CHAPTER X 



WE MEET DR. ANDERSON 



I STAYED only a day or two at Collinson Point and then 

 started eastward along the coast, encouraged by the enthu- 

 siasm with which Chipman had received my plans for 

 enlarging the work, and anxious to overtake Dr. Anderson before 

 he sent away his mail, so that he could, if he desired, alter that 

 report to the Government, eliminating the sections describing our 

 lack of equipment and consequently restricted program and substi- 

 tuting the more ambitious project which I had outlined from Barrow. 



But on meeting Dr. Anderson's party about twenty miles east 

 of Collinson Point, I found that his views and mine w^ere far from 

 coinciding. He insisted that we must abide by his program, which 

 he had already sent off to Ottawa, and said that he did not believe 

 we had any right to purchase dogs and supplies or to hire men for 

 the projected survey of the Mackenzie delta, nor did he think the 

 Government would approve of these expensive and too ambitious 

 plans. He was of the opinion that the Mackenzie delta was too far 

 from Collinson Point and could not be successfully reached for 

 survey work, and also of the opinion that no really useful work 

 would be done in sounding the river channels. He considered we 

 had been instructed to work in the vicinity of Coronation Gulf and 

 that we should practically mark time until we got there, husbanding 

 all supplies and incurring the least possible expense no matter if this 

 economy did limit very narrowly the scientific work done. 



My reply to this was that the instructions telling the expedition 

 to do its first year's work in the vicinity of Coronation Gulf had 

 been originally formulated by myself, although issued over the sig- 

 nature of others, and that I could not but know exactly what they 

 meant. We had expected to reach Coronation Gulf this year, but 

 now that we could not I took it as our duty to do as much as pos- 

 sible where we were. It seemed to me that as we had already in 

 the field an expedition with a large staff of scientists drawing pay 

 and costing as a whole perhaps one or two hundred thousand dol- 

 lars, it would be folly to lose this entire sum just to save an addi- 

 tional expenditure of fifteen or twenty thousand dollars. 



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