On Nov. 14, 1881, American George Melville limped across a frozen delta in Siberia and pulled a pole from the snow with his frostbitten hands.
Exhausted and half-starving, Melville was scouring the wasteland for fellow survivors of the then-most famous ship in the world. The USS Jeannette had set sail from San Francisco to conquer the North Pole. Instead, it quickly got trapped in ice and spent nearly two years drifting across the Arctic Ocean, lost to the rest of humanity.
When it was finally crushed by the ice, the Jeannette’s 33 crew members set out across the frozen sea. A storm separated them and Melville mustered a team of locals in the desolate Lena Delta to find his missing shipmates. He braved the wilderness as the days grew shorter, his legs so swollen and blistered from exposure that he vomited with the pain.
Illustration: June Hsu
First he found the pole. It marked the spot where George de Long, the Jeannette’s captain, had buried the valuables he had grown too weak to carry. They included De Long’s most prized possessions: the ship’s four logbooks. These hefty, leather-bound volumes recorded, in intimate detail, the ill-fated Jeannette expedition and the discoveries it had made.
It took Melville four more months to find De Long’s body. Nineteen other crew members also died, their heroic lives cut short by drowning, disease, exposure and starvation.
However, thanks to Melville, the logbooks survived. Once, while battling through a snowstorm, he briefly considered reburying them to lighten his load, then changed his mind.
“Setting my teeth against the storm,” he wrote, “I would swear a new oath to carry them through, let come what might.”
Thousands of kilometers away and 138 years later, the Jeannette’s logbooks sit in a climate-controlled room in the US National Archives Building in Washington. Every page has been digitized and uploaded to the Web, then transcribed by an eccentric group of citizen-scientists called Old Weather.
For the past decade, its far-flung volunteers have shown that the Jeannette’s logbooks, and others like them, are more than what Melville called “the records … of our two years of toil and suffering.” They are rich repositories of data that can help humanity understand how profoundly the Earth’s climate has changed and what might happen to it in the future.
Meteorologists have long recorded the weather at land-based stations, but nearly three-fourths of the planet is covered by water and that is where most weather takes place. Thousands of ships have crisscrossed the oceans, noting the weather in handwritten logbooks that for decades sat forgotten in bookshelves and basements.
In a sometimes obsessive quest, thousands of Old Weather volunteers have extracted millions of observations about barometric pressure, wind speed, air temperature and ice from the old logbooks. These are fed into a huge dataset at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), creating what NOAA calls “a dauntingly complex, high-resolution, four-dimensional reconstruction of the global climate that estimates what the weather was for every day back to 1836.”
Or, as NOAA has nicknamed it, “a weather time machine.”
Many of the ships, like the Jeannette, hail from the great era of Arctic exploration, when crews risked everything in a race for the North Pole. Ships plunged into the frozen unknown and vanished, inspiring other ships to launch daring but luckless missions to rescue them.
In an age when Arctic ice is fast disappearing, many Old Weather volunteers also see their work as a rescue mission, but with much higher stakes, as the warming Earth makes its own leap into the unknown.
WINDOW INTO THE PAST
Three years ago, a private Russian expedition searched in vain for the wreck of the Jeannette. The ship spent three days stuck in ice while hungry polar bears prowled around it. However, it did not sink.
“That would have been quite ironic, don’t you think?” said Kevin Wood, who was on the ship.
Wood, a research scientist at NOAA and the University of Washington in Seattle, is the lead investigator for Old Weather’s Arctic data project.
Wood got involved in Old Weather after meeting its founder, British meteorologist Philip Brohan, at a conference in Baltimore, Maryland. Over a drink at a nearby bar, Brohan explained his problem: Old Weather volunteers were working so quickly, they would soon run out of the British Royal Navy logbooks he had set them to transcribing in 2010.
So, in 2011, Wood set up a team at the US National Archives and Records Administration to start digitizing its about 80,000 logbooks from US Navy and US Coast Guard ships. Their weather observations, once extracted by volunteers, would help scientists build what Wood calls “essentially a satellite view of 19th-century weather.”
At the time, these observations helped captains navigate safely and swiftly across a trackless sea. The logbooks were returned to naval authorities or shipowners, who used them to build pilot charts and guide later navigators.
“Today, we can go back and reuse all that data, with a completely new purpose that they would never have imagined,” Wood said. “Every ship becomes part of our quest, because the more data we have, the better the reanalysis will be.”
Wood handles the science for Old Weather, but as a sailor who spent more than 25 years roaming the world’s oceans, he seems equally smitten with the romance of the seafaring life. He described himself as a “sporadically voracious reader” who devoured all 20 volumes of Patrick O’Brian’s high-seas adventure series Master and Commander in six weeks.
Although about 20,000 people have contributed to Old Weather over the years, Wood said that a 50-strong community of stalwarts has done about half the work.
