18791776 Club
De Long sails the Jeannette north from San Francisco; the pole, he believes, is a warm current away
James Gordon Bennett's newspaper money backs the voyage; the Bering Strait and an open Arctic sea are the theory on which the expedition rests.
In the summer of 1879, the North Pole remained one of the last blank spaces on the map, and newspaper money smelled an opportunity in it. On July 8, the USS Jeannette left San Francisco under Lieutenant Commander George W. De Long, bound for the Bering Strait on a theory that a warm Pacific current would carry the ship straight to the pole. Two months later, on September 7, the ship was locked in ice at 71°35′N, 175°6′E. It would not sail free again…
