by | 17 May 2026 · 12:17 am

Mare Island Navy Yard, 1879

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 105-107:

Captain De Long scrutinized his weather-beaten ship in the golden California light, going over every valve and fitting, every strake of her long hull. He wondered where her weaknesses lurked. Were there rotten timbers? Leaky seams? The smallest flaw could mean his death, and the deaths of the men who would serve with him in the Arctic. The Jeannette had survived the trip—had performed admirably, in fact—but he knew she was not ready for the coming battle with the ice. There was still much work to be done, and only a few months in which to do it. To withstand the pressures of the pack, the Jeannette would have to be reinforced in a way that no Arctic-bound vessel had ever been reinforced before.

For most of the month of January 1879, the ship lay moored at the Mare Island Navy Yard, near San Francisco, awaiting inspection from a specially appointed board of naval engineers. Mare Island was the only Navy shipyard on the West Coast, a place where new vessels were sometimes constructed and where the existing ships of the Pacific Squadron routinely came in for maintenance and inspection. It was a complex of foundries, pipe shops, machine shops, pitch houses, sawmills, smokestacks, and derricks clustered around a floating dry dock, all of it set on a marshy island where the Napa River emptied into a remote estuary of San Francisco Bay.

Each morning, the bell announced the start of the shift, and the crews of tradesmen—carpenters and coppersmiths, tinsmiths and teamsters, plumbers and painters, caulkers and coopers—went about their smoky, cacophonous work. Mare Island was the western outpost of America’s burgeoning might, the well-equipped repair shop of her still tiny but soon to be ascendant Navy, which was slowly converting from canvas to steam, and from wood to metal. Perched atop the headquarters building was a copper-sheathed statue of an American eagle, the huge bird cocked at an angle toward the water, as if to bid farewell to the nation’s ships as they ventured to the far reaches of the Pacific.

Many great ships had been launched or overhauled at Mare Island—brigs, monitors, corvettes, schooners, sloops of war. But the shipyard’s most storied fixture throughout much of the nineteenth century was the old Boston-built fifty-four-gun frigate the USS Independence, which, according to one Navy historian, was for nearly seventy years “as much a part of the Mare Island waterfront as the seagulls.”

Among the warships moored beside the yard, the slender Jeannette looked fragile and unobtrusive. When Navy engineers commenced a formal study of her, they were not impressed. To withstand the ice, they thought, the Jeannette still needed a considerable amount of work—on her hull, especially. How this exploring yacht, as the Pandora, had survived three journeys in the Arctic was a mystery to them.

Of course, these men were paid to be cautious, and they knew their recommendations would carry little consequence within the Navy hierarchy, especially since Bennett would be covering all expenses. Still, the engineers’ assessment was sweeping: Decks would have to be ripped out, they declared, bulkheads constructed, new boilers installed, coal bunkers rearranged, the entire hull reinforced with additional layers of planking. They talked of adding ambitious networks of beams and braces. As their checklist of repairs and renovations kept growing, they envisioned a price tag as high as $50,000.

De Long was shocked, even though he knew many of the repairs were necessary, and even though he and his men would be the beneficiaries of the contemplated improvements. He saw deep trouble in the engineers’ recommendations. “We must stop them,” he wrote, “or they will ruin us.” While Bennett rarely blanched at a bill, De Long believed it his duty to make sure the engineers did not concoct unnecessary repairs in order to swindle the faraway—and notoriously profligate—publisher. “I consider your interest identical to my own,” De Long wrote Bennett not long after his arrival in California. “I am laboring to keep down expenses with as much zeal as if I were to foot the bills instead of you.”

Leave a comment

Filed under economics, industry, labor, military, nationalism, science, travel, U.S.

by | 16 May 2026 · 7:13 pm

Riding the Kuroshio to Wrangel

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 81-82:

Most assuredly, it was time for an entirely new route. Petermann had read Silas Bent’s treatises on the Kuro Siwo and was familiar with his ideas about a “thermometric gateway.” Petermann agreed with Bent. The place to strike for the pole was the Bering Strait, just as De Long had been thinking. Not only had the route never been tried before, but the Kuro Siwo was likely to be a warm-water current powerful enough to soften up a pathway through the ice that would lead to the Open Polar Sea.

