Captain’s Bookshelf The Grand and Terrible Voyage of the USS Jeannette

Well into the 1800s, leading cartographer and geographer August Petermann theorized that the North Pole would be navigable by sea if a reinforced ship followed warm-water currents brought north into the Arctic by the Gulf Stream. Petermann reasoned that the ship would break through where the currents were able to weaken stubborn ice floes, thus creating a path to a hypothetical “Open Polar Sea.” Petermann was persuasive, too. Under two of his sponsored expeditions, attempts to discover the polar sea ended in failure.

Around the same time, and in keeping with the theory of the day, hydrographer Silas Bent suggested an alternative: He reasoned that the more likely route was that a branch of tropical Pacific current—the Kuro Siwo—flowed into the Arctic via the Bering Strait. After his failures in the Atlantic, Petermann relented to Bent’s theory, and a renewed expedition launched in July, 1879.

Under the command of George De Long—a naval skipper who already had a notch in his Arctic explorer’s belt—sailed the USS Jeannette out of San Francisco Bay. Less than two years later, on the evening of June 12, 1881, the three-masted naval ship was crushed by ice and sank in the East Siberian Sea. For her last 16 months at sea, her captain and crew had nowhere to go, as the Jeannette drifted hopelessly in the clutches of the Arctic.

Chronicaled by author Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice reaches a perfect balance between an historical account of this age of maritime exploration and a thrilling tale of both survival and tragedy. The story doesn’t end with the sinking of Jeannette, and it doesn’t begin with her departure two years earlier. Sides paints a complete picture of the honor of exploration, discovery, and the inherent risk and passion of these 19th century adventurers.

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