of following the conventional route north through Baffin’s Bay and Smith Sound, the “Jeannette” sailed from San Francisco and pushed northward through Bering Sea.  In July, 1879, she weighed anchor.  Two years after, no word having been heard of her meanwhile, the inevitable relief expedition was sent out—­the steamer “Rodgers,” which after making a gallant dash to a most northerly point, was caught in the ice-pack and there burned to the water’s edge, her crew, with greatest difficulty, escaping, and reaching home without one ray of intelligence of DeLong’s fate.

That fate was bitter indeed, a trial by cold, starvation, and death, fit to stand for awesomeness beside Greely’s later sorrowful story.  From the very outset evil fortune had attended the “Jeannette.”  Planning to winter on Wrangle Land—­then thought to be a continent—­DeLong caught in the ice-pack, was carried past its northern end, thus proving it to be an island, indeed, but making the discovery at heavy cost.  Winter in the pack was attended with severe hardships and grave perils.  Under the influence of the ocean currents and the tides, the ice was continually breaking up and shifting, and each time the ship was in imminent danger of being crushed.  In his journal DeLong tries to describe the terrifying clamor of a shifting pack.  “I know of no sound on shore that can be compared with it,” he writes.  “A rumble, a shriek, a groan, and the crash of a falling house all combined, might serve to convey an idea of the noise with which this motion of the ice-floe is accompanied.  Great masses from fifteen to twenty-five feet in height, when up-ended, are sliding along at various angles of elevation and jam, and between and among them are large and confused masses of debris, like a marble yard adrift.  Occasionally a stoppage occurs; some piece has caught against or under our floe; there follows a groaning and crackling, our floe bends and humps up in places like domes.  Crash!  The dome splits, another yard of floe edge breaks off, the pressure is relieved, and on goes again the flowing mass of rumbles, shrieks, groans, etc., for another spell.”

[Illustration:  DELONG’S MEN DRAGGING THEIR BOATS OVER THE ICE]

Time and again this nerve-racking experience was encountered.  More than once serious leaks were started in the ship, which had to be met by working the pumps and building false bulwarks in the hold; but by the exercise of every art known to sailors, she was kept afloat and tenable until June 11, 1881, when a fierce and unexpected nip broke her fairly in two, and she speedily sunk.  There followed weeks and months of incessant and desperate struggling with sledge and boat against the forces of polar nature.  The ship had sunk about 150 miles from what are known as the New Siberian Islands, for which DeLong then laid his course.  The ice was rugged, covered with soft snow, which masked treacherous pitfalls, and full of chasms which had to be bridged.