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, Raymond Lee.

$300.00

Item Number: 126900

Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Company, 1882.

First edition of  Newcomb’s account of the Jeannette Arctic Exploration. Octavo, original illustrated cloth, tissue-guarded frontispiece, illustrated with maps, portraits, and numerous engravings. Introduction by Rev. W. L. Gage. In good condition.

The Jeannette expedition of 1879–1881, officially called the U.S. Arctic Expedition, was an attempt led by George W. De Long to reach the North Pole by pioneering a route from the Pacific Ocean through the Bering Strait. The premise was that a temperate current, the Kuro Siwo, flowed northwards into the strait, providing a gateway to the Open Polar Sea and thus to the pole. This theory proved illusory; the expedition's ship, USS Jeannette and its crew of thirty-three men, was trapped by ice and drifted for nearly two years before she was crushed and sunk north of the Siberian coast. De Long then led his men on a perilous journey by sled, dragging the Jeannette's whaleboat and two cutters, eventually switching to these small boats to sail for the Lena Delta in Siberia. During this journey, and in the subsequent weeks of wandering in Siberia before rescue, twenty of the ship's complement died, including De Long. Before its demise, the expedition discovered new islands—the De Long Islands—and collected valuable meteorological and oceanographic data. Although Jeannette's fate demolished the widely believed Open Polar Sea theory, the appearance in 1884 of debris from the wreck on the south-west coast of Greenland indicated the existence of an ocean current moving the permanent Arctic ice from east to west. This discovery inspired Fridtjof Nansen to mount his Fram expedition nine years later.