Category Archives: publishing

by Joel | 2 August 2026 · 10:29 am

German Spies on Oahu in late 1930s

The Far Outliers are back in the Pacific now, as my reading reflects. I’ve been reading a new book that came out after we left for our academic year in Poland: Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor (Celadon Books, 2025), by Christine Kuehn, the granddaughter of the family of spies. Honolulu Civil Beat author Kirsten Downey read an advance copy of the book and highlights some of its findings in her online commentary on The Secret Life of a Prominent Kailua Family Revealed. Here are some excerpts.

There were indeed spies among us.

A long-running tale of intrigue in Hawaiʻi will get a new twist later this year with the publication of a soon-to-be published book from inside the family of notorious Hawaiʻi spies. Wealthy German nationals Otto Kuehn and his family were paid by the Japanese government to spy on U.S. military operations at Pearl Harbor, and they funneled information to Japan that helped make the Dec. 7, 1941 attack so devastating.

…

In her book Christine — the daughter of Otto’s son, Eberhard — describes the family’s spy history as a secret concealed from the grandchildren. She gradually unspools how she unraveled the story and pressured her relatives into sharing some of the facts, with her own research filling in more of the specifics. Eberhard, sometimes crying, declined to share many details about what his family had done and then developed dementia.

Her account will be new to many people. But the tale has independently survived in Hawaiʻi, amid the whispered reminiscences of kamaʻāina, in published news accounts from the era, inside archival records housed at the University of Hawaiʻi’s War Records Depository and in books about espionage published after the war. It’s been included in a list of the FBI’s most famous cases. All shed more light on how the chain of events unfolded.

Otto Kuehn, a former naval officer in Germany, his wife Friedel and their three charming children made quite a splash in Hawaiʻi in the late 1930s.

Mr. and Mrs. Kuehn had first arrived on the ship Tatsuta Maru in the spring of 1935, stopping in Honolulu for two weeks before heading to Japan, which they visited several other times in the next few years, according to gossipy society news reports at the time.

By 1936, the Kuehns had permanently settled on Oʻahu, where they were mentioned as the hosts of a dance party at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and as guests at a music recital attended by Hawaiʻi’s elite. He said he was in Hawaiʻi to learn Japanese.

The Kuehns became popular hosts at their posh homes in Kailua and Lanikai, frequently hosting the young naval officers who were squiring Ruth, their pretty 22-year-old daughter, around town and on outings. She and her mother operated a beauty salon near the Kāneʻohe Naval Air Station that was a favorite spot for Navy wives. Their two younger sons, Eberhard and Hans, were students at Punahou.

In August 1941, Ruth, then 25, married a widower, retired stock broker, J. Carson Moore, “who was flattered by her interest,” his family later recalled. Moore, 48, was a generous bon vivant who hosted an open bar at his home, with free-flowing booze, that was frequented by service members. Moore called his little saloon the S.S. Rum, according to archival records at the University of Hawaiʻi.

America was at peace at the time, but the Japanese Empire’s expansionist and militaristic ambitions were drawing increasing concern, particularly as Japan allied itself with Nazi Germany.

…

Many details of the Kuehn case were initially concealed because it was a wartime secret, which allowed both Otto and Friedel to vehemently protest that they were innocent of the charges.

In a letter to Otto, Hormann told him they felt misled, because they had considered him “a good Joe,” but that now they had been left hoping “that you were innocent of giving aid to the enemies of our country.”

Otto responded to Hormann in 1947, described the spying allegations as “ugly rumors,” and said his attorney had “demonstrated his innocence.”

“Mistakes will be made in time of national hysteria or danger,” Otto wrote in another letter. He added that his attorney “firmly believes in American justice and is sufficiently confident in a final success regarding my affair.”

In 1962, Friedel sued the U.S. government, saying that the charges against them were “all rot,” and that the allegations were brought against Otto to cover up the incompetence of the American military in allowing the surprise attack to occur. She sought $27,000 in damages from the U.S. government.

The facts, however, when they finally emerged, were damning. The Kuehns had done much more than make friends with amiable American military officers.

Otto had opened a steel furniture company, winning a commission to decorate a cocktail lounge at Pearl Harbor, which enabled him to get access to the base and take photographs of the ships in the harbor. He took pictures of other military installations, including Bellows, Wheeler and Hickam, revealing aircraft configurations. On at least one occasion, Otto took little Hans with him as he conducted his investigations, according to his granddaughter.

A Wikipedia article on the Kuehn family pieces together more sources on the family spy network.

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Filed under Germany, Hawai'i, Japan, migration, military, publishing, U.S., war

by Joel | 28 July 2026 · 5:44 am

Forster’s A Voyage Round the World

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 229-231:

By the end of 1776, less than four months after he had written the first word, the manuscript of A Voyage Round the World arrived at the printer. Publication was eagerly awaited—the naturalist Gilbert White (who was the publisher’s brother) excitedly informed friends and family at the end of January 1777 that publication was imminent. George felt no sense of relief because he had to begin the German translation immediately.

