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DE LONG, George W.

The Voyage of the Jeannette.

The Ship and the Ice Journals of... Lieutenant-Commander, U.S.N. and Commander of the Polar Expedition of 1879-1881. Edited by his Wife, Emma De Long.

First Edition. The Jeannette was originally the unfortunately named HMS Pandora, a Royal Naval gun-boat. She was purchased by James Gordon Bennett, the owner of the New York Herald best known for his sponsorship of Stanley in the search for Livingstone, and fitted out for an expedition to the North Pole via the Bering Strait. With the permission of Congress she was crewed with US Naval officers and sailed under naval regulations although privately owned. Caught in pack ice near Wrangel Island the ship, whose hull had been massively reinforced, held strong as she drifted for 21 months whilst the crew continued to keep scrupulously maintained records. In June 1881 however, the hull gave out and they were forced to abandon ship. The crew escaped on three boats but after storms and exposure to appalling conditions most, along with De Long himself, perished. The Chief Engineer, George W. Melville, survived and returned in search of fellow survivors, bringing back the logs which formed the basis of these volumes. From the evidence of De Long’s observations and the later discovery of fragments of the Jeannette on the American side of the Arctic Ocean, Nansen consolidated the theory which underpinned the Fram expedition.

2 volumes, octavo. Original pebble-grained brown pictorial cloth, gilt. Steel-engraved portrait frontispiece to Volume I and one other similar portrait, tinted lithographic frontispiece to Volume II, 13 wood-engraved plates in all, numerous illustrations, maps, charts and diagrams to the text, some full-page, folding map in end-pocket to the first volume. Marginal browning as usual, folding map differentially browned, but overall a very good, tight set, the binding just a little rubbed at the extremities. A particularly bright and well-preserved set.