Most of the assignments consisted of “showing the flag” in foreign ports and performing mind-numbingly dreary tasks aboard ship. It was a life of “crushing hopelessness,” said a junior officer at the time. “The most aspiring years of our lives” were consumed by “the dullest, the most uninteresting, the most useless duties.” Like many young officers, De Long often felt that he was wasting away his brightest days. “A stagnant navy,” noted one maritime scholar, “was no place for a man on the make.”
George De Long was nothing if not a man on the make, driven by big ideas. It was no wonder, then, that the Arctic, for all its hardships and dangers, exerted such a powerful pull on him. Here was a way for him to circumvent some of the drudgeries of naval duty, to achieve fame if not fortune, and possibly to hasten his ascension in rank while also doing something consequential for science and the nation. It offered a path to glory that an ordinary Navy career—at least during peacetime—seemed incapable of offering. A risky Arctic expedition carried some of the dash and distinction of a wartime assignment without the necessity of being in a war. Most important, it provided a faster track to commanding a ship, something to which De Long, even in his youth, had always aspired.
GEORGE FRANCIS DE LONG was born in New York City on August 22, 1844, the only child of a lower-middle-class couple in Brooklyn. George’s father, a cool, quiet, indifferent man of French Huguenot roots, exerted little influence over him. It was George’s Catholic mother, loving but overprotective in the extreme, who dominated—and quite nearly suffocated—his adolescence. Forever fearful that he might be injured, she refused to let George play outside or pal around with neighborhood kids. Always expecting him to be punctual, she ordered him to make long, straight marches to and from school. Emma said that De Long’s mother was “morbidly solicitous for him” and strictly forbade his skating, swimming, or boating, so that he was “jealously guarded from outdoor influences, and restrained from the ordinary sports of boyhood.”
One day a gang of neighborhood kids who mistook his aloofness for elitism waited in ambush and pelted him at close range with snowballs. In the melee, George’s eardrum was damaged by ice shards, and his inner ear became infected. The family doctor, worried that George might lose his hearing, attended to him for several weeks. An Arctic historian later noted, half facetiously, that this incident seemed an augury—“De Long’s first encounter with hostile ice.”
Driven indoors throughout his youth, George became intensively, if resentfully, bookish. “His spirit and energy, hemmed in upon the adventurous side, found exercise in an intellectual ardor,” noted a biographical sketch published by Houghton, Mifflin in the 1880s. George practically lived at the Mercantile Library in midtown Manhattan, and he even became a librarian there in his mid-teens. He read deeply in history and was drawn to stories of great monarchs, politicians, and generals. In contrast to the drab safety of his own boyhood, he began to yearn for a career of adventure. When he was sixteen, thinking his middle name, Francis, to be a bit feminine, he got it into his head to formally change his name to George Washington De Long. His parents were puzzled, but George insisted, and the name change became official.
Around that same time, George became a connoisseur of the naval battles of the War of 1812 and a devotee of Frederick Marryat’s swashbuckling tales of the high seas. These books ignited in him a profound desire to enter the Naval Academy. He imagined himself sailing the world and living a life of stirring sea battles, with anchorages in exotic ports. “Because of the repression to which he was so constantly subjected,” observed the Houghton, Mifflin biography, “he was restless and filled with an uneasy desire for larger liberty.”
George’s mother was dead set against the idea of her only child pursuing a life in the Navy, with all its perils. Instead, she wanted George to become a lawyer, a minister, or a doctor. But he would not budge on the issue. Through remarkable persistence that involved, among other things, taking a train down to Washington and personally pleading his eligibility before the secretary of the Navy himself, he secured an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy for the fall of 1861.
During the Civil War, the Lincoln administration thought it prudent to move the Naval Academy from its Annapolis campus to a hodgepodge of buildings in Newport, and so Rhode Island is where De Long spent his years as a midshipman. (Newport was also young Gordon Bennett’s summertime haunt and the place where he often kept his yachts.) At the Naval Academy, De Long proved a serious scholar and a meticulous cadet. He thrived there—“I was in my proper element at last,” he later said. He graduated tenth in his class in the spring of 1865, just as the war was drawing to a close.
