I am about halfway through In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette
, an account of a trip to the Arctic circa 1880 when nobody had an airplane or a GPS and a lot of folks thought that the North Pole was the center of a open warm sea that would welcome anyone who could push through the ring of ice that surrounded it.
The business of journalism seems to have been about the same back then…
Bennett Sr.’s [owner of the New York Herald] views were never tepid on any subject. He was, for example, a vigorous opponent of women’s rights—“motherhood is the best cure for the mania,” he said, “and we would recommend it to all who are afflicted.” His outlook on life was unencumbered by even a trace of altruism. “Lofty editorials and public-spirited crusades, in his view, were a lot of nonsense,” observed one biographer. “All men were selfish, greedy, and intrinsically worthless; the human condition could never be bettered, certainly not through the medium of journalism.” Instead, Bennett busied himself solely with “getting out the liveliest sheet in town and watching his acumen reflected in the balance sheets, the circulation tallies, and the advertising revenues.”
Going to the doctor was not pleasant…
[About six months into the voyage] But after a few weeks, [the navigator] Danenhower’s condition worsened. The pain was so excruciating he could scarcely think. When Dr. Ambler examined him again, he saw that something was wrong with his iris. It was inflamed, and it appeared “sluggish.” It had turned a strange hue—more or less the color of mud—and a sticky fluid oozed from his eye. In late December, Ambler decided to review Danenhower’s entire medical history. After a lot of questioning, the navigator admitted that he had once contracted venereal disease, though he believed it had been cured. Now Dr. Ambler told him otherwise: His condition was called syphilitic iritis. It was a fairly common symptom of second-stage syphilis. Syphilis was a strange and pernicious disease that manifested itself in countless maladies of the body and mind. It often masqueraded as some other disease—and did it so well that doctors often called it the Great Imposter. Ambler had seen and treated syphilitic iritis before. The malady could be very serious. Unless Danenhower was extremely careful—or extremely lucky—he would likely go blind in his left eye. There was always a chance it could develop in his right eye, as well. Ambler treated Danenhower with a shot of mercury in his buttocks, a standard, if dubious, treatment for syphilis at the time that had numerous deleterious side effects. (A dictum common among doctors went: “One night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury.”) To dull the pain, Ambler applied lint doused with tincture of opium. He also dropped small doses of atropine into Danenhower’s eye to dilate the pupil. The goal was to keep the pupil open and to prevent the iris from adhering to the lens. If the drops didn’t work, Ambler would be forced to operate, inserting a probe into the eye’s tissues to release the gummy adhesions before the iris and lens melded together into a permanent scar.
[About 18 months in] DANENEHOWER WAS ANOTHER kind of scrappy survivor. The navigator had spent the entire year of 1880 confined to his darkened room. His advanced syphilis had begun to manifest itself in other symptoms, including lesions on his legs and inside and around his mouth. It appeared that he would indeed lose the sight of his left eye. Even though Dr. Ambler applied atropine religiously, the gummy substance inside the eye kept reappearing, adhering the iris to the lens. In January, when the pain had become too much for the navigator to bear, Dr. Ambler decided to operate. He gave Danenhower a little opium, and three burly men were brought in to hold down the patient’s arms and legs. Then Ambler, wielding a knife and a rubber probe, cut into the cornea and investigated the anterior chamber of the eye. He used an aspirator to “let out a lot of turbid fluid,” as he put it in his report. The pain was excruciating, but Danenhower endured it stoically. Every so often, De Long would stick his head into the room and watch the proceedings. “I hardly know which to admire most,” he wrote, “the skill and celerity of the surgeon or the nerve and endurance of Danenhower.” The procedure was a partial success, but over the next six months, Ambler would have to operate again, and again, to drain the “purulent matter” off the eye. All told, Danenhower underwent more than a dozen operations throughout 1880.
Germans worked hard and did not tend to look on the bright side…
Nindemann did not respond to praise, and he kept his distance. Seemingly emotionless, he had a black mustache and leathery skin and spoke forcefully in a thick German accent—a man of action, not words. He wouldn’t attend De Long’s divine service on Sunday, either. “I believe in nature,” he said. “Nature is my God. I don’t believe in the hereafter. This world is where we get all our punishment.”
“We’re from America and we’re here to help” didn’t work out so great for the locals…
By early 1879, the Yupiks all over St. Lawrence Island had begun to starve. … Alcohol and the severe winter were certainly factors—alcohol, especially. But something far larger had been taking place that made this colossal famine a certainty: Over the previous decade, American whalers in the Arctic, seeking to augment the value of their cargo, had turned to harvesting walruses in astoundingly high numbers. Throughout the 1870s, American whaling vessels had taken as many as 125,000 walruses from the Bering Strait region. The slaughter had proved to be a lucrative sideline to the whaling business. The whalers cooked the animal’s blubber into oil and hacked off the tusks to sell in ivory markets as far away as England and China. In a single season in 1876, more than 35,000 Bering walruses were killed. Compared to the risky rigors of Arctic whaling, “walrusing” could be ridiculously easy. Rather than wielding lances and harpoons from tippy open boats, the whalers had discovered that they could simply clomp onto the ice with rifles and shoot large numbers of walruses point-blank in the head. … In less than a decade, this industrially efficient slaughter had largely destroyed the Yupiks’ primary source of food and the seasonal hunting life upon which it was based. By the 1880s, the walrus was nearly extinct in large swaths of the Bering Sea.
It was the Arctic version of a story already well known to Americans, the story of the buffalo and the Indians of the Great Plains. Here, as there, the wholesale slaughter of a people’s staple prey had led, in a few short years, to ruinous dislocations, terrible dependencies—and a cultural apocalypse.
Alaska had been an American possession for slightly more than a decade. The czar’s influence, weak in the first place, had faded. While it could not be said that contact with Russian trappers and traders had improved the lives of Alaskan natives—far from it—the Russian fur concerns had rarely reached the level of entrepreneurial organization and ruthless efficiency pursued by American whalers, trading agents, and fur companies. The systematic introduction of just a few things—repeating rifles, booze, money, industrial methods of dismantling animal flesh—had caused the native cultures of Alaska to collapse at record speed.
I recommend In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette to anyone interested in the polar regions or even simply anyone interested in life in the 19th Century.
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