One is Joan Arthur, who works as the office coordinator at an environmental institute at the University of Oxford.
Arthur, 61, whose father had served on a Royal Navy ship, first heard of Old Weather five or six years ago, through an ad on the university’s Web site.
She was soon captivated by the logbooks and the “thundering age” of exploration they recorded.
“The stories are just so astonishingly epic,” she said.
Her e-mails are punctuated with phrases such as “How exciting!” and “Oh joy!” One promises tales of “a mutiny, a death, a tussle with ice, scrappy writing, a spelling nightmare.”
Arthur worked on the Jeannette’s logbooks, whose weather and ice observations have allowed researchers to reconstruct the climate in an area of the Arctic that was then almost unknown.
“It was basically the moon,” Wood said. “We had no information about it.”
Old ships’ logs can also offer new insights into extreme events such as storms or floods, which happen infrequently and therefore need a long history to properly understand.
Data from the USS Jamestown, another US Navy ship, and the Jeannette were reanalyzed by NOAA’s “weather time machine” to reconstruct what had long been described as a hurricane that hit Sitka, Alaska, in 1880. The reanalysis showed that it was not a hurricane, but part of a much larger storm system known as an extra-tropical cyclone.
After working on the Jeannette for a while, Arthur switched to the USS Rodgers, a US Navy ship that in 1881 was sent to find De Long and his crew.
She talked about the Rodgers as if it was still afloat — “She’s a bit of a tub to sail” — but the Rodgers is long gone, its story almost as tragic as the ship it was meant to rescue.
RESCUE GOES WRONG
The Rodgers sailed from San Francisco on June 16, 1881, with 38 men on board. They had no way of knowing that, three days earlier, the Jeannette had already been crushed by the ice and De Long and his shipmates had begun their desperate journey over a no-man’s land toward Siberia.
At first, the Rodgers sailed west, crossing the North Pacific to resupply at a port on Russia’s wild Kamchatka Peninsula. Then it headed north, passing through the Bering Strait, the sliver of ocean separating two continents, and into barely charted Arctic waters teeming with walruses, polar bears and whales.
Nearly all US Navy vessels had a scientific component and the Rodgers was no exception. The instruments on board — chronometer, thermometer, barometer, compass — were, at the time, state-of-the-art. Its logbook begins with directions for recording everything from accidents and desertions to “the appearance of the heavens.”
Every hour, the crew dutifully noted the ship’s speed and course, as well as the temperature, weather, wind conditions and barometric pressure. By late August 1881, as the Rodgers neared Wrangel Island, the crew began logging the observations about ice that future scientists would find so valuable.
However, for the Rodgers, monitoring the shifting ice that could trap or even sink it was a matter of life or death. Twice the Rodgers changed course to investigate what looked like “a black mass resembling a ship”; both times it proved to be a ship-sized chunk of dirty ice.
With pack ice closing in, the Rodgers headed south again. It had found no trace of the Jeannette’s crew, who by this time had begun their arduous trek across the ice, hundreds of kilometers to the west.
However, the Rodgers was about to get a taste of what the missing sailors were suffering. En route, the Rodgers sent ashore Charles Putnam, the ship’s 29-year-old master, and seven other crew members. Equipped with 18 dogs, two sleds and a year’s provisions, Putnam’s team had orders to continue the search for the Jeannette along the Siberian coast.
The Rodgers sailed on to evade the ice — only to be destroyed by a fire that started in its hold just five months into its mission. Its crew and its logbooks were rescued, although there was one casualty. The ship’s dog, a sorry-looking mutt named One-Eyed Riley, died in the fire.
When Putnam heard that the Rodgers had been destroyed, he raced south to help his shipmates. On the way a storm blew up and Putnam — separated from his guides, half-blinded by snow — drifted out to sea on a chunk of ice.
Later that day, he was spotted floating about 11km offshore.
“A vigorous attempt was made to rescue him by four of the Rodgers’ crew and two natives in a canoe, but owing to the intervening ice they were unable to reach him and were obliged to put back after getting three miles [4.8km] from shore. This was the last ever seen of Putnam,” an official dispatch said.
In 2016, an academic paper on Arctic auroras was published in Astronomy & Geophysics, the journal of the Royal Astronomical Society in London. It was based on observations gleaned by Old Weather volunteers from the Jeannette’s logs, written while the ship was held captive by ice.
Old Weather volunteers have also collected log entries about wildlife, kelp, comets and volcanic activity.
“We’ve discovered volcani c eruptions that have not been recorded before,” Arthur said.
As US Navy ships, the Jeannette and the Rodgers were run with a discipline reflected in their logbooks, which were usually detailed and legible, unlike the logs of whaling ships that Old Weather began transcribing in 2015.
