Lost in the Ice

Hampton Sides: Newspapers during the Gilded Age were captivated by the Arctic and found that stories about polar explorers stirred readers and sold copies galore. Some newspapers, such as The New York Herald, pictured here, even funded their own expeditions into the Arctic, such as the tragic polar voyage of the USS Jeannette, 1879 to 1881. 

Gallant fur-cloaked explorers, like the Jeannette’s captain, George DeLong became national idols. They were the aviators, the astronauts, the knights-errant of their day. The reading public couldn’t get enough of them. They were a special breed of “scientist-adventurer,” their quest informed by a dark romance and a desperate chivalry. 

Today, it’s hard for us to comprehend just how profoundly people needed to know what was at the top of the world. The polar problem, as it was called in the press, took on a quality of nagging, gnawing, obsession. The Arctic was a magnetic region, but it was also a magnetic idea. It loomed as a popular fixation and a planetary enigma, as alluring and unknown as the surface of Venus or Mars. What was up there? People wanted to know. Were there open sea routes? Unknown species of animals? Monsters that lived on the ice? Lost civilizations, even? Were there whirlpools, as many people believed, that led to the bowels of the earth?

American newspaper barons like the New York Herald’s James Gordon Bennet, Jr., found they could milk Arctic sagas in myriad ways. The stories became blockbuster spectacles that appealed to the public’s sense of adventure and stirred a morbid fascination with the grim themes of starvation and survival in the world’s frozen attic. Tales from the Arctic, quite simply, flew off the newsstands.