Reinhold had signed a contract with a German publisher who had travelled from Berlin to London in the previous summer. Karl Spener was an ambitious young man who had taken over his father’s firm at the age of twenty-three and who had met the Forsters already before the Resolution voyage when he visited England in 1771. Spener was only five years older than George and would become a trusted friend. George, Reinhold decided, would translate his own book, a daunting prospect given the many years in which George had spoken only English—he didn’t even converse in German with his family (and for the rest of his life, his father would speak and write to him in English). George’s letters to friends and acquaintances in Germany were always peppered with English words and his written German had become erratic. ‘I just have to ask one thing,’ he wrote to Spener with apprehension, ‘can the Berlin printers spell correctly?’ Someone would need to correct the final manuscript.

George was ill, exhausted, and had lost so much weight that even Reinhold Forster had to admit his son might need some assistance. It arrived in the form of Rudolf Erich Raspe, a brilliant eccentric who had fled the German state of Hesse-Kassel after it was discovered that he had been stealing and selling ancient coins from the collections of his employer, Landgrave Friedrich II. With news travelling slowly, Raspe wangled himself onto the guest list of the Royal Society but was soon expelled. He would later write the hugely successful Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia — a whimsical satire in which the eponymous protagonist performs such feats as riding on a cannonball, shooting a stag with cherry stones (the stag subsequently grows a cherry tree between his antlers) and visiting the moon. For the moment, Raspe was to work with George on the German translation of A Voyage Round the World. Progress was woefully slow and Raspe was often ill. Like his fictional character Munchausen, he also had a tendency to exaggerate and lie, coming up with excuses for his failure to deliver and reasons to borrow money from the Forsters. George spent a lot of time merging the voices of two translations into one and the collaboration ended in anger. Raspe, George told Spener, liked only himself and believed that others existed entirely to serve him.

The English edition of A Voyage Round the World was published on 17 March 1777. Six weeks later, Captain Cook’s own Voyage Towards the South Pole appeared, printed in a larger format and illustrated with more than sixty engravings after the drawings by William Hodges, the expedition artist—but the images of animals and plants were copied from George’s drawings which Banks had bought. It was one thing that George hadn’t been allowed to use Hodges’ evocative landscapes and depictions of indigenous people (as his father believed had been initially agreed with the Admiralty), but quite another that he couldn’t use his own drawings after Reinhold had sold them. But to see them published in Cook’s book now was a terrible blow.

Thankfully, the reviews of George’s A Voyage Round the World were mostly positive, with several writers commenting that they felt as if they were actually travelling on the Resolution. George was delighted. Samuel Johnson, one of the great literary figures of the age and the author of A Dictionary of the English Language, called the book ‘a great affection of fine writing’. Johnson’s friend and biographer James Boswell declared that ‘he carries you along with him’. Those who compared the two books favoured George’s A Voyage Round the World. ‘Captain Cook’s own narrative is a mere sailor’s journal,’ wrote one reviewer, but he was disappointed by the lack of illustrations in George’s account. ‘Every page of it abounds with life and character,’ raved the reviewer for The Town and Country Magazine, ‘painted with all the force of language.’ More than a dozen reviews were published in England, several with long extracts.

Rather than wait for the German translation, many German reviewers also read the English edition. Most admired the book, describing it as ‘ravishing’ and ‘admirable’, but there were also critical voices. One took offence at George’s description of the Dutch East India Company as ‘cruel and ambitious spice merchants’, and another disliked the favourable depiction of indigenous people, complaining about his ‘acerbic allusions to the cruelty, harshness and vices of the Europeans’. Confident about his arguments and portrait of the islanders, George sent a public reply to one of Germany’s leading newspapers, asking: ‘Why not deliver eulogies on virtues? They may appear anywhere—in a beggar’s hut or a palace, in Europe or Tahiti.’ He had no interest in repeating tedious prejudices against the indigenous people—‘I therefore show real virtues among savages, where in similar cases vices prevail among civilized people.’

The most glowing German review came from Christoph Martin Wieland, a distinguished writer who declared George nothing less than a poet. In an extensive commentary, published over three issues of the Teutsche Merkur, one of Germany’s most important journals, Wieland pronounced A Voyage Round the World a thrilling book. The descriptions were painterly and humanistic, executed with intensity and enthusiasm. It was a masterpiece. As always, Reinhold attempted to take the credit, insisting that he had shaped his son. ‘I alone was his leader, his teacher,’ he later said to Wieland, ‘who awakened the dormant spark of divinity in him.’

Within six months, pirated French and Swedish translations were available, followed by Spanish and Russian editions, and then even more French editions. None were authorized. Soon the book was declared a classic but it didn’t sell enough copies to support Reinhold’s spending habits, and of course they never received any money from the pirated translations. People loved pictures, George admitted, and at two guineas A Voyage Round the World cost the same as Cook’s generously illustrated and Admiralty-subsidized account. Father and son would have to find other ways to finance their life in London.

