Hell on ice

by Edward Ellsberg

PREFACE

On the summit of a grassy hill in Maryland looking across an arm of the Severn River toward the spreading lawns and the gray buildings of the Naval Academy stands a stone cross frosted with marble icicles topping an oddly shaped granite cairn.

In the summer of 1910, a boy of eighteen fresh from the Colorado Rockies, I stood, a new midshipman in awkward sailor whites, before that monument and read the inscription to Lieutenant Commander G. W. De Long and the officers and men who perished with him in the Jeannette Expedition of 1879 in search of the North Pole. Casually I noted that no one was buried beneath that cross, and since I had never heard before either of De Long or of the Jeannette, I wandered off to study the monuments to naval heroes whose deeds shone out in the histories I had read—the officers who in the wars with Tripoli had humbled the Barbary pirates; those who in the Civil War had braved Confederate forts and ironclad rams to save the Union; and most of all to stand before the tomb of John Paul Jones, the father of our Navy and a valiant seaman, fit companion to the great commanders of all ages.

Over the next twenty years I heard again occasionally of De Long in connection with the successful expeditions to the North and to the South Poles, finally reached by Peary and by Amundsen and those who followed in their footsteps. But except as a dismal early failure, De Long’s expedition seemed to have no significance, until some seven years ago a brief article by a friend of mine, Commander Louis J. Gulliver, appeared in the Naval Institute summarizing so splendidly the history of the Jeannette that immediately that old stone cross in Annapolis for me took on a new importance and I began to study what had happened. Reading what I could get my hands on concerning it, I soon enough saw that De Long’s early failure was a more brilliant chapter in human struggle and achievement than the later successes of Peary and of Amundsen.

But in my early search, based mainly on De Long’s journals as published nearly sixty years ago, much of what had happened eluded me; first, because De Long himself, fighting for the lives of his men in the Arctic, never had opportunity to set down in his journal what was going on (the most vivid day of his life is covered by two brief lines); and second, because the published version of his journal was much expurgated by those who edited it to create the impression that the expedition was a happy family of scientists unitedly battling the ice, whereas the truth was considerably otherwise as I soon learned.

Fortunately there came into my hands the old record of the Naval Court of Inquiry into the disaster, before which court the survivors testified, from which it appeared that De Long’s struggles with his men tried his soul even as much as his struggles with the ice; and on top of that discovery, with the aid of Congressman Celler of New York, I got from the records of Congress the transcript of a Congressional Investigation lasting two solid months, a volume of nearly eleven hundred closely printed pages, from which the flesh to clothe the skeleton of De Long’s journal immediately appeared. For there, fiercely fought over by the inquisitors (Congressional investigations apparently being no different over half a century ago from what they are today) were the stories of every survivor, whether officer or man, dragged out of him by opposing counsel, insistent even that the exact words of every controversy, profane as they might be, go down in the record to tell what really happened in three years in the ice pack. And there also, never otherwise published, were all the suppressed reports relating to the expedition, the expurgated portions of De Long’s journal, and the unpublished journals of Ambler and of Collins.

From the records of these two inquiries, Naval and Congressional, backed up by what had been published—the journal of De Long appearing as “The Voyage of the Jeannette”; “In the Lena Delta,” by G. W. Melville, chief engineer of the expedition; and “The Narrative of the Jeannette,” by J. W. Danenhower, navigator—stood forth an extraordinary human story. Over this material I worked three years.

How best to tell that story was a puzzle. De Long and the Jeannette Expedition had already most successfully been embalmed and buried by loving hands in the sketchy but conventional historical treatments of the published volumes mentioned above. To repeat that method was a waste of time. It then occurred to me that since I had once narrated in the first person in “On the Bottom” the battle of another group of seamen (of whom I was one) with the ocean for the sunken submarine S-51, I might here best give this story life and reality by relating it in fictional form as the personal narrative of one of the members of the expedition.

But who should that man be?

It was of course obvious that he must be chosen from the group of survivors. That narrowed the field to three officers and eight seamen. Now as between officers and seamen, it was evident that the officers were in a far better position to observe and to know what was happening than the seamen, so the choice was limited to the three surviving officers. For reasons that will afterwards be clear, among these three there could hardly be any question—Melville patently was best. And aside from the fact that Melville was a leading light in the expedition and next to De Long himself the man who actually bore the brunt of Arctic fury, he was an engineer, and since I am also, I could most easily identify myself with him and with his point of view.

So here as it might have been told about thirty years ago by Admiral George Wallace Melville, retired Engineer-in-Chief of the Navy, blunt, loyal, and lovable, a man whose versatility in four widely dissimilar fields of human endeavor gave him at his death in 1912 good claim to being considered one of America’s geniuses, is the Saga of the Jeannette.

Edward Ellsberg.

HELL ON ICE
THE SAGA OF THE “JEANNETTE”