Books: White Tragedy

HELL ON ICE — Commander Edward Ellsberg—Dodd, Mead ($2.75).

Of all the hard-driving figures in U. S. journalism, the demoniac James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald was the most reckless, the most imaginative. Before he was 30 he had sent H. M. Stanley to Africa with blunt orders to find Livingstone. For circulation’s sake he sent out scientific expeditions, wangled government support for his journalistic adventures and launched balloon races that started as many as 50 gas bags blowing wildly over the U. S. Nobody knows what wires Bennett pulled in Rutherford Hayes’s Administration to persuade the U. S. Navy to back the terrible attempt of the Herald to find the North Pole. But on July 8, 1879. a crude, unwieldy little naval vessel called the Jeannette sailed slowly out of San Francisco, carrying scientific equipment, a crew of 31, including two Herald correspondents, headed for the Polar Seas and sure disaster.

For two months the Jeannette sailed north. A reconditioned yacht, fitted for Arctic service by a sheathing of heavy planks, she could make four knots with her engines, six with her sails in a good breeze. But under sail she could scarcely be managed, and her engines used five tons of coal a day. Owned by Bennett, she had been commissioned by the Navy. Bennett paid the expenses of the trip although naval officers were in command and even the correspondents sailed as U. S. Navy seamen. Naval engineers shook their heads over the Jeannette, reported skeptically that “so far as practicable” she had been fitted for Arctic service. No naval vessel was on hand to do her honor as she waddled out of San Francisco Bay. No naval functionary attended the celebration when she sailed. The Jeannette went to her ruin with only the cheers of landlubbers speeding her voyage.

To Unalaska in the Aleutian Islands, to St. Michaels in bleak Norton Sound, through storms on the shallow Bering Sea to St. Lawrence Bay on the coast of Siberia, through the Bering Straits to the black cliffs of Herald Island, the Jeannette pushed her way. There she was frozen in, far south of the Pole, even south of waters regularly visited by whalers. Contrary to common belief, the frozen wastes were not silent and inert. Submerged ice floes smashed steadily against the hull of the Jeannette. The pressure on her timbers made the ship crack with a sound like repeated rifle shots, and at times the sides seemed to pant under the strain. The ice itself seemed alive. Once a section near the Jeannette churned as if in a millrace, and sometimes ice fragments as large as houses piled up, threatening to crash down on the ship.

For almost two years she was held, while the ice drifted slowly north, and when at last she broke free, leaking like a sieve, another pack crushed her like a giant nutcracker, heaved her almost above the surface, then opened again to let her plunge to the bottom.

Loading their three boats (weighing four tons) on sledges, and carrying three and a half tons of food, the crew started over the ice, with Siberia 500 miles south of them. In eight days they traveled five and a half miles. But the ice had moved beneath them: they were 25 miles north of where they started. Three months later a few of the survivors, some blind, some mad, one so badly frozen his feet had fallen off, landed on the coast of Siberia where the Lena River pours into the Arctic. Of a party of 14 men, including Commander George Washington De Long, only two came through alive. Nine, after incredible hardships, were almost within reach of help when they starved. Another group of eight was lost in a storm within a day’s sail of safety. Ten men under Chief Engineer Melville stumbled on a native village, set out to rescue the others, found only their bodies and the disconnected record of their suffering written in their journals and their emaciated bodies.

Two Congressional committees investigated the Jeannette’?, fate, parts of Commander De Long’s journal were published, but what happened in the two years in the ice pack remained a mystery. Piecing the story together from these documents and unpublished writings of other members of the crew, Commander Ellsberg (On the Bottom) has tried to make its terrors more oppressive by the device of having it told by Chief Engineer Melville as a first-hand observer. Not altogether successful, the device enables Commander Ellsberg to put hackneyed remarks in the mouths of the characters that rob the book of authority without making its people seem any more real. Not by means of stale jokes cracked by the doomed, but by the simple facts of their plight do readers gain a sense of the tragedy of the Jeannette.