Now while the Vega was drifting slowly about northeast of Siberia during that early summer of 1879, not only were Schwatka hunting for Franklin relics with the Eskimos of King William’s Land, the Danish Captain Jansen tracing the northeast coast of Greenland, and Dutch and English explorers investigating the neighborhood of Francis Joseph Land, but within a few leagues of Nordenskjöld and his men there was beginning one of the most dreadful of those tragedies that have seared with suffering the track of Arctic exploration since men began to pry into the secrets of the frozen North: I mean the story of the Jeannette.
Many readers of this book will easily remember the intense interest which the starting of this expedition created in the United States, for it was organized at the suggestion and expense of James Gordon Bennett, the proprietor of the New York Herald. The government coöperated, however, lending from its navy the officers and men needful, and otherwise aiding the project. The vessel itself was the steam yacht Pandora, which had been proved a worthy craft by Sir Allen Young in his search for the magnetic pole in 1875, and which Mr. Bennett had bought and rechristened.
Supplied with everything science and experience could suggest, the Jeannette sailed from San Francisco on July 8, 1879, and missing the incoming Vega among the fogs of Bering Sea, passed through into the Siberian ocean, bound poleward. The last report of her was that she had been seen September 3d steaming toward Wrangell Land, which had been sighted by American whalers in 1867, and was generally regarded as of continental extent northward. It is now known that De Long intended to reach it and winter there; but to his dismay he could not escape from the ice-pack, and to his astonishment found himself drifting past the northern margin of Wrangell Land, thus proving it an island about seventy miles long.
When two years had passed and no tidings had been received, the United States government equipped a search expedition in the steamer Rodgers, commanded by Lieutenant Berry, which in 1881 reached and examined Wrangell Land, and then went north farther even than Collinson, reaching 73° 44´, the highest point yet attained immediately north of Bering Strait, where the paleocrystic ice spreads much farther from the pole than on the American side. But he found no trace of the Jeannette, and himself had a hard time getting home, for the Rodgers was burned in her winter quarters.
What then had befallen the lost vessel? She had become beset in the ice and drifted with the pack around the north end of Wrangell Island, and then west, until at the end of twenty-two months she had been crushed, and sunk on June 12, 1881, in latitude 77° 15´ N., and longitude 155 E. Two small islands, named Jeannette and Henrietta, had been visited some distance east of the scene of the catastrophe; but when the crews, saving themselves and what little they could on the ice, started to drag their boats and sledges homeward, they headed directly south, and soon found a new island, named Bennett, which is the northernmost of the New Siberia group.
It would be a sad task, were it possible, to relate here the frightful hardships of that journey through the fast-gathering Arctic night toward the bleak coast of Siberia. Having passed the islands, open water was found, and the starving men embarked in their three boats for the mouth of the Lena; but soon they were separated in a storm, and each one proceeded as best he could. One boat foundered in the first gale. Another, in charge of Melville (now engineer-in-chief, U. S. N.), reached an eastern mouth of the river and ascended it to a Russian village. A third boat, with De Long and others, also reached the Lena delta, but only two seamen were able to proceed afoot to Bulun, a far-away Russian settlement. Melville heard of this, and made haste to start out searching parties, but they were too late. De Long and his crew had died of exhaustion, and it was not until the next season that their bodies and records were fully recovered.
Nevertheless, as we are assured by experts, the results of this unfortunate expedition were important, physically and geographically. “They covered some 50,000 square miles of polar ocean, and clearly indicate the conditions of an equal area between their line of drift and the Asiatic coast.” De Long believed the Siberian ocean to be a shallow sea, dotted with islands; and his conclusions have been confirmed by the admirable scientific work since of Toll, Bunge, and other Europeans who have explored the Liachoff Islands and other places in that part of the Arctic realm.
The desire for scientific study of the polar world had now become the motive for northern research, though men were still ambitious to reach the pole; and when Sir George Nares returned from the great British expedition of 1875, to tell how the men of the Alert had reached a wintering-point beyond Robeson Channel, on the west coast of Greenland, in latitude 82° 27´ N., and that Markham and a sledge-party had gone about one degree farther (to 83° 20´ 26´´ N.), greater pride was felt in this fact, perhaps, than in the careful observations and collections that the ships had made. This remained the advance record until the memorable feat of Lieutenant Lockwood of the American Greely expedition eight years later.
This expedition was one of several acting in concert, according to a scheme suggested by Weyprecht, and perfected at international congresses of interested men meeting at Hamburg in 1879 and at St. Petersburg in 1882. This plan was for the establishment by various governments of a ring of stations as far within the Arctic circle as practicable, where simultaneous daily observations of the weather, magnetic conditions, tides, currents, etc., might be made. The arrangement was begun in the summer of 1883, and observing stations were established by Austria on Jan Mayen Island; by Denmark at Godthaab, Greenland; by Germany on Cumberland Bay, west of Davis Straits; by Great Britain at Great Slave Lake, Canada; by Holland at the mouth of the Yenisei; by Norway at Alten Fjiord, Norway; by Russia at the mouth of the Lena, and on Nova Zembla; by Sweden on Spitzbergen; and by the United States at Point Barrow, Alaska, and, farthest north of all, Lady Franklin Bay, Greenland. Nothing need be said about most of these stations—all were successful except the Dutch; but to the last-named belongs a story that Americans will not forget.