THE THEORIES OF Silas Bent and Matthew Fontaine Maury, while buttressed by the science of their day, tapped into wellsprings of myth, fable, and belief. Variations of the Open Polar Sea idea had existed since prehistoric times. The notion of a safe, warm place at the roof of the globe—an oasis in a desert of ice, a polar utopia—seems to have been deeply embedded in the human psyche.
