Between 1879 and 1881, the USS Jeannette carried the US Arctic Expedition, financed by New York Herald owner James Gordon Bennett Jr. Its aim was to reach the North Pole from the Pacific Ocean via the Bering Strait, based on a theory by German cartographer August Petermann that a temperate current, the Kuroshio, would flow northwards through the strait, providing a gateway to an open sea from the Pole. Alas, Petermann’s theory proved wrong, and the Jeannette was trapped in the ice with thirty-three crew members on board, drifting for almost two years before being crushed by ice pressure and sunk northeast of the Siberian coast.
The expedition’s results were not entirely negative, however: valuable meteorological and oceanographic data, and the discovery of new islands and of an ocean current moving the Arctic ice from east to west. This last observation inspired the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen to mount the successful Fram expedition nine years later.
A monument to the dead of the Jeannette was erected in 1890 at the Annapolis Naval Academy.