Category Archives: travel

by | 23 July 2026 · 6:20 am

Cannibalism in New Zealand, 1773

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 148-151:

A week later, on 21 November, a group of Māori women paddled out and told the Resolution crew that they were worried. Their men, the crew learned, had left to attack their enemies. Who those opponents were remained unclear, but the next morning dozens of Māori warriors, their cheeks painted red, arrived in a flotilla of eight canoes packed with cloaks, weapons and greenstone objects to trade with the Resolution. Suspecting that the warriors must have raided a neighbouring settlement to sell their goods to the Europeans, George wrote, ‘I am much afraid that their unhappy differences with other tribes, were revived on our account’.

In any event, it was time for the Resolution to leave and the next morning Cook took a few men to a neighbouring island to collect sea celery, wild spinach and other greens as provisions for the long journey. Some officers rowed to a nearby cove to trade. When they pushed their boat ashore, they saw the Māori warriors from the previous day, and also something round and red impaled on a stick, possibly an organ, maybe a heart. As they looked around, they found more organs and intestines scattered on the ground—and to their horror a human head from which the lower jawbone was missing. The skull had clearly been fractured by something blunt, perhaps a club. The victim seemed to have been an adolescent boy. As the officers stared at the bloody heap, the Māori skewered the lung and showed them more body parts. When the officers asked what had happened, the warriors told them that there had been a fight with their enemies. With words and gestures, they explained that they had killed the boy and eaten parts of him, but they too had lost men, pointing at some weeping women nearby who were cutting their foreheads with sharp stones as they lamented the dead.

For Europeans, cannibalism seemed inconceivable. ‘In accordance with human nature,’ said Immanuel Kant, Germany’s most respected philosopher, ‘there cannot be many [man-eaters], or, more likely, perhaps none at all.’ As explorers had returned from South America and the South Pacific in previous centuries, there had been rumours and the occasional suspicious body parts but no one had ever actually observed the practice. In January 1770, during the Endeavour voyage, the Māori had confirmed that they did indeed eat people by picking up a human bone and pretending to bite into it. They ‘shew us that they had eat the flesh they bit a[nd] naw’d the bone and draw’d it thro’ their mouth and this in such a manner as plainly shew’d that the flesh to them was a dainty bit’, Cook had recorded in his logbook. The graphic demonstration had been enough to convince the crew. Richard Pickersgill, who had also travelled on the Endeavour, had noted that the ‘Barbarrous cruelty these savages is guilty of which ought to make them to abhord by all who may have occasion to tutch at these Islands’. This didn’t stop him from trying to purchase the half-eaten head now, so that he could take it to London to show his friends. He offered a nail and a bargain was struck.

When the men returned to the Resolution, Pickersgill placed his grisly purchase on a railing and soon everybody on board had gathered to examine it. Another group of Māori had come to the Resolution to trade and they now asked for the head so that they could eat it, but the new owner refused. Second Lieutenant Charles Clerke, who was known and liked for his practical jokes—‘a genal favorite’, as young Elliott said—proposed an experiment. Taking a sharp knife, he cut off one cheek and handed it to the Māori, but they gestured that they only consumed cooked flesh. After debating what to do, Clerke put the cheek on a gridiron and grilled it over the fire in the galley kitchen.

Transfixed the crew of the Resolution watched the Māori eat the cheek. Some goaded them, and others were revolted. Some even seemed tempted to try a bite themselves. A little later, when Cook returned from gathering wild vegetables, he demanded that the spectacle be repeated. He wanted to prove the rumours once and for all. ‘Being desireous of being an eye wittness to a fact which many people had their doubts about’, Cook wrote in his logbook, ‘I concealed my indignation and ordered a piece of the flesh to be broiled and brought on the quarter-deck where one of these Canibals ate it with a seeming good relish.’ Describing the scene as calmly as a scientific experiment at the Royal Society in London, Cook concluded ‘that the New Zealanders are Canibals can now no longer be doubted’.