It was not unusual to find among the young men of the immediate post–Civil War generation a kind of inferiority complex, a sense that history had passed them by, that their brothers and fathers and uncles had participated in something momentous while they had not. The magnitude of the previous generation’s sacrifice made young men like De Long feel inadequate—and irredeemably green. If De Long could not win glory on fields of battle, then perhaps he could earn it in fields of ice.
De Long’s early naval assignments, however, were anything but glorious. He first served aboard the USS Canandaigua, a seven-gun sloop of war that had seen considerable action during the Union blockade of the Confederacy. On the day he reported for duty at the Boston Navy Yard, where the Canandaigua was docked, De Long did something amusing. Inspecting his quarters aboard ship, De Long observed that there were only two berths even though four midshipmen had been assigned to the compartment. The two others, presumably, would have no beds at all—or else would have to swing in hammocks. So De Long boldly marched to the office of the commandant of the Boston Navy Yard, an august rear admiral named Silas Stringham, to lodge a complaint.
“Admiral,” he said, “I am Midshipman De Long of the USS Canandaigua. Sir, I have been inspecting my quarters on board. I came to ask you to have two more berths put in before we start.”
Admiral Stringham peered at this impertinent young man. “So you are Midshipman De Long of the USS Canandaigua?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, Midshipman De Long of the USS Canandaigua, I advise you to return to the USS Canandaigua, and consider yourself lucky that you have any bunks at all in the steerage.”
Chastened, De Long did as he was told. The crew of the ship ridiculed him for the temerity he had shown, but the joke was on them: Just before the Canandaigua left port, a team of carpenters came aboard and constructed two more berths. Admiral Stringham had taken De Long’s suggestion to heart. (Years later, Stringham and De Long shared a laugh over the story.)
Throughout his career, De Long would prove to be a man unafraid to badger his superiors in order to get things done. “He got what he wanted,” Emma said, “because he dared to ask for it.”
DE LONG SAILED aboard the Canandaigua for three years. As part of the European Squadron, the sloop of war cruised the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean, protecting American interests and showing the flag at ports all over Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. In June 1868, the ship was brought into Le Havre, France, for repairs. Le Havre, its waterfront an extensive network of piers, dry docks, and shipyards, was a pleasant international city near the place where the Seine emptied into the English Channel. It was surrounded by the green rolling hills of Normandy, which gave way to precipitous cliffs that swept down to the cold sea.
De Long, now twenty-four years old, was given leave and spent a week carousing in Paris with fellow officers before returning to Le Havre. There he attended a dinner party at the home of a successful American steamship magnate named James Wotton. Captain Jimmie, as he was known, was part owner of the New York and Havre Steamship Company. He and his wife, Margaret, had a large family and lived in a mansion high on a hill, called La Côte, that overlooked the busy port city and the whitecap-streaked English Channel beyond. The Wottons liked to fill their home with interesting people, good food, and dancing, and they were kno
wn for generously entertaining American naval officers when they sailed into port. They had a billiards room and a large ballroom, where musicians frequently played waltzes.
On this evening De Long became entranced by the Wottons’ daughter, Emma. She was seventeen years old, pretty, with big, perceptive eyes, an often insouciant expression, and lustrous curly brown hair. Emma had been raised in both New York and Le Havre, had been well-schooled at a French lycée, and considered herself “a finished young lady.” De Long took a liking to her immediately, and when the waltzing began, he went straight to her dance card and jotted his name in all the spaces not already taken. Emma was intrigued by the young officer—she found him “dashing, tall, and broad-shouldered” but a little “aggressive,” as she later put it, noting, “Evidently he intended a conquest.”
A week later, the Wottons held another soiree. At the close of a dance, De Long led Emma to a sofa in the middle of the ballroom and, without preamble, asked her to be his wife.
