From lumber scraps they’d found scattered along the river, Melville and his men built a massive coffin—seven feet wide, twenty-two feet long, and twenty-two inches deep—held together by mortise and tenon joints. The bodies were placed inside it, with their faces turned toward the rising sun. Then the top of the coffin was hammered into place.
Next, hundreds of lichen-covered rocks were pried from the permafrost and piled upon the coffin until the monument assumed a pyramidal shape. From driftwood timbers, Bartlett and Nindemann constructed a massive cross, twenty feet high with a twelve-foot crossbeam. They hoisted it with guys fashioned from dog-sled traces, then chocked it into place. With chisel and mallet, they carved out the inscription: in memory of the officers AND MEN OF THE ARCTIC STEAMER “JEANNETTE” WHO DIED IN THE LENA DELTA, OCTOBER 1881.
Their somber work was completed on April 7. Melville called the place Monument Point, but the Yakuts gave it a different name, one that would stand for more than a century: Amerika Khaya—“America Mountain.” On clear days, the cross would be visible for a hundred miles, floating in the Arctic atmosphere.
Melville, Bartlett, and Nindemann would spend another month along the Arctic coast—searching, unsuccessfully, for any sign of Chipp and his men. But now, with their Yakut friends looking on, they paid their last respects to George De Long, and to the grand and terrible voyage of the USS Jeannette.
“In the awful silence of that vast waste,” Melville wrote, “we tenderly laid our dead comrades to rest. We were overawed by the simplicity of the obsequies, the oppressive stillness, the wonderful wilderness of white. There, the everlasting snows would be their winding-sheet and the fierce polar blasts would wail their wild dirge through all time. Surely heroes never found fitter resting-place.”
All this will be forgotten when we meet again; it will seem only as a bad dream—a fearful nightmare that has been successfully passed through. However dangerous your surroundings are at present I can still trust God and hope a little longer. I often dream of you and you seem all right, only sad and not as strong as you used to be. Oh darling! I cannot show you my love, my sympathy, my sorrow for your great sufferings. I pray to God constantly. My own darling husband, struggle, fight, live, come back to me!
EPILOGUE: AS LONG AS I HAVE ICE TO STAND ON
A little past noon on September 13, 1882, the Cunard liner Parthia steamed through the Narrows toward New York Harbor. It was a crisp autumn day, the skies a deep blue, the water catching brilliant disks of sunlight. In the distance, the smoky ramparts of Manhattan stole into view. Melville had not seen his native city in four years. For him, it was the happiest of times, the moment of his long-delayed homecoming, and yet he could not forget the day’s gravity: Exactly one year earlier, his whaleboat had become separated from De Long’s and Chipp’s in the gale.
Most of the Jeannette survivors had arrived in New York in May, with Danenhower’s party. But Melville was the talk of the country, and his homecoming was viewed as the moment to witness. Thousands of people were gathered at the docks in anticipation of his arrival. In the public eye, the engineer’s efforts to find his dead shipmates, pushing against all hope into the Siberian wilds, had become an epic tale of loyal comradeship, captured in songs, poems, and magazine articles, not to mention dozens of articles in the New York Herald. If De Long was seen as the martyred hero of the Jeannette expedition, then Melville had emerged as its living hero. Now all the papers, not just the Herald, wanted his time.
James Gordon Bennett was not among the well-wishers gathered along the harbor. The publisher had made good on all his Jeannette bills, just as he promised he would. He had certainly gotten his blockbuster: Sending multiple reporters to Siberia, he and his editors had capitalized on the Jeannette narrative in ways that may even have eclipsed Stanley’s dispatches from Africa. One of his correspondents, William Henry Gilder, had traveled to the Bering Strait to search for the Jeannette aboard the relief vessel USS Rodgers, but was forced to go inland when a fire completely destroyed the ship. Then a Navy officer from the Rodgers, Charles Putnam, became stranded on an ice floe, drifted out to sea, and was never heard from again. By dog-team, Gilder journeyed two thousand miles west across Siberia until he picked up the scent of the Jeannette disaster. By intercepting a sealed pouch full of Melville’s correspondence and racing his account to the telegraph station in Irkutsk, Gilder was able to break the story of the Jeannette’s loss to the world.
