Our Lost Explorers: The Narrative of the Jeannette Arctic Expedition as Related by the Survivors, and in the Records and Last Journals of Lieutenant De Long

Newcomb was the naturalist of the ill-fated Jeannette expedition which sank in the Arctic Ocean in 1881. James Gordon Bennett, Jr., owner of the New York Herald, funded an official U.S. naval expedition to reach the North Pole, choosing as its captain a young officer named George Washington De Long, who had gained fame for a rescue operation off the coast of Greenland. On July 8, 1879 the USS Jeannette set sail from San Francisco to cheering crowds in the grip of “Arctic Fever.” De Long led a team of 32 men deep into uncharted Arctic waters. After journeying north of the Bering Straits they found themselves trapped in pack ice. Two years into the harrowing voyage, the hull was fatally breached, and the Jeannette sank to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. The men found themselves marooned on the ice cape nearly a thousand miles north of Siberia with three open boats and only the barest supplies.

Thus began their long, fateful march across the frozen sea — an ordeal that ranks as one of the greatest struggles for survival in our history. Facing everything from snow blindness and frostbite to ferocious storms and bewildering labyrinths of ice, the expedition battled madness and starvation as they desperately strove for the Siberian coast. The story of the Jeannette expedition is one of incredible hardship, two winter ordeals, the crushing of the expedition ship Jeannette, retreat by open boat, a lone journey thousands of miles across Siberia, death after death, insanity, starvation, amputation, and exhuming corpses from the grave. The Jeannette expedition represents the beginning of a turning point that changed Arctic exploration and Arctic science forever.