The entry says that the Jeannette’s result reached Christiania on a pair of oilskin breeches. This piece goes through the record of the find: what was found, what the people who handled it said, what the people who did not want to believe it said, and the arithmetic Nansen made from it. The documents are Lytzen’s letter of 23 June 1884, Captain Wilson’s statement and Noros’s letter of 20 August 1884, all printed by Charles Wolcott Brooks in San Francisco that September; Lytzen’s article in the Danish Geographical Society’s journal for 1885, which I have translated; and the first chapter of Farthest North.

Lytzen’s account

Carl Lytzen was the kolonibestyrer, the colonial manager, at Julianehaab, the Danish trading colony at the southern end of Greenland’s west coast. He began his article by saying that the objects themselves were worth nothing: “old clothes, scraps of cloth, torn pieces of paper and the like; but the peculiar circumstances under which they were found give them very great scientific importance.” Then he told the story.

“On the three-year anniversary of the day the shipwrecked men had left the ice floe, 18 June 1884, three Greenlandic kayakmen who were out hunting in Julianehaab fjord noticed that a raven kept hovering over a piece of ice out in the fjord. They concluded at once that there must be something peculiar about this piece of ice, and so tried to work their way over to the spot. When they came nearer they did indeed catch sight of a cotton sock sticking out of the ice, and then discovered several other objects, most of which were frozen fast in it. The three Greenlanders took great pains to save as many of the objects they could see as possible; but since they were not at all prepared for work of that kind, and had only the most inadequate tools with them for the purpose, they had to content themselves with a smaller part and leave the rest. They noticed at the same time that the piece of ice on which the things were found was in the course of breaking in two.

“The ice conditions in the fjord were unfavourable in those days, and it was not until 20 June that one of the kayakmen was able to reach Julianehaab, where he at once reported to me what had happened. I sailed out at once to the place indicated, accompanied by the kayakman in question and four other capable kayakmen; but in spite of all the effort expended, the remarkable piece of ice was no longer to be found. I now offered a reward that was, by Greenland standards, exceedingly generous, for the recovery of at least some of the things that had had to be left on the floe; but it helped just as little. The piece of ice with the things on it was gone, and stayed gone, for good.

“On the other hand, in the following days there came word of a similar find from Kassimiut, a smaller trading station nine miles north-west of Julianehaab. There were found there in all 58 pieces of clothing, which the finders divided among themselves, and several of which were at once taken into use. I did, however, succeed in acquiring various of these things, and I shall now give a summary of the most important of the objects saved from the two finds.”

Nine Danish miles are about sixty-eight kilometres. His list:

“1. A provision list signed by the commander of the Jeannette, Lieutenant de Long, with the commander’s own signature.

1. A written list of the ship Jeannette’s boats.
2. A cap peak on which is written F. C. Lindemann. That was precisely the name of one of the expedition’s members, who is among those saved.
3. A pair of oilskin trousers with the name Louis Noros. That was the name of one of the crew of the Jeannette.
4. A great quantity of scraps of paper belonging to various notes and the like.
5. A piece of a cheque book, in which there are also several American postage stamps.
6. A good many buttons and similar things.
7. Many different pieces of clothing, some whole, some more or less torn; among them may be mentioned the upper part of a pair of trousers whose lower half was lost when the piece of ice broke up in Julianehaab fjord.
8. Remains of a tent, especially lines and cords.”

The seaman’s name was Nindemann; “Lindemann” is how it had been read off a cap. Lytzen went on to what the three kayakers agreed had been left frozen in the floe: “the lower parts of a tent of cloth, of which some cords and lines, as mentioned, were saved; a bearskin, of which one foreleg and part of the hair stuck out of the ice; a large boot of skin, sewn together from seal and dog skin with stripes along it; the remains of a partly rotten skin with a fine coat of hair, probably a buffalo skin or a black sheepskin.”

Then the argument. Several of the objects carried the names of members of the expedition, he wrote, and with the list of the boats and the provision list signed by De Long himself, “the matter is perfectly clear; the objects in question cannot belong to any other vessel than the Jeannette, which went down in the Arctic Ocean north of the coast of Siberia on 13 June 1881.”

Lytzen’s letter, and the body

What reached America first was shorter. On 23 June 1884 Lytzen wrote to the Danish consulate in New York, in a letter the consulate translated for the New York Herald when it arrived in Philadelphia on 15 August aboard the cryolite barque Fluorine:

“I hereby take the liberty to request the consulate to inform the editors of The New York Herald that on the 18th inst., three Greenlanders picked up on an ice-floe some effects, and some partly torn papers belonging to the American Arctic Jeannette expedition, among which are the following:

“1. Two end-pieces of a wooden box, on which are written with lead pencil, on one piece: GENERAL ORDERS. TELEGRAMS. SAILING ORDERS. DISCIPLINE. SHIP’S PAPERS. VARIOUS AGREEMENTS. CHARTER PARTY. The last words not very plain. On the other piece was: BEFORE SAILING.

