116 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



Furthermore, I knew that the Chief of the Survey, Mr. R. W. 

 Brock, had never intimated in any way to his men that they 

 would be justified or supported in disobeying orders. O'Neill ad- 

 mitted, in fact, on being questioned that it was not Mr. Brock 

 who had said this, but some one whose name he declined to give. 



O'Neill's purpose in coming with the present party was to 

 proceed up the Firth River for a survey. This was the survey 

 planned and outlined in my dispatches to the Government from 

 Point Barrow, and was one of the points where the plans as out- 

 lined by Dr. Anderson coincided with plans as outlined by me. I 

 had every interest in seeing the project itself carried through; what 

 had disturbed me on meeting O'Neill's party was not that it should 

 be on its way but rather that it should have in it Captain Bernard 

 and Louis Olesen, both of whom should then have been engaged 

 in helping Storkerson with the outfitting for the ice trip. Instead 

 of these men O'Neill should have had with him other white men 

 and local Eskimos with their dogs, an arrangement that would 

 have served quite as well. 



Captain Bernard and Olesen now faced the unhappy question 

 of whether they were going to obey my orders or Dr. Anderson's. 

 Olesen took the position that Dr. Anderson was his real commander, 

 there having been two expeditions with two independent heads, 

 myself in command of the Karluk, and Anderson of the Alaska and 

 Mary Sachs. Captain Bernard expressed the opposite view, so I 

 did not argue Olesen's, for O'Neill had to have somebody to help 

 him with his geological work and my opinion of Olesen was such 

 that I was well pleased to let somebody else have him. 



It had been O'Neill's intention to proceed forthwith up the 

 Herschel River, but as he had, in common with most of the men 

 at Collinson Point, spent the entire winter in the house, he was so 

 "soft" and became so badly laid up with the fifteen-mile walk from 

 where he met me to Herschel Island that his departure for the 

 mountains had to be deferred several days. Such "softness" is the 

 inevitable result of the time-honored polar explorer custom of spend- 

 ing the winter in camp whether in study (where the officers teach the 

 men), theatricals, and the publishing of busy-work newspapers 

 known as Boreal Bugle or North Polar News, as was done by the 

 British expeditions from Parry to Nares; or whether in reading, 

 listening to phonographs and writing reams of home letters for next 

 summer's mail, as has been the custom on recent expeditions. Such 

 idleness makes muscles flabby and (what is worse) breeds discontent, 

 personal animosities and bickerings of all sorts. That is one reason 