But there was another compelling reason for going by way of the Bering Strait, Petermann suggested. Lying off the coast of northeastern Siberia, not far from the Bering Strait, was a mysterious landmass marked on some maps as Wrangel Land. For centuries, it had existed as little more than a rumor, a mirage, a fog-gauzed dream. People weren’t sure what it was. Perhaps it was an island, perhaps a continent, perhaps a magical portal to the pole. Perhaps it didn’t exist at all. Before it came to be called Wrangel Land, it had gone by a succession of other names scrawled on whaling charts: Tikegan Land, Plover Island, Kellett Land.

In 1822, Chukchi natives on the northeast Siberian coast told the Russian-financed explorer Ferdinand von Wrangel about a land to the north that could sometimes be seen when atmospheric conditions were just right. The Chukchis had never been there, but once every few years, on sharp, clear days when the mists and fogs opened up, and when the vagaries of Arctic refraction were favorable, a mountainous land seemed to rise up from the sea like a dream. The Chukchis called it the Invisible Island, and they spoke of legends of a forgotten people who lived there. They had seen herds of wild reindeer clomping north from the Siberian mainland across the ice, presumably to graze on the strange land during their seasonal migration. Flocks of geese and seabirds, too, had been seen aiming in that direction. The animals seemed to know something the humans did not.

Enticed by what he heard, Baron von Wrangel sailed for the mythic land, but he was thwarted by ice and failed to snatch even a glimpse of it. Nearly thirty years later, the captain of an English vessel searching for Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition thought he spotted a large Arctic island in the distance. Later, various whaling captains insisted they’d seen it, though their claims were disputed. A German whaler, Eduard Dallmann, was even said to have briefly landed on it in 1866.

Something was there—Petermann was convinced of it. And this land, he believed (on the basis of anecdotes from Arctic whalers and ancient reports from Russian explorers), was surrounded by open water. “It is a well-known fact,” he had written, “that there exists to the north of the Siberian coast, and, at a comparatively short distance from it, a sea open at all seasons.”

Now Petermann drove home his point: Bennett and De Long should utilize that open sea and make Wrangel Land the target of their expedition. What a contribution to science it would be to finally learn what this land was about! On their way to the pole, he said, Bennett’s party should try to land on Wrangel, explore it, and claim it for the United States.

Leave a comment

Filed under Germany, nationalism, Russia, science, travel, U.S.

by | 15 May 2026 · 12:31 am

Centennial Exhibition, 1876

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 55-57:

Throughout the first week of July 1876, the week of America’s hundredth birthday, the nation’s attentions were focused on Philadelphia. Not only was the City of Brotherly Love the place where the Declaration of Independence had been signed a century earlier; the city was hosting a world’s fair, which, on this sultry summer week, was drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the globe. The Centennial Exhibition, host to thirty-seven nations, was situated on a campus of nearly four hundred acres in Fairmount Park, across the Schuylkill River from Philadelphia. It was America’s first world exposition, and by summer’s end nearly ten million people would have come to gawk at the nearly thirty thousand exhibits nestled inside the fair’s 250 pavilions and halls. The grounds were so sprawling that a newly devised elevated rail system—an early type of monorail—was used to shuttle crowds back and forth between two of the most popular buildings.

The crowds had come to be dazzled, and they were not disappointed. Among the many new creations on display were the Remington typewriter, an intricate stringed apparatus called a Calculating Machine, and a curious gizmo that a bearded Scotsman named Alexander Graham Bell was calling his “telephone.” (Bell would read from Hamlet’s soliloquy at one end of the hall, and attendees at the other could plainly hear the inventor’s voice issuing from a little speaker. “My God, it talks!” exclaimed one prominent visitor, Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil.)

All summer the exposition had been the talk of the land. James Gordon Bennett had been to the fair several times, and he’d made sure his best reporters stayed in Philadelphia to work the grounds and cover the comings and goings of dignitaries from around the world—the lords and monarchs, the authors and artists, the scientists and railroad magnates. The Herald ran Centennial Exposition stories every day—in fact, by special arrangement, thousands of copies of Bennett’s paper were printed on an enormous press right on the grounds. Young entrepreneurs like George Westinghouse and George Eastman could be seen at the centennial, hungrily prowling the exhibits for ideas cross-fertilized with other ideas. The twenty-nine-year-old Thomas Edison was there, too, showcasing a strange little device called the electric pen. Another brilliant American inventor, Moses Farmer, drew crowds with his electric dynamo, which he used to power a set of artificial lights—called arc lamps—that blazed through the Philadelphia night.

