Voyage to the North Pole | Finding USS Jeannette | 6
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Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Against the Odds early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. I'm Mike Corey, and this is Against the Odds. On July 8th, 1879, the USS Jeanette left San Francisco on a voyage to explore the North Pole.

Her crew hoped to become the first people to reach the top of the world. The route? Head to the Bering Strait, unlike previous expeditions. Then, using questionable maps, find a passage through the ice and sail into the warm polar ocean. The goal? Discover new lands, species, or perhaps even unknown civilizations.

We know from our series that the USS Jeanette's journey became one of the most grueling ordeals imaginable for the 33-man crew. Joining me today is someone who traveled across the world, including to Siberia, to piece together what Captain George W. DeLong and his men went through. Hampton Sides chronicles the history of exploration in his many books, including In the Kingdom of Ice, The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeanette.

Hampton Sides. Welcome to Against the Odds. It's good to be with you. I got to ask first, how did you first come across the story of the USS Jeanette? I understand that it was on a different expedition? Yes, I was in Norway doing a story for National Geographic magazine about another polar exploration. A man named Fridtjof Nansen had been captivated by the Jeanette voyage and

he learned that a pair of Captain DeLong's seal-skin pants had washed up on the shores of Greenland. What this meant was that the Jeanette, when it sank, somehow this pair of pants

moved with the ice flows over the top of the world and came ashore in the Atlantic Ocean on the other side of the world. This suggested to Fridtjof Nansen that these were the prevailing currents and the prevailing direction of the wind and of the ice flows. And so he got this idea in his head, well, why don't I just essentially recreate the

the terrible voyage of the Jeanette, but do it in a boat that is designed very differently, that is designed absolutely to withstand the pressure of the ice. And why don't we get ourselves deliberately rammed into that ice?

drift with the ice flows and get as close as we possibly can to the North Pole. Then perhaps we'll get out on the ice with our dogs and make a mad dash for the North Pole and claim it. You know, this was still the grail of explorers for generations after DeLong.

But his voyage and recreation of DeLong did not go according to plan. They did get locked in the ice. They drifted toward the North Pole. They got very close, but they couldn't get to the pole. So I went to Norway. I went to Oslo to this amazing museum called the Fram Museum devoted to his ship, the Fram, the ship that was in fact designed to withstand the ice.

And everywhere you go, you see along the walls references to the Jeanette voyage. Oh, interesting. Captain DeLong. And as an American, I'm thinking, well, why haven't I heard of this? This should be in the shorthand of American tales. This is the American Shackleton story. I should know about it. It kept me busy for years. And I traveled all over the world to try to pin the story down. And I had a ball doing it. Well, talk to me about that. Because you, yeah, you did travel the world to retrace some of these steps, right? Yeah.

I did. You know, firstly, I wanted to understand some of the kind of underpinnings of the story and was particularly fascinated by August Peterman, the German scientist, or I should maybe say pseudoscientist, the exquisite mapmaker who lived in Germany. So I went to his village where he had his mapmaking empire. And from there, I went to Moscow and got a ton of permits because in order to get to Siberia, you had to have approval from all sorts of agencies.

I spent about two weeks in Moscow, and then I went to the Lena Delta, Siberia, where, of course, DeLong and his men wandered in that labyrinth for days and weeks. And we, of course, know their fate. I really wanted to see those places. I wanted to see particularly America Mountain, the place where George Melville buried his comrades.

and made a monument to their suffering. And finally, I also wanted to go up through the Bering Strait and see Wrangell Island and managed to get on a icebreaker that was heading north. We, in fact, briefly got stuck in the ice ourselves, even though we had essentially an icebreaker. But for a day, we didn't budge. And it was a fascinating and a little bit eerie experience to be

around that much ice and to hear the crunching and the sighing and just like the pressure of this pack. And you realize it's not a monolithic or quiet environment as the ice is warring with itself and warring with the ship. And imagine doing that in a ship that is not reinforced very well for the ice, a wooden ship for two years. You know, what I experienced was a very, very, very tame and very pale comparison to what these men were experiencing every single day.

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kind of like Bruce Wayne, Batman, Playboy character. And he was the guy who funded the Jeanette. I'd love if you could paint a picture here for our audience about who this guy was and why would he fund this crazy journey? Yeah, the more I learned about James Gordon Bennett Jr., the more I almost worried that he would upstage the entire book. James Gordon Bennett was an outrageous character, outlandishly wealthy. He was said to be the second richest man in New York City.

