Hampton Sides - In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

In the kingdom of ice, far from the world,

lamentations rise from the ship,

As she battles the slabs and the growling swirls,

and writhes in their throttling grip.

The crusted floes crack in fits and in sprees,

and in fury flog her planked hide,

Spent sailors fall upon supplicant knees,

yearning for kith and hearthside.

The hungry ice clutches more tightly,

to check the flight of its prey,

The captains command rings forthrightly,

All hands quit while ye may!

See how the rough men pine and weep,

as she falters and slips,

High in the masts, the haunted winds whine,

a dirge to the truest of ships

That bore them so long, yet now in the murk,

the proud boat twists to her bed,

And when the day hath ended its work,

Northern Lights paint her grave purple-red.

The Sinking of the Jeannette, by Joachim Ringelnatz

The privilege isnt given to everyone. You must have suffered first, have suffered greatly, have gained some miserable knowledge. In that way your eyes are opened to it.

Henry James, 1881

NAVAL OFFICERS

Lieutenant George De Long, commanding

Lieutenant Charles Chipp, executive officer

Master John Danenhower, navigation officer

George Melville, engineer

Dr. James Ambler, surgeon

CIVILIAN SCIENTISTS

Jerome Collins, meteorologist, correspondent to the New York Herald

Raymond Newcomb, naturalist

SPECIAL DUTY

William Dunbar, ice pilot

John Cole, boatswain

Walter Lee, machinist

James Bartlett, first-class fireman

George Boyd, second-class fireman

Alfred Sweetman, carpenter

SEAMEN

William Nindemann

Herbert Leach

Carl Grtz

Edward Starr

Heinrich Kaack

Frank Mansen

Adolph Dressler

Walter Sharvell

Louis Noros

Henry Wilson

Peter Johnson

Henry Warren

Albert Kuehne

Hans Erichsen

Nelse Iverson

George Lauterbach

COOK AND STEWARD

Ah Sam

Charles Tong Sing

INUIT HUNTERS AND DOG DRIVERS

Alexey

Aneguin

O n a misty morning in late April 1873, the Tigress, a steam barkentine out of Conception Bay, Newfoundland, was pushing through the loose floes and bergs off the coast of Labrador, heading for the seasonal seal-hunting grounds. Late in the morning, the Tigress encountered something strange: A lone Inuit in a kayak was hailing the ship, waving his arms and screaming at the top of his lungs. The native man was clearly in some kind of trouble. He had ventured much farther out into the perilous open waters of the North Atlantic than any Eskimo ordinarily would. When the Tigress pulled closer to him, he yelled, in accented English, American steamer! American steamer!

The crew of the Tigress leaned over the railings and tried to decipher what the Inuit was talking about. Just then, the fog parted enough to reveal, in the middle distance, a jagged floe piece, on which more than a dozen men and women, plus several children, appeared to be trapped. Seeing the ship, the marooned party erupted in cheers and fired guns into the air.

The Tigresss captain, Isaac Bartlett, ordered rescue boats put in the water. When the stranded peoplenineteen in allwere brought aboard, it was immediately apparent that they had suffered a horrific ordeal. Emaciated, filthy, and frostbitten, they had haunted looks in their eyes. Their lips and teeth were greasy from a just-finished breakfast of seal intestine.

How long have you been on the ice? Captain Bartlett asked them.

The senior member of the group, an American named George Tyson, stepped forward. Since the fifteenth of October, he replied.

Bartlett tried to understand what Tyson was saying. October 15 was 196 days earlier. These people, whoever they were, had been stranded on this ice slab for nearly seven months. Their precarious floe had been, Tyson said, a God-made raft.

Bartlett questioned Tyson further and learned, to his astonishment, that these pitiful castaways had been aboard the Polaris, a ship famous around the world. (This was the American steamer! the Inuit had been screaming about.) The Polaris, an unprepossessing steam tug that had been reinforced for the ice, was the exploring vessel of an American polar expedition, partly funded by Congress and supported by the U.S. Navy, that had left New London, Connecticut, two years earlier and, after a few stops along the way to Greenland, had not been heard from since.

AFTER PENETRATING JUST beyond the 82nd parallel, a nautical latitude record at the time, the Polaris had become trapped in the ice high along the west coast of Greenland. Then, in November 1871, the expedition commander, a brooding, eccentric visionary from Cincinnati named Charles Francis Hall, had died under mysterious circumstances after drinking a cup of coffee that, he suspected, had been laced with poison. Following Halls death, the leaderless expedition had completely unraveled.

On the night of October 15, 1872, a large piece of ice on which Tyson and eighteen other expedition members were temporarily encamped had suddenly broken away from the vicinity of the ship and started drifting into Baffin Bay. The party of castaways, which included several Inuit families and a newborn infant, was never able to rejoin the Polaris, and they resigned themselves to their slab of ice. They helplessly floated toward the south, through the winter and spring, sleeping in igloos and living on seals, narwhals, seabirds, and the occasional polar bear. Not having any fuel with which to cook, they ate only raw meat, organs, and blood, when they were lucky enough to have it, for the duration of their drift.