George W. DeLong

George W. DeLong

The USS Jeannette

George W. DeLong ( George Washington DeLong * 22. August 1844 in New York City , † around the thirtieth October 1881 in the delta of the Lena , Siberia) was a US -American navigator and Arctic explorer .

DeLong entered the United States Naval Academy in 1861 and became a lieutenant in 1869 . In 1873 he took part in the expedition to Baffin Bay to search for the lost crew of the Polaris in Melville Bay .

North course

DeLong initially drove on whaling ships, most recently as a captain . On July 8, 1879, he broke in San Francisco (United States) with the ship Jeannette and 32 crew members on a north polar expedition financed by the publisher James Gordon Bennett Jr. to clarify the fate of the missing ship Vega used by Adolf Erik Freiherr von Nordenskiöld on. After a stopover in Alaska , he passed the Bering Strait on August 29, 1879 and reached the Chukchi Peninsula . Here DeLong learned that the Vega had resumed her voyage after a successful winter. Thereupon he made the decision to reach the North Pole with the Jeannette .

Frozen in the polar sea

On September 5, 1879, the Jeannette froze in the ice of the Arctic Ocean near Herald Island . After a short time, the ship leaked. During the ice drift that followed, DeLong discovered the De Long Islands named after him . After two years, however, his ship got into severe ice pressures and sank on June 13, 1881 about 800 km from the Lena Delta . DeLong and his crew were initially able to save themselves. During their march to the Siberian coast, however, the ice drift drove them further north. Since the direction and intensity of the ice drift changed in the following days and they also changed their course, the castaways reached the New Siberian Islands in September 1881 . On September 12th, the castaways decided to cross over to the Lena Delta with their 3 boats. A boat led by DeLongs, one led by marine engineer George Wallace Melville (1841-1912) - the actual boat captain Lieutenant John Wilson Danenhower (1849-1887) could not do his job because of a chronic eye condition - and one took under the leadership of Lieutenant Chipp the course. They soon got caught in a storm and were separated. The boat under the command of Lieutenant Chipp is missing.

In the Lena Delta of Siberia

The group led by Melville was rescued by Yakut hunters. There was no trace of the second group that DeLong had led. After a few days, however, two men from this group, Wilhelm Nindemann and Louis Philippe Noros (1850–1927), reached the Yakut camp and met their comrades. In November 1881 they were restored to the point where the survivors could leave for the spot where the DeLong group had apparently disembarked. They found only traces of DeLong and his men. Because of the approaching polar night and extremely low temperatures, they had to break off their search in November 1881. In 1882 a new search party led by Melville found the last camps of DeLong's group. A camp was found on the embankment of a Lena arm. There, around a fireplace, the bodies of Walter Lee (1840–1881), Heinrich H. Kaack (1857–1881), Neils Iverson (1848–1881), Adolph Dressler (1857–1881), Carl A. Gortz ( 1844-1881) and Jerome J. Collins (1841-1881). About 500 meters away the search party saw a rigid, frozen hand sticking out of the snow. It was DeLong's hand who drew attention to the “last camp”. The bodies of DeLong, Dr. Ambler and Ah Sam. His diary lay next to DeLong's body. The search expedition erected a tomb and the names of all those who had died from DeLong's boat were placed on a cross. Especially the entries of the last days of the unfortunate group DeLongs in his diary have been published several times, the last page as a “copy of the original”. There they learn that the members of the DeLong group starved to death.

Late finds off Greenland

In 1884 the remains of the Jeannette were found on the east coast of Greenland . As a result of the ice drift, Noros clothing and some wreckage had been transported over 2,900 km. This find gave Fridtjof Nansen the idea of ​​reproducing the drift of the effects with a ship, which was finally implemented during the Fram expedition (1893-1896) . DeLong's diaries were preserved and were later published by his wife.

literature

• The voyage of the Jeannette. The ship and ice journals of George W. De Long, lieutenant-commander USN and commander of the Polar expedition of 1879-1881. Edidet by his wife, Emma Dealing […] in two volumes. Boston 1884 (digitized volume 1 and volume 2 in the Internet Archive ).
• H. Wichmann: The polar expedition of the "Jeannette" under Lieut. De Long, 1879-1882 . In: Petermann's Geographische Mittheilungen 28, No. 7, 1882, pp. 241-252.
• William H. Gilder : In ice and snow. The discovery of the Jeannette expedition. Verlag F. A. Brockhaus, Leipzig 1884; New edition under the title The Downfall of the Jeannette Expedition. Brockhaus, Leipzig 1921 (Reprint: Europäische Hochschulverlag / maritime press, Bremen 2013)
• Fridtjof Nansen : In night and ice. Verlag F. A. Brockhaus, Leipzig 1897
• Knud Rasmussen : Book of Heroes of the Arctic. Voyages of discovery to the North and South Poles. Verlag F. A. Brockhaus, Leipzig 1933
• Tom Wittgen : Ice Sea Drift. Historical novel about the sinking of the Jeannette expedition. New Life Publishing House, Berlin 1979, ISBN 3360001125
• Hampton Sides : The Polar Voyage. About an irresistible longing, a grandiose plan and its dramatic end in the ice. Mare Verlag, Hamburg 2017, ISBN 978-3866482432 (detailed description of the last expedition of the USS Jeanette under the direction of DeLong; excerpt: PDF, 7.1 MB )

Web links

• Lieutenant Commander George W. DeLong, USN, (1844-1881) , entry with the Naval History & Heritage Command of the United States Navy