Hampton Sides: author, editor, teacher: optimism is the all-pervasive quality you have to have if you're going to be an explorer.

• Author: Wolf, Mark
• Position: ON RECORD - Interview

Hampton Sides is the author of such acclaimed nonfiction best-sellers as "Americana," "Blood and Thunder" and "Hellhound on His Trail." He is an editor-at-large for Outside Magazine and a frequent contributor to National Geographic and other magazines. He teaches narrative nonfiction at Colorado College, where he is the journalist in residence.

He addressed legislative leaders at NCSL's Legislative Summit in Chicago about the leadership qualities displayed by the protagonists of his latest thriller, "In the Kingdom of Ice," which describes the heroic 1879 Arctic voyage of the USS Jeannette.

Your latest book recounts a harrowing story. Set the stage for us.

This was the Gilded Age. America was beginning to flex its muscles on the world stage and to compete with the European powers. It was a time of polar fever, when the world was trying to figure out what the heck was up there at the top of the world. So the U.S. Navy, in cooperation with an eccentric and very wealthy man named James Gordon Bennett Jr., publisher of the New York Herald, decided to team up and try to sail to the North Pole, past our recent acquisition from Russia--Alaska--by way of warm water currents they believed to be up there.

What did they think they would find?

There was a theory that, at the top of the world, beyond the ice, there was warm water, something called the Open Polar Sea. Obviously a wrong idea, completely wrong, dangerously wrong. They left in the summer of 1879 from San Francisco thinking they might reach the North Pole. The ship was crammed with all the latest American inventions, like telephones and telegraphs, telegraph wires and lights that Edison had just invented.

What they found instead was ice, and they drifted in the icepack for over two years until the ship finally sank to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean and the men were out on the ice, trying to figure out a way to get home. That's really when the story of leadership and comradeship and all of these incredible qualities started to emerge.

How did Capt. George W. De Long's leadership skills play out?

De Long's extensive planning was the first sign of his leadership. As much as we might think that this was a crazy and half-cocked mission, nothing could be further from the truth. Before they set off, he read everything, he had the best maps, the best charts, the best scientists, consulted everybody, had enough food for three years, researched everything.

How was competition relevant to survival?

...