Another Herald reporter, John P. Jackson, found the grave site of De Long and his men and briefly disinterred the bodies, ostensibly to collect relics and papers, but more likely to search for signs of cannibalism, murder, or other foul play (he found none). When Emma De Long learned about the desecration of her husband’s grave, she told Bennett it was “the bitterest potion I have had to swallow in my whole life.” Still, Jackson’s sensational accounts, like Gilder’s, had flown off the newsstands.
ON BOARD THE Parthia with Melville that day were two other celebrated survivors of the expedition—Nindemann and Noros—and some very important pieces of freight. In carefully packed crates and boxes were all the logs, charts, papers, and natural history articles from the voyage of the USS Jeannette. Melville had De Long’s journals, too, and the separate diary the captain had kept during the long march across the ice and through the delta until his death. He also had all the keepsakes that had been found on the bodies of the Jeannette dead. For six months, he had kept a close custodial watch over these precious boxes.
To reach New York, Melville, Nindemann, and Noros had journeyed twelve thousand miles around the world: from the Lena delta across the tundra to Yakutsk, then across the taiga to Irkutsk, then across the steppes by horse sleigh to the railhead in Orenburg, then nine hundred dreary miles by train to Moscow.
In St. Petersburg, the czar invited the trio to Peterhof, one of the imperial palaces. Arriving by royal coach, the three Americans were served cognac and cigars and then ushered into one of the palace’s great rooms.
Alexander III, a bald, gruff, bearish man with an intense gaze, greeted Melville and the two seamen. The czar was fully aware of the story of the Jeannette, and he wanted to commiserate with the Americans on behalf of the entire Russian nation. “I trust,” he said, “that it was the rigor of our climate alone, and not the coldness of heart of any of my people, that caused the death of your comrades.” Empress Maria Feodorovna tenderly examined Melville’s hands and fingers, which still bore the scars of frostbite. “I hope,” she said, “that you will not again tempt fortune in the frozen North.”
From Russia, Melville and his party passed through Berlin, then made a stop at Nindemann’s birthplace, the Baltic Sea island of Rügen. There the German native was hailed at the village gates “by a bevy of rustic maidens,” said one newspaper, “bearing flowers and wreaths.”
Then it was on to England, where the American explorers caught the Parthia from Liverpool and steamed across the Atlantic. As the ship approached New York, she was met by a private yacht, the Ocean Gem, filled with city dignitaries, Navy officers, and family members. Transferred to the Ocean Gem, the three explorers were swarmed by well-wishers. Melville’s brother, two sisters, and a niece were there to embrace him. Nindemann’s fiancée, a Miss Newman, quietly waited for him on deck. A Herald reporter noted that the couple “spoke only with their eyes, and their faces were so happy that they rained smiles on all around them.”
Emma De Long’s father, Captain James Wotton, was also on board the Ocean Gem. He stepped forward and greeted the survivors as the representative of the De Long family. Approaching Melville, Wotton burst into tears. “My God!” said Melville, who was now crying, too. “You have lost a son, and I a friend!”
Despite his long ordeal, Melville appeared robust. One family member thought he “looked almost the same as ever, except that he had lost a little flesh.” His eyes, noted the Herald reporter, “beamed with their old, affectionate lustre.” Beneath that luster, however, there must have been sadness, for Mel
ville had learned that over the course of the expedition, his wife, Hetty, had all but lost her mind and had nearly killed herself with drink. In Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania, neighbors had seen Hetty walking around town pushing an empty stroller and talking to an imaginary baby. To Melville’s relief, Hetty had not come to New York, but he knew he would have to deal with the situation in a few days, once he returned home.
The Ocean Gem docked along the pier at Twenty-third Street. Flanked by two long rows of Marines in full regalia, the explorers marched off the dock to their waiting carriages. Melville had a long day ahead of him, with speeches to make and dignitaries to meet. But first, he had to head uptown, with his boxes of papers and relics in tow, to visit Emma De Long.