There were other puzzlements and oddities. At the Japanese pavilion, a miraculously fast-growing pea plant called kudzu was unveiled to an unsuspecting Western world. Elsewhere, the crowds could gaze upon new works by Rodin, listen to concerts played on the world’s largest pipe organ, or marvel at the immense handheld torch of Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi’s Lady Liberty (the rest of her was still under construction in France). It was here, at the Centennial Exhibition, that the American masses were introduced to a new condiment called Heinz ketchup, to a fizzy sassafras concoction sold under the name Hires Root Beer, and to the perfect novelty of a tropical fruit, served in foil with a fork, known as a banana.

BY FAR THE most popular attraction of the exposition, however, was Machinery Hall, a cavernous greenhouse structure that covered fourteen acres—nearly three times the square footage of St. Peter’s Basilica at Vatican City. The hall was a temple to machines of all kinds, and it thrummed and whirred and whined with the operation of countless pumps, turbines, generators, lathes, saws, and ingenious new fixtures of tool-and-die equipment. The floor was packed with aisle after aisle of inventions—most of them American, many of them revolutionary. There was, for example, the Line-Wolf Ammonia Compressor, a contraption for making ice. There was the Brayton Ready Motor, a practical early prototype of the internal combustion engine. There was a seven-thousand-pound pendulum clock manufactured by Seth Thomas that was calibrated to control twenty-six other clocks interspersed throughout the hall. There were new kinds of locomotive brakes, new kinds of elevators, and improved versions of the rotary cylinder press.

But the most extraordinary thing about Machinery Hall was the great motor that powered everything else. The Grand Central Engine, sometimes simply called the Centennial Steam Engine, was the largest engine in the world. Weighing more than 650 tons, constructed by the brilliant American engineer George Corliss, it supplied free steam power, via a network of underground shafts totaling a mile in length, to the more than eight thousand smaller machines on display throughout the hall.

Leave a comment

Filed under economics, industry, nationalism, science, U.S.

by | 14 May 2026 · 6:05 am

U.S. Navy Arctic Hero to Be, 1870s

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 33-34:

America’s newest Arctic hero was a young man of myriad talents and deep contradictions. Emma De Long thought there was within her husband an “incessant friction”—a contrast between impetuosity and patient striving, between a love for adventure and a compulsion to accomplish something ambitious and sustained. De Long could be a romantic, sometimes an extravagant one. He had what Emma called “a hungry heart.” But he willingly confined himself for most of his life to a straitjacket of absolute discipline. He knew what he wanted with nearly perfect clarity, and he pursued it with unswerving conviction—resistance only intensified his resolve.

De Long was a lover of opera, symphonies, and fine novels, an exacting correspondent who wrote beautiful letters in a delicate, florid hand. He doted on his baby girl, Sylvie, and hated the assignments that took him away from the daily joys of their family life. Letting Emma supervise the details of the household and most of their finances, De Long was casual about his domestic affairs. When in command of a ship, however, he could be a harsh disciplinarian with a granite disposition. One historian called his commanding style “monolithic.” Though a complete creature of the Navy, he hated nothing in the world more than naval hierarchies, naval politics, and naval rules, all of which he found an aggravation and a bore.

De Long blamed the Navy for some of his worst traits. He once wrote, “Ship life is a hard thing on the temper. Mark Twain in his Innocents Abroad says that going to sea develops ‘all of man’s bad qualities and brings out new ones that he did not suppose himself mean enough for.’ I wonder if that accounts for all the rough edges of my character.” He admitted that he could be “hard on men,” but such was the nature of a naval officer’s life. “I can only say I never allow any argument,” De Long once wrote. “It is my office to command and theirs to obey.”