Whaling logbooks often have poor handwriting, worse spelling and erratic punctuation, Arthur said.
The whaling logbooks are challenging, but the extra effort is worth it, Wood said.
Yes, the whalers make fewer daily observations than the navy ships and generally lack instrumental weather data, “however, there are many more whaling voyages and, especially in the early years, there are many ships out on the ice edge at the same time in a given year,” he said. “This will significantly augment the picture we have of the ice.”
THE NUN AND THE WHALER
Helen Julian, 64, belongs to an Anglican religious order of sisters called the Community of St Francis and lives in Darlington, in northern England. Her first logbook for Old Weather belonged to a 890-tonne British naval sloop that patrolled the African coastline during World War I. It had what she called “a very unexciting war,” but she was soon absorbed by the rhythms and details of life at sea a century ago.
“You always have a very particular relationship with your first ship,” she said. “It’s a bit like falling in love. You can’t always say why.”
St Francis is the patron saint of ecology and Julian said that Old Weather feels “like part of my discipleship.”
She heard about the group by chance, on a radio program, and saw it as a way that someone with no scientific background could help climate science.
“It’s a contribution to an important cause and to another form of community,” she said, meaning the nerdy and unfashionably courteous Old Weather Forum, an online platform that many volunteers speak of with affection.
In one chat titled “Signs of OW addiction,” a volunteer said that she continued to transcribe a logbook despite going into labor.
Julian was working on the Fleetwing, a 19th-century whaling ship whose logbook was kept by the captain’s 15-year-old daughter, Adaline Heppingstone.
Whaling captains often brought wives and children on voyages, but it was rare to find a log written by a teenage girl, Julian said.
At the time, US whaling ships were floating abattoirs, their decks slippery with blood and oil. Many logs detail the gruesome, round-the-clock task of processing a whale: slicing off the blubber, boiling it to extract the oil, harvesting the bone. Some logs record a kill with a whale-shaped stamp.
The interests of 19th-century whaling captains and 21st-century climatologists converge on a long-suffering species: the bowhead whale. Bowheads feed by filtering the ocean with long vertical plates in their mouths called baleen, a substance once highly prized for making everything from horse whips to corsets. Whaling ships hunted them by patrolling the ice edge where the bowheads fed, which meant their logbooks were filled with observations about ice.
These observations were taken when the Arctic felt impossibly remote from everyday life.
Today, humanity knows that the Arctic plays a vital role in regulating the Earth’s climate and that changes there will affect everyone, Wood said.
Melting ice exposes more ocean or land, which, because it is darker, absorbs more sunlight and causes more heating. Melting ice on land also causes sea-level rise.
In 1882, the Fleetwing was part of a US fleet searching Arctic waters for bowheads. They have the longest life spans of any whale: 200 years or more. There might be bowheads alive today who remember the mass slaughter of their species — who might even have fled from the Fleetwing’s approach.
DOMESTICITY AND GORE
In some of her entries in the Fleetwing’s logbook, Heppingstone wrote of everyday pastimes. She did embroidery with her mother and took walks on the deck. She played checkers with the captains of nearby whaling ships and recorded a visit by some “Esquimaux” selling fox skins.
In others, domesticity comes with a dollop of gore. Over a few days in April, in precise cursive with little flourishes on the capital letters, Heppingstone describes the crew butchering whales and boiling the blubber into oil.
Three weeks passed, with Heppingstone recording a few sightings, but no catches. Then, on the afternoon of May 17, 1882, the crew spotted a whale and her calf, “and struck right away.”
“We got the calf too — it was very small. We took it in on deck. We are cutting,” Heppingstone wrote.
Apart from the logbook, Heppingstone left little trace in the world.
Julian, transcribing the log in her cozy living room in England, had assumed that the captain’s daughter had died very young, but then she was directed to a Web site that uses crowdsourcing to locate old graves. It noted that Heppingstone had died in South Yarmouth, Massachusetts, in 1957.
Julian was delighted; she and the whaler’s daughter had drawn closer.
“She was still alive when I was born. We overlapped. Just,” she said.
LETTERS FROM THE PAST
Julian has never met Arthur and neither of them has met Michael Purves, another Old Weather stalwart, who lives in Victoria, British Columbia. They mainly communicate through the forum and talk about one another fondly, like old friends.
Purves brings to Old Weather climate expertise and experience of northern latitudes. Now 72, he is a retired meteorologist who spent 22 years living and working in the Yukon in western Canada, a wild and sparsely populated territory famous for gold rushes and grizzlies.
Purves lives in a blue clapboard house filled with artwork from the Yukon. On its roof is a small weather station that produces reports for his neighbors. His first ship was the HMS Grafton, a Royal Navy battle cruiser that served in World War I. Scruffy handwriting made the logbooks hard to read, but Purves was hooked.
“There is a deeper connection when reading something handwritten than when reading the same information in print,” he said. “Reading the various entries is almost like hearing individual voices.”
Once, the Grafton rescued the survivors of a torpedoed hospital ship. Reading the logs, Purves said that he thought: “This is real. A real person saw this and wrote this.”
His work for Old Weather has driven home how quickly and profoundly the planet’s climate is changing. He has helped refine the data in the logbooks — and therefore the climate models they inform — by plotting about 350,000 hourly locations for dozens of ships, including the Jeannette and the Rodgers.
He has spent more time on a ship called the USS Bear than any other. Built in Scotland in 1874, the Bear spent its most illustrious years in the Arctic in the US Revenue Cutter Service, a forerunner of the US Coast Guard. Its career spanned 89 years, two centuries, two world wars and both poles. It sank in 1963 while being towed to Philadelphia to become a floating restaurant.
“I’ve done 38 years of the Bear and we’re still transcribing,” Purves said.
His home is a short drive from the coast; in its heyday, the Bear would have sailed past to take on coal at Ladysmith or anchor in Vancouver Harbour.
“I could even look it up and tell you which days,” Purves said.
Earlier this year, he was reading the Bear’s log from June 1918. It had set out to resupply the remote Alaskan outpost at Point Barrow, but heavy ice forced it to turn back. Purves looked at maps published by the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, a government agency based in Boulder, Colorado, to see where the ice was in June this year. What he found was sobering.
“The ice in 2019 was more than 650 miles [1,046km] north of where it was on the same day in 1918,” he said. “You sit there and you think: Whoa.”
Purves said that he feels most people have yet to grasp the gravity of climate change.
“I’m 72, and I’m thinking I’ll still live to see a summer with no ice in the Arctic Ocean,” he said. “Will that be enough to wake people up? I really don’t know.”
HELL ROARING MIKE
The Bear’s best-known captain was an ironfisted, hard-drinking sailor called Michael Healy — also known as “Hell Roaring Mike.” Healy was born in Georgia, the son of a plantation owner and a slave, but he looked white and his racial background remained a secret until 1971, decades after his death. Only then was Healy recognized by the coast guard as the first African-American to command a federal ship.
In 1880, Healy was a lieutenant on another ship that searched in vain for the missing Jeannette. Three years later, at the Bear’s helm, he ruled Alaska. He chased poachers and smugglers; rescued shipwrecked sailors; delivered mail and medicine; and transported missionaries, criminals, scientists and VIPs.
“If you should ask in the Arctic Sea, ‘Who is the greatest man in America?’ the instant answer would be, ‘Why, Mike Healy,’” the New York Sun said. “He knows the Bering Sea, the Straits and even the Arctic as no other man knows them.”
The Bear’s logbooks are among the longest records of marine observation in the Arctic. Nearly unbroken, they run to tens of thousands of pages. While packed with weather observations, the logs are also terse and unrevealing, even during Healy’s most dramatic moments, like when he rescued 160 people from five whaling ships wrecked by a storm.
“When I am in charge of a vessel, I always command; nobody commands but me,” Healy once said. “I do not steer by any man’s compass but my own.”
However, his heroism sat uneasily with a reputation for abusing alcohol and his fellow sailors. Healy was later accused of “tricing” some mutineers — tying their hands behind their backs, then hanging them so that their toes barely touched the deck. He also inflicted the same agonies on his own crew.
In 1896, after a trial in San Francisco, he was stripped of the command of the Bear. He died eight years later.
In 2015, a coast guard icebreaker named after him, the USCGC Healy, became the first unaccompanied US surface ship to reach the North Pole.
ENDURANCE AND HOPE
The pack ice that destroyed those old ships now retreats enough during the summer to allow luxury cruises through Arctic waters. A New Zealand company called Heritage Expeditions makes regular voyages to Wrangel Island, near where the Jeannette was first trapped, its desperate crew surviving by eating the polar bears and walruses that today’s tourists travel to see.
Those tourists are rarely disappointed.
Polar bears gather on Wrangel Island in ever-increasing numbers, possibly driven ashore by the loss of sea ice, researchers have said.
The “measureless frozen ocean” that De Long described is no more and his era’s obsession with conquering the North Pole has been replaced by the graver challenge that drives so many Old Weather volunteers: averting catastrophic climate change.
For those volunteers, the logbooks are a reminder not only of how much the world has changed, but also of the human capacity for ingenuity, endurance and hope.
Even in the permanent gloom of an Arctic winter, with the ice grinding and screeching around his ship, De Long wrote: “If we are thrown out on the ice we must try to get to Siberia, if we can drag ourselves and food over the two hundred and forty miles intervening; sleds are handy, dogs ready, provisions on deck, knapsacks packed, arms at hand, records encased. What more can we do? When trouble comes we hope to be able to deal with it, and survive it!”
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