In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeanette / Hampton Sides

My wife has a passion for polar adventures, which is odd considering she absolutely hates being cold. Or, maybe that’s why it makes it so compelling for her—it’s like her own personal horror literature. Anyway, we both heard the author of In the Kingdom of Ice speak last week, and not being a fan of icy journeys myself, I was nevertheless eager to read this book.

The story of the USS Jeannette is history, not fiction, and although the expedition was celebrated when it occurred during America’s Gilded Age at the end of the 1800s, there are few people in 2015 who know anything about it.

At the time the crew set out on its course past the Bering Strait little was known about what lay at the northernmost extreme of the globe—it was either the stuff of fiction—Santa Claus’s abode was placed there in the 1800s, for example, or of scientific conjecture—some speculated that an ice-free sea stretched across the North Pole. The US was beginning to test global ambitions, and the Navy underwrote this exploratory journey as a means of demonstrating the might of an emerging world power.

The Jeannette very soon became stuck fast in the frozen sea (not so very unlike Shackleton at the opposite end of the globe many years later). The ship was icebound for nearly two years until eventually the men abandoned it after the forces of the surrounding ice crushed it. The details of the survival of the crew, their scientific work, discoveries of strange and interesting islands in the ice sea, and eventual landing on the remotest Siberian coast, all make for a fascinating read.

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