The Jeannette Expedition — a warm-sea theory that froze a ship and killed twenty men
Summary
In 1879 the U.S. Navy lieutenant George Washington De Long took the steam barque USS Jeannette north through the Bering Strait, chasing a theory that a warm Pacific current would open a navigable route to an ice-free sea at the top of the world. The theory was false. About 20 of the 33 men aboard died, including De Long himself. The ship was beset in the pack ice in September 1879, drifted helplessly for nearly two years, and was finally crushed and sunk north of Siberia on 13 June 1881. The survivors then hauled three boats and sledges south across the ice toward the Siberian mainland, were scattered by a gale off the Lena Delta, and died in ones and twos of cold and starvation in one of the most desolate corners of the Arctic.
The expedition was financed by James Gordon Bennett Jr., the proprietor of the New York Herald, the same press baron who had sent Stanley to find Livingstone. Its scientific premise came from the German geographer August Petermann, who held that the warm Kuro Siwo current flowed north through the Bering Strait and dissolved the polar ice into an "open polar sea." Unknown to De Long, the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey had already concluded the current had no such effect. The Jeannette sailed into the pack on the strength of a hypothesis that the available science had already refuted.
What the disaster produced, against the men's intentions, was knowledge. De Long kept his journal almost to his death, and it was recovered from the snow of the Lena Delta the following spring, fixing the record of the party's final weeks. And in 1884 wreckage from the Jeannette was found frozen into an ice floe off southwestern Greenland — on the far side of the Arctic — proving that a current carried ice clear across the polar sea from Siberia. That single observation inspired Fridtjof Nansen to design the Fram and deliberately freeze a ship into the same drift, turning the Jeannette's destruction into the foundation of a more successful method of polar travel.
Timeline
A current that did not exist
The Jeannette expedition was built on a geographic faith that the era's leading authority could not let go of. August Petermann, the most influential cartographer in Europe, had long argued for an "open polar sea" — a navigable, ice-free basin at the top of the world, sealed off by a ring of pack ice but warm at its centre. By the late 1870s he located the gateway in the Pacific, contending that the warm Kuro Siwo current flowed north through the Bering Strait, melted a path through the ice, and led to open water near the Pole. De Long, an ambitious naval officer with prior Arctic service, embraced the theory and the route it implied.
The money came from a newspaper. James Gordon Bennett Jr., owner of the New York Herald, had already turned exploration into circulation by backing Stanley in Africa, and a dash to the North Pole promised the same. He bought the former Royal Navy gunboat Pandora, renamed her Jeannette, and had her strengthened for ice, while the U.S. Navy supplied the officers and crew and a veneer of official sanction. The combination — naval discipline, private money, and a press baron's appetite for a sensation — committed 33 men to a plan whose premise the science of the day had already begun to demolish. The Coast and Geodetic Survey had found that the Kuro Siwo's warmth did not survive north of the strait, but that conclusion never reoriented the expedition.
So the Jeannette sailed north in July 1879 toward a current that would not melt the ice and a sea that was not open. Within two months she was beset off Herald Island, locked into the very pack the theory said should have parted before her.
Twenty-one months in the ice, then a march to the Lena
The beset ship did not sink quickly; she was tortured slowly. For 21 months the Jeannette drifted in the grip of the pack, lurching generally northwest but doubling back on herself, going nowhere her crew had chosen. In January 1880 the ice cracked her hull, and only quick work — plugging the breach and rigging a mechanical pump from cannibalized equipment — kept her afloat through another year and a half of pressure. The men endured two Arctic winters aboard a ship that was being crushed by inches. In May 1881 the drift carried them past two uncharted islands, which De Long claimed for the United States, a brief discovery in a long imprisonment.
On 12 June 1881 the ice finally won. With the hull failing, De Long ordered the ship abandoned, and the next day the Jeannette sank some 300 nautical miles off the Siberian coast. Now the 33 men faced the worst phase: a retreat on foot across moving sea ice toward the Lena Delta, hauling three boats — a large cutter, a smaller cutter and a whaleboat — mounted on sledges, plus provisions and the sick. The haul consumed the summer, the ice working against them as it had against Andrée's party in the same decade.
