You very much for coming out on the somewhat damp august evening. Just a few quick administrative notes. Now would be the time to turn off your cell phones or anything else that might be put during the presentation. When they get to the q a a little later in the program there is a microphone over there. We would appreciate it if you would make your way to it if you would like to ask a question, especially because we have the cameras here going this evening. Finally at the end, please help our staff by folding up the chairs that you are seated and then placing them against something solid. We are delighted to have with us this evening a very talented writer of a narrative history. Hampton sides has several bestselling works to his name. Among them ghost soldiers, about the during world war ii raid on a hellish prison camp in the philippines to rescue more than 500 p. O. W. S. That book sold and has sold more than 1 billion copies since its release in 2002. Another of hamptons books, blood and thunder about the life and times of frontiersman kit carson made some best book lists in 2006 when it came out. Four years ago he tackled the murder of Martin Luther king jr. On the International Manhunt for James Earl Ray and now with the release of in the kingdom of ice hampton recounts as the subtitle of the book says, the grand and terrible polar voyage of the uss jeanette, which started in 1879. Hamptons background is actually in magazine journalism and he has also done some radio and newspapers. He is an editoratlarge for outside magazine and is written for a number of other periodicals. Indeed he considers himself a journalist who happens to write books about history, meaning he goes after an and historical subject, morris a journalist might, blindfolded themes that resonate with Current Events and details that will be certain to to draw a reader sent. The story he tells about the harrowing expedition of the uss jeannette has all the elements of a gripping epic tale. There is the quest, in this case to explore what was then one of the last uncharted regions of the world, the north pole and there is the leader, a young but commanding naval officer named George Washington delong who had become famous for her rescue mission off the coast of greenland. There is the bankroller, the rich and flamboyant owner of the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett who by the way also was a guy who had sent stanley to Africa Africa to find living stones some years earlier and there is much, much more. Based on information that hampton has painstakingly pieced together from a range of sources including official navy documents, delongs journals, private correspondence and memoirs. Reviews of the book have sounded well, the opposite of frozen, downright sizzling quote sides works storytelling magic declared the boston globe a firstrate polar history and adventure narratives of the New York Times. Quote a splendid book in every way proclaimed the wall street journal. Ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming hampton sides. [applause] hi. Its so great to be back in washington d. C. , one of my hometown someone of the places where he learned to write. I spent a lot of time in washingtonian magazine, Washington City paper and a lot of other places around town learning how to write these stories but i also wanted to leave and have a sense of adventure. I wanted to do Something Different and ended up in santa fe new mexico where outside magazine was based and where i really cut my teeth on adventure stories, adventure narratives. So, im going to talk tonight a little bit about the environment that produced the voyage of the uss jeannette and the thinking that went into it, the theories about what was up there at the north pole. One of the great puzzles of the 1800s was what is at the attic of the world . What does it look like . How can we reach it . Whys it so difficult to reach it and so im going to show some slides and give you a sense of the environment of the mid18 1800s and then also im going to give you a little sense of sort of how i spend my Summer Vacation during my travels in siberia. So, first of all, how many of you, barring those who have already read or are reading my book, how many people in the audience have heard of the voyage of the uss jeannette . You guys are cheating i think some of you because you have probably read it, right . This is a very informed audience because usually it will be in a room yesterday i was in dallas, 200 people in the room and i think two people raised their hands. Its it. Scary expedition. People have not heard of it even though in its own day it was a sensation. These men were sort of the astronauts of their time. They were the subject of bestselling books and poems and paintings and monuments. Everyone knew about the men of the uss jeannette. So i kind of want to change it. Thats sort of why im here, is to bring this rather forgotten story to the forefront where i think it belongs. It is one of the grated manager stories of all time. It is one of the most harrowing stories of survival. Its sort of the american shackleton. Shackleton north as i call it in when i first heard about it i couldnt believe it wasnt better now and. Is this mic on by the way . Can everyone hear me . Its okay . All right. One place where it is wellknown is the Naval Academy in annapolis, where there is a jeannette expedition monument on the banks of the river there and George Washington delong is viewed as one of the great exploration heroes of the navy and people there to celebrate it as well as a jeannette memorial thats in Woodlawn Cemetery in the bronx, one of these unbelievable gilded age cemeteries that has one of the monuments there to remember the