THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 129 



going so far to seaward that in one or two notable cases he had 

 just barely enough food to reach land and had to get his first 

 meals on shore from musk oxen or caribou. Peary also says that 

 it is essential to success that your plans shall command the confi- 

 dence of enough Eskimos to help you to carry them out. 



There is then no denying that Peary's testimony is against such 

 ventures as I was planning. We were going north from Alaska into 

 the Beaufort Sea which has been uniformly described by the British 

 explorers and by the American, Leffingwell, and the Dane, Mikkel- 

 sen — which means all the explorers who have been there — as the 

 region of the heaviest polar ice known. This is presumably the 

 least promising part of the whole polar regions for the method 

 of living by forage; this is the section specifically described by 

 Markham as ''the polar ocean without life." Seals might be 

 found in shallow waters in certain parts of the polar basin even at 

 some distance from land but they certainly would not be found 

 in abysmal depths. Leffingwell and Mikkelsen's soundings, taken 

 on their journey north of 72° N. latitude in 1907, had given the 

 presumption that the ocean north of Alaska would be deep, thus 

 supplying with one more argument those who believed food could 

 not be secured. 



To make the case against me all the stronger, there were the 

 Eskimos. As mentioned above, Peary thinks that it is one of the 

 essentials of a successful journey over the moving pack that you 

 shall have Eskimos with you. And no Eskimo in northern Alaska 

 was willing to go with us. Many of them were good friends of 

 mine and some had worked for me on other expeditions. Nat- 

 kusiak, for instance, had been with me for four years and was 

 anxious to enter our service again. But he specified that he would 

 not under any conditions go out on the moving ice. And so said 

 all his compatriots. They considered being out on the sea ice dan- 

 gerous enough through the accidents that are possible when, under 

 stress of wind or current, the ice floes crush each other, rising on 

 edge and going through other antics that are admittedly threaten- 

 ing in spite of their ponderous slowness. But the main obstacle 

 was the fear of starvation. Most of them said they would not go 

 with us at all, and the most venturesome said that they would not 

 consider going any farther than until half the food carried in the 

 sledges had been eaten. They wanted to have the other half to 

 bring them back ashore again, or to bring them at least into the 

 familiar shore waters where there were seals. 



I used to tell them that both they and we knew how to get 



