8 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



deaths — a sort of human counterpart of the impulse which leads 

 the lemming to march in thousands into the ocean to be drowned. 

 Other conceptions vary upward and upward, until we come to the 

 noble view that the explorer is the scientist urged by a thirst for 

 knowledge, who struggles on through the arctic night with the same 

 spirit that keeps the astronomer at his telescope, neither of them 

 thinking of material profit or necessarily of glory or even of the 

 approbation of his fellows. 



There is much of the adventurer in some explorers and much 

 of the scientist in others ; in a few the qualities are happily blended. 

 But in order to understand the Arctic explorer and his work we 

 must understand the Arctic as it really is. It might seem that the 

 easiest way to do this would be to learn more about it. A far 

 easier way is to forget what we think we already know. 



The Arctic as pictured in the first two paragraphs of this chapter 

 and in the minds of most of our contemporaries, does not exist. It 

 may be a pity to destroy the illusion, for the world is getting daily 

 poorer in romance. Elves and fairies no longer dance in the woods, 

 and it appears a sort of vandalism to destroy the glamorous and 

 heroic North by too intimate knowledge, as the Greeks drove their 

 gods off Olympus through the perverse scaling of the mountain to 

 its top. 



Our first close look at the Arctic shows us that our central 

 "fact," the preeminent inaccessibility of the Pole, is not a fact at 

 all. The portion difficult of access is not circular with the Pole at 

 its center, but of a highly irregular shape with the Pole lying well 

 towards one of the edges. The region in the north difficult of access 

 is an ocean more or less covered with ice. The inaccessibility of any 

 part of this area is due to the fact that there is too much ice for 

 ships to sail as they sail on the Atlantic, and not enough for men 

 to walk safely and easily as they walk on land. There is no single 

 huge expanse of level ice: there are instead innumerable floes or 

 cakes of ice. These are pressed against each other under the stress 

 of wind and current, their edges crumble under the terrific strain, 

 and ice pressure ridges are formed resembling mountain ranges in 

 contour, though seldom more than fifty or sixty feet in height. If 

 the floes are extensive they break up under heavy pressure not only 

 along their edges but at various points within the general field, 

 buckling till they crack and forming new floe edges with new pres- 

 sure ridges. Then when the strains slacken or become unequal the 

 floes, instead of hugging each other, spread apart with water lanes 

 between. This happens even in midwinter with the temperature at 



