In the annals of drift, things get stranger still. On June 18, 1884, while Private Schneider, whose diary a year later C. Brainard would discover on the banks of the Mississippi, was expiring on Cape Sabine, 500 miles to the southeast, Eskimo fishermen from Greenland noticed some strange flotsam—or was it jetsam?—stranded on a floe.
History records neither the first initials nor the last names of these keen-eyed Inuit, which is a shame, for their discovery would prove far more consequential than C. Brainard’s, and far more relevant to my own investigations. On that floe were some fifty-eight items (clothes, gear, papers)—the relics, evidently, of a shipwreck. In the journal of the Danish Geographical Society, Greenland’s colonial director later cataloged them. They included, notably, a list of provisions hand-signed by Lieutenant George De Long, captain of the USS Jeannette; a list of the Jeannette’s boats; a pair of oilskin breeches in which a certain Louis Noros had written his name; and the peak of a cap inscribed by one F. C. Nindermann. 35
In 1879, in the mistaken belief that at the top of the planet there lay an open sea, the officers and crew of the Jeannette, a 142-foot steam yacht, had sailed through the Bering Strait, plowed boldly into the ice, expecting to break through it, and promptly, off the coast of Wrangell Island, found themselves beset—a fate that at the time few ships had been known to survive. The steamer lasted surprisingly long, drifting about for twenty-one months, before the ice crushed it. To the Norwegian scientist-explorer Fridtjof Nansen, the relics of the Jeannette discovered three years later off the coast of Greenland were not merely historical curiosities but data, data that seemed conclusively to prove the existence of uncharted, transarctic currents.
At the time, many geographers were reluctant to accept Nansen’s conclusions. Some questioned the provenance of the relics. Wasn’t it far more likely, they speculated, that they’d come from the sunken relief vessel sent to rescue the Greely expedition? Furthermore, the Jeannette had made it only to within 884 miles of the pole. Who could tell what lay beyond? Some obstinately or wishfully or devoutly clung to the theory of an open polar sea. Those fond of symmetries believed that at the North Pole as at the South there must exist a continent, or perhaps an undiscovered archipelago.
“It is doubtful if any hydrographer would treat seriously [Nansen’s] theory of polar currents,” wrote none other than Lieutenant Adolphus Greely, namesake and leader of the disastrous expedition to Ellesmere Island that had claimed the life of Private Schneider. Seeking vindication, Nansen proposed to do what at the time seemed suicidal: in a smaller, better, more iceworthy ship, he would reenact the voyage of the Jeannette—or at least the first twenty months of it. He named this vessel the Fram, Norwegian for “forward,” because once he and his crew found themselves beset off the northeast coast of Siberia, Nansen foresaw, there would be no turning back.
The voyage of the Fram is one of the most heroic and least gothic in the history of Arctic exploration. Everyone survived, and everything went almost perfectly according to Nansen’s carefully preconceived plan, and when it didn’t, good fortune seemed almost miraculously to intervene.36 The Fram entered the ice pack in 1893. Three years and fifteen hundred miles later, passing through the strait that now bears that vessel’s name, it emerged into the open waters east of Greenland.
When you go beachcombing in the annals of drift, you tend to notice coincidences, coincidences that seem to indicate the presence of subtle currents or eddies, currents or eddies that flow through time as well as through oceans. Consider this: In charting the likely transarctic route the castaway toys would take, Ebbesmeyer examined the precedents set by both the Jeannette and the Fram. Or consider this: The Greely expedition took place under the auspices of the first International Polar Year, or IPY. This expedition, the one I’ve joined, the one Eddy Carmack conceived, is taking place under the auspices of the fourth International Polar Year, in honor of which the Louis S. St-Laurent recently received a new paint job. Adorning the starboard side of the Louis’s red hull is the new IPY logo, rendered in what might be called the United Nations style. A blue figure reminiscent of those that appear on the doors of men’s rooms, assuming the splayed posture of Leonardo’s famous portrait of man, stretches his limbs to the four corners of an abstract