Hitihiti was appalled and ‘Metamorphosed into the Statue of Horror’. Crying inconsolably, he hid in a cabin and it took George several hours to calm his friend. George was also shocked but refused to regard the Māori as heartless barbarians, determined to understand their motivation. It couldn’t be hunger, given the abundance of fish in Queen Charlotte Sound and the Māori’s productive vegetable gardens. Perhaps, then, the motive was revenge. Weighing up the arguments, he noted: ‘The New Zealanders never eat their adversaries, unless they are killed in battle; they never kill their relations for the purpose of eating them; they do not even eat them if they die of a natural death, and they take no prisoners with a view to fatten them for their repast.’ Although he might never know their exact reasons, ‘the action of eating human flesh, whatever our education may teach us to the contrary, is certainly neither unnatural nor criminal in itself.’

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by | 22 July 2026 · 8:06 am

Polynesian Explorers with Cook, 1773

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 133-135:

On 18 September 1773, after a month in the Society Islands, the Resolution and the Adventure sailed west. The crew were sad to leave. Fourteen-year-old Midshipman John Elliott, so dismissive of the Māori in New Zealand, had thought Tahiti a paradise—‘the Men being all fine’, he wrote in his journal, and ‘the Women beautiful, compaired with all those that we had seen, of the Middle Size, zingy, suple figures, fine teeth and Eyes, and the finest formed Hands, fingers, and Arms that I ever saw’. The stores were filled with fresh fruit, vegetables and water, and on Huahine they had bought plenty of livestock. The Resolution left with 209 pigs, thirty dogs, and fifty fowls on board, and so many bananas that the deck looked like a tropical orchard. The men felt rested and healthy—except those suffering from venereal diseases.

They also had two new crew members: Hitihiti, who had boarded the Resolution on Raiatea, and Mai on the Adventure. Mai was in his mid-twenties, a tall and slim man with long black hair and small hands ornamented with tattoos. Originally from Raiatea, Mai had fled to Tahiti as a boy after invaders from Bora Bora had overthrown the Raiateans. A few years later, in 1767, he had been wounded during the bloody battle between the Tahitians and the Dolphin crew—the jagged scar below his ribs a lifelong reminder of the encounter. He then returned to Raiatea, but he was captured and taken to Bora Bora, from where he escaped to the island of Huahine. By his own account, he had assisted one of the high priests and travelled between the islands, but mostly he was burning to avenge Raiatea against Bora Bora. During the Dolphin attack he had seen and painfully felt the violent power of European guns. So when the Resolution and the Adventure arrived at Huahine, Mai had asked if he could travel to England to procure firearms in order to fight against the Bora Borans.

Mai was affectionate and full of energy, quickly becoming popular with the Adventure crew who nicknamed him Jack. They were especially impressed by his fishing skills and couldn’t believe how much more he was able to catch compared to them. James Burney, the Second Lieutenant on the Adventure, believed that Mai’s curiosity and strength made him perfectly suited for an expedition. George also thought him intelligent, if sometimes too hot-tempered. He preferred the company of seventeen-year-old Hitihiti, who was also liked by the rest of the crew. Elliott was struck by his handsome looks, declaring him ‘in every respect a very superior sample of this Country than Omai’. Mai and Hitihiti were not particularly fond of each other—presumably because Hitihiti was originally from Bora Bora, which had invaded Mai’s Raiatea—and they engaged with each other as little as possible.

Both islanders had to adjust to their strange new lives. Cooped up below deck in the airless space where the sailors slept, his hammock swaying to the rhythm of the Resolution’s pitch, Hitihiti became seasick. How different it was to sail on this cavernous ship compared with a Polynesian outrigger canoe. He only felt better when he ate some pieces of raw dolphin, which he dipped into a bowl of seawater, and some of the fermented breadfruit balls which he had brought on board. On the Adventure, Mai was homesick and then terrified when he saw most of the crew assembling on deck the day after he had come on board. The captain’s solemn voice, the men lacing their fingers in prayer and tracing a cross from forehead to their shoulders, convinced him that this was some kind of ritual and that they were going to offer him as a human sacrifice. It took a while, Burney said, to understand why Mai was so scared and to convince him that this was just the ship’s normal Sunday service.

Despite the initial difficulties, over the next weeks the two islanders became part of the crew, respected and valued. On the Adventure, Burney, who had been at sea since the age of ten, looked after Mai. Burney enjoyed Mai’s tales from the Society Islands even if he was exaggerating—‘he is a Small matter addicted to romancing.’ On the Resolution, George and Hitihiti struck up a friendship. Roughly the same age, they talked and taught each other side by side at a table, George’s wavy dark-brown hair tied into a ponytail next to Hitihiti’s tight black curls. Hitihiti helped George to review his vocabulary from the Society Islands and George in turn taught Hitihiti English. They learned from each other.

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by | 21 July 2026 · 5:41 am

Forster’s First Impressions of New Zealand

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 93-96:

George was a gifted linguist, quick to learn Māori names and words as he pointed at plants, animals, clothing, weapons and jewellery, asking to be told what they were called and keen to understand the Māori way of life. He noted the striking tattoos—‘strongly carved with spirals in the face’—and their clothing and hairstyles. Some of the women wore caps made of brown feathers, while others had tattooed lips with several rows of blue punctures on their chin. There were young men with ‘amazing bushy hair, which hung wildly over their faces’, and others who tied it back and often decorated it with white feathers or carved bone combs. George described their canoes and clothing—‘an apron, made of their close-wrought cloth, covered with red feathers, faced with white dog-skin, and ornamented with pieces of the ear-shell’—and watched them dance ‘alternately extending their arms, and stamping with their feet in a violent and almost frantic manner’.

Equally fascinated by nature, George recorded black oystercatchers with bright red bills and feet strutting along the beach, and the long-necked shags, part of the cormorant species, roosting on rocky outcrops. Falcons with brown-and-cream-flecked plumage glided above him, and the noisy ka-hek-ka-hek-ka-hek call of the Fluttering Shearwater echoed across the water. He shot birds and caught fish which he painted, and collected plants to press. One evening, he and his father caught a small tawny-brown spotted owl with beautiful golden-yellow eyes as they scrambled through the dense forest, and a few days later the now extinct slate-grey South Island kōkako, a bird slightly smaller than a pigeon with prominent orange wattle flaps under its beak.

The forests were thick and lush, an entangled web of evergreen trees and ferns that seemed prehistoric. Ancient rimus soared high—with dangling spiky foliage which almost looked like Spanish moss from a distance. There were giant pukatea that stood firm with their huge buttress roots and cabbage trees with dense tufts of long sword-like leaves at the tip of their branches, which the Māori used for weaving, the roots an important food source. Tree ferns laced the sky—ponga with crowns of large fronds with a silvery underside that glowed in the moonlight and the even taller mamaku which grew up to 60 feet high.

A lively trade was soon established between the Europeans and the Māori. Glass bottles, nails, hatchets and European clothes were exchanged for carved fishing hooks, tools, jewellery, weapons, cloaks—and sex. The Māori were particularly keen on glass bottles and European shirts, George observed, admiring how ‘they were not inclined however to make disadvantageous bargains, and demanded the best price for every little trifle which they offered for sale’.

But when the Māori men presented their women to the sailors, George was appalled. The women were reluctant but, no matter how much they cried, the Māori men decided whether or not they had sex with the Europeans. Like Cook (who worried that his men would introduce vice and disease), George blamed the crew for having started this sex trade. He doubted whether the Māori ‘ever debased themselves so much as to make a trade of their women, before we created new wants by shewing them iron-tools’. Nothing could excuse the crew’s behaviour. Who was worse, George wondered, the Māori men who forced their women to have sex, or the Europeans who partook?

…

‘I fear that hitherto our intercourse has been wholly disadvantageous to the nations of the South Seas; and that those communities have been the least injured, who have always kept aloof from us,’ George now wrote. Less than two months after praising how the Resolution crew had shown the Māori at Dusky Sound the advantages of European improvements—tree felling, repairing, painting—George’s attitude had drastically changed. It was an extraordinary statement for the time. More typical was young John Elliott, who was convinced that the Māori were ‘ferocious Cannibals’ who ‘work themselves into a frenzey, foaming at the mouth’, and Anders Sparrman, who declared that they had a ‘desire to tear their enemies’ limbs apart with their teeth’.

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by | 20 July 2026 · 5:19 pm

Furneaux’s Adventure in New Zealand

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 91-92:

After losing sight of the Resolution among the Antarctic icebergs, Captain Furneaux had sailed the Adventure to Tasmania, a large island about 150 miles south of Australia which the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman had sighted and visited in 1642. The French had landed there in 1772, but the Adventure was the first British ship to anchor. For a few days they charted parts of the eastern coast, stopping briefly to fill up their water stores. They saw some abandoned huts and overgrown pathways but didn’t encounter any inhabitants. From there the Adventure sailed east to New Zealand’s Queen Charlotte Sound, where they arrived in early April 1773, two months after their separation from the Resolution.

Like a vast river estuary, the opening of Queen Charlotte Sound was eight miles wide but narrowed as it stretched inland. Sheltered by mountains, the waters within were calm. Steep ravines, rocky headlands and densely forested ridges serrated the coastline where some of the mountains dropped in perpendicular cliffs into the sound, and others sloped down towards long beaches. The water was dark with thin azure bands along the shallow edges. When the Adventure reached the rendezvous point at Ship Cove, a natural harbour with a wide sandy beach and a freshwater stream, they discovered trees carved with the names of the Endeavour’s crew but no sign of the Resolution. Over the next six weeks, Furneaux’s men repaired their ship, took on supplies, and also met a great number of Māori who lived in nearby settlements.

The Māori had carefully approached the Adventure in canoes. ‘Tobia Tobia,’ they called out, using their name for Tupaia—the high priest and navigator from Raiatea, an island near Tahiti—who had joined Cook on his previous voyage and travelled with the Endeavour to New Zealand in 1770. As Māori and Tahitian were related languages, Tupaia had not only assisted Cook with his navigation but also acted as the Endeavour’s translator. In Māori tradition, Raiatea was also their ancestral homeland so they felt a reverence for Tupaia. Having seen him work as interpreter, guide and navigator, most of the Māori had regarded Tupaia as the Europeans’ leader. In the intervening three years, stories about Tupaia, and the Endeavour’s thundering cannons and her pale-skinned crew, had been recounted by the Māori across New Zealand. And so they asked the Adventure crew—some of whom understood a few Māori words because they had been part of Cook’s first expedition—about Tupaia and were saddened to hear that he had died during the Endeavour voyage.

…

The next morning, at 5 a.m., the Resolution turned into Queen Charlotte Sound. Once past the entrance Cook fired a cannon and to their delight another answered. A few hours later, they saw the Adventure in Ship Cove. That evening the two ships anchored next to each other and the men celebrated their reunion.

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by | 19 July 2026 · 8:44 am

Translating for the Royal Society

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 51-53:

At the end of 1770, the Forsters moved back to London, taking lodgings next to Reinhold’s old school friend Woide, who had moved to Somerset House Stable Yard near the Thames. On 13 December, three days after their arrival, father and son went to the Royal Society, the nexus of British scientific enquiry where, since its foundation in the 1660s, fellows met to learn about new scientistic discoveries and exchange ideas with like-minded men. Reinhold Forster knew the Royal Society well, having attended the weekly meetings during their first stay in London. But now he wanted to introduce his son and present George’s translations (though Reinhold’s name was on their covers). So they made their way to Crane Court, a short fifteen-minute walk from their lodgings in a little cul-de-sac off Fleet Street, where the fellows met every Thursday. The president directed the meetings from a large armchair at one end of a long table, with a bust of the Society’s first royal patron, King Charles II, behind him, while the fellows sat on green-upholstered benches around the table.

