THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 101 



trading salt meat for flour, that I was delighted to do ; on the basis 

 of market values in Seattle and at the prices which then prevailed, 

 the food value of a dollar's worth of flour was far greater than that 

 of a dollar's worth of salt meat. Furthermore, having always looked 

 upon the Arctic as abundantly stocked with meat, I have never seen 

 the use of bringing any in. What we had brought was in deference 

 to the food tastes of our sailors. Personally I have none too much 

 sympathy with a man who has an abundance of caribou meat and 

 must have bread with it, but I have far less with a man who, hav- 

 ing caribou meat, wants to change off to salt beef now and then, 

 A great advantage, too, of flour over salt meat is that it is far 

 more satisfactory for emergency dog-feed. It is not an ideal dog- 

 feed, but mixed with other things it can be cooked up into a passable 

 ration, while salt meat cannot be fed to dogs without the bother of 

 soaking it first in several changes of water, and in the Arctic in 

 most places water is in winter one of the hardest things to get. 



At the Belvedere I spent Christmas very pleasantly with Cap- 

 tain and Mrs. Cottle, old friends. There was no hurry about getting 

 down to Herschel Island, for I learned from Captain Cottle then 

 that the police did not intend to send their mail out before the 

 New Year. 



A day's journey east from the Belvedere was another old friend, 

 "Duffy" O'Connor, who had been landed there with a trading outfit 

 by a ship which had later gone away and left him. His goods con- 

 sisted largely of articles which our expedition needed badly. He 

 was not making much of a success of the trading venture, for the 

 compulsory wintering of the Belvedere just west of him had given 

 him a competitor that he had not counted upon. So it suited 

 O'Connor to sell out to me, and I arranged to purchase the lot for 

 eight thousand dollars, a cheap price for the locality at the time, 

 although high as compared with prevailing wholesale prices in the 

 trading centers of the world. 



Ten miles east of O'Connor's place, Captain Martin Andreasen 

 was wintering with the North Star. He also was an old friend and 

 a man who had been trading in these regions for a number of years. 

 I had met him last at Point Atkinson east of the Mackenzie when 

 I spent several days at his camp there in 1912. 



Captain Andreasen and his ship, the North Star, were exponents 

 of not exactly a new but nevertheless an uncommon theory of arctic 

 navigation. The one idea familiar to those who read arctic books 

 is that a ship for ice navigation should be tremendously strong, 

 tremendously powerful, and shaped in such a way that she has a 



