Now while the _Vega_ was drifting slowly about northeast of Siberia during that early summer of 1879, not only were Schwatka hunting for Franklin relics with the Eskimos of King William’s Land, the Danish Captain Jansen tracing the northeast coast of Greenland, and Dutch and English explorers investigating the neighborhood of Francis Joseph Land, but within a few leagues of Nordenskjöld and his men there was beginning one of the most dreadful of those tragedies that have seared with suffering the track of Arctic exploration since men began to pry into the secrets of the frozen North: I mean the story of the _Jeannette_. Many readers of this book will easily remember the intense interest which the starting of this expedition created in the United States, for it was organized at the suggestion and expense of James Gordon Bennett, the proprietor of the New York _Herald_. The government coöperated, however, lending from its navy the officers and men needful, and otherwise aiding the project. The vessel itself was the steam yacht _Pandora_, which had been proved a worthy craft by Sir Allen Young in his search for the magnetic pole in 1875, and which Mr. Bennett had bought and rechristened. Supplied with everything science and experience could suggest, the _Jeannette_ sailed from San Francisco on July 8, 1879, and missing the incoming _Vega_ among the fogs of Bering Sea, passed through into the Siberian ocean, bound poleward. The last report of her was that she had been seen September 3d steaming toward Wrangell Land, which had been sighted by American whalers in 1867, and was generally regarded as of continental extent northward. It is now known that De Long intended to reach it and winter there; but to his dismay he could not escape from the ice-pack, and to his astonishment found himself drifting past the northern margin of Wrangell Land, thus proving it an island about seventy miles long. When two years had passed and no tidings had been received, the United States government equipped a search expedition in the steamer _Rodgers_, commanded by Lieutenant Berry, which in 1881 reached and examined Wrangell Land, and then went north farther even than Collinson, reaching 73° 44´, the highest point yet attained immediately north of Bering Strait, where the paleocrystic ice spreads much farther from the pole than on the American side. But he found no trace of the _Jeannette_, and himself had a hard time getting home, for the _Rodgers_ was burned in her winter quarters.