40 THENORTHPOLE 



regions themselves were to furnish for their own con- 

 quest. Cape York, or Melville Bay, is the dividing 

 line between the civilized world on the one side and 

 the arctic world on the other — the arctic world 

 with its equipment of Eskimos, dogs, walrus, seal, fur 

 clothing, and aboriginal experience. 



Behind me lay the civilized world, which was now 

 absolutely useless, and which could give me nothing 

 more. Ahead of me lay that trackless waste through 

 which I must literally cut my way to the goal. Even 

 the ship's journey from Cape York to winter quarters 

 on the north coast of Grant Land is not "plain sail- 

 ing"; in fact, it is not sailing at all during the later 

 stages; it is jamming and butting and dodging and 

 hammering the ice, with always the possibility that 

 the antagonist will hit back a body blow. It is like 

 the work of a skilled heavy-weight pugilist, or the 

 work of an old Roman fighter with the cestus. 



Beyond Melville Bay the world, or what we know 

 as the world, is left behind. On leaving Cape York, 

 we had exchanged the multifarious purposes of civi- 

 lization for the two purposes for which there is room 

 in those wide wastes: food for man and dog, and the 

 covering of miles of distance. 



Behind me now lay everything that was mine, 

 everything that a man personally loves, family, friends, 

 home, and all those human associations which linked 

 me with my kind. Ahead of me lay — my dream, the 

 goal of that irresistible impulse which had driven me 

 for twenty-three years to measure myself, time 

 after time, against the frigid No of the Great 

 North. 



