And the North Pole is where?

Something jumped out of the newspaper today and hit me in the face. No really - it did!

As I flipped through the pages of the Boston Globe, the title of an obituary jumped out at me: "William Anderson; sailed sub under North Pole". Tell me, how do you sail under a point on the surface of the earth?

Am I wrong? Is the North Pole somewhere else? I went searching... The Boston Globe obit clearly said "under the North Pole". Out of curiosity, I looked for another obituary for William Anderson, and I found that the LA Times worded their version as "under the polar ice cap to the North Pole". That was more acceptable to my silly brain because I've always thought of the poles as a location on the surface of the earth.

I turned to Wikipedia for a defintion of North Pole and found something that could support either of the two examples. The primary definition matched my understanding though. From Wikipedia:

"When not otherwise qualified, the term North Pole usually refers to the Geographic North Pole – the northernmost point on the surface of the Earth, where the Earth's axis of rotation intersects the Earth's surface."

Perhaps the author of the "under the North Pole" description really meant the North Celestial Pole,

"an imaginary point in the northern sky towards which the Earth's axis of rotation points".

I've been told that the way my brain is wired is sometimes too precise. Perhaps this is an example of that somewhat wacky behavior...