In the Kingdom of Ice

by Hampton Sides

The privilege isn’t given to everyone. . . . You must have suffered first, have suffered greatly, have gained some miserable knowledge. In that way your eyes are opened to it. —Henry James, 1881

When it came to the Arctic, Petermann was a man “with an undeviating affinity for the wrong guess,” noted David Thomas Murphy, a historian of German Arctic exploration. “Such notions strike the modern reader as so unlikely, so spectacularly counterintuitive, and in retrospect so wrong that they seem to border upon the deranged.”