The Jeannette expedition of 1879–1881, officially called the U.S. Arctic Expedition, was an attempt led by George W. De Long to reach the North Pole by pioneering a route from the Pacific Ocean through the Bering Strait. The premise was that a temperate current, the Kuro Siwo, flowed northwards into the strait, providing a gateway to the Open Polar Sea and thus to the pole. This theory proved illusory; the expedition’s ship, USS Jeannette and its crew of 33, was trapped by ice and drifted for nearly two years before she was crushed and sunk.
About Jeannette expedition in brief
The Jeannette expedition of 1879–1881, officially called the U.S. Arctic Expedition, was an attempt led by George W. De Long to reach the North Pole by pioneering a route from the Pacific Ocean through the Bering Strait. The premise was that a temperate current, the Kuro Siwo, flowed northwards into the strait, providing a gateway to the Open Polar Sea and thus to the pole. This theory proved illusory; the expedition’s ship, USS Jeannette and its crew of 33, was trapped by ice and drifted for nearly two years before she was crushed and sunk, north of the Siberian coast. Before its demise, the expedition discovered new islands—the De Long Islands—and collected valuable meteorological and oceanographic data. The appearance in 1884 of debris from the wreck on the south-west coast of Greenland indicated the existence of an ocean current moving the permanent Arctic ice from east to west. This discovery inspired Fridtjof Nansen to mount his Fram expedition nine years later. A monument to the Jeannettes’ dead was erected at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, in 1890. The expedition had the full support of the U S. Government. In 1773, a British naval expedition under captain Constantine Phipps sought a route to the Pole from the Seven Islands, but found the way impassably blocked by ice. The early explorers had little success in finding these routes, but made important geographical discoveries.
In time, the search for trade routes became secondary to the prestige objective of reaching the North pole itself, or at least of registering a “Farthest North”. In 1852, a succession of expeditions probed the area in succession for the fabled gateways to the Polar Sea. In 1828, one of these expeditions found no sign of the supposed polar sea, and probed for 25 years in abeyance. In the 1850s, Elisha Kane found a channel between Greenland and Ellesmere Island, a northerly channel that might be one of the entrances to the polar sea. The search for the Arctic Pole became a search for a gateway to the North Sea. After one of a series of incursions into the Canadian Arctic, Edward Inglefield discovered a ring orannulus of ice which, it was thought, could be penetrated via several warm-water gateways or portals in North America. The initial quest for the Pole for one of one of those portals was in 1818 and 1827–1828. The British naval expeditions had probed north of Spitsbergen and Spitsen in 1828 and 1828–1827–28. In 1850, the Search for the lost Franklin expedition generated a rash of incursion into theCanadian Arctic, particularly that of Edward Augustus Inglefeld, particularly for these for the northernmost Canadian Arctic islands. The first of these incursions in this area was in 1850, in Eaile.
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This page is based on the article Jeannette expedition published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 05, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
