Imagining the North The uncharted North fired the imagination of Europeans and North Americans in the 19th and early 20th century. Many believed in a warm open ocean existed, on the other side of a ring of ice. John B Sheldon of Hillville, New Jersey believed that the pole was made out of diamond. But the idea of a perpetually frozen landscape was alien to farming peoples in the warm and fertile south. Few people, in Russia or the West could conceive of a life among the sophisticated hunter gatherers who had lived in the Arctic for millennia. Credit: Face to Face Media