The United States in the 1870s was, De Long knew, far from being a world-class naval power. Although the U.S. Navy was slowly making advancements, many European nations viewed the tiny, antiquated American fleet as a joke. According to naval historian Peter Karsten, it was “a third-rate assemblage” of “old tubs” in “various states of disrepair … the laughingstock of the world.” Far from an adventurous existence, life in the American Navy was marked by cramped quarters, low pay, draconian discipline, and jealous competition for rank in a promotion process that could be stultifying and slow.

Most of the assignments consisted of “showing the flag” in foreign ports and performing mind-numbingly dreary tasks aboard ship. It was a life of “crushing hopelessness,” said a junior officer at the time. “The most aspiring years of our lives” were consumed by “the dullest, the most uninteresting, the most useless duties.” Like many young officers, De Long often felt that he was wasting away his brightest days. “A stagnant navy,” noted one maritime scholar, “was no place for a man on the make.”

George De Long was nothing if not a man on the make, driven by big ideas. It was no wonder, then, that the Arctic, for all its hardships and dangers, exerted such a powerful pull on him. Here was a way for him to circumvent some of the drudgeries of naval duty, to achieve fame if not fortune, and possibly to hasten his ascension in rank while also doing something consequential for science and the nation. It offered a path to glory that an ordinary Navy career—at least during peacetime—seemed incapable of offering. A risky Arctic expedition carried some of the dash and distinction of a wartime assignment without the necessity of being in a war. Most important, it provided a faster track to commanding a ship, something to which De Long, even in his youth, had always aspired.

Leave a comment

Filed under military, nationalism, science, travel, U.S.

by | 13 May 2026 · 8:07 am

Arctic Rivalry in the 1800s

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 21-22:

To be sure, nationalism also drove the obsession. Americans, slowly emerging from the devastation of the Civil War, yearned to prove themselves on the international stage. Polar exploration, some suggested, could help unify the divided country—it was an endeavor that everyone, North and South, could agree on. An ambitious expedition of discovery provided a way for the still-mending republic to flex her power in a quasi-military, but ultimately peaceful, way.

It was a British naval officer, William [Edward] Parry, who in 1827 led what is widely regarded as the first serious expedition specifically aiming to reach the North Pole. Ever since then, the British Admiralty had led most of the cutting-edge polar explorations. This was largely due to the nearly evangelical zeal of Second Secretary of the Admiralty John Barrow for all things Arctic, and to the fact that after the defeat of Napoleon, the Royal Navy had had few major wars to fight throughout much of the 1800s. The great ships of the world’s mightiest navy were rotting away largely unused, and many officers had been relegated to half wages with little to do, yet with ambitions still burning in their breasts. The British primarily focused their efforts on finding a navigable sea route across the top of Canada—and on searching for previous English expeditions that had disappeared while looking for this elusive Northwest Passage.

But now, in the 1870s, attention was shifting away from finding the Northwest Passage and more toward the goal of reaching the North Pole itself, as an object of pure, abstract exploration. Not only England but France, Russia, Sweden, Germany, Italy, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire had mounted, or were now proposing, expeditions to reach the pole first. The United States considered herself a viable contender in this grand chase, and many Americans fervently wished to see the Stars and Stripes planted at the top of the world.

America’s desire to push north could be considered, in some ways, an extension of Manifest Destiny, the country’s pioneering surge toward the west. With the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, the western frontier was closing—or at least its conquest was reaching a different phase, one that consisted less of adventurous exploration and more of the messy backfill work of occupation and settlement. But in 1867, the United States had purchased Alaska from the czar for the paltry sum of $7.2 million, and this enormous new frontier lay untapped and largely unknown. Thus the national movement west, having reached California, had taken a right turn and become a movement north.

In 1873, the country was still digesting this acquisition, was still trying to learn about the immensity of what America owned in her Far North and why she owned it. The money spent on Russian America remained controversial—Alaska was still widely referred to as “Seward’s Icebox” and “Seward’s Folly” and “Seward’s Polar Bear Garden,” in derision of former secretary of state William Seward, who had championed and then negotiated the purchase. Yet the American people also wanted to know what might lie beyond the country’s new northern borders—and they were hungry for a hero to personify the country’s northern tilt.

