From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 20-21:
The “polar problem,” as it was sometimes called in the press, had taken on a quality of nagging, gnawing obsession. People had to know what was Up There—not only scientists and explorers but the general public. The North Pole was, said the London Athenaeum, the “unattainable object of our dreams.” An eminent German geographer named Ernst Behm compared humanity’s ignorance of what lay at the poles to the insatiable curiosity felt by a home owner who doesn’t know what his own attic looks like. “As a family will, of course, know all the rooms of its own house,” Behm wrote, “so man, from the very beginning, has been inspired with a desire to become acquainted with all the lands, oceans, and zones of the planet assigned to him for a dwelling-place.”
A New York Times editorial at the time echoed Behm’s sentiment: “Man will not be content with a mystery unexplored, will not rest with a perpetual interrogation point at the end of the earth’s axis, whose query he cannot answer.”
By the 1870s, no greater mystery existed on the face of the earth. (Antarctica was, of course, equally mysterious, but the South Pole was considered a less obtainable goal for the leading exploring nations, all of which happened to be located in the Northern Hemisphere.) It was hard to comprehend how profoundly the world needed to scratch the Arctic itch. Speculation about what lay at the North Pole permeated popular culture and world literature, from the books of Jules Verne to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (whose scientist-protagonist pursues his monster across the floes all the way to the North Pole). Many practical considerations were floated as justifications for pursuing the polar grail—landmasses that might be claimed, minerals seized, shipping routes discovered, colonies founded, new species described. There was a riddle of geography to solve, and personal glory to be won. But the quest was ultimately about something even more elemental and atavistic: to reach the farthest place, the ne plus ultra, where no human had been before.
“Within the charmed circle of the Arctic,” argued the Atlantic Monthly, “lay the goal of geographical ambition … the final solution of the polar problem. And it may be said that long years of fruitless effort and frightful suffering seem only to have whetted the appetite for discovery; and the more we know of our planet the more ardent becomes the desire of geographers to view the mysterious extremity.” An 1871 article in the journal Nature characterized the search for the pole as the paramount scientific and geographical riddle of the age: “The immense tract of hitherto unvisited land or sea which surrounds the northern end of the axis of our earth, is the largest, as it is the most important field of discovery that remains for this or a future generation to work out.”
Far Outliers 