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by Joel | 27 July 2026 · 6:09 am

European Nationalist Revolts in 1905

This week’s edition of Culture.pl contains an article by Zachary Mazur written in 2022 that heralds his new book entitled To Kill a Spy: Everyday Nationalism and Political Violence in Fin-de-Siecle Europe from Amsterdam University Press’s CEU Press imprint later in 2026. Here are excerpts from most of the text of the article, without illustrations.

For decades, the Revolution of 1905 has been tucked away in history books as a mere ‘dress rehearsal’ for the Soviet rise in 1917. But for the Poles, Jews, Lithuanians and Ukrainians living under the Tsarist yoke, 1905 wasn’t a rehearsal for someone else’s drama – it was their own leading role. It was the moment the modern mass nation was born, an epoch-making explosion of culture and defiance that shattered imperial censorship and provided a blueprint for the independent states that would follow.

The catalyst: a war of hubris & machine guns

On the eve of the revolution, the Russian Empire was engaged in an embarrassing war with Imperial Japan. The two powers fought over control of northeast China (Manchuria) and the Korean peninsula. The Japanese, from the European perspective, were an upstart Asiatic power that had only recently emerged from isolation and the variable dark ages of feudalism. Fuelled by an unapologetic anti-Asian racism, most people expected that the tsar’s Russia would destroy the Japanese army in a matter of weeks when the war began.

Instead, Russian troops faced continuous setbacks. Japanese commanders used trenches and machine guns – new technologies of the day – to break the will of their opponents. On the seas, Japan’s gunships destroyed the Russian Pacific fleet, leading to an epic journey for the Baltic fleet around the horn of Africa, 18,000 nautical miles.

After the nearly 8-month ocean voyage, Russia’s sailors again faced a thrashing in May 1905. With two fleets destroyed and numerous losses on land, Russia admitted defeat in the summer. US President Theodore Roosevelt invited the sides to negotiate peace in New Hampshire at an American naval base and the Treaty of Portsmouth ended the Russo-Japanese War in September 1905.

On the home front, the people of the Russian Empire took the brunt of the war effort. Among the newly formed urban working classes, a concomitant economic slowdown put severe pressure on the people as they faced unemployment and hunger. Already in 1904, there were anti-war protests in Warsaw and in a few other cities around the Russian-controlled partition of the Polish lands.

The true beginning of the revolution, however, came when Russian subjects led by a charismatic young Orthodox priest tried to petition the tsar in January 1905. A crowd of calm marchers solemnly moved toward the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, and despite the fact that the tsar was not even there, the guards panicked and opened fire on the people. The resulting mayhem and death became the rallying cry for radicals all over the empire. The tsar had tried to cultivate an image of a benevolent father figure, but after ‘Bloody Sunday’, even his most fervent supporters were disillusioned.

A hotbed of revolt: strikes & the October Manifesto

For the next two years following the events of January 1905, protests and strikes broke out all over the Russian Empire. The Polish part of the empire, that included the large cities Warsaw, Łódź, Radom, Kielce, Piotrków and Białystok, was the most industrialised region. As a result, it was poised to be a hotbed for revolutionary activity. Organisers went to work gathering support for strikes, and confrontations with police often turned violent. In Łódź, a huge centre for textile manufacturing, workers fought pitched battles on the streets with barricades and makeshift weapons.

General strikes, where whole industries stopped work, and especially striking railroad workers, forced the hand of the tsar. Finally, he had to give up some concessions to the protestors. In October, the tsar issued a decree that allowed for limited democratic freedoms of press and assembly and the formation of a parliamentary assembly, called the Duma. Though many of the protestors felt that this did not go far enough and continued their fight for further privileges, the so-called October Manifesto created an outpouring of publications, theatre and cultural life that the Russian Empire had never seen before.

Prior to this moment, censorship had been stifling, strictly regulating the languages in which books could be published or theatre performed. Lithuanian, Yiddish and Ukrainian had been banned for decades. While the suppression of the Ukrainian language continued – seen as a threat to the Russian ‘heartland’ in a policy of identity erasure that remains tragically relevant today – Lithuanian, Yiddish and other suppressed languages finally began to gain legal recognition within the empire.

The linguistic renaissance: breaking the imperial silence

Lithuanians gained the right to publish newspapers in the Latin alphabet as early as the spring of 1904, but the popular press exploded thanks to the Revolution of 1905. The proliferation of daily newspapers, such as the Vilniaus žinios (Vilnius News) signalled the beginning of a mass Lithuanian culture. The first great national assembly of Lithuanians took place in Vilnius, with 200 delegates, between 4 to 5 December 1905. All sections of society – from Belarus, East Prussia (where many Lithuania speakers lived as well) – took part.

They ended by demanding political autonomy for Lithuania, and to have their own provincial parliament with boundaries defined on ethnographic terms. Lithuanian scientific and artistic associations grew at the time, establishing the cultural arms of the Lithuanian national movement. These became vital just a few years later for the establishment of the independent Lithuanian state after World War I.

Yiddish too experienced a renaissance (or naissance) based on new-found freedoms in cities with large Jewish populations, such as Warsaw, Łódź and Vilnius. The tsarist authorities lifted bans on Yiddish printing and theatre in 1905, allowing for the creation of art and literature in a vernacular that practically all Jews used on a daily basis. Finally distinctly Jewish art could move to the public stage and reach audiences that had never experienced such forms of culture. The demand was clearly there, since four new theatres popped up in Warsaw almost immediately after the ban was lifted. In Mokotów, there was Bagatela, Elizeum on Karowa Street, Jardin d’Hiver on Chmielna and Muranower on Bonifraterska, all performing exclusively in Yiddish. Sholem Aleichem’s play Scattered and Dispersed saw its debut at this time (directed by Mark Arnshteyn). Yiddish dailies also appeared, and their content shows the popularity of theatre at the time. Jardin d’Hiver was playing two shows per day, with the exception of Shabbat. In 1908, the dedicated journal Teater Velt (Theatre World) appeared. All this newfound energy for Yiddish culture caused a modernisation of the language and uniformity that did not exist before among the Jews of the Russian Empire. This emergence also allowed for literary theatre to grow. On top of that, American actors with new plays written in New York came over and were the most commercially successful pieces.

Shadows of the revolution: the Pimps’ Pogrom

In the midst of the social upheaval and suffering, people looked for scapegoats to blame leading to one of the most bizarre episodes of the revolution: the Pimps’ Pogrom. In the working class Warsaw neighbourhood of Wola (today the site of skyscrapers, giving it the nickname ‘Hong Kong’), a seedy underworld of pimps, prostitutes and the men who frequented these establishments operated with the approbation of the local police.

In the Russian Empire, the sex trade was officially regulated, requiring both brothels and individual prostitutes to register with the police. Pimps supported the Tsarist status quo rather than the revolutionaries, as they could turn a profit under the state’s protection. Consequently, the sex trade was seen as an extension of the Russian regime and its police – the same officers who beat protesters and fired into crowds. The violence, however chaotic, was a strike against the very infrastructure of Russian control.

A song from that time:

Oj, lumpy to szpiedzy, [Oh the pimps are spies]
Prowokatorzy; [Provocateurs]
Chodzą na ‘giełde’, podsłuchują [They go to the market, eavesdropping]
potem donoszą na policje [then they tell the police]

It’s unclear what exactly sparked the riots against the brothels, but at the end of May 1905, a series of events led workers to destroy dozens of brothels, leaving at least 15 people dead. They moved from one house to the next, destroying furniture, smashing mirrors, tearing up clothes and bedding.

In one bordello, the sex workers put up a fight. A prostitute grabbed a copper pipe and hit a rioter over the head with it. In response, someone stabbed her with a knife and she died on the spot. In another brothel, the pimps fled, leaving the girls alone. Frightened for their safety, they hid under beds and in closets. The rioters pulled them out and beat them. The women yelled hysterically, called them names and cried: ‘What do you want from us? What did we ever do to you?’

Although a majority of the pimps and prostitutes were Jewish, both Polish and Jewish workers gathered on the streets to exact vengeance. In this way, it was very different from anti-Jewish pogroms, many of which took place in the context of the revolution. Some historians see this event as a moral crusade, while others claim that the association of the pimps with the Russian police was the strongest motivator. There were also witnesses who claimed that competing pimps were the most virulent rioters, so some plain old business competition was at play too.

These events brought attention to problems with prostitution in the Polish lands, sparking some difficult public discussions about issues that were normally left undisturbed. It also inspired several poems, such as Leo Belmont’s Po Pogromie (After the Pogrom) and novels, mostly published in Yiddish.

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by Joel | 16 July 2026 · 3:49 pm

Ukraine Invasion Begins, Feb. 2022

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 152-154:

Putin’s address was aired on Russian television in the early hours of February 24, on the eighth anniversary of Putin’s decision to start the Crimean annexation in 2014. He expected the results to be as quick, decisive, and positive as they had been then.

Putin concluded the speech with an appeal to Russian citizens: “I believe in your support and the invincible force rooted in love for our Fatherland.” The key motifs of his address, including the denazification of Ukraine, would be picked up and popularized by the Russian media in the days and weeks to come, although it was difficult to change the propaganda line right away. Leonid Slutsky, the head of the Russian State Duma Committee on Foreign Affairs, denied the invasion even on the very day it began. “We do not intend to unleash any war. We are not going to invade Ukraine as we are being accused of in Ukraine itself, and not only there,” he told journalists. As he spoke those words, Russian columns were moving toward the Ukrainian capital.

The Russian assault on Ukraine began shortly before 4:00 a.m. Kyiv time on February 24, 2022, on multiple fronts. The citizens of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, Zaporizhia, Zhytomyr, Mykolaiv, and Kherson, to list only the main regional centers, woke up to the sound of explosions—Russian aviation and missiles were attacking airfields and military installations all over the country. Radio and television covered the news on the basis of posts in social media from around Ukraine. There were also reports of Russian amphibious landings in Odesa on the Black Sea and Mariupol on the Sea of Azov. Those later turned out to be false.

The Russian armed forces bombarded Ukrainian command and control centers, air defenses, and critical infrastructure with more than 100 short-range ballistic missiles launched from the air and from the sea. Columns of Russian tanks and personnel carriers began to cross the Ukrainian borders from Belarus toward Kyiv, from Russia toward Kharkiv, and from the occupied Crimea toward Kherson and Nova Kakhovka in the south. Tens of thousands of troops were suddenly on the move. Ukraine, where neither the government nor the general population believed in the possibility of large-scale Russian aggression, was in for a rude awakening.

The entire military operation, underpinned by Putin’s belief in the nonexistence of the Ukrainian nation and the desire of Ukrainians to live under Russian rule, was modeled on the Russian takeover of the Crimea. In the first echelon of ground troops advancing on Kyiv immediately after the paratroopers were units of riot police, and in burned-out tanks and vehicles Ukrainians would find parade uniforms of Russian soldiers prepared for a victory march down Kyiv’s main avenue, Khreshchatyk. The soldiers had rations for only two or three days, as they were promised that the operation in Ukraine would take no longer. Since the invasion was billed as a mission of liberation, the officers and soldiers were ordered not to show any hostility whatever to the local population. They were told that the military operation was ordered to prevent the installation of NATO bases in Ukraine.

“Orders have been given to the Russian army not to assault cities or their inhabitants. The leadership of the Russian Defense Ministry emphasizes that the population of a fraternal country has nothing to fear from the Russian army,” confided the political consultant Sergei Markov to a reporter on the second day of the invasion, February 25, 2022. Regarding the further plan of the action, Markov suggested: “All groupings of the Ukrainian Armed Forces will be surrounded (mainly from the air) and given an ultimatum. They will have to surrender their arms. If everything proceeds normally, a process of disarmament will begin. Wherever normality does not prevail, those groupings will be destroyed. I think that most subunits of the Ukrainian Armed Forces will surrender their weapons. Part of them will continue to offer resistance. Those are the neo-Nazi military subunits.”

That was not just Markov’s plan but Putin’s as well. In his address at the start of the war, Putin had appealed to the Ukrainian military to lay down their arms. But the Ukrainian army continued to fight. Not a single unit would surrender, to say nothing of switching sides. Putin and his propagandists like Markov were in for a rude awakening.

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by Joel | 30 May 2026 · 1:26 am

Legacies of the Jeannette Expedition

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 406-410:

IN 1883, George De Long’s remains, along with those of his comrades, were removed from Amerika Khaya [in Russia] and brought to the United States in a long and elaborate mass funeral procession jointly orchestrated by the U.S. Navy and the Russian government. The secretary of the Navy called De Long and his men “martyrs in the cause of science.” After a Manhattan funeral attended by thousands of mourners, De Long was buried, along with five of his fellow explorers, in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx; that same year, his journals from the voyage, edited by Emma De Long, were published to wide acclaim. Although the Jeannette expedition became the subject of a naval court of inquiry and a congressional hearing that produced considerable controversy, both tribunals upheld De Long’s command and reputation. In 1884, New York City dedicated a prime piece of land along the East River as Jeannette Park (it’s now known as Vietnam Veterans Plaza). Six years later, a replica of Melville’s Lena monument and cross was erected on the grounds of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, overlooking the Severn River. A mountain range in northwestern Alaska was named in De Long’s honor, as were two naval ships. In Russia, the High Arctic islands he discovered—Jeannette, Henrietta, and Bennett—are known as Ostrova De Long.

FOR MORE THAN a century after his death, August Petermann’s work continued to be a prominent force in cartography. In 2004, after nearly 150 years of publication, Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen halted its presses in Gotha and closed its doors forever. The geographer’s legacy lives on in dozens of place-names scattered about the planet, including the Petermann Ranges of Australia; Petermann Island, off the coast of Antarctica; and the Petermann Glacier of Greenland, one of the world’s largest. His name has even been immortalized in space: A feature in the north polar region of the moon is known by astronomers as Petermann Crater. Today, Petermann’s rare maps often fetch thousands of dollars at auction and are coveted by fine-art collectors around the world.

…

GEORGE MELVILLE NEVER quite got the north country out of his system. In 1884, he returned to the Arctic to search for survivors of yet another disastrous American polar effort—the Greely Expedition—and remained a tireless champion of America’s push for the North Pole. Melville divorced Hetty and remarried, spending most of his life in Washington. He rose within the ranks to become engineer in chief of the U.S. Navy and, eventually, a rear admiral. Melville presided over an expansive redesign of the fleet, largely completing its conversion from wood to metal, and from wind to steam power. When he retired, in 1903, the U.S. Navy boasted one of the most powerful modernized fleets in the world. Widely sought on the lecture circuit, Melville wrote a popular book on the Jeannette expedition, In the Lena Delta, and defended De Long to the end. Melville died in Philadelphia in 1912. Two Navy ships—a destroyer tender and an oceanographic research vessel—were named after him. Today, the George W. Melville Award is the Navy’s highest honor for accomplishments in nautical engineering.

AFTER RECOVERING FROM his Jeannette ordeal, John Danenhower also enjoyed popularity on the lecture circuit and became a well-known critic of both the De Long expedition and Arctic exploration in general. “It is time to call a halt,” Danenhower argued, “to further exploration of the central polar basin. There are better directions for the display of true manhood and heroism.” Danenhower married and fathered two children, and for several years, he served successfully, and seemingly happily, as an officer in the U.S. Navy. But in 1887, his melancholy returned. Alone in his quarters in Annapolis, Danenhower shot himself in the head with a .32-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver.

JOHN MUIR NEVER returned to the High Arctic. After his trip on the Corwin, he became gradually embroiled in the conservation battles that led to his co-founding, in 1892, of the Sierra Club. Instrumental in the creation of Yosemite National Park, Muir is considered one of the fathers of the environmental movement. He died in 1914. The Cruise of the Corwin, Muir’s posthumously published account of his journey in search of the lost Jeannette, is now a classic of Arctic literature.

AFTER WINNING MEDALS and Navy commendations, Charles Tong Sing turned to a life of gambling and crime, resulting in several prison terms. As the head a powerful Chinese criminal syndicate in New York, he was said to be responsible for at least six murders; he became known as Scarface Charley, in reference to a five-inch facial scar from an injury he sustained aboard the Jeannette. An 1883 article in the New York Times noted, “Recently he gained an unenviable notoriety in Chinatown through his ferocity and physical prowess, and has been suspected of a number of bold and very adroit robberies.” Later in life, Charley Tong Sing went clean and reportedly ran a Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles, worked as a court interpreter, and briefly served as a policeman in Portland, Oregon. The circumstances of his death are unknown.

WILLIAM NINDEMANN WAS awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. He married Miss Newman in New York, as planned, but was soon widowed and left to raise their only son, Billy. Nindemann spent two decades working closely with the Irish-American engineer John Holland, widely regarded as the father of the modern submarine. Serving as a gunner and torpedo operator on Holland’s prototypes, Nindemann delivered several of the new undersea vessels to Japan for use in the Russo-Japanese War. In 1913, one year to the day after his son, Billy, drowned in a canoe accident on the Hudson River, Nindemann died in Brooklyn.

…

THE LAST SURVIVING member of the Jeannette expedition was Herbert Leach, the seaman from Melville’s party who nearly perished of frostbite in the Lena delta. A native of Penobscot, Maine, Leach worked much of his life in a shoe factory in Massachusetts. In 1928, he joined Emma De Long at the unveiling of an enormous granite statue dedicated to George De Long and the other Jeannette dead, at Woodlawn Cemetery. Leach died in 1933.

…

IN 1938, Emma De Long, well into her eighties, published her memoir, Explorer’s Wife. (That same year had seen something of a Jeannette revival, with the publication of a best-selling novel, Hell On Ice, which was adapted into a nationally broadcast radio drama by Orson Welles.) Emma De Long never remarried, and she lived out her last years alone—happily, she said—on a New Jersey farm she had purchased. “My husband’s memory,” she said, “is all I have left.” Not only was she a widow, but she had lost her only child: Sylvie De Long, after serving in World War I as a Red Cross nurse, marrying, and giving birth to two children, had died in 1925, of a mastoid infection. Emma De Long passed away in 1940 at the age of ninety-one. She was laid to rest beside her husband at Woodlawn Cemetery.

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by Joel | 29 May 2026 · 12:06 am

Arctic Expedition Status, December 1881

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 374-375:

LONDON, DECEMBER 22, 1881

The following telegram was received at the [New York] Herald’s London office at twenty past two this morning:—

Irkutsk, December 21, 2:05 P.M.
Jeannette was crushed by the ice in latitude 77 degrees 15 min. north, longitude 157 degrees east.
Boats and sleds made a good retreat to fifty miles northwest of the Lena River, where the three boats became separated in a gale.
The whaleboat, in the charge of Chief-Engineer Melville, entered the east mouth of the Lena River on September 17th. It was stopped by ice in the river. We found a native village, and as soon as the river closed I put myself in communication with the commandant.
On October 29th, I heard that the cutter containing Lieutenant De Long, Dr. Ambler, and twelve others, had landed at the north mouth of the Lena. All are in a sad condition and badly frozen. The commandant has sent native scouts to look for them, and will urge vigorous and constant search until they are found.
The second cutter has not yet been heard from. Telegraph money for instant use to Irkutsk.
(Signed), Melville

Navy Department
Washington, DC December 22d, 1881
To Engineer Melville, U.S.N., Irkutsk:—
Omit no effort, spare no expense, in securing safety of men in second cutter. Let the sick and the frozen of those already rescued have every attention, and as soon as practicable have them transported to a milder climate. Department will supply necessary funds.
Hunt, Secretary

Department of State, Washington, D.C.
A dispatch from Mr. Hoffman, chargé d’affaires of the United States at St. Petersburg, conveying the assurance that the most energetic measures would be taken by the Russian authorities for the discovery and relief of the missing men, was received today by the Secretary of State at Washington.

Immediately upon receipt of the first news about the Jeannette, Mr. James Gordon Bennett [New York Herald publisher], residing in Paris, transferred the sum of 6,000 roubles by telegraph, through Messrs. Rothschilds, to St. Petersburg, with a request to draw on Mr. Bennett for any further sums required for the succor and comfort of Lieutenant De Long and his party.

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by Joel | 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.”

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by Joel | 13 April 2026 · 12:52 am

Note to Readers by Hampton Sides

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

I was just a kid when it happened—six years old, living in a rambling brick house on Cherry Road close by the Southern Railway. My father worked for the Memphis law firm that represented King when he came to town on behalf of the garbage workers, and I remember my dad rushing home that night, pouring a screwdriver or three, and talking with alarm about what had happened and what it meant for the city and the nation and the world. I remember the curfew, the wail of sirens, a line of soldiers with fixed bayonets. I remember seeing tanks for the first time. Mainly, I recall the fear in the adult voices coming over the radio and television—the undertow of panic, as it seemed to everyone that our city was ripping apart.

Four days after the assassination, Coretta Scott King arrived in Memphis, wearing her widow’s veil, and led the peaceful march her husband could not lead. For several miles, tens of thousands of mourners threaded through the somber downtown streets to city hall. Enveloped in the beautiful sadness, no one breathed a word. There was no shouting or picketing, not even a song. The only sound was leather on pavement.

All writers sooner or later go back to the place where they came from. With this book, I wanted to go back to the pivotal moment in the place where I came from. In April 1968, a killer rode into a city I know and love. He set himself up with a high-powered rifle a few blocks from the Mississippi River and took aim at history. The shock waves still emanate from room 306 at the Lorraine Motel, and continue to register across the globe. The Lorraine has become an international shrine, visited by the likes of the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela and the boys from U2—a holy place. People come from all over the world to stand on the balcony where King stood, squinting in the humidity, surveying the sight lines of fate. They try to imagine what really happened, and what larger plots might have been stirring in the shadows.

The first writer I ever met, the great Memphis historian Shelby Foote, once said of his Civil War trilogy that he had “employed the novelist’s methods without his license,” and that’s a good rule of thumb for what I’ve attempted here. Though I’ve tried to make the narrative as fluidly readable as possible, this is a work of nonfiction. Every scene is supported by the historical record. Every physical and atmospheric detail arises from factual evidence. And every conversation is reconstructed from documents. I’ve consulted congressional testimony, newspaper accounts, oral histories, memoirs, court proceedings, autopsy reports, archival news footage, crime scene photographs, and official reports filed by the Memphis authorities, the FBI, the U.S. Justice Department, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and Scotland Yard. Along the way, I’ve conducted scores of personal interviews and traveled tens of thousands of miles—from Puerto Vallarta to London, from St. Louis to Lisbon. Readers who are curious about how I constructed the narrative will find my sources cited in copious detail in the notes and bibliography.

As for King’s assassin, I’ve let his story speak for itself. Whether witlessly, incidentally, or on purpose, he left behind a massive body of evidence. Much of my account of his worldwide travels comes from his own words. The rest comes from the record. Many questions remain about his motives, his sources of money, and how much help he may have had. But the killer left his fingerprints, both literal and figurative, over everything.

HAMPTON SIDES, SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO

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by Joel | 10 March 2026 · 6:24 am

Kapuściński as Catastrophist

From Ryszard Kapuscinski: A Life, by Artur Domoslawski (Verso, 2012) Kindle pp. 115-117:

I turned to a reporter friend who writes about the Czech Republic to ask how and where to look, and whether such an account did actually exist. He helped me get in touch with Jaroslav Bouček, son of the late ‘commander’ of the Congolese expedition, and this led me to a radically different story from the one presented in The Soccer War.

It turned out that Bouček Jr had written an essay titled ‘In Deepest Congo’. In it, he compares Kapuściński’s account with his father’s, which he found in the National Archive in Prague, along with his Cairo diary, his letters and dispatches.

Jaroslav Bouček wonders if Kapuściński’s expressive depiction of the dangerous journey to Congo, compared with the ‘civilian’ mood of Bouček’s account, arose from the fact that it was the first time Kapuściński had ever found himself in the dramatic situation of civil war in an African country, and so he took the verbal threats addressed to the ‘suspicious foreigners’ quite literally. As a reporter, Jarda Bouček, on the other hand, was a veteran of several armed conflicts, and ‘verbal threats did not throw him off balance to that extent’.