jeannette. The idea of the jeannette seems on its surface to be kind of crazy which was to sail to the north pole. Why would you want to sail to the north and how could you do it . Why would that not be considered completely insane and quixotic . That but it has its roots in a lot of mythology, a lot of history and a lot of science and pseudoscience that were swirling around in the 1800s. Going back to some of the early maps like this 1590s map which showed this thing called an open polar sea with these for symmetrical sort of Rivers Feeding into it and once you get something on a map, especially a beautiful map, its very hard to dislodge it from the public imagination. And so it becomes like trying to prove the existence of god with various elaborate arguments. Like we havent seen god patina we know he exists and we know this open polar seas exists up here at the theories on why it exists. Proving something we havent even seen or witnessed. Now the greeks talk about something called hyperborilla. The vikings talked about something they called ultimate tool. There were all sorts of ideas deeply embedded in mythology of different cultures about a warm jolly happy place, sometimes with weird Sea Creatures and marine life and Tropical Weather that existed just beyond the mountains, just beyond the ice. If you can just somehow reach it. So there was that kind of weight of ages that contributed to this notion of the open polar sea. Okay so there were also some decidedly wackier ideas going on in the 1800s especially there was this one gentleman named John Cleve Simms i believe who went the world, but around the country selling out crowds with lectures, talking about something he called holes at the polls. He believed that there were massive holes that lead into the deep cavities of the earth and there were people down there and it was just a matter of time before we would find them. It sounds completely like lunatic fringe stuff but he sold out giant crowds and convinced congress to dispatch one expedition in the 1840s towards the south pole to try to find these polls at the polls. This idea lives on today. This is kind of an image of what it was supposed to look like. This was from harpers magazine. One hole at the top of the world and one at the bottom of the world. You get the general idea. It still lives on today though and if you google polls at the polls you will find it interesting subculture that i had no knowledge of before. Apparently there are lots of people down there. There is a lot of energy and a lot of weird species and the Obama Administration has done everything he can to prevent us from knowing about it. [laughter] its interesting. The idea certainly has some kind of shelf life. I dont know why. This guy jules vern certainly popularized the notion of an open polar sea with his book journey to the center of the earth although he brought it underground. The subterranean cavities which had something which he called the central sea. Again just to sort of show the way this idea was popular in 18 the 1800s and how it sort of circulated all Different Levels of society. So other people are supposed to be up there as well. This is true. We know this to be a fact that santa was at the top of the world. I thought this was an ancient idea. It turns out that it was a fairly recent contemporary idea from the 1860s thomas nast cartoon from harpers which showed santa and his helpers out there. Again this idea that what is up there . We desperately wanted to know. It was this nagging gnawing obsession to know what is in the attic of the world . This is the environment that the expedition was launched in. Now there were other scientists and pseudoscientists and experts and went farther in terms of theorizing what was out there and how we might reach it. Foremost among those was the sky, dr. August peterman from germany. He was the foremost mapmaker in the world at that time. He had this huge operation which produced these stateoftheart maps that were beautiful hand uptodate maps, sort of the google maps of his time. He also like so many characters in my book had excellent facial hair. [laughter] atlas of physical geography was one of his many publications, beautiful stuff, very influential of its time in a sort of gave him a platform to talk about these wacky theories about the arctic which was one of his obsessions. There he is. Not the kind of guy you would want to hang out with and have a beer with but a very intense and very intelligent man, tragic character who is very important to my book, like in the first third or so. I went to germany to understand his world and this mapmaking university created there. This is his grave in germany. His house where he was raised. This begins to show some of his theories about what was up there. He was intrigued by the gulf stream. We are beginning to learn just how powerful it was in terms of bringing stuff from the tropics north and going powerfully and quite fast towards the north, past norway and no one knew exactly where it went so the fleeting theory was that at time of under the ice and eventually made its way to the north pole. Those explaining the open polar sea that we all believed in. On the pacific side there was another sea while that was known to exist that swept north towards the bavarian straight. No one knew for sure where it went that the theory was again that the tunnel under the eyes cap and these two great currents of the world met at the north pole. This wonderful sort of symmetrical grandiose elaborate thermoregulation system that the planet supposedly had. Only some romantic have crazy german intellectual would come up with this theory and convinced a lot of people that it was true. So here is another rendering of it. The key