Jeannette Island is a barrier island about 0.5 miles (0.8 km) long and one of the McClure Islands, on the Beaufort Sea coast of the Arctic Ocean, roughly 92 miles (148 km) west-northwest of Kaktovik and 25 miles (40 km) northeast of Deadhorse, Alaska. It was named in 1881 by Lieutenant-Commander George W. De Long of the USS Jeannette, a U.S. Navy steamship, during the United States Arctic Expedition, also known as the Jeannette expedition.

The Jeannette expedition of 1879–81, led by De Long, attempted to reach the North Pole by pioneering a route from the Pacific Ocean through the Bering Strait. Its premise was that the Kuroshio, a warm current, flowed north into the strait, opening a path to a theorized Open Polar Sea and thence to the pole. Instead the USS Jeannette, carrying a crew of 33, became trapped in ice and drifted for nearly two years before being crushed and sunk off the Siberian coast. De Long led his 32 men on a grueling trek by sledge, hauling the ship’s whaleboat and two cutters, before switching to the boats to sail for the Lena Delta. Twenty of the crew, De Long among them, died during the journey and the weeks of wandering in Siberia that followed before rescue.

The McClure Islands comprise Narwhal, Jeannette and Karluk islands. Ernest de Koven Leffingwell named the group for Captain Robert McClure of the Royal Navy, who discovered them in 1850. The McClure Arctic expedition of 1850–54, one of many British searches for Sir John Franklin‘s lost expedition, is best remembered as the voyage on which McClure, an Irish-born officer, became the first person to traverse the Northwest Passage, doing so by a combination of sailing and sledging.  Read more here and here. Explore more of Jeannette Island and McClure Islands here: