John Muir marveled at the weird energy of “the busy throng” milling about the St. Michael shore, around the fort, and among the storerooms of the Alaska Commercial Company. “They formed a strange, wild picture on the rocky beach,” Muir wrote, “the squaws pitching the tents and cutting armfuls of dry grass to lay on the ground as a lining for fur carpets; the children with wild, staring eyes; groups of dandy warriors, arrayed in all the colors of the rainbow, grim, and cruel, and coldly dignified; and … the big bundles of shaggy bearskins, black and brown, marten, mink, fox, beaver, otter, lynx, moose, wolf, and wolverine, many of them with claws spread and hair on end, as if still fighting for life.”
All around St. Michael was an extensive volcanic field, with more than fifty cones, craters, and maar lakes pocking the surrounding tundra. Inuits from far and wide believed that this seething mephitic realm was the place where the souls of the recently deceased entered the underworld. Muir walked down into one of the craters, noting the “ashes and pumice cinders strewn plentifully around the rim of the crater and down the sides of the cone … The rumbling sounds heard occasionally are supposed to be caused by the spirits when they are conducting in a dead Indian.”
Perhaps it was the awesome power of this smoldering landscape that attracted the medicine men to come every summer to investigate matters of life and death and the netherworld. Masters of sleight of hand and ventriloquism, they wore elaborate masks and strange long gloves, their heavily tattooed bodies festooned with bear claws and animal teeth, which clanked and clicked as they moved.
The answer the shamans had for Captain Hooper was unequivocal: There was no hope whatsoever for the Jeannette. She was forever lost in the Arctic ice.
And what of De Long and his men? Where were they?
Their fate was sealed, the shamans said. They would never be seen again.
But there was more. The medicine men had a stern warning for Captain Hooper. The Corwin, if she ventured into the ice, would suffer precisely the same fate as the Jeannette. Go north, they told Hooper, and you will never come back.
THIS URGENT REPORT from the underworld did not faze Calvin Hooper in the least. The captain was an obstinate and straightforwardly secular man without a trace of superstition in his New England bones. The young Inuit man Hooper had hired as a translator, however, was so shaken by the shamans’ pronouncement that he begged off the voyage then and there. As far as he was concerned, the Corwin was a ship aimed straight for hell.
As a substitute, Hooper succeeded in hiring what he described as a young Russian-Inuit “half-breed” named Andrewski, who seemed competent enough and less swayed by omens. But as a precaution, Hooper decided to take on enough coal, food, and supplies to see the Corwin through an entire winter, in case she should get locked in the ice, as the shamans predicted.
Muir found many of the Indians encamped at St. Michael “insolent” and “dangerous.” He sensed that their relationships with traders had sapped their self-reliance: “They hunt less, and spend their idle hours in gambling and quarreling.”
Muir felt sure that these Indian dissatisfactions would only fester as more and more American miners pushed into these parts of Alaska. Rumors of gold and silver were running high; in fact, a party of prospectors was reported to have been seen about a hundred miles upriver. They had come up from San Francisco in a schooner, wrote Muir, “to seek a mountain of solid silver.” With the resignation of a northern Californian all too familiar with the vulgarities of “gold fever,” Muir sensed what the future held. “There will probably be a rush to the new mines ere long,” he wrote, and then even this distant wilderness would be invaded by men with pans and pickaxes.
Muir observed many of the same baneful American influences here that he’d seen on St. Lawrence Island. The introduction of the repeating rifle, in particular, had altered the rhythms of native hunting. A few years earlier, the hills around St. Michael had been home to thousands of wild reindeer. Now, armed with buffalo rifles, the Eskimos and other natives would slaughter caribou by the hundreds and leave them, said Muir, “lying where they fell, not even the hides being taken.” The hunters would “simply cut out their tongues and leave the rest to be eaten by wolves.”
Before departing for the High Arctic, Hooper deposited with representatives of the Alaska Commercial Company a sheaf of letters Emma De Long had written to her husband over the previous year. He also had a number of important items of cargo to transfer to the St. Paul, a San Francisco–bound steamer owned by the company. Among these were the relics the Siberian seal hunters from Wankerem had removed from the American whaling ship Hooper believed to be the wrecked Vigilant.
