USS Jeannette

1881

Arctic ice, De Long, wreckage across the pole Location: Arctic Ocean, NW of New Siberian Islands · Coordinates: 77.25°N 155.00°E · Casualties: 20 · Survivors: 13 · Depth: abyssal · not recovered · Cause: ice — Crushed and sunk by Arctic pack ice on 12 June 1881 after twenty-one months beset in the Chukchi and East Siberian Seas. The survivors set off south by sledge and whaleboat. Lieutenant De Long and thirteen others died of starvation and exposure in the Lena delta; the second boat reached the Siberian coast. · Fate: sank through the ice · Type: exploration · former British gunboat · Tonnage: 420 tons · Crew: 33 · Flag: United States Navy · Launched: 1861 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 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 kil