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, Canada, migration, military, nationalism, U.S.

by | 12 May 2026 · 12:42 am

Era of Polar Obsession

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 20-21:

The “polar problem,” as it was sometimes called in the press, had taken on a quality of nagging, gnawing obsession. People had to know what was Up There—not only scientists and explorers but the general public. The North Pole was, said the London Athenaeum, the “unattainable object of our dreams.” An eminent German geographer named Ernst Behm compared humanity’s ignorance of what lay at the poles to the insatiable curiosity felt by a home owner who doesn’t know what his own attic looks like. “As a family will, of course, know all the rooms of its own house,” Behm wrote, “so man, from the very beginning, has been inspired with a desire to become acquainted with all the lands, oceans, and zones of the planet assigned to him for a dwelling-place.”

A New York Times editorial at the time echoed Behm’s sentiment: “Man will not be content with a mystery unexplored, will not rest with a perpetual interrogation point at the end of the earth’s axis, whose query he cannot answer.”

By the 1870s, no greater mystery existed on the face of the earth. (Antarctica was, of course, equally mysterious, but the South Pole was considered a less obtainable goal for the leading exploring nations, all of which happened to be located in the Northern Hemisphere.) It was hard to comprehend how profoundly the world needed to scratch the Arctic itch. Speculation about what lay at the North Pole permeated popular culture and world literature, from the books of Jules Verne to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (whose scientist-protagonist pursues his monster across the floes all the way to the North Pole). Many practical considerations were floated as justifications for pursuing the polar grail—landmasses that might be claimed, minerals seized, shipping routes discovered, colonies founded, new species described. There was a riddle of geography to solve, and personal glory to be won. But the quest was ultimately about something even more elemental and atavistic: to reach the farthest place, the ne plus ultra, where no human had been before.

“Within the charmed circle of the Arctic,” argued the Atlantic Monthly, “lay the goal of geographical ambition … the final solution of the polar problem. And it may be said that long years of fruitless effort and frightful suffering seem only to have whetted the appetite for discovery; and the more we know of our planet the more ardent becomes the desire of geographers to view the mysterious extremity.” An 1871 article in the journal Nature characterized the search for the pole as the paramount scientific and geographical riddle of the age: “The immense tract of hitherto unvisited land or sea which surrounds the northern end of the axis of our earth, is the largest, as it is the most important field of discovery that remains for this or a future generation to work out.”

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, Canada, Germany, literature, nationalism, publishing, travel, U.S.

by | 11 May 2026 · 12:31 am

Polish Realia: Longest City Name

Najdłuższa nazwa miasta w Polsce
The longest city name in Poland

To miasto ma najdłuższą nazwę w Polsce! Znajdziecie je w Świętokrzyskiem
This city has the longest name in Poland! You can find it in the Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship. via Radio Eska [SK] by Agnieszka Jędrasik

Jaka jest najdłuższa nazwa miasta w województwie świętokrzyskim? Liczy się każda literka, a tych najwięcej ma Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski. I tu ciekawostka … miasto to zajmuje także pierwsze miejsce w Polsce, jeśli chodzi o długość jego nazwy. O innych ciekawostkach dotyczących długości nazwy miast i miasteczek w regionie świętokrzyskim przeczytacie w naszym artykule.
What is the longest city name in the Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship? Every letter counts, and Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski has the most. And here’s an interesting fact… this city also ranks first in Poland when it comes to the length of its name. You can read about other interesting facts about the length of names of cities and towns in the Świętokrzyskie region in our article.

Najdłuższa nazwa miasta w Polsce liczy sobie 22 litery. To Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski.
The longest city name in Poland has 22 letters. It’s Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski.

Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski jest drugim co do wielkości miastem województwa świętokrzyskiego. Mieszka w nim ponad 67 tys. osób. Obecnie jest siedzibą powiatu, prawa miejskie uzyskał zaś w 1613 r. Będąc jednym z głównych ośrodków Staropolskiego Okręgu Przemysłowego, odziedziczył tradycje hutnicze, których wizytówką jest kombinat metalurgiczny Huta Ostrowiec. Miasto położone jest nad rzeką Kamienną. Niedaleko od niego rozpościerają się cenione turystycznie Góry Świętokrzyskie. Nazwa Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski funkcjonuje od 1937 r. Wcześniej nazywane było Ostrowcem Kieleckim lub Ostrowcem nad Kamienną. 
Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski is the second largest city in the Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship, with a population of over 67,000. Currently the county seat, it received city rights in 1613. As one of the main centers of the Old Polish Industrial Region, it inherited a tradition of metallurgy, epitomized by the Ostrowiec Steelworks. The city is situated on the Kamienna River, with the tourist-friendly Świętokrzyskie Mountains nearby. The name Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski has been in use since 1937. Previously, it was known as Ostrowiec Kielecki or Ostrowiec nad Kamienna. 

