BOOK REVIEW-FIVE STARS
In the Kingdom of Ice by Hampton Sides
On the cutting edge of the industrialization in the 1830s, America and Americans were frantically clamoring for new frontiers to exploit. Zealots with tons of money and with ego building self-aggrandizement delusions made this true story into a fiasco. Lessons were learned at a very high price.
This is a captivating, fast moving, and must read story.
EXCERPTS;
Bennett was the third-richest man in New York City, with an assured annual income just behind those of William B. Astor and Cornelius Vanderbilt. Bennett was not only the publisher but also the editor in chief and sole owner of the Herald, probably the largest and most influential newspaper in the world. He had inherited the paper from his father, James Gordon Bennett Sr. The Herald had a reputation for being as entertaining as it was informative, its pages suffused with its owner’s sly sense of humor. But its pages were also packed with news; Bennett outspent all other papers to get the latest reports via telegraph and the transatlantic cable. For the newspaper’s longer feature stories, Bennett did whatever was necessary to acquire the talents of the biggest names in American letters—writers like Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Walt Whitman. Bennett was also one of New York’s more flamboyant bachelors, known for affairs with burlesque stars and drunken sprees in Newport. He was a member of the Union Club and an avid sportsman. Eight years earlier, he had won the first transatlantic yacht race. He would play an instrumental role in bringing the sport of polo to the United States, as well as competitive bicycling and competitive ballooning. In 1871, at the age of twenty-nine, Bennett had become the youngest commodore in the history of the New York Yacht Club—a post he still held.
Bennett, was known for racing fleet horses as well as sleek boats. Late at night, sometimes fueled with brandy, he would take out his four-in-hand carriage and careen wild-eyed down the moonlit turnpikes around Manhattan. Alert bystanders tended to be both puzzled and shocked by these nocturnal escapades, for Bennett nearly always raced in the nude.
Minute by minute, the pressure intensified. Then a great fist of ice burst through the starboard coal bunker, and soon the hold was flooding. “She had been stabbed in her vitals, and was settling fast,” Newcomb wrote. “The ship is not yet built that can stand such hugging.” Some of the men, thinking this must be the end, raced to their bunks and grabbed their knapsacks, which had been packed for a catastrophe such as this. Finally it came, the call they had been dreading but preparing for, off and on, for many months: “Abandon ship!”
In a final whirl of water, the Jeannette plunged out of sight. Nothing remained, said Danenhower, “of our old and good friend, the Jeannette, which for many months had endured the embrace of the Arctic monster.” She had sunk at latitude 77°15 N, longitude 155° E, a little more than seven hundred miles south of the North Pole.
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