WHEN SHE FIRST received confirmation that her husband was dead, Emma briefly slipped into a catatonic state. She was in Burlington, Iowa, then, far away from the world, away from the East Coast newspapers and the prying eyes of society. It was almost possible for her to treat the tragic news as though it were an abstraction, a dispatch from another realm. “It was as if the seas had closed over me,” she said. “I longed for peace and solitude. I wanted to be let alone, to talk to no one, to feel nothing.”
But then she realized it would fall upon her to represent the Jeannette expedition, to sift through her husband’s papers, to edit and publish his journals, to tend to his legacy and the legacies of the other men, living and dead, of the voyage. As was customary for all lost Navy vessels, there would be an official court of inquiry, which would require her cooperation and testimony. She would need to console the loved ones of those who had died, and to fight for medals, commendations, and pensions. Whether she liked it or not, she was, she realized, the public face of the Jeannette expedition. Perhaps for the rest of her life, she would play the role of Explorer’s Wife.
Over and over again, she asked herself whether the Jeannette expedition was worth it—the suffering, the anguish, the loss of life, for what could only be measured as an incremental advance toward the ultimate attainment of the Arctic grail. “Is it said that too high a price in the lives of men was paid for this knowledge?” she asked. “Not by such calculation is human endeavor measured. Sacrifice is nobler than ease, unselfish life is consummated in lonely death, and the world is richer by the gift of suffering.”
Emma moved to her parents’ apartment in New York, where, on this fine September day, fresh from the docks, Melville called at her door. He wanted to pay his respects and deliver De Long’s papers, journals, and personal effects. But he also came to pledge his loyalty to her, in the spirit, almost, of a medieval knight. He apologized to her for his wife, Hetty—“the unfortunate woman that I married,” as he called her—for the strange letters she had written to Emma and for hysterical comments she had made in the press. “I have had a miserable existence for seventeen years,” he later wrote Emma, referring to his domestic life. “There seems to be no relief until death clears the obstruction.”
Melville told Emma that he remained dedicated to the Jeannette expedition. He was immensely proud to have been a part of it. In the years to come, the Jeannette voyage would accumulate its critics and doubters, he warned her. Authors would write conflicting histories; grandstanders would try to exploit the story for personal gain. Melville wanted Emma to know that he would fight unrelentingly for the memory of her husband—his beloved captain.
“I will stand by you and De Long,” he told her, “as long as I have a piece of ice to stand on.”
THAT NIGHT, THE CITY of New York threw Melville, Nindemann, and Noros an honorary banquet at Delmonico’s, probably the finest restaurant in Manhattan. More than 150 people, dressed in formal attire, came to toast the three survivors.
Throughout the evening, dignitaries stood up to speak—a federal judge, a U.S. senator, the chief engineer of the Navy, and many others. After a bittersweet toast to the dead, Melville himself was asked to rise and say a few words. He was brief almost to the point of curtness. “Gentlemen,” he began in his booming voice, “on behalf of myself and my two comrades, I can only say that we did our whole duty, that we did all that we could do, and that if we had not tried to do that, we would have been no men at all.”
The most eloquent tribute of the night was delivered by the mayor of New York, William Russell Grace. Mayor Grace looked over at Nindemann and Noros and recalled the story of their farewell to De Long and his starving men. “At that parting scene,” said Grace, “when on the banks of the Lena, standing knee deep in snow, the men gave three cheers to the comrades who were going forth for rescue, the last words from the already closing grave were these: ‘When you get to New York, remember me.’ Yes, we do remember them. We remember their courage to dare, and still higher courage to endure. Their story is graven on our hearts. This city and this country welcome these three gentlemen home with a joy tempered only with grief for the loss of the brave men who will come home no more.”
After the banquet, Melville and his two shipmates were given a carriage tour of the city. When they passed down Broadway, they were dazzled. The thoroughfare was ablaze with light: A newly installed network of brilliant arc lamps had turned the New York night into day.
