What I’m reading
As I finished the second draft of my book about the wreck of the Nantucket whaling bark Phoenix I turned my attention to the proposal for submission to literary agents in hopes of landing one to represent me in selling the book to a publisher. Book proposals are the literary equivalent of a business plan, especially for the narrative non-fiction genre. They are structured documents that can range as long as 50-pages and include a summary of the story, author’s biography, table of contents with a brief description of the chapters, a section describing the author’s “platform” (social media presence, credentials of authority, etc.) and a discussion of recent books that are comparable to the work.
The shipwreck/survival genre is popular, and the recent best-seller status of David Grann’s The Wager is one indicator of a strong market for maritime history. In my comps I focused on relatively recent titles such as: The Wager; Andrea Pitzer’s Icebound (about the 1596 voyage of William Barents to the Arctic Circle in search of a northeastern passage over Russia to China); and Hampton Sides’ Wide Wide Sea (about the Pacific voyage of exploration by Captain James Cook).
Hampton Sides is the author of eight non-fiction books. The first I read by him, Ghost Soldiers, is about the rescue of American POWs from a Japanese prison camp in the Philippines. Hellhound On His Trail is about James Earl Ray, the man who assassinated Martin Luther King at the Lorraine Motel in in Memphis in 1968.
The third Sides’ book I’ve read (and just finished) is In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Voyage of the U.S.S. Jeannette. It was published in 2014 by Doubleday.
Literary agents and publishers tend to prefer recent titles in a proposal’s comp section, but the parallels between my book — The Marginal Sea: Shipwreck and Survival on Siberia’s Sea of Okhotsk — and In the Kingdom of Ice are too close to ignore, so even though the book is nine years old I believe it should be included.
The story begins in 1879 when the U.S.S. Jeanette, a ship named for the sister of its benefactor, New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett (see my previous blog post about the history of the Mohawk disaster and Bennett’s role in that tale), sailed from San Francisco bound for the Bering Straits in search of a sea route to the North Pole. The ship had been rebuilt and reinforced to withstand the rigors of the arctic ice pack, and was under the command of the U.S. Navy officer George Washington DeLong who was accompanied by a crew of 32 men under the auspices of the US Navy.
The Jeanette searched for, and found the rumored Wrangel Island northwest of the straits, but became icebound and drifted with the ice pack for over a year, eventually sinking 300 miles off the coast of Russia in June, 1881 after the ice crushed her hull and left her crew on the ice with a pack of sled dogs, the ship’s small boats, and a stack of provisions.
DeLong led the crew over the torturous ice pack over the brief summer, a miserable slog that Sides brilliantly describes based on his research into the expeditions’ accounts and logs. After hopscotching between the New Siberian Islands they took to the three boats to cross 100 miles of open sea at Semyonvsky Island.
The three boats became separated in a late summer gale. Two made landfall on the delta of the Lena River. The third was lost without a trace. DeLong’s boat landed at the northern extremity of the insanely convoluted and unmapped delta. The second boat to make it to land, commanded by the Jeanette’s engineer, George Melville, came ashore on the southeastern side of the delta.
Then, as the Russians would say, “things got worse.”
I won’t spoil the story, but heartily recommend In the Kingdom of Ice as a classic in maritime survival literature. I first became aware of the Jeanette expedition during my research on the Marginal Sea via George Kennan’s Siberia and the Exile System, and that explorer’s description of being in the Sakha Republic when the Jeanette’s dead were being carried out of the wilderness for eventual interment in New York City.
The writing is superb, the scene setting and descriptions of the various personalities associated with the Jeanette are masterfully executed. All in all I would rank In the Kingdom of Ice up there with Alfred Lansing’s Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage as a must-have for any section of a book shelf devoted to Arctic survival.
