Jeannette, a bark-rigged wooden steamship, was built in 1861 at Pembroke Dockyard, England, as the British gunvessel Pandora. The Royal Navy sold her in 1875 for use in Sir Allen Young's voyages to the Arctic. She was purchased by New York newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett in 1878 and renamed Jeannette. Lieutenant George W. DeLong, USN, who had collaborated with Bennett on a project to use the ship for an attempt to reach the North Pole, sailed her from Europe to San Francisco, California. Under the terms of a law authorizing the Navy to provide officers and crew for the proposed expedition, if Bennett paid for all other expenses, she was refitted at the Mare Island Navy Yard, in northern San Francisco Bay. In addition to receiving new boilers and other equipment, Jeannette's hull was massively reinforced to allow her to navigate in the Arctic icepack.

On 8 July 1879 the Jeannette, privately owned but Navy operated, left San Francisco under DeLong's command. His crew included four other Navy officers, twenty-three enlisted men and three civilians. Visiting Alaska, she stopped at Unalaska and Saint Michael, where two Inuit dog drivers joined her, with their dogs and sleds. Jeannette then called on an eastern Siberian port to top up her coal bunkers, passed through the Bering Strait and headed for Wrangell Island. Near there, on 6 September 1879, she entered the Arctic ice, where she was soon frozen in. During the next twenty-two months the drifting ice carried the ship several hundred miles to the northwestward, until on 12 June 1881 her hull was broken open when ice flows rapidly converged after opening a few days previously. Jeannette sank the following morning, after her crew had removed boats, equipment and provisions in preparation for a months-long journey on foot across the desolate ice to reach open water north of Siberia. In the end, of the thirty-three who set off after the ship went down, only thirteen of Jeannette's men survived their adventures and returned to civilization.