In the Kingdom of Ice
Tales of explorers trying to find the North Pole are legion, especially that of the British ship known as the Franklin. In the latter half of the 19th century, many ships worked their way up past Greenland, only to become wedged in the ice and lost. Then ships sent after them for rescue would become lost.
Sides focuses on a voyage I had not heard of before, that of the USS Jeannette, captained by a seasoned Arctic sailor, George de Long. Although a commissioned US Navy ship, the mastermind and money behind the mission was James Gordon Bennett, owner of the New York Herald. Bennett was also the man who hired Stanley to find Livingstone.
"The North Pole. The top of the world. The acme, the apogee, the apex. It was a magnetic region but also a magnetic idea. It loomed as a public fixation and a planetary enigma--as alluring and unknown as the surface of Venus or Mars." Many scientists and geographers imagined that the North Pole might be an open sea, where there may be an undiscovered race of people, or even a tropical zone. "Many improbable ideas had been floated to explain the Open Polar Sea. Some people said it was due to the churning effects of the earth's rotation. Others said it was caused by heat vents, or by some extreme magnification of the sun's rays that occurred at the poles."
De Long, who was a "pagophile," someone happiest on the ice, tried to find the Pole through the Pacific, rather than the Atlantic. Several theories held that a current would sweep him up through the Bering Strait. He found this was not true, as was the notion of an open sea. De Long, fairly early in the voyage, found himself stuck in the ice--in August. He and thirty-two crew members and two dozen dogs floated around the Arctic Circle, firmly embedded in ice. They stayed this way for over a year, and in the meantime those back home had no idea how they were doing.
A rescue ship was sent, the Corwin, which was notable for having John Muir, the future environmentalist, on board. They heard rumours about the Jeannette, but did not find her. Eventually, the ship succumbed to the pressures of the ice and sank. The crew members now had to head on foot towards Siberia. "Yet they trudged on, sunburned and chapped-lipped, dressed in sour-smelling pelts, wearing slitted ice goggles, singling galley songs as they slogged over the impossible expanses of crust and rubble and sludge."
Sides weaves a magnificent tale that has a lot going for it. From Bennett's eccentric ways--he was banished from society for a time after urinating into a fireplace at a party--to the personalities of the crew (one man suffered from syphilis, and ended up with eye problems. Try not tor read about the doctor performing surgery on his eye without anesthetic without wincing), the story moves along at a cinematic pace. It's amazing that they were able to survive for so long--over two years--before the crew was separated into three parts, each thinking the other lost.
The last part of the book is thrilling. They have made landfall, which for a while seemed impossible, but have to find civilization in order to be saved, and there's not much action on the Northern coast of Siberia. The men are extremely haggard, and the description of frostbite, with toes lost or worn down to the bone, are gruesome. Two men head off to try to find a village, and they do, and then there is a miraculous reunion, and a man named Melville becomes the hero, spending months trying to find De Long. I won't spoil the ending.
I sort of would like to go where they went, if I could be assured to having a nice warm cabin and plenty of food and medicine. They, of course, had no such guarantees, and their bravery is astonishing. Some of the men couldn't resist the allure of the North, even after ships were lost and hardships exposed. No matter how jaded we are in this age, where a trip to the North Pole can take a matter of minutes in a jet, tales of heroic exploration send a chill down my spine, especially when they are told by the skillful Hampton Sides.
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