Ce 
Ice at sea has always constituted a real terror to the sea- 
man. Icebergs drifting down from the Arctic into the North 
Atlantic shipping lanes have stove in many a hapless ship 
and sent her and her crew to the bottom. The most widely 
known case was the loss of the SS Titanic, with her 1517 
souls aboard. In still higher latitudes, ships are occasionally 
caught between moving masses of pack ice and crushed like 
eggshells under the tremendous pressures they exert. An ex- 
ample of such an event was the fateful expedition of the 
Jeannette in 1879 to the Arctic Sea in an attempt to reach the 
North Pole. The expedition, under Lieutenant Commander 
George Washington De Long, U.S.N., an Annapolis gradu- 
ate, seemed to be under an evil spell from the start. In hopes 
of finding a clear passage through and above the Bering 
Straits (because of their mistaken notion that the warm 
Kuroshio Current flowed up through them), they found them- 
selves caught in the pack ice early in September 1879, and 
were forced to spend the winter in the Polar regions. Even 
during the ensuing summer they were unable to free the ship 
and had to endure another winter in the terrible cold of the 
far north. During this time their food supply dwindled and 
deteriorated. Occasionally their ship would be momentarily 
freed in a narrow crack in the ice, down which huge blocks 
and chunks of ice came hurtling, any one of which could have 
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