Najdłuższe nazwy miast w Polsce: lista długich nazw miejscowości
The longest city names in Poland: a list of long place names.

Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski – 22 letters.
Kalwaria Zebrzydowska – 20 letters.
Grodzisk Wielkopolski – 20 letters.
Czechowice-Dziedzice – 20 letters.
Baranów Sandomierski – 19 letters.
Aleksandrów Kujawski – 19 letters.

Leave a comment

Filed under education, language, Poland

by | 10 May 2026 · 12:04 am

Bloodhounds on His Trail, 1977

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 395-397:

BY SUNDAY MORNING, officials were fairly boiling with frustration. Although three of the prisoners had been caught, Ray remained at large. The full might of the state and the nation could not bring the prime fugitive to bay—not the planes and helicopters with their heat-sensing machines, not the National Guardsmen with their night-vision goggles, not the FBI with its topo maps and roving surveillance cameras. So the search would have to come down to the man hunter’s oldest technology, the surest technology of all. It would have to come down to the dogs.

Sammy Joe Chapman was the captain of the bloodhound team at Brushy Mountain. He was a big, pale guy with a miner’s lamp blazing from his forehead and an impressive Civil War mustache that crimped and tweezed when he smiled. People around the prison called him a “sniffer” and a “dog boy.” He’d spent his life tracking coons and hunting for ginseng root in the Cumberland woods, learning what he called “the tricks of the mountains.” He knew all the landmarks around the New River valley—Flag Pole, Chimney Top, Twin Forks, Frozen Head. He knew where the burned-out cabins were, and the abandoned mine shafts, and the naked faces of the mountains where the strip miners had done their crude scrapings.

Chapman had grown impatient with the feds and all their instruments and all their worrying. He knew that his bloodhounds would find Ray in due course. All they needed was a good drenching rainstorm. That was the funny thing about bloodhounds: their extraordinary snouts didn’t work well in dry weather. When the forest was in want of moisture, all the wild odors mingled into olfactory confusion, and the dogs couldn’t pick out a man’s clear scent.

Then, on Sunday afternoon, the weather turned. For hours and hours it rained strong and steady, flushing out the forest, driving the stale airborne smells to the ground. Chapman looked at the gray skies and smiled.

Around nightfall he put a harness to his two best hounds, a pair of fourteen-month-old bitches named Sandy and Little Red. He’d personally trained them, teaching them to hunt in perfect silence—none of the usual yelping and singing normally associated with hounds. Late that night, along the New River about eight miles north of the prison, the dogs picked up something strong. The wet ground quickened their senses, just as Chapman knew it would. Tugged by Sandy and Little Red, Chapman followed the river toward the Cumberland strip mine. After a few miles, they crossed over to the other side, then started up the steep flanks of Usher Top Mountain. An hour into the chase, the hounds remained keen.

Now Chapman radioed back to the prison: “We’ve got a hot trail!” He crossed a set of railroad tracks and a logging road and a clearing strewn with coal. In his headlamp, Chapman could see a rusty conveyor belt and other industrial machinery of the West Coal Company. It was nearly midnight, but the dogs kept leading him uphill, toward Usher Top. For two hours, he strained and struggled up the face of the ridge, his dogs never letting up. At one point he halted them and heard thrashing in the blackberry bushes, not more than fifty yards up the mountain.

In another ten minutes, Chapman and the dogs had nearly reached the mountain’s summit. Halting his dogs again, he heard silence—nothing but the crickets and a slight breeze whispering through the oaks and the rush of the river down in the moonlit valley, hundreds of feet below. It was ten minutes past two on Monday morning. Sandy and Little Red yanked Chapman a few feet farther. They snuffled and sniffed in the wet leaves. Their bodies went rigid, but still they didn’t bark or bay—they only wagged their tails.

