This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 10/10/2020
[POLAR EXPLORATION] DE LONG, George Washington (1844–1881). The Voyage of the Jeannette: The Ship and Ice Journals of George W. De Long. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1884. 2 volumes. 8vo. Second American edition. Frontispiece in each volume, numerous illustrations including engravings, maps including folding map in rear pocket of Vol. I (maps sprung in Vol. II with several clean tears at folds), and many intertextual vignettes. Publisher’s brown cloth pictorially stamped in black and gilt, lower covers pictorially stamped in blind (chipping or fraying at spine ends, upper joints mildly rubbed with some splitting, joints starting, ownership signature to ffep). Smith 2391. The Jeannette sailed from San Francisco into the Bering Sea and through the Bering Strait, but was caught in the ice near Herald Island on September 2, 1879. For nineteen months she drifted northwest until the ship was finally crushed and sank northeast of the New Siberian Islands. Twenty-five of the thirty-three men who abandoned the ship reached the Lena Delta, but there De Long and eleven others perished.