(Later that summer, the Merchants Exchange in San Francisco would put these and other artifacts on public display in the hope of identifying the doomed vessels and their lost crews. It was determined that one of articles, a pair of spectacles, belonged to Ebenezer Nye, the hard-bitten whaling captain who had ominously told De Long, “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.” This made sense, as Nye was known to have been whaling in the vicinity of the Vigilant. Like a prophesy turned on itself, Nye and the crews of both the Vigilant and the Mount Wollaston had perished in the very same ice pack he had so melodramatically warned De Long about.)
On July 9, when Captain Hooper weighed anchor and steered the Corwin from St. Michael, the seas seemed full of portent. Surgeon Irving Rosse wrote of “curious freaks of refraction and other odd phenomena.” Muir described a “weird red sunset, land miraged into most grotesque forms, [and] heavy smoke from the burning tundra.” But Hooper, undeterred by the ominous atmospherics, turned northwest, aiming for the Bering Strait and the High Arctic beyond. They were headed, said Muir, for the “top-most, frost-killed end of creation.”
WRANGEL LAND WAS their goal, but throughout the month of July, it remained locked in ice and veiled in drizzling mist and thus could not be reached, or even seen. Muir called Wrangel “this mysterious country,” “the untrodden shore,” “the long-lost island.” Nelson referred to it as the land “so long discussed by geographers.” Rosse declared it a “problematical northern land” and began to regard it “as a myth.”
Captain Hooper yearned to prove Wrangel’s existence once and for all, while hunting for signs of De Long’s expedition. But by the end of July, the closest Hooper could get to Wrangel was Herald Island. It was not far from Herald Island, Hooper knew, that the Jeannette had last been sighted, during the first week of September 1879, by three American whaling ships.
Although Herald was small—no more than six miles long—it was quite high, its rocky summit towering more than a thousand feet above the sea. If he could reach it, Hooper thought, he would have a commanding view of the Arctic ice, of Wrangel, and, perhaps, of the lost Jeannette. His goal, then, was to make a first ascent of Herald, and he knew that in John Muir he had a first-class mountaineer who would find his way to the top.
At ten p.m. on July 30, after what Hooper called “a good deal of bumping, squeezing, and twisting around through narrow, crooked leads,” the captain anchored the Corwin a few hundred yards from the misty, icebound island. While most of the men leapt onto the floes and raced for the bird-swarmed rock in a spirit of mad conquest, Muir calmly scanned the cliffs with field glasses and determined the best route up. He grabbed his ice ax and took off for a steep glacial ravine a few hundred yards away from where the other men, alpine novices all, made their noisy landing. As they promptly became bogged down in heavy snow and then endangered themselves by raining boulders down on one another, Muir made good progress. He cut steps into the ice with his ax and steadily climbed past thousands upon thousands of birds “standing on narrow ledges like bottles on a grocer’s shelves.” Within an hour he had ascended the cliffs and was well on his way to the summit.
Muir relished his solitude. He spent several hours walking along the summit, taking notes, making sketches, hastily collecting plant spe
cimens. He did not see a single sign of the Jeannette—no cairns, no relics, no evidence of human disturbance.
But the panorama was awe-inspiring, and he scanned it carefully with his glasses. In attempting to describe it, he fell into the rhapsodic language for which he would later become famous as a conservationist. “The midnight hour I spent alone on the highest summit [was] one of the most impressive hours of my life,” he wrote. “The deepest silence seemed to press down on all the immeasurable, virgin landscape, [with] the frozen ocean stretching indefinitely northward.”
To the west, Muir could vividly make out “the mysterious Wrangel Land … a wavering line of hill and dale over the white and blue ice-prairie.” It was a substantial island invitingly riddled with mountains. Looking at them, he was impatient for the intervening ice to melt so he could go ascend them. The “pale gray mountains loomed,” he wrote, “well calculated to fix the eye of a mountaineer.”