IN 1883, George De Long’s remains, along with those of his comrades, were removed from Amerika Khaya and brought to the United States in a long and elaborate mass funeral procession jointly orchestrated by the U.S. Navy and the Russian government. The secretary of the Navy called De Long and his men “martyrs in the cause of science.” After a Manhattan funeral attended by thousands of mourners, De Long was buried, along with five of his fellow explorers, in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx; that same year, his journals from the voyage, edited by Emma De Long, were published to wide acclaim. Although the Jeannette expedition became the subject of a naval court of inquiry and a congressional hearing that produced considerable controversy, both tribunals upheld De Long’s command and reputation. In 1884, New York City dedicated a prime piece of land along the East River as Jeannette Park (it’s now known as Vietnam Veterans Plaza). Six years later, a replica of Melville’s Lena monument and cross was erected on the grounds of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, overlooking the Severn River. A mountain range in northwestern Alaska was named in De Long’s honor, as were two naval ships. In Russia, the High Arctic islands he discovered—Jeannette, Henrietta, and Bennett—are known as Ostrova De Long.
FOR MORE THAN a century after his death, August Petermann’s work continued to be a prominent force in cartography. In 2004, after nearly 150 years of publication, Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen halted its presses in Gotha and closed its doors forever. The geographer’s legacy lives on in dozens of place-names scattered about the planet, including the Petermann Ranges of Australia; Petermann Island, off the coast of Antarctica; and the Petermann Glacier of Greenland, one of the world’s largest. His name has even been immortalized in space: A feature in the north polar region of the moon is known by astronomers as Petermann Crater. Today, Petermann’s rare maps often fetch thousands of dollars at auction and are coveted by fine-art collectors around the world.
THE THEORY OF the Open Polar Sea essentially died with the Jeannette voyage, although recent climate projections show that by 2050, significant portions of the polar pack will entirely melt in summertime. After the Jeannette, no other Arctic explorer undertook an expedition with a serious intention of meeting an open polar sea. Yet one prominent explorer, Norway’s Fridtjof Nansen, did deliberately lock himself in the ice above Siberia in an attempt to re-create the Jeannette’s drift. He had read that in 1885, an article of George De Long’s sealskin clothing had washed up on the coast of southwest Greenland, having followed the currents of the pack on a slow, deliberate journey of four years and five thousand miles—passing over, or at least very near, the North Pole. Surmising that this relic’s drift clearly indicated the prevailing direction of the Arctic ice pack, Nansen, in 1893, attempted to reenact the voyage of the Jeannette in a better-designed vessel. Nansen’s expedition nearly reached
the North Pole, and three years later his stout ship, the Fram, popped out of the pack into the North Atlantic, unsuccessful, but unscathed.
GEORGE MELVILLE NEVER quite got the north country out of his system. In 1884, he returned to the Arctic to search for survivors of yet another disastrous American polar effort—the Greely Expedition—and remained a tireless champion of America’s push for the North Pole. Melville divorced Hetty and remarried, spending most of his life in Washington. He rose within the ranks to become engineer in chief of the U.S. Navy and, eventually, a rear admiral. Melville presided over an expansive redesign of the fleet, largely completing its conversion from wood to metal, and from wind to steam power. When he retired, in 1903, the U.S. Navy boasted one of the most powerful modernized fleets in the word. Widely sought on the lecture circuit, Melville wrote a popular book on the Jeannette expedition, In the Lena Delta, and defended De Long to the end. Melville died in Philadelphia in 1912. Two Navy ships—a destroyer tender and an oceanographic research vessel—were named after him. Today, the George W. Melville Award is the Navy’s highest honor for accomplishments in nautical engineering.
AFTER RECOVERING FROM his Jeannette ordeal, John Danenhower also enjoyed popularity on the lecture circuit and became a well-known critic of both the De Long expedition and Arctic exploration in general. “It is time to call a halt,” Danenhower argued, “to further exploration of the central polar basin. There are better directions for the display of true manhood and heroism.” Danenhower married and fathered two children, and for several years, he served successfully, and seemingly happily, as an officer in the U.S. Navy. But in 1887, his melancholy returned. Alone in his quarters in Annapolis, Danenhower shot himself in the head with a .32-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver.