The Last Page of His Diary | The Jeannette Arctic Expedition, 1881

n March 23, 1882, in the frozen delta of the Lena River in Siberia, a search party found a hand raised out of the snow, and a few feet away, a small notebook. It was the journal of Lieutenant Commander George W. De Long of the U.S. Navy. The last page read: "October 30th, Sunday. One hundred and fortieth day. Boyd and Gortz died during night. Mr. Collins dying." In 1879, thirty-three men sailed from San Francisco on the Jeannette to find a warm, open sea at the North Pole. The ice trapped them for two years, crushed their ship, and sent them across the frozen ocean in three small boats toward Siberia. This film tells the story from De Long's own journals, published by his wife Emma in 1883, from the accounts of the survivors, and through the original engravings of the time. ⏱ Chapters 0:00 The Last Page 1:50 The Sailor 4:03 The Open Polar Sea 6:33 The Jeannette 9:41 San Francisco 11:53 Fly in Amber 15:22 The Long Drift 19:12 Land! 20:43 She Went Down 25:04 The Gale 26:58 The Delta 33:45 Two Men Walking 41:10 What Remains 📚 Sources Emma De Long (ed.): *The Voyage of the Jeannette. The Ship and Ice Journals of George W. De Long*, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1883). All quotations from De Long's journal are from this edition. George W. Melville: In the Lena Delta (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1884). John W. Danenhower: Lieutenant Danenhower's Narrative of the "Jeannette" (Boston: Osgood, 1882). Raymond Lee Newcomb (ed.): Our Lost Explorers: The Narrative of the Jeannette Arctic Expedition (Hartford: American Publishing Co., 1882). Fridtjof Nansen: Farthest North (1897) — on the Jeannette relics found off Greenland in 1884. Hampton Sides: In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette (New York: Doubleday, 2014). Leonard F. Guttridge: Icebound: The Jeannette Expedition's Quest for the North Pole (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1986). 🖼 Image credits Engravings, portraits and maps from The Voyage of the Jeannette (1883), Our Lost Explorers (1882) and In the Lena Delta (1884), public domain, scanned by the Internet Archive. Photograph of the Jeannette at Le Havre, 1878, and portrait of George W. De Long: U.S. Navy, public domain. General Arctic landscapes: DigitaltMuseum and the National Library of Norway (public domain). Narration: AI voice (ElevenLabs). Research and script: Final Dispatch. #Jeannette #ArcticExploration #FinalDispatch