When they finally reached open water in September and launched the three boats, a gale tore the party apart. Lieutenant Charles Chipp's cutter, with eight men, vanished and was never found. The whaleboat under engineer George Melville reached the southern part of the delta and, crucially, made contact with native inhabitants and survived. De Long's boat landed in the empty northern delta, and from there his party set out on foot into one of the bleakest landscapes on earth, with little food and the Siberian winter coming on.
The reckoning: a journal in the snow, and a drift across the Pole
De Long's party died in stages. The lieutenant kept his journal as men weakened and dropped, recording each death and, near the end, a supper of "a spoonful of glycerine." On 9 October he sent two of the strongest, Nindemann and Noros, ahead to find help; they survived, were found by local Yakut hunters, and eventually raised the alarm. De Long and the remainder could go no farther. His last entry is dated 30 October 1881. He, the surgeon James Ambler, the cook Ah Sam and the others died near the Lena, about 95 miles from the coast.
It was Melville — whose whaleboat crew had lived — who went back into the delta to find them. In the spring of 1882 his search recovered De Long's body and those of his party, and, half-buried in the snow, the journal that fixed the record of their final weeks. Melville's men wrapped the dead, raised a driftwood cairn and a cross inscribed with their names, and searched in vain for any trace of Chipp's lost cutter. Of the 33 who sailed, about 20 had died: Chipp's eight, De Long's party, and others along the way. Thirteen came home, among them Melville, who would rise to rear admiral.
The expedition's lasting contribution was one no one had sought. In June 1884, relics positively identified as the Jeannette's were found frozen into an ice floe off Julianehåb in southwestern Greenland — thousands of miles from where the ship went down, on the opposite side of the Arctic Ocean. The only explanation was a continuous current carrying ice across the entire polar basin. Fridtjof Nansen seized on the observation and built the Fram to do deliberately what had destroyed the Jeannette: freeze into the Siberian pack and let the transpolar drift carry the ship toward Greenland. The disaster that killed De Long had charted the current that would later be ridden, on purpose, by a wiser design.
The Five Factors
Aftermath
Thirteen of the 33 survived, and their return forced a public reckoning. A naval inquiry and a congressional investigation examined the expedition's planning and the conduct of its officers; Congress later struck the Jeannette Medal for the participants, and a monument to the dead was raised at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. De Long's widow, Emma, edited and published his journals, ensuring that the lieutenant's own clinical record of his party's death reached the public. The De Long Islands, discovered during the drift, still bear his name, though they lie in Russian waters.
The expedition's deepest mark was on the science of the Arctic itself. The Jeannette relics off Greenland in 1884 supplied the first hard proof of a transpolar drift, and Nansen's Fram, frozen deliberately into the same current in 1893, rode it for three years and survived — vindicating, through deliberate design, the very mechanism that had crushed De Long's ship by accident. The expedition's logbooks of ice and weather, kept faithfully through two winters, survive as among the only direct sea-ice measurements from the nineteenth-century Arctic, now used in modern climate research. The men died for a theory that was wrong; the data they brought back helped build the theory that was right.
Lessons
- Test the founding premise against the best available evidence, not the most prestigious authority; a celebrated theory can still be a refuted one.
- Never enter a trap without an exit — a plan that depends on conditions appearing has no plan for when they do not.
- Account for the medium itself: drifting ice can carry a ship or a sledge party backward faster than effort moves it forward.
- Keep a weakened party together; dispersing it across hostile terrain at the moment of crisis condemns each fragment to fail alone.
- Seek and credit local inhabitants — the people who live in the country are often the only available rescue.
References
- Jeannette expedition WIKIPEDIA
- Dying for data: the ill-fated USS Jeannette and the pursuit of scientific discovery NATIONAL SNOW AND ICE DATA CENTER
- The USS Jeannette's Perilous Journey NOAA NATIONAL CENTERS FOR ENVIRONMENTAL INFORMATION
- The Hair-Raising Tale of the U.S.S. Jeannette's Ill-Fated 1879 Polar Voyage NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC