Intending to reach the North Pole via the Bering Strait, the exploration vessel USS Jeannette became trapped in the pack ice of the Arctic Ocean and drifted for 21 months before being crushed and sunk. Led by Lieutenant Commander George W. De Long, the crew embarked on an extraordinary, 500-mile escape across the shifting ice floes and open water to reach the remote Lena Delta in Siberia, Russia. Hauling heavy lifeboats and sledges over rough pressure ridges while suffering from severe frostbite, scurvy, and starvation, a fraction of the crew managed to survive the harrowing trek and locate native settlements, concluding an unparalleled feat of collective polar endurance.

De Long's journals, recovered from his frozen hands after his death in the Siberian wilderness, were published as 'The Voyage of the Jeannette', providing a monumental text for late 19th-century exploration literature. The harrowing narrative of ice drift and wilderness survival deeply influenced polar poetry, injecting a grim, realistic vocabulary of freezing isolation and stoic sacrifice into the literary imagination of the late Victorian era.