Chapman shined his lamp at a bulge in the forest floor. From his shoulder holster, he produced a Smith & Wesson .38 Chiefs Special. “Don’t move or I’ll shoot!”

Then, like a ghoul, a pale white man rose lurchingly from the leaves. He was wet and haggard and smeared in mud. His scratched arms were crusted with poison ivy. He wore a navy blue sweatshirt and dungarees and black track shoes. James Earl Ray’s fifty-four hours of freedom had come to an end.

Chapman slapped some cuffs over the fugitive’s wrists and frisked him. Ray had a map of East Tennessee and $290—a stash he’d apparently saved up from his $35-per-month job in the prison laundry. Aside from the map, he had nothing on his person that appeared to have come from outside the prison, nothing that indicated he’d had any help.

“Ray, how do you feel?”

“Good,” he mumbled, averting his eyes in the lamp glare.

“Had anything to eat?”

“Naw,” Ray said. “Only a little wheat germ, is all.”

Chapman got on the radio to share the good news—and in the process learned that other bloodhounds had found another fugitive down on the New River several hours earlier (the sixth and final runaway wouldn’t be caught until Tuesday). Chapman congratulated Sandy and Little Red, tugging at their slobbery dewlaps. But he had to hand it to Ray, too. “For a 49-year-old man who didn’t know the mountains,” he said later, “Ray really didn’t do bad.”

Inmate #65477 headed down the mountain, back to a prison term that would last, unbroken by any more escapes, until his death in 1998 from hepatitis C (probably contracted through use of dirty needles or by a tainted blood transfusion he would receive after several black inmates repeatedly stabbed him). Now, tromping in manacles through the soggy Cumberland woods, Ray didn’t say a word. He only thought about his mistakes and what he’d do differently next time, if he ever got another chance.

Leave a comment

Filed under biography, science, travel, U.S.

by | 9 May 2026 · 12:10 am

Nabbed at Heathrow, 1968

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 365-366:

“Passport please,” a young immigration officer named Kenneth Human said when Sneyd approached the window.

Sneyd fished his wallet out of a coat pocket. From an inside fold, he retrieved a dark blue Canadian passport, which the officer opened and studied. Officer Human glanced at Sneyd, and then back at the passport photo. Nothing seemed untoward: the same man, the same glasses, everything matched.

Then Human saw another passport, peeking from Sneyd’s billfold. “May I see that other one?” he asked.

Sneyd handed the officer the second passport, which was clearly stamped “Canceled.”

“Why are the names different?” Human asked, noting that one said “Sneyd” and the other said “Sneya.”

Sneyd explained that his original passport, issued in Ottawa, had contained the misspelling—simply a clerical error—but that he’d had it corrected as soon as possible while in Portugal.

Officer Human appeared to be buying Sneyd’s explanation. But at this point, a Scotland Yard detective materialized—a slender, fastidious man with blue eyes and a trim mustache named Philip Birch. While Sneyd and the customs officer continued talking about the passport, Birch studied the Canadian’s face and movements. He had an “absent-minded professorial air” about him, Birch thought, but something about the traveler looked familiar. He seemed to recall seeing the man’s photograph in the pages of the Police Gazette.

Birch ran his finger down a list of names typed on an official Scotland Yard document that was labeled “Watch For and Detain.” Under the heading “All Ports Warning,” the Canadian’s name jumped off the page: Ramon George Sneyd.

Detective Birch tapped Sneyd on the shoulder. “I say, old fellow,” he later recalled telling the subject. “Would you mind stepping over here for a moment? I’d like to have a word with you.”

Seemingly more annoyed than alarmed, Sneyd glanced at his watch. “But my plane’s leaving soon.”

“Oh, this will only take a moment,” Birch assured him in a chipper tone. “May I see those passports, please?”

Two policemen joined Birch, and the three men escorted Sneyd across the busy terminal toward a police administrative office. Sneyd believed this was all just a routine passport mix-up, and so he remained grudgingly cooperative. Should things turn dicey, there was always the loaded revolver in his pocket. As far as he could see, this friendly trio of officers did not carry weapons.

When they arrived at the office, Birch turned and faced Sneyd. “Would you mind if I searched you?” he asked. Sneyd raised his arms and offered no protest.