word here is supposed to. So somebody who is captivated by the ideas of dr. August peterman was this guy also excellent facial hair. This is James Gordon Bennett junior publisher of the New York Herald which was then the largest newspaper in the world. He was the third richest man in manhattan, he inherited his newspaper from his dad and he was the sort of spoiled brat playboy. He was a yachtsman who won the first transatlantic yacht race. He also was a dualist and he was, what else was he into . Speed walking. He was a champion speed walker. He also got into all kinds of sports spectacles and eventually was ostracized for his bad behavior in paris where he lived most of his career and ran his paper the New York Herald from paris via the transatlantic cable. He eventually created something called the paris herald which then became the International Heraldtribune which still exists in a limited form. So James Gordon Bennett junior was fascinated by the north pole and wanted to bankroll an expedition there. He loved the ideas of august peterman. This is his newspaper, the New York Herald. This is the New York Herald offices in new york. One of the many eccentricities that peterman had was that he was deeply into owls. Live owls, browns owls, owls on his cufflinks. Just decorating his house. Something about the owl really tickled his fancy. Some people have suggested that he was the model for bruce wayne and because it of his extremely mysterious a Live International playboy bachelor who has this fetish for night creatures. That is him a little bit later in life in the pages of vanity fair. You cant invent, you just cannot invent that character. If you are writing a novel people would say this is too farfetched. This is insane. This is one of his many yachts. This is that liz estrada which he kept mostly in the mediterranean. It had all kinds of things on board like turkish baths but also down below he kept his dairy cows said he could have fresh cream at this breakfast every morning. This is a famous painting of one of his other yachts. I went to paris and i had to do some research on James Gordon Bennett. This is one of his apartments. This is his villa in the south of france not to far from mona monaco. Boulevard Gordon Bennett. This is the view from his villa. So lifeless and too hard for h him. My wife took most of these pictures. This is again the owl. You see the owl everywhere in his world and its just kind of intriguing. Then it was really interested in competitive sports and he was the guy who brought competitive tennis to the United States from england. He created this thing in newport called the Newport Casino where they had the first long tennis tournament ever held in the u. S. Whew there is a tennis match going on in newport so i cut back and forth between these different worlds. He also later in life got involved with automobile racing. And balloon racing. There is still to this day something called the Gordon Bennett cup which is the foremost prize in International Balloon racing, so the guy has been around and has cast a long shadow throughout the adventure world. Perhaps hes most famous though as was alluded to in the introduction for his sending stanley, Henry Morgan Stanley to africa to find livingstone who is not exactly lost. He didnt really need to be lost but bennett understood that this would be a great newspaper series. If he could send him off and along the way he would probably discover all kinds of things and get into all kinds of trouble and it would be a great series of dispatches. Precisely the way it worked out his dispatches were a sensation from the New York Herald and then i was looking for an encore to this great sensation. This is where he began to work on this idea of an expedition to the north pole that he would pay for completely all by himself but that would test the theories of dr. August peterman. This is the guy who got the job. This is Lieutenant CommanderGeorge Washington delong of the u. S. Navy, graduate of the Naval Academy, someone who had been to greenland and had fallen in love with the arctic and decided he wanted to be the guy the first to reach the north pole. He also is captivated and both petermans ideas and a lot of the other scientific ideas that were swirling around at the time. So bennett purchased this shift from the british and renamed it the jeanette and George Washington delong and his wife sailed the ship from france all the way around the horns of San Francisco in 1878. And began to work on the ship stuffing it with all the latest inventions including addisons lights which were still being worked on. They werent quite ready for time primetime but they were brought on board as for bugs in the bells telephone and telegraph equipment and an org organ, a stateoftheart library. They knew they were going into the great unknown and they knew it would be a least two or three years if not more. They didnt really want to suffer. This was the gilded age. People wanted to live well, as well as they possibly could. The ship was incredibly well provisioned and equipped. As we later learn he was just protecting it and as the ship was leaving just a few months later he did get the hang of these lights. Unfortunately the lights on the jeanette did not exactly work. So they left in the summer of 1879 from San Francisco. 20,000 people were gathered there to watch them, to send them off on their voyage. All the papers cover this and everybody knew about the jeanette. It was a National Endeavor although was paid for by this eccentric millionaire, was staffed by the u. S. Navy officers and it was flying under navy rules. It was a naval ship, the uss jeannette. Kind of an interesting unorthodox arrangement. It would be kind of like ted turn