Sublime

Natives seemed to have recovered from Mai’s ballistics

Yet even as he’d cinched the noose, he’d known that the vessel that carried the hope of validating his fondest dreams was en route to San Francisco—and then to the pole. The interview he gave for the New York Herald was the last public utterance August Petermann ever made.

Petermann had become the guiding spirit behind the expedition—its primary theoretician, its éminence grise.