At six the next morning, June 5, the watchman in the crow’s nest sounded an alarm and blurted, “Party in sight!” De Long raced onto the deck and, sure enough, he could see the flash of a silk flag appearing intermittently between the hummocks, several miles off. He was so excited that he ran toward the bridge for a better look with his field glasses. Bounding up the steps, he was leveled by a blow to the head and knocked nearly unconscious. He stood up, dazed. Blood trickled down his face and dripped onto the quarterdeck. Ah Sam looked at the captain aghast, saying, “Oh my! Great big hole!”
De Long, in his anxiousness to learn more about Melville, had forgotten about the recently reinstalled windmill. One of its sharp blades had sliced open his head, leaving a four-inch gash serious enough that Dr. Ambler demanded to take him to the infirmary. But before he would go, the captain had to know if everyone in Melville’s party was alive and safe. In the shaky lens of the lookout’s glass, the men emerged from behind an ice ridge. De Long was “intensely relieved” to spot six tiny forms trudging across the pack, with Erichsen out ahead, wearing his old felt hat and carrying the flag.
“Thank God,” De Long wrote, “we have landed upon a newly discovered part of this earth, and a perilous journey has been accomplished without disaster.”
Dr. Ambler stitched and plastered De Long’s wound, and soon the captain joined the others on the ice to welcome the sojourners. They hugged and laughed and drank whiskey, with “the dogs yelling lustily.” Melville couldn’t tell “who was more pleased, the greeters or the greeted.”
When Melville asked about the big bandage on the captain’s head, De Long replied sheepishly that he’d had “a bout with the windmill.” Then he smiled and embraced Melville. “Well done, old fellow,” he said. “I am glad to see you back.”
25 · TIDINGS
That same week, as De Long and his men rejoiced in their conquest of a new crag of land, another American vessel was working its way up the eastern coast of Siberia, across the Bering Strait from Alaska. This ship, the reinforced steamer Corwin, crept along the ragged margin of the pack, waiting for summer to melt the frozen gates of the Arctic.
The Corwin’s captain, Calvin Hooper, was a commissioned officer of the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service, a predecessor of today’s Coast Guard. And the Corwin, which had left its home port of San Francisco in May, had many errands to accomplish during its season’s cruise: carry the Arctic mail, check on the safety of the whaling fleet, interdict illicit whiskey and firearm traffic, enforce trapping and trade treaties in Alaska, and inspect the holds of ships for violations of the annual seal hunt. But the most urgent purpose of the Corwin’s mission, carrying the hopes and fears of the nation, was to learn the fate of the USS Jeannette.
As Hooper stopped at tiny settlements along the Siberian coast, a story began to emerge, filtered through multiple languages, its details distorted from having traveled by word of mouth from village to village. The Chukchis spoke of a shipwreck somewhere to the north, hundreds of miles up the coast. An American vessel had become locked in the ice and drifted for months. Finally it had been crushed, its timbers torn asunder and scattered over the ice. There had been disease and horrible tribulation. Some Chukchi natives were supposed to have seen corpses.
Hooper was guardedly interested. “Notwithstanding the well-known mendacity of the natives in this vicinity,” he wrote, “the report contained a ground work of truth.” Could this shipwreck be the Jeannette? he wondered. Was it one of several American whaling ships—among them the Vigilant and the Mount Wollaston, captained by the prophetic Ebenezer Nye—that had gone missing the previous fall? Or, just as likely, was the story a fiction, concocted by canny natives seeking a reward?
Whatever the case, Captain Hooper had to learn more. By the first week of June, he had pushed his way north to the ice’s edge, on the scent of this tragic tale.
FOR THE PREVIOUS year, newspapers across the United States had called for the launch of relief expeditions to learn what had become of De Long. Some papers had gone so far as to declare that De Long and all his men were dead. Emma De Long had lobbied quietly through the winter to ignite public sentiment for a rescue effort. By early 1881, cries for a solution to the Jeannette mystery had intensified: People had to know where De Long and his men were. It was as though the nation had sent its countrymen down into a hole in the earth, or off to another planet, and now, for reasons of science, for reasons of national pride and emotional closure, there had to be a reckoning.
