The Arctic Ocean surrounding the North Pole is icy and penetrable only by the strongest icebreakers. Until the late 19th century, however, many believed the Arctic Ocean was encircled by a ring of ice—and beyond it lay an open polar sea through which one could easily sail from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

True believers in the idea were not deterred by the fact that several exploratory expeditions in search of this stretch of water had found their way thoroughly blocked by ice. In 1879, a disastrous expedition—the U.S. Arctic Expedition—finally put an end to the theory that a large sea sloshed around at the top of the world.

The notion of an open polar ocean had been advocated as early as 1531, when English merchant Robert Thorne wrote a letter to King Henry VIII urging him to send a ship to confirm its existence.

Henry demurred, but subsequent centuries saw periodic attempts to investigate, including by Henry Hudson in 1607 and Sir John Franklin in 1818. Between 1853 and 1855, an expedition under the command of American physician and explorer Elisha Kent Kane spent two winters trapped in the ice off northwestern Greenland, its members surviving largely thanks to help from local Inuit. But, because during a sledging journey, two of the expeditioners saw a patch of open water far ahead—a common phenomenon known as a polynya—their return boosted belief in the open polar ocean.

Enter August Petermann, a German cartographer who briefly gave the theory a patina of scientific credibility. Not only did he claim the top of the world was open water, he said, but he knew why. The reason, he claimed, was a warm ocean current off the coast of Japan that extended far up into the Arctic. His ideas came to the attention of James Gordon Bennett, publisher of the New York Herald, who had recently earned renown for dispatching reporter Henry Morton Stanley to Africa on a successful search for British explorer David Livingstone.

“It just drove people insane that we couldn’t reach the North Pole, that we did not know for a fact what was up there,” says Hampton Sides, historian and author of In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette. Norway, Britain and other European nations, he points out, had dispatched multiple expeditions across the Arctic, “but now you have the United States, which has only fairly recently emerged from the devastation of the Civil War, beginning to flex its muscles and trying to say, ‘Hey, we’re a united nation again. We can participate in these sorts of competitions.’ The United States Navy is a fledgling navy, it isn’t very powerful, but they do have ships and they have naval officers. What they don’t have is money, and that’s where Gordon Bennett comes in.”

Bennett bought a ship, named it Jeannette after his sister, and placed it under the command of naval officer George W. DeLong. The voyage, dubbed the U.S. Arctic Expedition, left San Francisco on July 8, 1879. After making stops at the Aleutian Islands and in Siberia, it turned north on August 31. Five days later, it became trapped in the ice. It would never escape.

In March 1880, DeLong recorded that the ship’s position was essentially the same as it had been three months earlier; after 16 months in the ice, the ship had drifted a total of less than 200 nautical miles. To make matters worse, their measurements showed that Petermann was wrong. There was no warm Pacific current reaching the North Pole.

“It did seem like the mission was cursed, almost from the start,” says Sides. “It seemed like one thing after another after another goes wrong.” Despite the pervading sense of despair, however, “DeLong held it together. While they’re trapped in the ice, they’re hunting their own food. Nobody dies.”

The worst was yet to come, however, and it began with what seemed like the impending end of their misery. On June 11, 1881, the ice released its grip, only to close in rapidly again, crushing the hull and prompting DeLong to order Jeannette’s abandonment. On June 13, the ship sank and the crew set out for land, first across the ice and then in three boats that they launched into tempestuous waters.

One boat never reached shore, presumably capsizing with the loss of eight lives. The other two boats made it to Siberia’s Lena Delta but became separated. One group soon came into contact with a band of nomadic Yakut hunters, who helped lead them to safety. The bulk of the other group struggled across the Siberian landscape but became trapped by bad weather. Over the course of October 1881, 12 men died, including DeLong. In total, only 13 of the crew’s 33 men survived and returned to the United States.

The loss of the USS Jeannette brought an end to the quest for an open polar sea. But the expedition’s scientific contributions were not over.

On June 18, 1884, pieces of the Jeannette wreckage were found on an ice floe near southwestern Greenland on the other side of the Arctic. That discovery helped confirm that a current does flow from east to west across the Arctic Ocean. And the meteorological and oceanographic records the crew had diligently kept have helped modern scientists reconstruct temperature data that now reveal the extent of climate change in the Arctic Ocean—climate change that, ironically, may one day make a journey across the North Pole navigable through open water.