After an hour or so, surgeon Rosse caught up with Muir on the summit, and the two men erected a cairn on a promontory to mark their arrival. “It was midnight,” Rosse wrote, “and the sun shone with gleaming splendor over all this waste of ice and sea and granite.” Rosse placed a bottle inside the cairn that contained an account of the Corwin’s landing, as well as a copy of the New York Herald dated April 23, 1881.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Corwin crew spread over the shores and headlands of the island, looking for any trace of the Jeannette. They found none. It was clear to everyone that, wherever he was, De Long had never touched here. “If a cairn had been built on any conspicuous point,” said Muir, “we could not have failed to see it.”
Just as they were pulling away from Herald Island, and beginning to grope their way through the choked mazes of ice toward open water, a young male polar bear swam right up to the bow of the Corwin. Hooper thought the bear was “snuffing the air as if trying by the sense of smell to learn something of this strange visitor.” The captain grabbed a heavy breech-loading rifle and took aim. He wanted fresh meat for the galley, and a nice, warm skin for his quarters.
Muir found himself rooting for the bear as it tried to assess “the big, smoking, black monster” that had invaded his home. “He was a noble-looking animal and of enormous strength, living bravely … amid eternal ice.” But he was no match for Hooper’s marksmanship. “At length,” said Muir, “he received a ball in the neck and stained the blue water with his blood.”
FOR THE FIRST two weeks of August, the Corwin probed the pack, seeking a way to Wrangel. The little ship, as Rosse put it, “jammed and crashed along in a labyrinthine course,” at times “completely beset by great masses of ice.” It seemed as though Wrangel was taunting them—hiding behind clouds, appearing through a vent in the mist, vanishing again, then looming freakishly large through the distortions of the Arctic atmosphere. When raised by refraction, Hooper wrote, Wrangel’s hills “appeared as if coming out to meet us, then faded away until nearly lost to view.”
At one point the crew discovered a piece of wood on the ice—a ship’s foreyard, it was determined. “Bits of rope [were] still attached to it,” said Muir, and it “seemed to have been ground in the ice for a winter or two.” Studying it, Hooper thought it could have been from a whaling vessel, though he couldn’t rule out the possibility that it was from the Jeannette.
Finally, on August 12, the Corwin found a promising lead in the ice and drew close enough to Wrangel’s southeastern shore to launch a cutter. Hooper ordered the cannon fired. Its booming report echoed from the hills and mountains and gave “notice of our presence in case anybody was near to listen,” Muir said. As they approached the island in the cutter, Hooper and his landing party began to realize how substantial Wrangel was, how extensive its interior mountains, how varied its terrain. It was small wonder that mariners, snatching momentary glimpses of it over the decades, had thought it was a continent. Here was a formidable island seventy-eight miles long, its mountainous tundra flecked with the bright blooms of Arctic flowers. Winter white had given way to the briefest interval of summer’s tawny gold, with only a few shrinking scraps of snow visible in the highlands.
Though they could see only a small fraction of its twenty-nine hundred square miles, Hooper and his men knew this was a far cry from Herald Island. There was something peculiarly haunting and powerful about the raw prehistoric landscape—“this grand wilderness in its untouched freshness,” as Muir put it. Studying the island with field glasses, Muir could see “the small dimpling hollows with their different shades of color [and] furrows that seemed the channels of small streams … We gazed at the long stretch of wilderness which spread invitingly before us, and which we were so eager to explore—the rounded, glaciated bosses and foothills, the mountains with their ice-sculptured features and long withdrawing valleys.”
They landed on a black gravel spit that stretched in front of the mouth of a rushing river. Not far from the skeleton of a bowhead whale, some of the men hoisted an American flag on a makeshift pole of driftwood, and Hooper declared Wrangel a new possession of the United States. He renamed it New Columbia.
Some of the men fanned out over the beach, while others disappeared into the interior. Along the coast, they found a few human-made objects: a fragment from a biscuit box, a barrel stave, a boat’s spar. But all of these bits of flotsam were battered and abraded and ground up, as though they had come in on the churn of the ice pack. Hooper and his men found no signs that anyone from the Jeannette had lived here—indeed, no signs that a human being had ever set foot on the island.
