In the Kingdom of Ice - The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the Uss Jeannette

Zusatztext 49716811 Informationen zum Autor HAMPTON SIDES is the author of The New York Times bestselling histories On Desperate Ground, In the Kingdom of Ice, Hellhound on his Trail, Blood and Thunder , and Ghost Soldiers , which won the PEN USA Award for Nonfiction. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Klappentext A Best Book of the Year USA Today * Time Magazine * Washington Post * Miami Herald * Richmond Times Dispatch * Christian Science Monitor * Daily Beast * Minneapolis Star Tribune On July 8, 1879, Captain George Washington De Long and his team of thirty-two men set sail from San Francisco on the USS Jeanette. Heading deep into uncharted Arctic waters, they carried the aspirations of a young country burning to be the first nation to reach the North Pole. Two years into the harrowing voyage, the Jeannette's hull was breached by an impassable stretch of pack ice, forcing the crew to abandon ship amid torrents of rushing of water. Hours later, the ship had sunk below the surface, marooning the men a thousand miles north of Siberia, where they faced a terrifying march with minimal supplies across the endless ice pack. Enduring everything from snow blindness and polar bears to ferocious storms and labyrinths of ice, the crew battled madness and starvation as they struggled desperately to survive. With thrilling twists and turns, In The Kingdom of Ice is a spellbinding tale of heroism and determination in the most brutal place on Earth.             Prologue : Baptism by Ice     On a misty morning in late April 1873, the Tigress, a steam barkentine out of Conception Bay, Newfoundland, was pushing through the loose floes and bergs off the coast of Labrador, heading for the seasonal seal-hunting grounds. Late in the morning, the Tigress encountered something strange: A lone Inuit in a kayak was hailing the ship, waving his arms and screaming at the top of his lungs. The native man was clearly in some kind of trouble. He had ventured much farther out into the perilous open waters of the North Atlantic than any Eskimo ordinarily would. When the Tigress pulled closer to him, he yelled, in accented English, “American steamer! American steamer!” The  crew of the Tigress   leaned over the railings and tried to decipher what the Inuit was talking about. Just then, the fog parted enough to reveal, in the middle distance, a jagged floe piece, on which more than a dozen men and women, plus several children, appeared to be trapped. Seeing the ship, the marooned party erupted in cheers and fired guns into the air. The Tigress ’s captain, Isaac Bartlett, ordered rescue boats put in the water. When the stranded people—nineteen in all—were brought aboard, it was immediately  apparent that they had suffered a horrific ordeal. Emaciated, filthy, and frostbitten, they had haunted looks in their eyes. Their lips and teeth were greasy from a just-finished break- fast of seal intestine. “How long have you been on the ice?” Captain Bartlett asked them. The senior member of the group, an American named George Tyson, stepped forward. “Since the fifteenth of October,” he replied. Bartlett tried to understand  what Tyson was saying. October 15 was 196 days earlier. These people, whoever they were, had been stranded on this ice slab for nearly seven months. Their precarious floe had been, Tyson said, a “God-made raft.” Bartlett questioned Tyson further and learned, to his astonish- ment, that these pitiful castaways had been aboard the Polaris, a ship famous around the world. (This was the “American steamer!”  the Inuit had been screaming about.) The Polaris,   an unprepossessing steam tug that had been reinforced for the ice, was the exploring ves- sel of an American polar...

Product details

• Authors: Hampton Sides
• Publisher: Anchor Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 26.05.2015
• EAN: 9780307946911
• ISBN: 978-0-307-94691-1
• No. of pages: 480
• Dimensions: 135 mm x 205 mm x 25 mm
• Subject: Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous