James Markham Marshall Ambler, Hero of the Arctic
James Markham Marshall Ambler
The map follows the voyage of the Jeannette and her crew from Alaska to the final landings in northwestern Siberia. Credit: Meeting of Frontiers, frontiers.loc.gov. After a brief delay off the Siberian Coast, the Jeanette headed toward Wrangel Island, where they would set up their winter quarters. However, by early September, ice began thickening, and with 120 miles to go, progress halted and the ship was locked in the ice. On January 19, 1880, the hull was breached by the ice and began taking on water. Heroic efforts by the crew kept her from sinking. Ambler’s duties ranged from treating minor injuries and the effects of the cold to serious surgery on the eye of the ship’s navigation officer. He also was tasked with determining the salinity of ice melted to replace the ship’s dwindling water supply. Hopes that the ship could break free during the Arctic summer of 1880 were soon dashed. The drifting continued, and on May 17, 1881, an island was sighted in previously uncharted seas, the first land the crew had seen in over a year. On June 11, 1881, the Jeanette was briefly freed, but the next day, the ice crushed the hull and it sank about 350 miles off the Siberian coast. The crew started to trek south over the ice to the New Siberian Islands, dragging provisions and equipment in a large cutter, a smaller cutter and a
ocated in the graveyard beside Leeds Episcopal Church at Markham are the gravesites of several Fauquier families whose roots go back to the founding of the county. Notable among them is a monument to James Markham Marshall Ambler, a surgeon in the U.S. Navy, whose epitaph reads he “died in October 1881 in the 33rd year of his age near the mouth of the Lena River.” There his story ended, but the events leading up to his death in the northern reaches of Siberia have become legendary. Ambler was born December 30, 1848 at “The Dell,” near Hume, second of four sons and five children of Dr. Richard Cary Ambler and his wife, Susanna Marshall Ambler. At 16 he joined the 12th Virginia Cavalry Regiment, serving during the last months of the Civil War. Returning home, Ambler attended Washington College in Lexington for two years, then the University of Maryland School of Medicine, earning his degree in 1870. After practicing for four years, he joined the Navy as an assistant surgeon. Serving at the Norfolk Naval Hospital in 1878, Ambler became involved with an expedition to reach
the North Pole by sea undertaken by the Navy, but financed by James Gordon Bennett Jr., owner of the New York Herald. Bennett was interested in finding a sea route to the North Pole. The popular theory was that there was an “Open Polar Sea” at the top of the world. Earlier efforts to discover this route had failed. Bennett contacted Lt. George Washington DeLong, asking him to take a leave of absence from the Navy to lead another expedition to reach the North Pole. Once naval support was secured, DeLong arranged the purchase of a decommissioned British gunboat, the 142-foot steamer Pandora, at Le Havre, France, previously used in Arctic exploration. DeLong paid $6,000. The Pandora sailed to the Mare Island Naval Shipyard off Vallejo, California for refitting, and was formally commissioned in the Navy as the USS Jeanette. DeLong assembled the 33-man crew, including Ambler as the medical officer, an excellent choice. “Surgeon Ambler stood as ready to dispense cheer and inspiration as salve, bandage, or quinine to each morning’s sick parade,” wrote Leonard F. Guttridge in “Icebound: The Jeanette Expedition to Find the North Pole” (1986).
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MIDDLEBURG SUSTAINABLE COMMITTEE| Holiday 2023
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By John T. Toler