At only sixteen George now found himself in the same room with some of the greatest minds in England. Almost every Thursday he accompanied his father to the Royal Society, where he sat under the watchful eyes of the portraits of illustrious previous fellows: the periwigged former president and mathematician Isaac Newton; the philosopher Francis Bacon in a lace ruff and embroidered velvet coat; and the architect Christopher Wren, who rebuilt London after the Great Fire of 1666. At these meetings George heard scholars talk about the physics of light, rare birds in the East Indies, new comets, the latest telescopes, tumours in pregnant women and subterranean geological formations. He saw animals preserved in spirits, pinned insects, a stuffed sea lion and a 24-foot snake, as well as the skeletons of a crocodile and an ostrich. He was receiving instructions unlike any other sixteen-year-old. As father and son attended the weekly meetings and published translations, their names soon spread across the scholarly world. Then, in February 1772, a little more than a year after their return to London, Reinhold was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and became officially part of the British scientific establishment.

George continued to work, translating eight volumes in total, while his father wrote and published numerous essays on botany, insects, zoology, antiquities, geography and mineralogy. ‘If I didn’t have a son of seventeen who helped me with translating,’ Reinhold admitted, ‘I couldn’t possibly do all this work.’ George began to feel like a ‘translation-machine’, but the reviews were glowing. ‘He writes our language,’ the Critical Review applauded (praising Reinhold, since only he was credited), ‘with propriety; always with perspicuity, the great requisite in the communication of scientific learning’. Another critic even declared George’s translation of Bougainville’s A Voyage Round the World ‘superior to the original’.

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by | 18 July 2026 · 8:15 pm

George Forster’s Early Youth

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 27-28:

George Forster was ten when he went on his first expedition.

He was a slender boy, small for his age, but what he lacked in physical strength he made up for in tenacity during the five months that he and his father travelled through Russia. In charge of collecting and identifying plants, the ten-year-old would wander off alone, eyes wide open, searching for new discoveries—sometimes climbing trees, at others keeping his head near the ground to study the vegetation with a magnifying glass. When he returned to the tent with full bags, he would press the samples he had found between paper, carefully arranging blossoms and leaves so that he could classify them later. Soon his collection had risen to 700 specimens.

While other children sat on hard benches in orderly rows at school, learning by rod and rote, George found himself galloping on small Kalmyk horses across the Russian steppes and wading through marshes on the banks of the Volga river. He watched a violent wildfire race across the vast grasslands to the east, its ravenous flames consuming everything in its path. He remembered the terror he felt that day for the rest of his life. Instead of studying arithmetic or conjugating Latin verbs, he observed flocks of black herons, wild boars and wolves, and huge Bactrian camels used by the nomadic Kalmyks as pack animals, which evoked the stories of the Arabian Nights and Ali Baba. He met Muslim Tatar traders along the Volga, fierce Cossack warriors from the open steppes to the east who wore sheepskin hats, baggy trousers and colourful caftans, and German settlers so destitute that they lived in earth dugouts in the ground. Near today’s Russian border with Kazakhstan, he marvelled at Lake Elton, a huge shallow salt lake with a shoreline encrusted in a thick white layer like snow, against water which algae had turned blood red. And in the Ryn Desert just north of the Caspian Sea, he felt piercing winds whip across the dunes, as wild as the land itself.

Russia was on a different scale from the flat gentle countryside where George had been raised near Gdansk, in today’s Poland. Everything here was vaster and emptier. The skies, lakes and land were bigger, the distances immense, and the weather extreme. He feasted his eyes and tasted new foods. He ate wild asparagus, drank fermented mare’s milk—‘of a nauseous or disagreeable Taste’—and enjoyed the refreshing juice of bog cranberries mixed with water and honey after the long dusty days on horseback.

This was not like learning from the books he loved. He could see, smell and feel that he had entered another world. The food had a different flavour, the languages were unfamiliar, and the people looked nothing like those at home. In Russia, he absorbed a new and very foreign country for the first time. At the age of ten, he became a traveller.

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by | 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 | 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 | 28 May 2026 · 12:42 am

Entering the Lena River Delta, 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. 316-318:

THE LENA RIVER originates nearly three thousand miles to the south of the Arctic Ocean, in a mountain range near Lake Baikal in the deep interior of Russia, not far from the border with Mongolia. As the river flows through the forested solitudes of Yakutia, it picks up tributary after tributary—the Kirenga, the Vitim, the Olekma, the Aldan, the Vilyui. The Lena is the world’s eleventh-longest river, draining the world’s ninth-largest watershed, a boggy, mosquitoey swath of tundra and taiga that measures more than 960,000 square miles. The amount of sediment carried by the Lena is extraordinary—and the river’s enormous power discharges a plume of silt and debris more than fifty miles out into the Arctic Ocean.

The Lena, like only a few of the world’s largest river systems, flows northward, toward a mostly frozen sea. In the fall, it begins to freeze first at its mouth, not at its source, which means that it develops a natural barrier against the force of its own massive current. As winter approaches in the Arctic, the river continues to flow with unchecked power, until it meets the ever-thickening plug of ice at its lower reaches.

The water’s only response is to spread out, frantically seeking other paths to the sea. In other words, the ice distorts and magnifies the tendency all rivers have of fanning out at their mouths. The pressures that build behind the Lena’s ice dam become so tremendous that the river splays over more than eleven thousand square miles. This riot of swollen currents creates one of the largest and most complicated deltas in the world.

From the air, the Lena delta looks rather like the cross section of an enormous tumor that bulges far out into the Laptev Sea from the Siberian mainland. Inside this protruding mass, 125 miles in width, is a confusing mesh of branched streams twisting and threading across sandy flats pocked by thousands of ponds and lakes and oxbow swamps. The delta has more than fifteen hundred islands—though that number changes all the time. The river, as it pushes through this morass of alluvium, divides into seven main branches, which, in turn, subdivide into scores and scores of lesser ones, an array of channels that redirect themselves from season to season as they course like capillaries toward the Arctic Ocean. The river’s assiduous probing continues until early winter, when the weather finally turns so cold that this titanic natural plumbing project backs up entirely—freezing solid all three thousand miles upstream, creating a superhighway of ice.

A report that would come out in 1882 would note, “No chart had been laid down of this desolate region, and indeed it would seem impossible to make any which would not be falsified by the changes which every fresh season brought.” Petermann’s map was the only one that had been published with any level of detail, but it was largely hypothetical and riddled with major errors. His map showed eight mouths to the delta, when in fact there were more than two hundred—and the few place-names, landmarks, and villages specified on his map were either grossly misplaced or didn’t exist at all.

This was the utterly bewildering landscape that De Long and his men approached on the afternoon of September 16, 1881. They were three miles out from the delta, yet they were already stuck, grounded on the river’s massive deposits of silt.

When De Long stood up to assess the problem, only one solution came to mind. He had everyone crawl out of the boat to lighten her load, so that she would ride a few inches higher in the water. The men, wading in the riffling currents, gathered around the cutter and began to guide her, sometimes shove her, toward land. Only Snoozer [the last dog] and a few disabled men remained in the boat.

Through the clear, shallow water, the wading men could see that the congealed beds of silt on which they oozed along had been brushed into ornate patterns by the play of the currents. Small fish darted this way and that. The water varied between one and a half and four feet in depth but generally became shallower the closer they drew toward land. The mud sucked at their boots, sometimes pulling them clear off their feet. In frustration, some of the men hurled their mukluks into the cutter and waded barefoot.

Often the boat ran aground, forcing the crew to heel her over and angle the bow toward a more promising channel. It was backbreaking labor, made more unpleasant by the cold of the river, which soon turned their feet and legs numb. While most of the men grunted and strained around the gunwales of the boat, others waded ahead, wielding oars to smash the young ice and scouting the best path toward land.

Throughout the day, they made only halting progress, advancing perhaps a mile. They could move only when the tide was in—at low tide the boat sat stuck in the slough. By late afternoon, said Nindemann, “everyone was pretty well played out.” They crawled back into the boat with Snoozer and shared a drab dinner of beef tongue. Afterward, Ambler asked everyone to take off their boots so he could examine their feet. What the doctor saw greatly alarmed him. A day of wading in the frigid water had come at a tremendous cost. The men’s feet were badly swollen and had developed a sickening bluish pallor. Ambler feared that frostbite was rampant among the crew. Boyd, Erichsen, Collins, Ah Sam, and Captain De Long were in the worst shape, but everyone’s extremities had suffered.

