USS Jeannette (1878)
1861 Philomel-class gunvessel
USS Jeannette was a naval exploration vessel which, commanded by George W. De Long, undertook the Jeannette expedition of 1879–1881 to the Arctic. After being trapped in the ice and drifting for almost two years, the ship and her crew of 33 were released from the ice, then trapped again, crushed and sunk some 300 nautical miles (560 km; 350 mi) north of the Siberian coast. The entire crew survived the sinking, but eight died while sailing towards land in a small cutter. The others reached Siberia, but 12 subsequently perished in the Lena Delta, including De Long.
The vessel had begun her active career in 1861 as HMS Pandora, a Royal Navy gunboat. After more than a decade's service off the West African coast and in the Mediterranean, Pandora was retired from duty and sold as a private yacht to a British explorer, Allen Young. Young took her on two voyages to the Arctic, in 1875 and 1876, before selling her to James Gordon Bennett Jr., proprietor of the New York Herald, who changed her name to Jeannette. Although she sailed to the Arctic under the U.S. flag as USS Jeannette, subject to naval laws and discipline, Bennett remained responsible for the costs of the expedition.
Service history
Construction and launch
The ship that became USS Jeannette began her life as a Royal Navy gunboat, built at the Pembroke Naval Dockyards in 1860. She was of wooden construction, 146 feet (45 m) in length and 25 feet (7.6 m) at the beam, with a draft of 13 feet (4.0 m).
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2713398. VIAF identifies the subject as 159377184. The Library of Congress control number is n85290240. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1879, 1881, 1861 and 1875.
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