Exploration—for the furtherance of science, for national bragging rights, to fill in the remaining blank spaces on the map—was something the 19th-century U.S. Navy could proudly count among its undertakings. Such expeditions into uncharted and often perilous waters were, even without an enemy’s guns to confront, very much their own form of sailing into harm’s way. Consider, for example, the ill-fated Jeannette expedition of 1879, a voyage to the Arctic in a quest for its ultimate prize: to lay claim to being the first to arrive at the North Pole. The project, like the ship herself, had a bit of a hybrid provenance. Navy Lieutenant Commander George Washington DeLong, who had caught the Arctic fever while serving on an earlier expedition, joined forces with the legendary, larger-than-life newspaper tycoon James Gordon Bennett Jr. to make the North Pole mission a go. Sensing a golden opportunity and a great story, Bennett bankrolled the adventure, purchasing the three-master Jeannette, a former Royal Navy gun vessel customized for the rough conditions of the High North, and turned her over for the U.S. Navy’s use.
DeLong and his crew were cheered as they departed San Francisco in July 1879 and set a course for the Bering Strait. By that September, they were trapped in the cold grasp of the remorseless ice, and would remain so for nearly two years. They were near the New Siberian Islands when the ice finally crushed the hull, and the Jeannette went under on 12 June 1881. What followed was a harrowing tale of endurance, survival, and struggle across 140 days and 500 miles. Most of the men perished, including DeLong. But his remains would be recovered, and with them, precious artifacts that bear tribute to the explorer spirit.
These relics of the expedition, donated by the DeLong family and now in the collection of the U.S. Naval Academy Museum, include the Jeannette’s commission pennant (far right), sundry personal items of Lieutenant DeLong’s (above), a lock of his wife’s hair, a small silk banner bearing his daughter’s name (below), his Winchester rifle (right), the ship’s journal, and its companion volume, the “ice journal,” chronicling the arduous trek that followed the loss of the vessel. On 24 October 1881, DeLong wrote, “134th day. A hard night.” In another week, he would be dead. But he and his comrades’ remains eventually made the voyage home courtesy of the Russian government, which adorned the dead men’s railway car with a silk ribbon honoring “the Martyrs of the Jeannette Expedition.” Today, they are memorialized by a famous cross atop an oft-visited hill—where the Jeannette Monument stands as the largest edifice in the U.S. Naval Academy Cemetery.
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