After more than a decade's service off the West African coast and in the Mediterranean, Pandora was retired from duty and sold as a private yacht to a British explorer, Allen Young.

Young took her on two voyages to the Arctic, in 1875 and 1876, before selling her to James Gordon Bennett Jr., proprietor of the New York Herald, who changed her name to Jeannette.

Although she sailed to the Arctic under the U.S. flag as USS Jeannette, subject to naval laws and discipline, Bennett remained responsible for the costs of the expedition.

The ship that became USS Jeannette began her life as a Royal Navy gunboat, built at the Pembroke Naval Dockyards in 1860.

[1] In November 1861, during the American Civil War, the diplomatic incident known as the Trent affair caused the Admiralty to bring additional ships into active service.

He was diverted by a request from the Admiralty to look for the British Arctic Expedition under George Nares, which was engaged in an attempt to reach the North Pole from Smith Sound.

[8] Bennett's plan was to sail a vessel through the Bering Strait, on the theory that the warm Pacific Ocean current known as the Kuro Siwo would provide a "thermometric gateway" whereby a suitable ship might reach the North Pole.

[11] Pandora was renamed Jeannette, after Bennett's sister, and in January 1879 arrived at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, to be fitted for Arctic service.

De Long and his men unloaded provisions and equipment onto the ice, and watched as the ship continued moaning through the night and finally disappeared beneath the water in the early morning of June 13.

[21][22] After reaching the New Siberian Islands and gaining some food and rest, the party took to their three boats on September 12 for the last stage of their journey to the Lena Delta, their planned landfall.

The other two craft, commanded by De Long and chief engineer George W. Melville with 14 and 11 men respectively, survived the severe weather but landed at widely separated points on the delta.

After much hardship, with many of his men severely weakened, De Long sent the two strongest, William F. C. Nindemann and Louis P. Noros, ahead for help; they eventually found a settlement and survived.

It gave the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen the idea that a properly-constructed ship could enter the ice in the east, survive the pressure during the drift, and emerge in the Atlantic, perhaps having traversed the pole itself.

The path and fate of the Jeanette is mentioned several times in Buddy Levy's account of the disastrous journey of HMCS Karluk, Empire of Ice and Stone.