He was a playboy. He was a man of weird enthusiasms. Like, for example, he got into speed walking and held a race in New York City, which he won. He won the first transatlantic yacht race. He was, in fact, an amazing sailor.

He was fascinated by polo and brought polo to the United States. And then he got fascinated by tennis and he brought tennis to the United States. You know, he kind of kicked out of the United States after he dueled with someone. And he really ran his empire, his newspaper empire, largely from Paris. I mean, he was outrageous. He was an impossible man to work for.

He had a violent temper. He was quite erratic. He was famous for going to wealthy restaurants and ripping the tablecloth off the table of various patrons just for the hell of it. He just thought it was funny. He's like, I'm sorry. And then he writes a check immediately to pay for the damage. So you have this character, this crazy character who nonetheless...

is the guy who's bankrolling this voyage to the North Pole and many other kinds of expeditions. For example, he is the guy that sent Stanley to Africa to find Livingston. It made a great series of newspaper stories for his New York Herald. And that's probably why he got involved with Jeanette as well, right? Yeah, I was looking for an encore to that. He realized, man, you know, the job of newspapers and to sell newspapers is

Sometimes it isn't just to cover the news. It's also to make news, you know, to create it, build a news story. And the boy howdy, the Jeanette story was just that. It was a blockbuster. And if you were going to contrast Gordon Bennett with George DeLong, like Jeanette's captain, how would you do that? They couldn't be more different. Like I say, Bennett's erratic and he's flamboyant and he's usually nowhere to be found. He's on a yacht somewhere. Right.

Whereas DeLong is, you know, a true man of the Navy, very responsible, very committed, very studious, a little nerdy, maybe a little geeky. You know, he's a deep reader and a deep thinker and very stoic and willing to suffer for this cause. Whereas Bennett did not like to suffer for

Bennett liked to live high on the hog. But what's really weird about all this when you think about it is not only do you have this eccentric millionaire newspaper baron funding it, but it is in collaboration with the U.S. Navy. This was a time when the U.S. Navy was fledgling. It didn't have the money to really pull off an expedition like this. It needed the money, but

But it did have expertise. It did have ships. It did have Navy officers who could lead the voyage. I guess you brought up Shackleton. Shackleton went south, right? Looking for the South Pole. Then you drew some similarities, I guess, there. How did DeLong get a crew of misfits for his journey? A tour in the Navy, I mean, generally speaking, it was boring as hell. Most of these officers were bored out of their minds.

They're just running cruises to various locations. This is not a time of war. So the idea of going to places that humans had never been to before, places that had never been mapped, had an enormous appeal to a certain kind of Navy officer. He really didn't have a hard time. In fact, he had to turn away a lot of really qualified people. I guess there are plenty of people out there who...

have the adventure gene, are willing to suffer for it. And, you know, we also have to remember this was a time when life was dangerous. People didn't live long.

I mean, they were tough. So what's the difference between being tough on land and tough at sea, really? So he really did not have a hard time finding a good crew of officers. And I imagine back then, the explorers were real heroes, right? Going off into the unknown. And with this crew here, they had some idea maybe what would be up there. There was a great map in your book, too, about this supposed polar sea up north. And with that in mind, on the maps, they thought, hell, let's give it a shot, right? Yeah.

I'm sure that those maps must have tantalized some of the guys. There were scientists like August Peterman who truly believed that the warm water currents that we were learning a lot more about, and I'm talking mainly about the Gulf Stream, but also a corollary current in the Pacific Ocean that's called the Kurosiwa Current,

The idea was that these two currents go north, they finally meet the ice, they tunnel under the ice, and they keep going all the way to the North Pole. And that if there they meet, they create this warm water basin, which if you can just tunnel through the ice, and perhaps that warm water current will soften a pathway through the ice, you'll get to this warm water basin.

It was an old idea that goes all the way back to Mercator and ancient maps, completely flawed, completely made up. But once you get an idea of

enshrined in a map, particularly a beautiful map, it becomes almost impossible to dislodge that idea from the public imagination. And on top of all of that, there were all these kind of crazy scientific theories about pseudo-scientific theories about what's up there, that there's an enormous hole that leads down into the earth or a lost continent or a nice kind of warm water bathtub up there full of

marine mammals and all these crazy ideas that were, I guess, their day's version of conspiracy theories. DeLong was a skeptic, but he was willing to suffer and die to test it. And he was willing to at least get as close to it as he could. And let's just lay out for our listeners the concise plan that DeLong had. So where they took off from, what their expected arrival date was, some things they thought they would encounter and what they thought they'd find when they did arrive at the supposed destination.

