"I n the late nineteenth century, people were obsessed by one of the last unmapped areas of the globe: the North Pole. No one knew what existed beyond the fortress of ice rimming the Arctic seas, although theories abounded. The foremost cartographer in the world, a German named August Petermann, believed that warm currents fed into a vast Open Polar Sea that sustained a verdant land at the top of the world. National glory would fall to whoever could plant his flag upon its shores. James Gordon Bennett, Jr., the eccentric and stu- pendously wealthy owner of The New York Herald, had recently captured the world's attention by dispatching Stanley to Africa to find Dr. Livingstone. Now he was keen to re-create that sensation on an even more epic scale. He funded an official U.S. naval expedition to reach the Pole, choosing as its leader a young officer named George Washington De Long, who had gained fame for a rescue operation off the coast of Greenland. On July 8, 1879, De Long bid his young wife good- bye, and the USS Jeannette set sail from San Francisco to cheering crowds in the grip of "Arctic fever." De Long led a team of thirty-two men-carrying the aspirations of a young country burning to become a world deep into uncharted waters. power- After journeying north of the Bering Strait, they found themselves trapped in pack ice. Two years into the harrowing voyage, the hull was fatally breached, and the Jeannette sank to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. The men found themselves marooned on the ice cap nearly a thousand miles north of Siberia with three open boats and only the barest supplies. Thus began their long, fateful march across the frozen sea-an ordeal that ranks as one of the greatest struggles for survival in history. Facing everything from snow blindness and frostbite to ferocious storms and bewildering labyrinths of ice, the expedition battled madness and starvation as they desperately strove for the Siberian coast. Based on a wealth of unpublished correspondence and his own travels across the Siberian Arctic, Sides's epic narrative resurrects a classic American adventure story with all the twists and turns of a thriller. In the Kingdom of Ice is a spellbinding tale of heroism and de- termination in the most unforgiving territory on Earth."

ISBN: 9780385535373