One of a number of “experts” on the Arctic, Petermann believed that currents created a kind of tropic ocean around the North Pole, and that beyond the ice packs of the Arctic region was a beautiful island, which any powerful nation would want to claim as its own. August Petermann, a noted cartographer, was the main instigator of the mission to the North Pole. The book reads like a catalog of the prominent men who prompted and manned the expedition, ending with the horrific account of what the men endured after the boat was breached in ice. So little was known about the Arctic region around 1880, when the De Long expedition set off from San Francisco Bay. The story begins with the appeal of the North Pole – worldwide, people wanted to see what this uncharted region had to offer. Hopelessly stuck with no ability to turn back, the crew abandoned the boat and had to walk and dogsled more than one thousand miles to the mainland of Siberia or give up their lives entirely to the frozen, desolate north.
The crew of the famous USS Jeannette wanted to be the first people to set foot on the as yet unexplored North Pole but soon found themselves trapped in fifteen-foot-thick sheets of ice. In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette by Hampton Sides is a non-fiction book that follows the true story of the De Long expedition to the North Pole.
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