polar sea. So DeLong planned to leave from San Francisco where there was a Navy base there and he would fill the ship with food enough for two years and that would be 33 men. His plan also was to go pick up some

Inuit hunters in Alaska, which he in fact did, and some sled dogs. His plan was to, you know, during the summer season, get through the Bering Strait. And the idea was to get through whatever ice there would be, having a ship that was reinforced for the ice,

And by late summer, you'd probably pop out on the other side and be in this open polar sea, sometimes described as a bathtub, where they no doubt would be doing some fishing and maybe some limited amount of whaling and have access to food up there. And they would work their way over to the Atlantic side and essentially tunnel again through the ice and go south and pop out somewhere around Greenland. That was the idea.

They would be, of course, welcomed as heroes. They would have reached the North Pole. They would have seen what's up there, perhaps discovering some islands up there that, who knows, maybe they were populated by people. Maybe they were populated by strange creatures that had never been seen before. It was a tidy plan, but

It sounded great. An excellent summer adventure. Yeah, exactly. But it obviously didn't work out that way. Things did not go according to plan. I'm speaking with author and historian Hampton Sides about the voyage of the USS Jeanette. We'll take a quick break and then talk about what happened when the men got to the Arctic. ♪

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But of course, it wasn't a continent. It was an island. And if you look at a map, it's like 60 miles wide or something, hardly a continent. And you've actually been to Wrangell Island, right? Can you paint us a picture of what it's like there? I went there for a story for National Geographic. It is a fascinating place. It has become, now that the ice flows have shrunk or become less reliable, the polar bears congregate there in huge numbers.

And I got to see a lot of polar bear. That was fascinating. And maybe a bit scary because they're one of the bears that will be very interested in a human sandwich if they can get their hands on you. Absolutely. Thank God the structures there have really secure structures.

bear guards on every window. But they're only doing that really because there's no ice anymore. And, you know, one of the kind of ironies or tragedies of the Jeanette story is that if DeLong had embarked today on the same journey, he would never have gotten stuck in the ice on the trajectory he was on. It's a very different world now.

So Wrangell Island is a place that is believed to be the last place on Earth where woolly mammoths lived. There was a kind of a pygmy, smaller subspecies of woolly mammoth that lived there thousands of years after they had become extinct species.

Yeah.

was once claimed by the United States and now very much claimed by Russia. And although DeLong never made it to Wrangell, he tried to get on there, but the ice carried him away in another direction. A subsequent voyage, the Corwin, which was trying to find DeLong, did make landfall at Wrangell Island and out popped one of the more interesting participants of that voyage, the Corwin, and that was the young John Muir, the conservationist,

He was a newspaper reporter back then. He describes beautifully the flora and the fauna of Wrangell. And they're looking everywhere on that island for some signs, some tidings of the Jeannette. They do not find anything. They decide that maybe the Jeannette never touched here. And of course, the Jeannette got stuck on the ice for a very long time, even though she was an icebreaker. And you were on a much more modern icebreaker. And I'd love for you to paint a picture of just

The sounds, the experience, because myself and I'm assuming most of our listeners have never been on one before. But even just the thought of this wedge being jammed through ice sounds like a wild experience. It's quite violent. It's quite dynamic environment. First, when the ship is bashing through the ice, it is just all these shuddering sounds. You can feel it rattling through the entire ship.

structure of the boat and sometimes kind of rattles your bones. It's terrifying and wonderful to know that this is a ship that is massively reinforced and can withstand that. We

We did stop at one point and got out on some of the ice flows, the ones that were deemed to be safe enough to do that. And that's a whole different experience. It's beautiful and a little bit terrifying. There's so much noise, crunching sounds, and pressure ridges that are being formed. You're dealing with millions of...

foot pounds of fresh air. And it's a very dynamic environment. It's constantly changing. It makes these high-pitched sounds and then these guttural, low-pitched sounds that sound almost like growling. And water pushing up through holes and you're constantly in danger of perhaps slipping and falling or

perhaps drowning in these various pools that form. It's also, I can see how it would be an intoxicating thing for these explorers and kind of hauntingly beautiful. Yeah. Actually hearing you explain it in a strange contrast slash similarity, it almost sounds volcanic, right? Active, moving, cracking pools, geysers, all that kind of stuff.

