squeeze through,” De Long said. More and more, as he pushed through these tight passages, De Long came to rely on Dunbar’s advice. The New England codger could see things others couldn’t, could discern patterns in the ice that were inscrutable to the other men. He was, said Melville, “our ancient mariner and Arctic authority … with that keenness of vision that comes from forty years’ experience at sea.”