"In The Kingdom of Ice" by Hampton Sides

Above: "In the Kingdom of Ice - The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeanette - Hampton Sides - 410 Pages.

Its a different world up there that few of us, even the well traveled, will ever experience.

I completed reading this book today. The book was recommended to me by a friend, Bond... who is a more voracious reader than anyone else I know. I confess to have been unaware of the Jeannette story before I read the book.

During the final quarter of the nineteenth century there was intense interest about the "undiscovered" North Pole. Whaling vessels had encountered the northern ice pack on their hunting expeditions. The famous German map maker, August Heinrich Petermann was "sure" that above the northern ice pack there was a warm, open sea. James Gordon Bennet, Jr. flamboyant publisher of the New York Herald, having recently financed Stanley's successful meeting with Dr. Livingstone in the upper reaches of the Congo River, in Africa, turned to the North Pole as a potential newspaper selling adventure story... one that might even eclipse Stanley's adventure up the Congo.

Bennet and Petermann, after meeting together at Bennet's home in Germany, were certain that a North Pole discovery voyage should be undertaken. They needed a ship and a captain. Enter George W. De Long, a US Navy, Lieutenant Commander with Arctic sailing experience and intense wanderlust about Arctic exploration was the man they selected

In July 1879, backed by Bennet and under the auspices of the US Navy, De Long and thirty crew sailed from San Francisco on the ship USS Jeannette with a plan to find the North Pole via the Bering Strait.

The ship became trapped in the ice pack in the Chukchi Sea northeast of Wrangl Island in September 1879. It drifted in the ice pack in a northwesterly direction until it was crushed in the shifting ice and sank, almost two years later, on 12 June 1881 in the East Siberian Sea. De Long and his crew then traversed the ice pack to reach Siberia pulling three small boats. After reaching open water on 11 September they became separated and one boat - commanded by Executive Officer Charles W. Chipp - was lost, no trace of it was ever found De Long's own boat reached land, but only two men sent ahead for aid survived. The third boat, under the command of Chief Engineer George A. Melville, reached the Lena Delta and its crew were rescued.

De Long went to great effort to see that logs of the voyage were preserved notwithstanding the difficulty of carrying them through the frozen ice. We learn individual crew members' stories of heroism and of weakness. We learn that DeLong worked miracles in keeping crew spirits up most of the time... enough of the time, at least... under hardship circumstances most today could not even imagine

Author Hampton Sides draws from De Long's logs an amazing adventure story... how was the voyage conceived and put together.... how did men survive spending two years trapped on the northern ice pack... how did thirty men make their way across the frozen ice, later the Siberian Sea, to Siberia?

"The Kingdom of Ice" is the third Sides book I have read. The first two, "Blood and Thunder," about the life of Kit Carson and "On Desperate Ground" about the incredible break-out of US Marines from the Chosen Reservoir during the Korean War, were both page turning adventure stories. So, it was no surprise to me that "The Kingdom of Ice" would also be an exciting read.

I've seen Alaskan glaciers, the North Slope, 70 degrees north latitude, the glaciers of the Beagle Channel, 55 degrees south latitude. These sightings pale in significance to the 82 degrees north latitude ice where the Jeannette was finally taken in the north Siberian Sea. Its a different world up there that few of us, even the well traveled, will ever experience. How the members of the Jeannette expedition survived, though they failed to reach their intended destination, is excitingly told in in Side's account... one for the ages, as it were.