Emma was stunned. “But we’ve scarcely met!” she protested.
The skirts of the whirling dancers brushed against De Long’s face, but he appeared unperturbed. “I feel as though I’ve known you always,” he told her. “As though I’ve simply been waiting for you to appear.”
Emma did not quite know how to respond to his ardor. On the one hand, she liked him. “I was gradually being drawn to George De Long,” she wrote, “and I recognized in him many qualities which I admired.” But she found his “violent feelings” intimidating. “The energy of his courtship,” she said, “was inexhaustible.” When the evening was over and George left with the other officers of the Canandaigua, she was confused. “I felt completely lost,” she said. “I did not understand myself at all.”
The shipwrights had completed their repairs of the Canandaigua, and the sloop of war was scheduled to leave for the Mediterranean in a few days. Growing desperate, De Long wrote to Emma:
As I may not be able to speak to you alone before my departure, I have been bold enough to ask you to read the[se] few words … trusting you will accept them as the offering of an honest and loving heart. I am writing despondently. I am going away from you and placing an immense barrier between me and all that I love. I cannot lose you without a struggle. For you I will dare anything.
Though Emma was moved by his letter, she did not reply. She was determined not to succumb to his overtures. But the day before he left, she gave him a farewell present—a blue silk bag she had sewn, in which she had placed a lock of her hair and a gold cross inlaid with six pearls. In preparing this little gesture, she surprised herself. “I did not want him to go away empty-handed,” she later wrote. “Love, even then, was playing tricks upon one who thought herself immune!”
Pleased by her present, De Long took her in his arms and kissed her for the first time. The next day the Canandaigua sailed out to sea.
A FEW MONTHS later, De Long, after being assigned to another ship, found himself in New York City, where he arranged to meet with James Wotton, who was in the United States on business. De Long wanted to formally ask Mr. Wotton for permission to marry his daughter.
The meeting started off surprisingly well. “Your father spoke to me kindly and feelingly, perhaps more kindly than my merits deserve,” De Long wrote Emma. “He said in the first place that love was much too sacred a thing to interfere in lightly and that generally speaking the parties most interested were the best ones to decide such matters for themselves. But nevertheless it was necessary for parents to exercise such a care over their children as to insure them a happy life.”
Wotton refused to give his consent to the marriage. Instead, he issued a test. De Long, who had just been promoted to the rank of lieutenant, would soon be headed out to sea for a new cruise—this one aboard the USS Lancaster. The steam-powered sloop of war would head for the Caribbean and South America and would likely be away for three years. If, at the end of those three years, George and Emma still had feelings for each other, Wotton said, then he would give the marriage his blessing.
De Long was crushed by this enforced probation, but he accepted it with bulldog tenacity. “I am firmly resolved,” he wrote Emma from Brazil, “to remain a wanderer from my own land. I love you with all the strength of my heart and soul, and I am going forth to make myself worthy of you or give way under the pressure.”
In the torpor of the tropics, the little memento Emma had given George was looking a bit worse for wear. It had become a sorry mascot of his deferred love. “Poor little silken bag!” he wrote. “Salt water, salt air and heat have faded it sadly. You will hardly recognize it when you see it.”
ONE YEAR WENT by, then two, and De Long remained steadfast as he continued his long cruise in South American waters. His correspondence with Emma was interrupted in 1870, when the Prussian army stormed across France and laid siege to Paris. The Franco-Prussian War gave the world an ugly glimpse of what total warfare might look like in modern times. For five months, the trapped Parisians subsisted on rats, dogs, and cats and were able to communicate with the outside world only through messages sent by carrier pigeons or hot-air balloons. The Wotton family, fearing that Le Havre would soon fall to the Germans as well, filled a few chests with silver and other valuables and moved across the English Channel to the Isle of Wight.
George, deprived of news, did not understand why his letters were not reaching Emma. From Rio de Janeiro, he wrote in despair:
For this long, long year I have waited and waited and waited in vain. I have overestimated my strength. I am sick and unhappy all of the time and my life is a burden to me from day to day. I have no aim, no object in life. A kind word from you may save me yet.
