In the Kingdom of Ice

by Hampton Sides

Doubleday, 2014

The doomed and now-forgotten 1879 polar expedition of the USS Jeannette is the subject of In the Kingdom of Ice, the new book from Hampton Sides, author of 2001's bestselling Ghost Soldiers and 2006's thumpingly good Blood and Thunder. The Jeannette's expedition was financed by eccentric and fabulously wealthy New York Herald proprietor “Commodore” Gordon Bennett, who assembled thirty-two men under the leadership of dogged, noble commanding officer George De Long and sent them out as just the latest expression of the “Arctic fever” then seizing America's imagination. Sides, who's the editor of Outside magazine and who's done Arctic travelling of his own, perfectly captures the allure of the place back when scarcely any white people had set foot there. “It was a magnetic region but also a magnetic idea,” he writes. “It loomed as a public fixation and a planetary enigma – as alluring and unknown as the surface of Venus or Mars.”

Despite earnest and far-sighted logistics, the Jeannette might just as well have been journeying to Venus for all that they were prepared for the unthinkable and pitiless realm where they soon found themselves. The ship was trapped by pack ice north of the Bering Strait and eventually crushed, and the men were stranded for years in one of the most desolate and inhospitable places on Earth.

Sides has done an enormous amount of research into the day-to-day minutiae of this terrifying mooring. Through journals and letters and ship's manifests and contemporary news accounts, he's crafted the names on the Jeannette's roll call into a cast of characters as vivid and memorable as anything a novelist could concoct. The men of the expedition were forced to spend an expectedly vast amount of time in each other's close company, and Sides does a fascinating job of dramatizing those tense dynamics:

[Civilian meteorologist Jerome] Collins truly was an expert on weather, but what he seemed to care about was the “science” of puns, and by now he had exhausted his repertoire. The men had gown sick of his wordplay - “You give me an earache!” [naturalist Raymond] Newcomb had cried at one point – and yet Collins wouldn't quit. He'd run out of musical numbers, too. When he sat at his little organ, playing sprightly Gilbert and Sullivan selections for the hundredth time, he could not see how he was grating on everyone's nerves.

Often in the course of these 400 pages Sides lets his main characters do the talking, and they often have grim tidings to relate. De Long himself demonstrates a starkly dignified style in his log extracts, as when he records the story of a free-spirited dog among the expedition's team who's savagely turned upon by the other dogs:

“Though three or four hours had elapsed, the dogs remembered the circumstances of the desertion, and finding Bingo at a safe distance from the ship had pitched into him and chewed him so badly before Erichsen could reach them that he died within ten minutes of begin carried on board. We skinned him to have his coat for future wearing apparel, and he carcass lies frozen on the deck-house roof for possible food for his murderers.”

Sides breaks the claustrophobia of the Jeannette's plight by periodically widening his scope to take readers back to the United States, where the friends and followers of the expedition grow increasingly worried as the months and years pass with no word. One of those followers was of course De Long's wife Emma, who emerges as one of the book's most interesting characters and who was periodically reassured by the odious Bennett:

Bennett had promised Emma that he would spare no cost to find her husband. To him, the polar problem was like a rousing match of polo or tennis – a sport that quickened the blood, a bracing challenge, a game. Everything would be all right, he was sure of it. And if it wasn't, that was the risk of playing the game. He could think of no more honorable way to die than in the service of exploration – for the country, for the Navy, for science. And, of course, for the New York Herald. “The Herald is everything,” he once told a reporter. “The man is nothing.”

This was an odd contention coming from Bennett, who spent his lifetime not only believing in men but financing their heroism (he's the one who sent Stanley looking for Livingstone, for instance), and it certainly isn't anywhere in evidence this riveting book, as sure-fire a candidate for a Pulitzer Prize as anything the author has ever written. This is, instead, breathtakingly valorous stuff, a greedily readable treat for any reader of popular history.