Yeah, that's a pretty good description. A different kind of volcanic. The other thing is the different colors of blue. It's like 50 shades of gray. There's 50 shades of blue, old ice warring with new ice.

It's not this monochrome white that you might expect. There's a lot of color. Yeah, and I guess if people haven't seen that popsicle blue color of old ice that was deposited 10,000 years ago or something, it really is a special thing to see all those different shades.

Yeah, and the journals of the men, including DeLong, capture that. They aren't always suffering. They aren't completely tone deaf to the beauty. It's there. It is extraordinary at times. And getting stuck was part of the plan, right? They had lots of food. They had a library on board. Edison gave them some lights. Didn't work, but that was all part of the plan to get stuck for a little while. Not two years, but... Right. So they were there for the ride, you know? They knew it was going to happen at some point. They hoped it would be for a short time.

But they did bring, as you say, a lot of entertainments on board. They had Edison's lights. Unfortunately, it didn't work. They had telephones by Alexander Graham Bell that they wanted to set up on the ice to communicate over longer distances. They played football out on the ice. They went on hunting expeditions and became quite adept at hunting walrus and polar bear. DeLong was very insistent that they get out on the ice and do calisthenics and exercise activities.

They're constantly taking measurements of everything, the thickness of the ice and the barometric pressure, direction of the wind, all these scientific logs, which are now housed in National Archives in Washington. And this is a great data point that scientists today use to compare today's ice pack with what it looked like 150 years ago, 200 years ago. Yeah.

But then the stakes changed very drastically one day when the Jeannette sank, didn't it? Yes. And DeLong, of course, had planned for this. He had a plan for which objects to get out on the ice, which things to save and which things to forget about because they knew they'd have to move fast. These 33 men have to get out on the ice with whatever belongings that they're going to get them to safety and including their three boats. This was a decision that DeLong made.

He decided to bring all of these extremely heavy, cumbersome log books that have all the scientific information in them. Also his journals, all of his logs, because he knew that if the world never saw these things, it would be as though the Jeanette voyage never happened. You know, documentation was so important, even though they were so heavy. You know, when you go to National Archives and you see these things, these huge, very heavy books,

And his journals, you realize the sacrifice and the toil that it took to get them there. You know, they not only had to drag them across the ice pack and across the water, open water to Siberia and across the Lana Delta. And then finally by dog team and reindeer team to a railhead. And then finally all the way to St. Petersburg and then London. And then finally New York city and then Washington DC national archives. What a journey. Yeah, exactly. Hey,

Hey, listen, I'm a bit of a shipwreck enthusiast, and I'm wondering, do we know where the Jeannette went down? Yes. When the ship went down, DeLong, and this is somewhat indicative of his personality, he took as many measurements as he could over the next two or three days. They didn't start on their trek for Siberia immediately. They took quite accurate measurements of where they were when the ship went down. I can't remember those coordinates now, but they know pretty darn well where it is.

I've seen it placed on maps. It looks to be in about 250 feet of water. That's not too deep. That's not too deep. But it's perhaps just deep enough to escape the scraping of the underside of the ice pack. There are some people who have dreamed, including myself, dreamed about going to the site of the wreck and bringing up things like Edison's light bulbs and Alexander Graham Bell's telephones. One of the most unfortunate things is

And this may be one of the reasons why the Jeanette voyage isn't better known is that all the photographs that were taken all went down with the ship. So the question might be, is there any way to bring them up?

curate them and somehow bring them back to life. There was a passage in your book that I loved, and it was about what DeLong and his men had to endure, hauling their boats and supplies and their books and their logs across the ice to reach land. Can you read it to us? Yes. You're talking about the skeleton pack. Yeah, they call it the skeleton pack because so many of these ice forms look like bones, enormous bones. Okay, here it is. It was the time of the skeleton pack.

The time of tapered pools of meltwater and cul-de-sac canals, of aquatic riddles nearly impossible to solve. The flows were too soft and hole-ridden to allow the men to make any reliable progress by sledging, but neither was there enough open water to advance by sail. So they probed and threaded through these icy labyrinths, sometimes rowing their three boats, sometimes towing them from cake to melting cake.

So winding and intricate were these endless channels, DeLong thought, that I am reminded of the maze at Hampton Court. DeLong called it the Skeleton Pack because he thought it resembled an entanglement of bones. A dinosaur graveyard floating upon the slate blue sea. A reliquary of ice. Clean white ribs. Winged vertebrae. Cracked skulls pocked with eye openings.

