THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 33 



water entirely for cooking and drinking. It seemed to them there- 

 fore that I should do something about increasing the capacity of 

 the fresh water tanks. 



This proposition astounded me. I had considered carefully the 

 capacity of the tanks in relation to the voyage from Victoria to 

 Nome, which is almost as long as the Atlantic voyage from New 

 York to Liverpool. In consultation with Bartlett I had decided 

 that the tanks would be adequate even for this voyage, and now 

 that we had reached Nome and were on the outskirts of the polar 

 sea, it had appeared to me that all doubts were over. I suggested 

 that it would be only a few hundred miles until we should be 

 among the polar ice. I said that the ordinary method of naviga- 

 tion in Alaska is to follow the land as you proceed eastward, never 

 going far from shore and always keeping between the land and the 

 ice. We could go inshore for water at any time, but if we went 

 too far offshore and got beset, we should always be able to get 

 fresh water off the ice itself. 



At this point Murray became party spokesman. He said that 

 in winter it would be easy to get snow for cooking and drinking, 

 but that in summer there would be no snow on the sea ice, and that 

 if the ship became hemmed in by floes in such a way that it was 

 impossible to reach the land, we could have no way of getting 

 drinking-water. When he had been in the Antarctic with Shackle- 

 ton they had sometimes used ice for cooking, but that was different, 

 for it was always glacier ice they used. It was well known there 

 are no icebergs or fragments of glacier ice in the sea north of 

 Alaska. And he went on to say that I might possibly consider it 

 to smack of insubordination, but that he had been constrained 

 to tell the other members of the scientific staff in this connection 

 about my interview with Sir John Murray, where he had himself 

 been present and where Sir John, who was the greatest authority 

 on the ocean living, had dismissed as ridiculous my suggestion that 

 salt water ice became fresh. It was only then I recalled the silence 

 of James Murray on that walk home. 



It turned out impossible for me to convince my staff that it 

 would be safe on the score of drinking water to take a ship out 

 among the ocean ice. A number of them were prepared to resign, 

 considering that a person so lacking in judgment and discretion 

 as to be willing to take an entire ship's company into a position 

 where they might all die of thirst must be in general unsuitable 

 for the command of any arctic expedition. 



Had I known in advance the topic of the meeting I should have 