“3. A torn check book. On the back of one of the checks is printed, ‘For deposit with the bank of California.’

“4. A pair of oilskin trousers, marked: Louis Noros.

“These effects, numbering twenty-one pieces (besides the papers), are in my possession. I am going home to remain during the winter.”

The Fluorine’s master, Captain Alexander Wilson, who had been told of the find by the superintendent of the cryolite mine at Ivigtut, gave Brooks a fuller version at second hand. The Greenlanders had found the floe “floating in latitude 60° 36’ north, longitude 46° 7’ west”; on it were “the lower part of a tent, the upper part of which had been blown away by the storms of three Arctic winters; also the ends of a provision cask, and some stores marked ‘Jeannette’”, a charter party for the schooner that had carried the expedition’s coal to Alaska, “a partially used check book on the Bank of California, with a package of cancelled checks, signed by Captain DeLong — a pair of oilskin trousers marked ‘Louis Noros,’ and a bear skin, covering something of the size and shape of a human corpse, which the Greenlanders did not remove to ascertain what was under it, owing to a native superstition rendering those temporarily unclean who handle the dead bodies of human beings.”

That was the story that went round the American papers. Lytzen, writing after he had got home to Copenhagen, dealt with it at the end of his article. “Before I close, I must mention that, while I was still at Julianehaab, it came to my knowledge that it had been printed in several American papers that on the bearskin on the piece of ice at Julianehaab there lay a human body. Before my departure in September 1884 I therefore took great pains to speak with the three kayakmen who had discovered the bearskin and the other things. I succeeded in meeting two of these Greenlanders, and both assured me unanimously that they had not seen the slightest trace of any such human body, nor had the least suspicion that any such thing was on the piece of ice. This report must therefore have been invented in America to make the find more piquant. It is completely plucked out of the air.”

Noros

Louis Philippe Noros had been in De Long’s boat, and with Nindemann had been sent ahead on 9 October 1881 to find help; the two were the only men of the fourteen who lived. On 20 August 1884, from Newburyport, Massachusetts, he wrote an explanation that Brooks printed.

“Before we left the Jeannette we carried on to the ice a lot of bear skins, which we spread out to form a floor, and in addition carried clothing, food, rifles, tobacco, etc. After the Jeannette was crushed we had to leave the bear skins, a lot of canned goods, cans, rifles, and 200 or 300 pounds of tobacco behind, as we could not carry them all over the ice. We also left all the clothing except what we had on, and a suit of under-clothing, which we packed and carried in a knapsack. We carried five tents with us, De Long’s party having two, Melville’s two, and Chipp’s one. I may possibly have left my sealskin pantaloons on the ice where the Jeannette went down, but my impression is that they were left with other clothing, ship’s implements, utensils, papers, etc., in the cache left by De Long on the Siberian coast.”

He had a difficulty of his own. “What puzzles me most is how these articles now reported found could have remained on the ice so long. My experience taught me that all small articles placed on the ice in the arctic regions always attracted the sun and gradually melted down through the ice until lost to sight. Why, in a very short time a chip would be buried its own thickness under the ice by this peculiar process, and if the things found really belonged to the Jeannette something strangely wonderful seems to have providentially kept them so long a time on the surface of the ice.”

Brooks answered him from De Long’s journal. Six tents had been landed on the ice and five carried south, so one had been left. And De Long had sealed a written synopsis of the cruise, dated on the floe on 17 June 1881, in black rubber inside an empty water breaker and left it with the debris of the first camp; a commander who took that trouble, Brooks argued, would have covered the cache, and a covered cache would not melt down. Brooks also had the one piece of evidence that outweighed all opinion, the ship’s own log: “The Jeannette drifted steadily westward up to the time she sank, and the ice-floe on which these relics were found may have been one of those upon which her party took refuge just before she sunk. It is but natural to suppose that the floe kept on drifting westward, just as the Jeannette had been doing. Her course, while wedged in the ice, is a true proof of a westerly current along this unexplored and shallow portion of the Arctic Ocean north of Siberia.” And he drew the conclusion that is the hinge of the whole story: “it appears quite certain that had the Jeannette proved strong enough to hold together, she would have sailed safely into New York early in the Spring of 1884, if not before.”