“A land more severely solitary,” Muir thought, “could hardly be found anywhere on the face of the globe.” Surely, if anyone from the Jeannette had landed here, they would have left a cairn by this river—and they would have left footprints in the fragile tundra soil. “Had any person walked on this ground any time in summer when the snow was gone, his track would remain legible to the dullest observer for years.”
Yet the men of the Corwin found nothing.
ALTHOUGH HE COULD not linger, Muir was in awe of Wrangel Island. He of course did not know that De Long had already determined that it was not a continent, only a fair-sized island. Whatever its size, Muir sensed that it was a primeval place where animals thrived, and where humans could not. (In fact, Wrangel boasts such an astonishing abundance of wildlife that biologists would later call it the Galápagos of the Far North. The island supports the largest population of Pacific walruses as well as one of the most extensive snowgoose colonies on earth. It is also home to snowy owls, Arctic foxes, and massive populations of lemmings and seabirds—yet in pleasant contrast to the Siberian mainland, there are no mosquitoes.)
Wrangel was a place specially made for polar bears, Muir thought (and that remains true today—it is the largest polar bear denning ground in the world). “We found bears everywhere in abundance along the edge of the ice,” Muir wrote, “and they appeared to be very fat and prosperous, and very much at home, as if the country had belonged to them always. They are the unrivaled master-existences of this ice-bound solitude, and Wrangell Land may well be called the Land of the White Bear.”
In a way, Wrangel was a land out of time—life here was like going back many thousands of years. Because the island was never completely glaciated during the ice ages, and never completely inundated by seawater during periods of ice retreat, the soils and plants in its interior valleys offered remnants of undisturbed Pleistocene tundra unique on the planet.
When the pharaohs were constructing the pyramids, elephants were walking around on Wrangel: This was the last place on earth where woolly mammoths lived. A dwarf subspecies thrived here as late as 1700 B.C.E., more than six thousand years after mammoth populations elsewhere became extinct. Their large curved tusks could be found everywhere on the island, lying on the gravel beaches, in ravines and streambeds.
But Hooper and his men were not able to stay long enough to stumble upon any of these petrified trophies from another epoch. The island was too large to ex
plore in a single day, or even a single week. Much to his annoyance, Hooper realized he had to leave. A dangerous new shift in the ice was threatening the Corwin. He fired off several rounds to recall the scattered parties of explorers, and they climbed into the cutter. As they worked their way back to the ship, they were flushed with the excitement of having discovered a new land—and having claimed it for their country. “The extent of the new territory thus acquired is not definitely known,” wrote Muir, “nor is it likely to be for many a century, or until some considerable change has taken place in the polar climate.”
Hooper had given up on finding the Jeannette. He turned the Corwin toward the Bering Strait and headed for San Francisco, not realizing that if he had continued west, skirting the ice pack along the Siberian coast for a few weeks, he might well have crossed De Long’s path.
30 · A SECOND PROMISED LAND
Nearly a thousand miles to the northwest of Wrangel Island, Captain De Long and his men sat nursing their wounds in soggy tents on the fast-melting ice cap of the East Siberian Sea. It was the Fourth of July—twenty-two days since the Jeannette’s sinking, sixteen since they had started their retreat over the pack.
The men tried to put the best face on things for their country’s birthday. American flags fluttered over the tents. A bottle of brandy came out of hiding. Lauterbach tooted his harmonica, bringing on howls from the dogs, who cowered under the lee of the upturned whaleboats. But there was no disguising the fact that morale had sagged. The happy-hard delirium of the first weeks, the warm camaraderie of striving, had worn off. The galley songs had fallen silent.
The men were spent, their taut hides crosshatched with welts, their lips cracked, faces swollen, hands scabbed and blistered. All had developed variations of snow blindness, foot rot, and gastrointestinal distress. They had become little more than an accumulation of wounds moving over the ice. Every bone smarted, every sinew throbbed, every breath burned.