Talk to In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette like its author wrote you back.
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What it argues
In 1879, the USS Jeannette sailed from San Francisco into the Arctic under the command of Lieutenant George Washington De Long, on a mission to reach the North Pole. The expedition was backed by newspaper mogul James Gordon Bennett Jr., fueled by the era's romantic belief that a warm open sea lay beyond the polar ice, and crewed by men who knew the odds were not in their favor. Hampton Sides reconstructs what happened to them with the pacing of a thriller and the research depth of serious history.
The ship became trapped in pack ice within weeks of entering Arctic waters. For the next twenty-two months, the Jeannette drifted with the ice, unable to break free, slowly being crushed. Sides traces the daily life aboard the icebound vessel — the boredom, the frostbite, the disciplinary tensions, the scientific observations De Long insisted on keeping — while building a portrait of a captain who held his crew together through sheer force of will and institutional faith in the navy's chain of command.
What it gets right
- 1.
The belief in an 'open polar sea' beyond the ice was not fringe pseudoscience in 1879 — it was a respectable geographic theory that sent real ships and real men to their deaths.
- 2.
De Long's leadership was defined less by inspiration than by discipline: he maintained naval routines, kept detailed logs, and insisted on scientific observation even as the ship drifted helplessly.
- 3.
Pack ice is not a static obstacle. The Jeannette's drift across the Arctic — invisible at the time — was later recognized as a major discovery about ocean current patterns.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Hampton Sides is an American journalist and historian whose work focuses on adventure, exploration, and military history. He is a contributing editor at Outside magazine and the author of several acclaimed narrative nonfiction books, including Blood and Thunder, about Kit Carson and the conquest of the Southwest, and Ghost Soldiers, about the Cabanatuan prisoner-of-war raid in World War II. His reporting has appeared in The New York Times Magazine and other national publications. Sides is known for exhaustive archival research combined with novelistic pacing.