The people who did not believe it

The doubt had two parts. One was that the objects were not from the Jeannette at all. The other was that even if they were, they had come to Greenland by some way other than across the Pole.

Adolphus Greely, in The Forum for August 1891, took the first: “Probably some drift articles were found, and it would seem more reasonable to trace them to the Proteus, which was wrecked in Smith Sound about 1,000 miles north of Julianehaab.” The Proteus was the relief ship that had sunk in 1883 on her way to Greely’s own party. Admiral Sir George Richards, in a letter read at the Royal Geographical Society in November 1892, attached “no real importance” to the relics: “If found in Greenland, they may well have drifted down on a floe from the neighbourhood of Smith Sound, from some of the American Expeditions which went to Greely’s rescue. It may also well be that some of De Long’s printed or written documents in regard to his equipment, may have been taken out by these expeditions, and the same may apply to the other articles.” Greely cited “Melville, Dall and others” among the unbelievers, and the first of those had commanded one of the Jeannette’s boats.

Greely also took the second part. “If the articles were really from the Jeannette, the nearest route would have been, not across the North Pole along the east coast of Greenland, but down Kennedy Channel and by way of Smith Sound and Baffin Bay.” That was the objection Mohn had answered in 1884, and Nansen repeated the answer in 1890: a floe coming down Smith Sound keeps to the western side of Baffin Bay and ends on the coast of Baffin Land or Labrador, not on the west coast of Greenland, where the current runs the other way, northward, because it is the Greenland polar current coming round Cape Farewell. “It is by this current only that the floe could have come.” Could it have gone south of Franz Josef Land and Spitsbergen? Only by drifting much faster than any known current there, and against the direction of the currents as they were charted.

The arithmetic

Lytzen had already seen what the find meant, though he worked the distance out oddly. The floe, he wrote, had taken “exactly three years to cover the stretch from the place where the ship went down to the coast of Julianehaab district. That is certainly a long time; but the stretch the piece of ice has covered is not small either, namely no less than 17 degrees of latitude and 199 degrees of longitude”. It followed, he said, that the current ran from the Siberian coast northward and then down the east coast of Greenland and round Cape Farewell, “and that a piece of ice can cover this stretch in three years”, without being ground to pieces on the way. And then the sentence that Nansen quoted in a footnote in 1897, having found it after his own plan was made: “It will therefore be seen that Polar explorers who seek to advance towards the Pole from the Siberian Sea will probably at one place or another be hemmed in by the ice, but these masses of ice will be carried by the current along the Greenland coast. It is not, therefore, altogether impossible that, if the ship of such an expedition is able to survive the pressure of the masses of ice for any length of time, it will arrive safely at South Greenland; but in that case it must be prepared to spend several years on the way.”

Nansen’s version, in the lecture of February 1890, turned the distance into a speed and the speed into a timetable. “The distance from the New Siberian Islands to the 80th degree of latitude on the east coast of Greenland is 1,360 miles, and the distance from the last-named place to Julianehaab 1,540 miles, making together a distance of 2,900 miles. This distance was traversed by the floe in 1,100 days, which gives a speed of 2.6 miles per day of 24 hours. The time during which the relics drifted after having reached the 80th degree of latitude, till they arrived at Julianehaab, can be calculated with tolerable precision, as the speed of the above-named current along the east coast of Greenland is well known. It may be assumed that it took at least 400 days to accomplish this distance; there remain, then, about 700 days as the longest time the drifting articles can have taken from the New Siberian Islands to the 80th degree of latitude. Supposing that they took the shortest route, i.e., across the Pole, this computation gives a speed of about 2 miles in 24 hours.” And the check: “Two miles in the 24 hours, however, coincides most remarkably with the rate at which the Jeannette drifted during the last months of her voyage, from January 1st to June 12th, 1881. In this time she drifted at an average rate of a little over 2 miles in the 24 hours. If, however, the average speed of the whole of the Jeannette’s drifting be taken, it will be found to be only 1 mile in the 24 hours.”

He did not rest the case on the floe alone: an Alaskan throwing-stick found among the driftwood at Godthaab, the Siberian larch that made up most of that driftwood, and the diatoms in the mud on the ice of Denmark Strait, sixteen species of which all occurred in dust from a floe off Cape Wankarem near Bering Strait, were the rest of his evidence. “It points to an open connection between the seas east of Greenland and north of Asia.”

Two years after the Fram came home, Greely wrote in Harper’s Weekly that he now took the relics to have been genuine, and that the assumption of their drift “may have been correct”. The floe had been right, the kayakers had been right, Lytzen had been right, and the raven had been right first.