By the turn of the year, the Prussian scare was over, and Emma moved with her family back to Le Havre, where she was finally able to reply to George’s letters. “My great regret,” she wrote, “is the severe and long test you have been subjected to and the suffering it has caused you. I only hope and pray it has not injured you permanently. Please consider yourself absolutely free.” Then she wrote a somewhat cryptic closer: “I have not changed.”
George optimistically interpreted this to mean that she still loved him and that she was declaring their long probationary test to be over. He was so sure of this sanguine interpretation that in two days he had secured leave and packed his bags for the six-thousand-mile voyage, via New York, to Le Havre. He sent a note ahead to declare his intentions: At long last, he was coming to claim her as his bride.
Yet Emma’s true feelings were more ambiguous. She admired him—that much was true—and she did not want to cause him any more suffering. But on the subject of marriage she still vacillated. Mostly, she entertained doubts, fed by her father (a former steamship captain himself), about the hardships of being married to a naval officer; she was not certain she could endure the long absences, the doubt-ridden interludes, the years of hypothetical companionship. She saw for herself a life of waiting.
When George arrived at Le Havre in February 1871, foreign warships were anchored in the harbor to protect their nationals should the Prussian forces, still encamped around Paris, suddenly advance on the port city. Representing the United States was the USS Shenandoah, a sloop of war staffed by many officers De Long knew well. The Wottons invited De Long to stay in a guest room in their mansion on La Côte. Upon seeing Emma, George promptly reached into his vest pocket, produced a handsome diamond ring, and slid it onto her finger. “I melted somewhat,” she wrote, “but still felt full of turmoil. I could not make up my mind.”
For several weeks, they pursued a frantic courtship. They had much catching up to do—the two young lovers were nearly strangers, despite more than two years of fitful correspondence. George and Emma spent long afternoons strolling the pier, and at night the Wottons held their usual rounds of dinner parties and balls. Emma began to see George in a different light. “I was falling in love with [him] fast,” she said. “The better I came to know him the more I admired him.” He had an “adv
enturous spirit,” she thought, but was “innately refined.” As the days went by, she came to understand his “insistent wooing of me, and I gave him full credit for having foreseen that we really were suited to each other. I [had] found a companion who could assure me complete happiness.”
A date was set: the first of March. It would not be a white wedding; because of the war, the supply of white satin and silk had been exhausted in Le Havre, so Emma would have to improvise. The wedding’s location would have to be improvised as well. In France, marriage was a civil contract, and no official could be found in Le Havre who had the legal authority to perform the ceremony—they were all in Paris, where the armistice talks were under way. But then an ingenious solution presented itself: The USS Shenandoah, still docked in the harbor, was technically American soil. They could be married upon her decks. It seemed only fitting that a Navy lieutenant and a young woman from a steam-liner family would be married aboard a ship.
On the evening of March 1, 1871, the Shenandoah was decorated with festive flags and Chinese lanterns. The guests, in evening gowns and naval dress uniforms, waited on the pier as the Shenandoah’s boats rowed over from the ship. Finally the crowd had assembled, and then the bride and groom stepped onto the deck. A priest with the forthrightly American name of George Washington presided over the ceremony. When Emma and George were married, at precisely ten o’clock, wild cheers went up and echoed across the darkened harbor.
5 · GATEWAYS TO THE POLE
The quest on which George De Long had embarked after returning from Greenland was built on a grand and seductive idea, one that had taken hundreds of years to evolve. It was a concept with an elegant symmetry and a beguiling pull. De Long, who had read everything he could that pertained to the Arctic, knew every turn and wrinkle of the idea: the procession of explorers who had tested it, the thinkers who had contemplated its larger possibilities. De Long believed in the idea with such conviction that he was prepared to risk his career and even his life on it, for he knew that if he could take it out of the realm of the theoretical and into the world of fact, he would be judged one of the greatest exploratory heroes of all time.