From Bouček’s account it emerges that the journalists certainly did not have to leave Stanleyville for fear of losing their lives because of impetuous mob law imposed by Africans on whites. The Czechoslovak reporter’s son writes:

Before leaving for Congo, Bouček wrote to his editors that he would be able to stay in Stanleyville for about a month, and then he would have to come back to buy medicine, which in view of some chronic ailments he could not do without. His exit visa from Congo was signed by Louis Lumumba, brother of the murdered prime minister; before his departure, Bouček had arranged a return visa, as he foresaw that he would go back to Congo again.

According to Bouček’s account, the reporters left Congo because their money had run out, they weren’t sure if their dispatches were getting through, and an opportunity had presented itself in the form of a UN plane flying to Burundi. Bouček challenges Kapuściński’s account of the UN staff ’s alleged reluctance to help their group; unlike Kapuściński, he claims they knew from the start that they were flying to Usumbura. Bouček Jr again:

Writing further about how the Belgians were determined to kill them all, [Kapuściński] probably let himself be excessively frightened by the bravado-filled utterances of some young Belgian officers who cast swaggering remarks in their direction, such as, ‘Best shoot these journalists right away!’

In no instance did Bouček feel fear that the Belgians were planning to kill them. Usumbura was a civilian airport; in addition to the soldiers, the civilian airport staff was there too, as well as some customs officers, pilots and stewardesses from Sabena airlines, and passengers who would have involuntarily been witnesses to such a crime.

But above all – what sense would it have made for the Belgians to put to death five journalists who were officially accredited by the UN?

The younger Bouček sums up the situation by saying that ‘the expedition to Congo did not shake’ his father ‘in the least’.

Many of Kapuściński’s friends and acquaintances think he was a catastrophist, in the sense that he could blow up small incidents to unimaginable proportions and present ordinary fears as the end of the world.

‘I divided everything he said by at least two,’ says Adam Daniel Rotfeld, smiling.

The words of one of his friends come back to me – Kapuściński created his own courage in literature; he knew he was different.

Part of the legend of Kapuściński the reporter is based on the several times he avoided execution by firing squad. We know about all those incidents from him alone. In Bolivia, as he tells us, he was saved by a chauffeur who managed to intoxicate the officer who apparently wanted to shoot Kapuściński as a communist spy. In another of his accounts, after a coup in Ghana they wanted to shoot him as a spy working for Kwame Nkrumah, who had just been deposed.

He was also reportedly sentenced to be shot dead in Usumbura at the end of the Congolese expedition, after being locked up in a barred room at the airport along with the Czechoslovak and Soviet journalists. In a 1978 interview with Wojciech Giełżyński, he refers to ‘when I was in prison in Usumbura sentenced to be shot’. ‘I had a death sentence, I escaped shooting by a miracle,’ he says of this incident in another interview, also from the 1970s.

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Filed under Belgium, Congo, Czechia, Ghana, military, nationalism, publishing, U.N., war

by Joel | 9 March 2026 · 6:49 am

Forsaking Poland for Africa

From Ryszard Kapuscinski: A Life, by Artur Domoslawski (Verso, 2012) Kindle pp. 119-120:

The expedition to Congo is a crucial element in the formation of Kapuściński’s world outlook, his view of the Cold War conflict and of the dilemmas and dramas of the times from the perspective of the Third World countries attempting to gain their liberty.

In an entry in his Political Diaries dated 23 June 1961, Polityka’s editor-in-chief, Mieczysław Rakowski notes: ‘Rysiek has finished a series entitled ‘‘Congo Close Up’’. We published twelve reports. Rysiek is a fantastic reporter. This is no ordinary journalism. This is political literature produced by a devilishly talented writer. We collected 2,687,138 zloty for the Lumumba Fund.’

A year later, in a popularity contest for Polityka’s writers, Kapuściński comes first. His reports from Ghana and Congo play their role in gaining him fame and public recognition, but this is not the only way he displays his talents. In less than two years of working at Polityka, Kapuściński has created his own language, a new literary style, with a poetic rhythm to his sentences and an original way of depicting things – free of the wooden, propagandistic phraseology of his early years as a journalist at Sztandar Młodych. It is this new language and new tone that make the then cub reporter Małgorzata Szejnert (later co-founder of Gazeta Wyborcza and head of its reportage department for fifteen years) think on reading one of his reports: ‘He writes as he wants to.’

‘He flourished at Polityka,’ says Daniel Passent. ‘He wrote articles that showed what was really happening in Poland, warts and all.’

Between the African trips, Kapuściński travels to the Polish provinces, but he is not yet aware that his current visits will be his farewell – as a reporter – to Poland. A curious farewell, because he had just begun to shine as an incisive observer of the Poles during the ‘minor stabilization’ when he went off on a completely different path.

‘He deserted,’ some people would say.

Kapuściński refutes the charges: ‘Africa and the Third World were a continuation of the heroic period of reportage in Poland.’