In truth, many Arctic “experts” were optimistic about the Jeannette and thought that the dearth of news about her was a good thing—a sign that she had made it through the impediment of the ice and was well on her way to the pole. “I cannot see any reason for being … anxious about the Jeannette,” the Austro-Hungarian Arctic explorer Karl Weyprecht opined for the newspapers. “A ship whose object is discoveries in uninhabited regions cannot be expected to remain in communication with home … Mr. De Long has no reason to linger about the outer ice for the benefit of those who are expecting news. The absence of news … must be contemplated as a symptom of success.”
Bennett felt the same way. He had written to Emma De Long, “I hope the silly prophecies of outside irresponsible papers about the Jeannette have not frightened you. I am perfectly confident of the absolute safety of the ship and crew. The very fact of her not being heard from yet is to me the best evidence of her success.” At a meeting of the American Geographical Society in New York, the Arctic explorer Isaac Hayes dismissed all worries about De Long. “I do not anticipate that the Jeannette has been either crushed by the ice or hopelessly beset,” he said. Emma, in the audience, was given a standing ovation when she was acknowledged. “I see the face of Mrs. De Long among us,” Hayes said, “and I want to express my belief that her husband is just as safe tonight, though not as happy, as if he sat by her side.”
Maybe so, yet Congress was deluged with petitions for action. The American Geographical Society implored the White House and the U.S. Navy to do something. The new president, James Garfield, who had taken office in March, threw his wholehearted support behind the rescue effort. Congress appropriated nearly $200,000 to outfit suitable relief vessels, and the hastily created Jeannette Relief Expedition Board, led by a prominent rear admiral, began to oversee the effort. Bennett would kick in extra funding wherever it was needed. The search was strictly precautionary, the relief board insisted. There was no overriding cause for worry. “The whole history of Arctic exploration is marked by great dangers, wonderful escapes, [and] successes where appearances forbade any rational hope,” the board’s initial report concluded. “We believe that the Jeannette and her gallant crew are safe.”
All the same, Emma De Long had grown increasingly worried about the safety of her husband and his crew. She had been receiving letters from George Melville’s wife, Hetty, who was sure the men of the Jeannette had all perished. Hetty Melville’s letters were strange. Claiming to be a clairvoyant, she declared, “I shall never see my husband in this world again.” She insisted that she had been visited by her husband’s ghost: “He came to me as he said he would if he died, and he was in pure white.” Emma decided that Mrs. Melville was probably mentally ill, yet her own worries about the Jeannette only deepened as relief vessels prepared to depart for the Arctic during the spring of 1881.
The Corwin was the first of three American ships to be sent out. Another ship, the man-of-war Alliance, would leave from Norfolk with two hundred men and make for Arctic reaches far to the north of Norway, on the theory that the Jeannette might have traveled over the pole and popped out on the other side of the ice cap. A third rescue ship, the Rodgers, would leave from San Francisco later in the summer and pursue a slightly different route through the Bering Strait toward the frozen ocean beyond. Gordon Bennett made sure that both the Alliance and the Rodgers would have top correspondents from the Herald aboard, and Emma De Long furnished the captains of both ships with copies of all her correspondence to her husba
nd—the “letters to nowhere” she had been writing all year.
As for the Corwin, Captain Hooper’s instructions from his superiors in Washington were worded hopefully, brooking little possibility that the Jeannette might have met catastrophe. “You will make careful inquiry in the Arctic regarding the progress and whereabouts of the steamer Jeannette,” the orders read, “and will if practicable communicate with [it] and extend any needed assistance.” Hooper’s orders expressed confidence that he would “bring back some tidings” of the lost explorers. Along the way, they would put out the word among all the whalers, sealers, walrus hunters, traders, and natives they encountered to keep a lookout for De Long’s men and publicize a reward for reliable information leading to the discovery of the Jeannette. By the end of the season’s cruise, the Corwin would travel more than fifteen thousand miles.