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by | 27 May 2026 · 2:34 am

Trekking Over Arctic Ice, 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. 245-247:

In high spirits, De Long and his men began their long march across the frozen ocean, inching toward the familiar world, or at least a place where other human beings might conceivably be found. Stretched out for miles across the ice, they resembled, said Melville, a straggle of “vagabond insects.” It was numbing, staggering work, and yet they were strangely happy—happy to be free of the confines of the ship, relieved to be moving again, eager to accept the bonds of their common struggle. They aimed for the middle of Russia and the Siberian Arctic coast, but in their minds they were heading home, to wives and mothers and girlfriends, to plump chickens and fresh garden vegetables, to soft beds and warm fires, to gossip and invention, and if not to glory, exactly, then to the cheers of an appreciative homeland.

De Long and Dunbar, equipped with field glasses and pocket prismatic compasses, clambered ahead of everyone else in the foggy distances to mark the way with black flags stuck in the ice. They called their path a “road,” but the route they staked was little more than a suggestion of lesser treachery, a devious course across ever-shifting mazes of fissures, hummocks, pressure ridges, and pools of shimmering meltwater. Which is to say, the captain and his ice pilot—whose earlier problem with snow blindness had cleared up—were merely going on their best hunches.

Keep to the road! they cried. Stay on the road! The men could only laugh at the absurdity of the word. As Danenhower put it, there was only “knee-deep snow” and “lumps of ice that would have taken a whole corps of engineers to level.” Yet they trudged on, sunburned and chapped-lipped, dressed in sour-smelling pelts, wearing slitted ice goggles, singing galley songs as they slogged over the impossible expanses of crust and rubble and sludge.

The June sun, whenever it burned through the fog, had a strange quality of penetrating intensity, as though it were training X-rays on the snow. The light revealed a dirty ice pack at times strewn with signs of life—crab claws, bear scat, mussel shells, bleached bones, goose quills, plant seeds, driftwood, ocean sponges. The gyre of the ocean and the churn of the ice had mixed everything up, old and new, animal and vegetable, into a kind of Arctic gumbo.

Dr. Ambler cared for the sick; Alexey and Aneguin tended to the dogs. But the others spent their days as draft animals, straining against their hemp ropes and canvas harnesses. They pulled more than eight tons of provisions and gear, on improvised sleds whose crosspieces had been fashioned from whiskey barrel staves and whose heavy oak runners were shod with smooth whalebone. In addition to the three battered boats, they hauled, among other things, medicine chests, ammunition, stew pots, cooking stoves, tent poles, oars, rifles, ship logs and diaries, canvas for sails, scientific instruments, the wooden dinghy, and two hundred gallons of stove alcohol.

As for food, they had inventoried, at the outset, 3,960 pounds of pemmican, 1,500 pounds of hardtack, thirty-two pounds of beef tongue, 150 pounds of Liebig’s beef extract, twelve and a half pounds of pigs’ feet, and substantial quantities of veal, ham, whiskey, brandy, chocolate, and tobacco. Every pound, every ounce, had been carefully weighed at the start, then just as carefully apportioned to the different sleds and crews so that everyone, aside from the sick, would pull an equal amount of weight.

There was far too much to haul in one trip, so they had to double back—and sometimes triple back—to bring up everything from the rear. This meant that for many of the haulers, each mile of forward progress actually represented a distance of five miles traversed. A full day of this Sisyphean business could mean twenty-five miles or more of ceaseless struggle. It would have constituted slave labor even on hard, dry ground, but this slob ice, with all its gaping holes and intervening sea-lanes, was the most trying terrain imaginable—as a landscape, said De Long, it was “terribly confused.”

The men often had to launch the boats, cross a narrow lead of water, and then hop right back out again to re-stow the boats on the sleds. Other times, they would use a large cake of floating ice as a ferry, employing grappling hooks and networks of ropes to tow it, and all their belongings, across the water to the icy shore beyond. The “road-building crew” would wield pickaxes to clear a smooth groove through encrusted ice, shave off the top of a high hummock, or fashion what De Long called a “causeway” or a “flying bridge” across emerald pools of meltwater.

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