George W. De Long

Lieutenant George Washington De Long was driven by a nineteenth-century dream: to find a theorized warm-water route to the North Pole, the so-called Open Polar Sea. In 1879, he commanded the USS Jeannette, a reinforced steamer, into the Arctic pack ice north of Siberia. The ship was not just trapped; it was slowly, mercilessly crushed, sinking after two years adrift. De Long then led his men on an epic, desperate trek across the frozen sea and through the barren delta of the Lena River in Siberia. The retreat became a harrowing fight for survival against starvation and hypothermia. De Long and most of his party perished, but the expedition's records, miraculously preserved, provided oceanographers with groundbreaking data on Arctic currents. Crucially, wreckage from the Jeannette, found years later on an ice floe off Greenland, proved the existence of a transpolar drift, a discovery that would later guide explorers like Fridtjof Nansen.