Bleached balls floating loose in their sockets. For 15 days, they struggled over, through, and around it. Sometimes they would venture for half a day down an enticing lane, only to find that it gradually narrowed and then terminated. Other times they had to haul up on a slab and portage a half mile over to a larger channel.

Or they would use chisels and picks and ropes to pry open a large flow piece in order to obtain passage to another neck of water. In this way, they made fitful progress toward the south. One day, nine miles. Another day, five. Another day, twelve. What a beautiful depiction of that intense struggle.

And as they were crossing the ice, trying to find any way back to any kind of land, they did encounter uninhabited islands, a couple of them. And then they tried to make a big dash to the Siberian mainland in their boats, three different boats. But a storm hit and then only two boats made it to land. And just this whole journey, it's...

It's so hard to understand everything these people went through to be able to get to land these little boats on the north coast in the delta in Siberia. This is still the middle of nowhere. I urge listeners to go look up Lena Delta on a map. What's the men's predicament at this point?

You mentioned that they discovered these islands. These are islands that are known to this day as the DeLong Islands. And there's an island called Bennett Island, named after James Gordon Bennett. And as they're making their way south towards the Lennon Delta, they're trying to get to the Lennon Delta because the maps that had been provided by August Peterman very clearly showed all these villages in the Delta. You know, there's people there. If we can just get to those people, we'll be saved. Yeah.

Unfortunately, we believe one of the boats capsized in that freezing water and all those men perished. But two of the boats make landfall in the delta, which is an unbelievably tangled landscape. All deltas are complicated places, but this is unusually so because it empties into the Arctic Ocean and it freezes every year and it backs up. It's like a cauliflower that just pops out from the coast of Siberia.

Thousands of islands, thousands of channels, cul-de-sacs. It's a horrible labyrinth and one of the worst places to make landfall because it turns out it was a wilderness. There weren't villages there. Those maps were wrong. So they made landfall in a complete desolate wilderness. And they're trying to find each other. They're trying to save themselves. It's already starting to snow. What a nightmare.

My guest is author and historian Hampton Sides. When we return, we'll hear what happened to the men from the USS Jeanette. This season, Instacart has your back to school. As in, they've got your back to school lunch favorites, like snack packs and fresh fruit. And they've got your back to school supplies, like backpacks, binders, and pencils. And they've got your back when your kid casually tells you they have a huge school project due tomorrow.

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Captain DeLong and his men tried to navigate the Lena River Delta, but the maps they had weren't accurate. Not the first time that happened in the voyage, was it? Anyway, the villages that were on the maps, they just weren't there and the terrain was almost impassable. And as winter was coming, they were already so weakened and the odds were not in their favor. So what options did DeLong have at this point?

He had very few options and they were dwindling fast. Even the birds had left by then. There were migratory birds. They knew winter was coming. They had already headed south. So there's not much to eat anymore. So they're getting desperate. They're moving as fast as they possibly can toward the south, thinking they'll eventually find a village. But more of the men are developing horrible frostbite. And one of the men has to have an amputation and

It's getting gruesome. And DeLong is beginning to see the writing on the wall. The villages that they said were there, not all of them were there, but they did find people living in the river Delta. That did help them. They eventually did. Eventually DeLong decided to split his men into kind of two parties, those that could move faster and did not seem to have frostbite. You go ahead and see if you can find a village. And eventually they do. And DeLong

The Yakut people is an extraordinary tribe of people who had made this place their home for centuries.

saved them. And they, of course, tried to go back out to find along, and they were unable to find them. But the Yakut people are amazing. They speak a language almost identical to Turkish. Oh, wow. And had lived out there really just to avoid the long arm of the Tsar. And they were tough people who were reindeer herders and fishermen.

and moved seasonally over the delta. But by then they had pulled back to a series of villages further inland. You went to a village where the ancestors of the people there now actually helped the Jeanette survivors, right? Yes, and they knew all about the Jeanette story there. They're very proud of it. They're very proud to have helped. But think about it. They probably thought at the very beginning when these hairy, greasy, starving people

strange people show up in their village that, you know, one of the stories that's passed down is that they thought that they had come up out of the sea, that there were some creatures that lived beneath the sea because they had, you know, just never imagined that they would see white people coming inland like that.

But then they just began to, of course, figure out very quickly that these people were starving and desperate. And they were quite generous with their venison and with their fish. And they brought the survivors back to life fairly quickly. And how did the word finally get out that the Jeanette had, that people from the boat had survived? That's a story in and of itself. I mean, getting the word out to the world took forever, even though we now have telegraphs and newspapers everywhere.