Hooper’s mission was to reach the Bering Strait as quickly as possible and, once the ice permitted, to steam straight for Wrangel Land. De Long had stated from the outset of his voyage that his objective was to work his way up Wrangel toward the pole. As he had told Emma, the captain planned to leave messages in zinc canisters beneath well-marked cairns every twenty-five miles up the east coast of Wrangel, for the benefit of any future searchers. Hooper’s orders, then, were to hunt for these cairns and follow whatever story might be contained in the secreted messages.
The SS Thomas Corwin was the most seaworthy Arctic vessel on the West Coast. Built in Portland in 1876, she was a single-screw steam-powered topsail schooner 137 feet long and made of stout Oregon fir fastened with galvanized iron and locust pegs. Although not nearly as ice-strong as the Jeannette, the Corwin had done honorable Arctic duty for three years, and her hull had recently been sheathed with thick oak planking to withstand the pack.
The man at her helm was a coolheaded career mariner with little formal schooling but with a preternatural gift for mathematics and navigation. Thirty-nine years old, a native of Boston, Calvin Leighton Hooper was a stolid, no-nonsense man with shiny pomaded hair and aggressive muttonchops. He had sailed away from home at age twelve as a cabin boy, become a first mate on a clipper ship at twenty-one, and, following the Civil War, dedicated his life to the Revenue Cutter Service. His was a hybrid profession that required him to be captain, diplomat, detective, customs officer, and frontier sheriff of the high seas. His ship was well armed, and he had full authority to confiscate property, impound vessels, impose fines, arrest criminal suspects—and, if necessary, kill them. The implacable expression on his sea-dog face seemed to say that he would have no qualms about doing so. America’s sparsely populated new possession, Alaska, was a wild and violent territory; if there was any law to be found there, Calvin Hooper was it.
In addition to everything else Hooper had to do on this summer’s voyage, the crew of the Corwin also had to perform nearly ceaseless scientific and geographical tasks: taking soundings, making temperature and barometric readings, improving charts, sketching coastlines, collecting specimens.
The most famous, or soon to be famous, scientific eminence on board the Corwin was a Scottish-born botanist who had lately been studying the role that glaciers had played in the sculpting of Yosemite Valley. A wiry man with a shaggy red beard and the burning blue eyes of a half-crazed bard, he regularly wrote for the San Francisco Evening Bulletin—although, in his deepest soul, he was a poet. His name was John Muir.
BEFORE HE BECAME America’s preeminent naturalist, before he waged the conservation battles that would inspire the national park system and ignite the modern environmental movement, John Muir was a restless polymath who used newspaper and magazine assignments to help pay for his far-flung rambles to places of absolute wilderness. Like everyone else living in the Bay Area, Muir was well aware of the Jeannette’s voyage and the national desire to learn her fate. San Francisco viewed itself as the Jeannette’s home port, and the newspapers there had speculated endlessly on De Long’s whereabouts.
Muir, however, was not especially interested in the Jeannette mystery. An acquaintance of Hooper’s, he had decided to accept the captain’s invitation to come aboard the Corwin for the opportunity the trip afforded to study far larger mysteries: the role of ice in the shaping of continents, the formation of land bridges, the ebb and flow of ancient oceans.
Muir had been to southern Alaska twice before, and he had fallen in love with its pristine immensity. But he had never been above the Arctic Circle; nor had he encountered permafrost or the grinding forces of the polar ice pack. A natural historian later wrote that while voyaging on the Corwin, Muir wanted to “see back into deep time … In his heart of hearts, he was a wilderness man, always looking at the biggest picture.” He was interested in primordial processes of creation that, although millions of years in the making, might still be visible on a grand scale.
Muir had immigrated to the United States as a boy, but he still had a trace of a Scottish lilt. He’d grown up in Wisconsin and put in a few years at the state university in Madison before embarking on a thousand-mile walk across the American South to Florida, after which he’d continued on to Cuba. Through convoluted inspirations, Muir had landed in California, and he had been living there for thirteen years. Most of that time he’d spent in the Sierras, where he had herded sheep, discovered an alpine glacier, undertaken an ambitious field study of the giant sequoia, labored unsuccessfully on a huge book about the Ice Age, made first ascents of California’s highest peaks, and served as a guide in Yosemite.
