In the Kingdom of Ice

In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette by Hampton Sides is a non-fiction book that follows the true story of the De Long expedition to the North Pole. The crew of the famous USS Jeannette wanted to be the first people to set foot on the as yet unexplored North Pole but soon found themselves trapped in fifteen-foot-thick sheets of ice. Hopelessly stuck with no ability to turn back, the crew abandoned the boat and had to walk and dogsled more than one thousand miles to the mainland of Siberia or give up their lives entirely to the frozen, desolate north.

The story begins with the appeal of the North Pole – worldwide, people wanted to see what this uncharted region had to offer. So little was known about the Arctic region around 1880, when the De Long expedition set off from San Francisco Bay. The book reads like a catalog of the prominent men who prompted and manned the expedition, ending with the horrific account of what the men endured after the boat was breached in ice.

August Petermann, a noted cartographer, was the main instigator of the mission to the North Pole. One of a number of “experts” on the Arctic, Petermann believed that currents created a kind of tropic ocean around the North Pole, and that beyond the ice packs of the Arctic region was a beautiful island, which any powerful nation would want to claim as its own. Petermann called this region the Open Polar Ocean, insisting that ice would not bar the way for explorers looking to reach the Pole.



The mission was funded by the millionaire James Bennett, the owner of the New York Herald and a man known for an appreciation of exploration, adventure, and the desire for a new scoop. Bennett had funded the rescue mission of Dr. Livingstone, who had been abandoned in Africa, so his reporter Sir Henry Stanley could write about it for the Herald. Interested in North Pole exploration as an intellectual, Bennett wanted the Herald to have the first big news story about what lived in the far north of the globe. Agreeing to fund an entire journey to the North Pole, Bennett recruited Petermann to supply the maps and charts necessary for the crew to get there.

George De Long, a Navy Lieutenant, was eventually selected to captain the USS Jeannette. He was known as a lover of the North after he received acclaim for saving ship trapped in ice off the coast of Greenland. De Long found a crew of thirty-two men and set off in 1880 for the North Pole.

The ship sailed into the uncharted seas of the North, but before long, De Long and his crew discovered that Petermann and other “experts” knew nothing about what really lay in the Open Polar Ocean. They soon hit thick ice, sometimes as thick as fifteen feet. Two years into their voyage, the hull of the boat was breached by a particularly thick chunk of ice and the wear and tear of the journey. Water flooded into the boat, and the men were forced to evacuate with whatever they could carry with them.



Lost and alone, the men could see nothing but ice all around them. They had minimal supplies and nowhere to turn. De Long eventually led the men on their harrowing, one thousand mile walk through ice storms and frigid temperatures, in the hopes of eventually reaching mainland Siberia. The men fought against starvation, snow blindness, madness, and hopelessness as they walked. Only fourteen of the men survived – eleven died in a sailing boat after the ship sank, and nine more died, including Captain De Long, in the Lena Delta.

Hampton Sides is a historian, journalist, and author known for writing narrative non-fiction about American history, and particularly the history of land exploration and war. His books include Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder, Hellhound on his Trail, In the Kingdom of Ice, and On Desperate Ground. He is a member of the Society of American Historians and has guest lectured at Columbia, Yale, Stanford, and many other institutions. He lives in New Mexico with his wife, a former NPR producer and journalist.