There was a dog team. There was a reindeer team. It got on a railhead and went to Moscow. Once it got there, there was telegraphs that came in to the offices of the New York Herald and also to the United States Navy.

It took over a month for this message to get to the wider world. Do you remember what the message said at all? It was very vague. And this gave Emma DeLong, George DeLong's wife, much hope that maybe her husband was one of the survivors. And I imagine you were quite attached to that part of the story because of the letters that you were given, right? You had Emma's letters at one point. Yes. I think all historians have this kind of fantasy that they're going to find a descendant of a main character of their book and...

They're going to say, oh, we've got a trunk full of old letters in the attic. We don't know what to do with. Would you please come take it off my hands? And that had never happened to me before, but it did happen in this case. I was calling all the DeLongs of New England, trying to find some descendants and called this woman Catherine DeLong in Connecticut. And she said, yeah, you know, I just found this old trunk.

It's full of all these yellowed old papers and things. And there are all the letters of Emma DeLong, the wife of the captain. What's amazing is that in that trunk full of old letters, there were

copies of these letters that she had sent around the world. She had sent letters. She called them letters to nowhere. She hoped that if she sent them by way of Arctic whalers toward the north in all different directions, that somehow, some way, they would reach her husband. And they were love letters. They were essentially, come home. I love you. I'm with our daughter now. We're by the fireplace.

And some of them were a little bit salacious. You know, she really hoped he would come back and thought these letters would reach him. And unfortunately, none of them did. You would know firsthand how how much in love that they were. You read Emma's letters. She still thought he was alive and they were very much in love, as we know.

But he perished. His group perished. And when Melville and the rescue party came, they found their frozen remains. They buried their remains. And I'd love if you can describe what they did with them to honor DeLong.

George Melville, the engineer who really becomes one of the great leaders of this story, particularly in DeLong's absence, realizes that he's got to mount another expedition and go back and try to find DeLong and his party of men. He goes back home.

hundreds and hundreds of miles by dog team and by reindeer team. And he does eventually find DeLong and his men. And he does eventually find the log books, amazingly, that had been left with a cairn in the hope that someone would find them. And in fact, Melville finds them. But he's not really sure what to do with the bodies of these men. So he finds the highest location he can for 100 miles in any direction. And he goes to the top.

And he buries the men, which is not an easy thing to do in permafrost. It's a pretty shallow grave, but there's lots of rocks and they build a monument there with a huge cross on it. And he calls it America Mountain. And they have a ceremony there for his men. To this day, that place, it's a high hill, I don't know, a very small mountain that they call America Mountain. The Yakut people call it that.

and Russian scientists who go there studying the climate change will make the trek up to America Mountain. And when I was there, I went up and paid my respects one day. It took forever or ever to get there. There's a little box with messages in it. Some of them were in English. Some of them were in French. Most of them were in Russian. A couple of them were in Japanese. And I left my own little message to the men wishing DeLong well, paying my respects, and

He had a slogan. He had a message that he always sent out to his men, which was, Niel Desperandum, never despair. I wrote that in my note. What an incredible story to be on America Mountain with this box of little notes from people from all over the world in different languages, finding themselves at this one remote place, maybe pursuing this story. And where is DeLong buried today? Once they could assemble a real team of

Man, during the summer, I guess it was the following summer, they exhumed all the bodies and got them to the United States. He's buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, which is a beautiful, beautiful cemetery in the Bronx. He's buried with some of the other men who were brought back from Russia. It's an extraordinary place and a place of pilgrimage. You should go there.

Well, Hampton Sides, thank you so much for joining me today on Against the Odds. What a great talk. It's been a great pleasure. I've enjoyed it. If you like Against the Odds, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.

This is the sixth and final episode of our series, Voyage to the North Pole. Thank you so much to our guest, Hampton Sides. He's the author of In the Kingdom of Ice, the Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeanette. His new book is called The Wide, Wide Sea, Imperial Ambition, First Contact, and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook.

I'm your host, Mike Corey. This episode was produced by Pauly Stryker. Audio engineer is Sergio Enriquez. Coordinating producer is Desi Blaylock. Series produced by Emily Frost. Managing producer is Matt Gant. Senior managing producer is Ryan Lohr. Senior producers are Peter Arcuni and Andy Herman. Executive producers are Jenny Lauer-Beckman, Stephanie Jens, Marshall Louis, and Erin O'Flaherty for Wondery.

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