Recently married, Muir had pledged to his wife, Louisa, that he would curb his footloose ways and settle down with her on her father’s extensive fruit ranch in the golden hills northeast of Oakland. But the call of travel had proved irresistible: Only two months after the birth of their first child, Muir had signed on with the Corwin for a cruise that would last at least six months—and, if the ship were to become trapped in the ice, for another year after that. It would be, Muir thought, a “fine icy time.”
WHEN THE CORWIN left San Francisco, in the first week of May, the Marin hills were flecked with golden poppies, and well-wishers cheered from yachts that rode alongside the departing steamer in the bay—a miniature version of the send-off San Franciscans had given the Jeannette. The Corwin had a crew of twenty, including several Japanese cabin boys. Turning north after passing through the Golden Gate, Hooper steamed up the Pacific for two weeks, then groped through the foggy Aleutian Islands, where the ship weathered snowstorms and a battering gale.
The ship would make several stops in the Aleutian Islands. As far as Muir could see, the native Aleuts had been virtually ruined by their contact with “civilization,” first Russian and now American. Whalers, sealers, and representatives of the fur companies had introduced them to new vices while sapping the vitality from their old ways of doing things. “After paying old debts contracted with the Companies,” Muir wrote, the Aleuts “invest the remainder in trinkets, in clothing not so good as their own furs, and in beer, and go at once into hoggish dissipation, hair-pulling, wife-beating, etc. In a few years their health becomes impaired, they become less successful in hunting, their children are neglected and die, and they go to ruin generally.”
The Corwin pushed into the Bering Sea and made several stops in the Pribilof Islands, where the Alaska Commercial Company was killing and flaying some one hundred thousand fur seals each year. The farther north the Corwin ventured—to places less contaminated by outside influences—the more things improved. On the coast of Siberia near Plover Bay, Hooper called at a tiny settlement of thirty Chukchi natives. He and his men were invited into one of the hovels half-buried in the ground, its roof little more than a network of bones and driftwood logs covered in walrus skins. Inside, Muir was surprised to find “a number of very snug, clean, luxurious bedrooms, whose sides, ceiling, and floor were made of fur; they were lighted by means of a pan of whale-oil with a bit of moss for a wick.” Muir found these people happy, well fed, and seemingly living in equilibrium with their world. “After being out all
day hunting in the stormy weather, the Chukchi withdraws into this furry sanctum, takes off all his clothing, and spreads his wearied limbs in luxurious ease, sleeping perfectly nude in the severest weather.”
Hooper was touched by the Chukchis’ hospitality around the hearth, even if the food they offered the Americans was, in the captain’s mind, inedible: boiled seal entrails, fermented walrus, raw whale meat, bowls of coagulated blood, and berries floating in rancid oil. While the food “created a feeling of … nausea,” Hooper wrote, “one cannot but be impressed with the generous nature of the natives in thus offering to divide their best, and in many cases all they have, without thought.”
The Americans smoked and drank tea with the Chukchis, and were coaxed into participating in athletic contests: footraces, lance throwing, stone putting, and shouldering huge piles of driftwood logs. For all their strength and dexterity, the natives indicated that they did not how to swim. Wrote Irving Rosse, the surgeon on the Corwin, “They have the greatest aversion to water,” though they were most adroit with their “little shuttle-shaped canoe, which is a kind of marine bicycle.” The doctor noted that they were extremely kind to their children (“who do not show the same peevishness as seen in our nurseries”), and he seemed both intrigued and repulsed by the Chukchis’ sexual promiscuity—“women are freely offered to strangers by way of hospitality, showing a decided preference for white men.”
Muir would write at length about the Chukchis—of their smiles and laughter, of their trusting nature, of small moments of tenderness between a father and son. He was heartened to see a way of life that, though fragile, still held an ancient integrity. Witnessing a farewell between a husband and his gently sobbing wife, Muir felt moved to paraphrase Shakespeare: “One touch of nature makes all the world kin, and here were many touches among the wild Chukchis.” They were, he thought, “better behaved than white men, and not half so greedy, shameless, or dishonest … These people interest me greatly, and it is worth coming far to know them.”