Carefully patting him down, Birch quickly discovered the revolver: a Japanese-made .38-caliber Liberty Chief—its checkered walnut stock wrapped with black electrical tape. Birch spun the revolver and found five rounds of ammunition.

“Why are you carrying this gun?” Birch asked in an even tone.

“Well,” Sneyd replied. “I’m going to Africa. I thought I might need it. You know how things are there.” For the first time, a note of alarm had edged into his voice.

Birch handed the revolver to one of the other policemen and continued frisking the suspect. In Sneyd’s pockets, Birch found a little booklet on rifle silencers and a blank key, of the sort that a locksmith might carry. Sneyd had a small amount of money—less than sixty pounds—on his person.

“I have reason to believe you have committed an arrestable offense,” Birch said, and told Sneyd he was being detained. Now he would be missing his flight. Sneyd slumped in his chair.

The officer got on the phone and tried to have Sneyd’s bag pulled from the plane—but it was too late, the jet was already easing back from the gate. Then Birch called Scotland Yard headquarters and informed his superiors that just two days after being placed on the “All Ports Warning,” Ramon George Sneyd was now in police custody.

Leave a comment

Filed under biography, Britain, Canada, education, migration, U.S.

by | 8 May 2026 · 7:33 am

Robbing a Bank in London, 1968

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 356-357:

SNEYD HAD MOVED from the Heathfield House to the New Earls Court Hotel only a few days before. Though the little hotel was just around the corner, on Penywern Road, the weekly rent was cheaper and the accommodations a little nicer. Besides, Sneyd thought it prudent not to linger too long in any one place—especially after his aborted jewelry store stickup in Paddington.

The hotel was a four-story walk-up, with Doric columns and a blue awning covering a cramped vestibule; it was near the Earls Court tube stop and Earls Court Stadium, where Billy Graham had recently conducted a series of wildly successful crusades. For another week, Sneyd remained faithful to his usual nocturnal schedule, keeping to his brown-wallpapered room all day, receiving no calls, and taking no visitors. “He was nervous, pathetically shy, and unsure of himself,” the young hotel receptionist, Janet Nassau, later said. Feeling sorry for him, Nassau tried to make conversation and help him out with a few currency questions. “But he was so incoherent,” she said, “that nobody seemed able to help him. I thought he was a bit thick. I tried to talk to him, but then I stopped myself, I was afraid he might think I was too forward—trying to chat him up.”

For Sneyd, a far bigger worry than the peculiarities of British money was the fact that he scarcely had any money at all; his funds had dwindled to about ten pounds. But on June 4, the same day he called the Daily Telegraph journalist Ian Colvin, Sneyd worked up his courage and resolved to finally dig himself out of his financial straits.

That afternoon he put on a blue suit and pair of sunglasses. Then, at 2:13 p.m., he walked into the Trustee Savings Bank in Fulham and stood in the queue until, a few minutes later, he approached the till of a clerk named Edward Viney. Through the slot, Sneyd slid a paper bag toward the teller. At first, Viney didn’t know what to do with the rumpled pink bag. Then, on closer inspection, he saw writing scrawled across it.

“Put all £5 notes in this bag,” the message demanded. Viney caught a faint glimpse of the man’s eyes through his shades and realized he was serious. Glancing down, he saw the glinting nose of a revolver, pointed at him.

Viney quickly emptied his till of all small denominations—in total, only ninety-five pounds. Sneyd was displeased with his slim pickings, and he leaned over the counter and craned his neck toward the adjacent till. “Give me all your small notes!” he yelled, shoving his pistol toward the teller, Llewellyn Heath. In panic, Heath backpedaled and kicked a large tin box, which produced a concussive sound similar to a gunshot. The noise startled everyone, including Sneyd, who leaped away from the counter and sprinted down the street. Two tellers took off after him, but he lost them, ducking into a tailor’s shop, where for five minutes he feigned interest in buying a pair of slacks.

At Trustee Savings Bank, Edward Viney surveyed the premises and realized that the robber had left his note behind, scrawled on the pink paper bag. When the bobbies arrived, Viney handed them the bag—upon which, it was soon discovered in the crime lab of New Scotland Yard, the robber had left a high-quality latent thumbprint.

Leave a comment

Filed under biography, Britain, economics, migration, science, U.S.