116 THE LENA DELTA 



According to another legend of more recent date, 

 there was an intervening land, the land that Wrangell 

 went to seek and the Jeannette went to winter at, 

 and the supposed site of which she drifted through, in 

 her last and longest imprisonment in the ice. 



The Jeannette was the old Pandora, bought from 

 Sir Allen Young by James Gordon Bennett, and 

 accepted by and fitted out, officered, and manned 

 under the orders of the Navy Department of the 

 United States, her commander being Lieutenant 

 George Washington De Long. She left San Fran- 

 cisco on the 8th of July, 1879, and two months after- 

 wards had been run into the pack and was fast in the 

 ice off Herald Island, drifting to her doom. Her 

 route, in the main, was north-westerly, with many 

 complicated loops, at first at the rate of half a mile a 

 day, then at two miles, then at three, showing that 

 the current from Bering Strait had been reinforced by 

 some other current as she went further west, and, 

 from its direction, there seemed to be land to the 

 northward which was never sighted. 



Wrangell Land, passed to the south, proved to be 

 not a continent but a small island. No other land was 

 seen for a monotonous twenty months, and then, in 

 May, 1881, the ship drifted, stern first, past that 

 sighted by Hedenstrom from New Siberia, which was 

 found to consist of two islands, to be henceforth known 

 as Jeannette and Henrietta. On the 12th of June, in 

 latitude 77 14' 57", the Jeannette was crushed and sank, 

 her fore yardarms breaking upwards as she slipped 

 down through the rift in the pack, and a start was 

 made for the Siberian Islands over the ice ; but the 



