He purchased a sturdy 146 foot, three-masted steam vessel, formerly belonging to the Royal Navy, and renamed it Jeannette after his sister. Seeking another such coup, Bennett decided to sponsor a U.S. David Livingstone (who was in no need of finding) and in the process greatly increase newspaper circulation by reporting on his travels. It was he who sent Sir Henry Stanley to Africa to find Dr. James Gordon Bennett, the eccentric plutocrat who owned The New York Herald, believed that newspapers should not only report the news, but should also make it. The world’s most eminent cartographer, the German August Peterman, had theorized that the Kuroshio, a warm current flowing north past Japan in the Pacific, probably continued through the Bering Strait between Siberia and Alaska, and then under the pack ice to warm a large, hitherto undiscovered “Polar Sea.” All that was known for certain was that ships (usually whalers) that sailed north of Canada or Siberia encountered impenetrable pack ice that moved south in winter, but retreated to the north somewhat during the Arctic summer.
Jeanette,” as this book is subtitled.Īs late as the end of the nineteenth century, no human being had ever been to the North Pole, but theories about what lay there abounded. Hampton Sides, an excellent storyteller, here takes on “the grand and terrible polar voyage of the U.S.S.
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