In 1879 Lieutenant George De Long set out with a crew on the USS Jeannette in hopes of claiming the North Pole for the United States. De Long's plans were based on maps developed by mapmakers at the time (cartographers). Like most mapmakers, Dr. August Heinrich Petermann believed there was an open polar ice-free sea, teeming with marine life "whose waters could be smoothly sailed, much as one might sail across the Caribbean or the Mediterranean."

Unfortunately, every previous expedition that had sailed north in search of the sea had run into a problem—ice. Now you might think that running into ice every time would lead scientists to abandon the theory of an Open Polar Sea. Not so. Instead, Petermann merely modified the original theory by adding the idea of a "thermometric gateway." As Hampton Sides recounts the story in his book In the Kingdom of Ice, "If an explorer could just bust through this icy circle, preferably in a ship with a reinforced hull, he would eventually find open water and enjoy smooth sailing to the North Pole. The trick, then, was to find a gap in the ice… a natural portal of some kind."

George De Long and his crew of 28 men wanted to find that portal. It didn't take long for De Long to realize that all the cartographers, scientists, and geographers had been wrong. He wrote, "I pronounce a thermometric gateway to the North Pole a delusion and a snare." Eventually, De Long began to doubt the existence of the Open Polar Sea. He and his men encountered ice that seemed to stretch out forever.

De Long and his crew came to grips with the fact that they had been duped. The team had to "replace [their wrongheaded ideas] with a reckoning of the way the Arctic truly is." They were running up against the rocks or hardened ice of reality. In September 1879, the USS Jeannette got trapped in the ice pack and his crew escaped and tried to go toward Siberia. The crew got separated. Some made it to Siberia and survived; others continued their lonely trek through the ice. As for George Washington De Long, he died in late October 1881 of starvation. He was covered up by snow, except for one of his arms, which was raised as if to signal toward the sky.

Possible Preaching Angles: What are the maps for your life? What are the assumptions, the worldviews that guide your life? Is your map true or false? All too often we stake the expedition of our lives on false maps.