For nearly two years, USS Jeannette was not sailing through the Arctic Ocean. She was being carried by it.
Locked inside moving pack ice north of Siberia, the steam bark drifted wherever the floes took her. Her crew measured weather, sounded depths, hunted for food, maintained the machinery, and listened to the hull groan under pressure. Then, on June 12, 1881, the ice finally won. The ship went down, leaving 33 men standing on a frozen ocean with three small boats and hundreds of miles between them and help.
What followed was not a clean tale of exploration or triumph. It was a disciplined retreat across broken ice, an open-water crossing, a gale that scattered the boats, and a final struggle through the Lena River Delta. Thirteen men survived.
A Navy Expedition Built Around a Theory
The expedition began with a geographical gamble. Some nineteenth-century thinkers believed a warm Pacific current might pass through the Bering Strait and open a navigable route toward the North Pole. Newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett Jr., who had backed Henry Morton Stanley’s search for David Livingstone, financed the venture. The U.S. Navy supplied officers, discipline, and official authority.
The expedition’s leader was Lieutenant George Washington De Long, a naval officer with previous Arctic experience. Its ship had begun life as the British vessel Pandora. Strengthened for the ice, fitted with steam power and sail, and renamed Jeannette, she entered U.S. naval service for the expedition.
On July 8, 1879, Jeannette departed San Francisco. Her mission included scientific observation and a search for the missing Swedish explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, whose own expedition was attempting the Northeast Passage. By early September, De Long’s ship had passed through the Bering Strait and reached the waters near Herald and Wrangel Islands.
On September 5, the pack closed around her.
Twenty-One Months Inside the Ice
The Arctic did not hold the ship still. Wind, current, and pressure moved the entire frozen field in long loops and reversals. Over roughly 21 months, Jeannette traveled about 1,300 miles with the ice while gaining only a fraction of that distance toward the northwest.
Life aboard became a long exercise in routine under strain. The crew kept watches, maintained the engine and pumps, took scientific readings, exercised on the ice, and hunted when possible. Chief Engineer George W. Melville and his department fought to keep the ship habitable and mechanically alive. De Long enforced order because in that environment, a small lapse could become fatal before anyone finished arguing about it.
The drift disproved the hoped-for easy path toward an open polar sea. It also carried the expedition into areas little known to Western cartography. The crew sighted and named several islands now included in the De Long group north of the New Siberian Islands.
By the spring of 1881, pressure returned with violence. Ice rose in ridges around the vessel. Floes squeezed the hull until seams opened and water entered faster than the pumps could manage. De Long ordered boats, sledges, instruments, food, and records moved onto the ice.
During the night of June 12, Jeannette slipped beneath the pack.
The Long Retreat Toward Siberia
The ship was gone, but the sea had not released the crew. Their nearest hope lay south, across a shifting mixture of pressure ridges, leads of open water, and ice that sometimes carried them backward while they slept.
The men hauled their boats and supplies by sledge. Progress was exhausting and slow. Boots failed, food dwindled, and every rough ridge demanded that loads be broken down and dragged across in pieces. When the party finally reached navigable water, the same boats that had been burdens became their only passage to the Siberian mainland.
On September 12, all 33 men left Simonoski Island in three boats. De Long commanded the first cutter. Executive Officer Charles W. Chipp led the second. Melville commanded the whaleboat. A gale separated them almost immediately.
Chipp’s boat and its eight men disappeared. No confirmed trace of them was ever found.
Melville’s 11-man party reached the Lena Delta, found shelter, and eventually made contact with local residents. De Long’s cutter also reached the delta, but landed far from Melville and far from the settlements shown on his charts. The delta was a maze of marsh, channels, snow, and distances that looked smaller on paper than they felt to starving men.
The Last Entries in De Long’s Journal
De Long sent seamen William Nindemann and Louis Noros ahead to find help. They eventually reached people who fed and sheltered them, but language barriers and confusion prevented rescuers from locating De Long’s camp in time.
Back with the main party, the men weakened one by one from starvation and exposure. De Long continued his journal through the collapse of the camp, recording deaths with the same spare accuracy he had used for navigation and weather. His final entry was dated October 30, 1881.
Melville, already exhausted from his own escape, organized searches when he learned that other members of the expedition might have landed elsewhere. In March 1882, he, Nindemann, and a companion followed De Long’s trail and found the last camp. De Long and his companions had died. The searchers recovered journals and records and built a cairn over the dead.
Only 13 of the expedition’s original 33 men returned. Eleven had come ashore with Melville; Nindemann and Noros were the two survivors from De Long’s boat.
What the Jeannette Left Behind
The expedition failed to reach the North Pole, but failure is not the same as uselessness. Its observations added to knowledge of Arctic weather, depths, currents, and ice movement. The drift showed that the imagined warm, open route north of the Bering Strait did not exist as planners hoped. The expedition also mapped islands and left records of endurance, engineering, command, and survival under conditions few crews have faced.
Like the desperate boat voyage after the wreck of USS Saginaw, the retreat from Jeannette proved that abandoning ship is often only the beginning of the casualty. And like the long uncertainty surrounding USS Conestoga, it reminds us that a crew’s story can outlast the vessel that carried them.
For more designs and stories rooted in service and working-water history, visit the Fair Winds Coast Guard & Navy collection.
The Watch Continued on the Ice
The strongest part of the Jeannette story is not the theory that sent her north. It is what happened after the theory failed. The ship was trapped, then crushed. The crew kept the watch. When the deck disappeared beneath them, they loaded the boats, took their records, and started walking south.
Thirteen made it home. The journals ensured that the others were not simply swallowed by a blank place on the chart.