The Record
Naval steam yacht of the U.S. Navy, purchased by the New York Herald for Lieutenant George De Long's 1879 expedition to reach the North Pole via the Bering Strait. Trapped in pack ice north of the New Siberian Islands for twenty-one months before the floes finally crushed her hull. She sank through the ice on 12 June 1881; the survivors walked for months across the Arctic, De Long and thirteen others dying of starvation in the Lena delta. Wreckage from the Jeannette drifted across the pole and washed up on Greenland three years later, the proof Fridtjof Nansen needed for the theory that would produce his Fram expedition.
The Vessel
USS Jeannette was an American Arctic exploration ship, commissioned at the Pembroke Dockyard in Wales in 1861 as HMS Pandora, a British Royal Navy despatch vessel. She was 43 metres long, 420 tons displacement, and had been built with a steam-augmented sailing rig for operations in the waters of the North Atlantic. Her initial career had been in British Royal Navy service; she had been sold in 1878 to the American newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett Jr. for Bennett's planned Arctic expedition.
Bennett's specific interest in Arctic exploration had been stimulated by the publication of August Petermann's theory of an ice-free Arctic ocean. Petermann, the German geographer, had argued that the Arctic pack ice formed a thin crust around a central ice-free Arctic ocean, and that a sufficiently-powered ship could reach the Arctic pole by following the warm Japan Current (the Kuroshio) through the Bering Strait. Bennett had financed the USS Jeannette expedition specifically to test the Petermann theory.
The ship was refitted in 1879 for her Arctic mission: her hull was reinforced with additional iron-plate armour against ice impact; her steam engine was upgraded to increase her pushing power; her provisions holds were expanded to carry three years of food. Her mission commander was Lieutenant George Washington De Long, 34, a career U.S. Navy officer.
The Voyage
USS Jeannette departed San Francisco on 8 July 1879, bound for the Bering Strait and the Arctic Ocean beyond. Her complement was 33 officers and crew: De Long in command, the meteorologist Jerome Collins, the engineer George Melville, the physician James Ambler, and 29 enlisted crew. She reached the Bering Strait on 28 August 1879 and entered the pack ice of the Chukchi Sea on 6 September 1879.
The Petermann theory proved to be fundamentally wrong. The Arctic pack ice, far from forming a thin crust around an ice-free ocean, was the fundamental condition of the Arctic Ocean. Jeannette was beset in the ice of the Chukchi Sea on 6 September 1879 and did not achieve significant northward progress for the subsequent 21 months. The ice flow carried her in a generally northwesterly direction through the Chukchi and East Siberian Seas between September 1879 and June 1881.
The specific psychological burden of the expedition was substantial. The crew was isolated, unable to move north against the Arctic pack; the ship's supplies were progressively exhausted; the long Arctic winters produced depression and physical deterioration; the specific question of how the expedition would eventually escape the ice was not clear.
On 12 June 1881, Jeannette was crushed by the pack ice at approximately 77°15′N 155°00′E, approximately 750 kilometres north of the New Siberian Islands. Her hull was split open by the combined pressure of the ice; she sank within four hours of the initial pressure event.
The Disaster
De Long and his 32 crew escaped Jeannette with approximately two weeks of provisions and two of the ship's three lifeboats (the third had been damaged in the ice crushing). The specific survival plan was to march south across the ice to the open water of the Laptev Sea and from there to reach the Lena River delta on the Siberian mainland coast. The total distance was approximately 1,000 kilometres across the Arctic pack ice; the weather and ice conditions were deteriorating as the Arctic autumn approached.
The march was conducted between June and September 1881 through conditions that are difficult to exaggerate. The expedition pulled their lifeboats across the pack ice; they hunted and ate the few seals and birds that could be obtained; they suffered from progressive scurvy, hypothermia, and frostbite. The specific organization of the expedition had broken down into three separate parties by the time the open water of the Laptev Sea was reached in September 1881.
The three parties sailed south in their lifeboats across the Laptev Sea toward the Lena River delta. The weather produced a catastrophic dispersal: the three lifeboats lost sight of each other during a severe storm on 11 September 1881, and the subsequent fate of each boat was different. Engineer Melville's boat reached the Lena delta and was saved by a Siberian fishing settlement. Lieutenant De Long's boat reached the delta but De Long and his party died of starvation and exposure in the delta approximately 100 kilometres from rescue settlements. Lieutenant Charles Chipp's boat was never located and is presumed to have been lost in the storm.
Of the 33 who had left USS Jeannette on 12 June 1881, 20 died, 13 survived. The survivors reached the Russian mainland between October 1881 and January 1882 and were eventually returned to the United States by the Russian Imperial authorities through the trans-Siberian railway system.
The Legacy
Lieutenant George Washington De Long and the 19 other dead of the Jeannette expedition became, in American late-Victorian cultural memory, the iconic Arctic-exploration martyrs. De Long's personal journal, recovered with his body by an American search expedition in 1882, was published in 1883 as The Voyage of the Jeannette; the book became a bestseller and established the American popular conception of Arctic exploration as a heroic but fundamentally tragic activity. The specific combination of scientific ambition (the Petermann theory), geographical discovery (the expedition had confirmed the existence of several previously-unknown Arctic islands including Jeannette Island and Henrietta Island), and ultimate human failure made the Jeannette story particularly resonant for late-Victorian American audiences.
The scientific contribution of the Jeannette expedition was substantial despite the human tragedy. The specific data that De Long had been collecting throughout the ship's 21-month drift in the Arctic pack ice produced, when analysed by subsequent researchers, the first systematic oceanographic mapping of the Arctic Ocean currents and the first demonstration of the Transpolar Drift Stream (the specific west-to-east drift of Arctic pack ice that the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen would subsequently use for his Fram expedition of 1893-1896). The fragments of the Jeannette wreckage that washed up on the coast of Greenland in 1884 (3,400 kilometres from her sinking position) provided the specific physical evidence that confirmed the Transpolar Drift theory.
Nansen's Fram expedition was, in this specific sense, a direct intellectual descendant of the Jeannette expedition: Nansen designed the Fram specifically to exploit the Transpolar Drift that De Long's expedition had proven to exist, and Nansen's successful drift across the Arctic between 1893 and 1896 validated both the Transpolar Drift theory and De Long's scientific legacy.
The 20 American dead of the Jeannette expedition were returned to the United States between 1884 and 1885 through the specific efforts of the Russian Imperial authorities and the American Navy search expedition under Captain Melville (one of the surviving officers). De Long's body was interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York, in 1884; the burial ceremony was attended by approximately 10,000 mourners.
The USS Jeannette herself was never recovered. Her wreckage pieces have been collected at various Arctic locations over the subsequent 145 years; specific items from the wreck are held at the U.S. Naval Academy Museum at Annapolis, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The USS Jeannette expedition has become, in American polar-exploration historiography, the canonical example of Victorian-era scientific tragedy and the specific validation of the Transpolar Drift theory that would subsequently guide Nansen's Fram expedition and shape the modern understanding of Arctic oceanography.