THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 135 



had been fools and incapable of finding this royal road to ex- 

 ploration. 



To these objections I could reply sincerely that I yielded to 

 no one in my admiration for Peary and that he had been my friend 

 and adviser for many years. But according to plans which he 

 considered (and found) adequate to the task of reaching the Pole, 

 Peary had started from Grant Land with food enough to take him to 

 his destination and back again; there was no reason why he 

 should stop to hunt for seals. Furthermore, Peary himself does 

 not ever appear to have hunted seals by the Eskimo method and 

 probably was not familiar with the technique of it and especially 

 with the unobtrusive signs by which the expert hunter can detect 

 the presence of seals. The reply to me was that Peary had Eskimos 

 with him who were presumably expert seal hunters; to which it 

 could be countered that, while Peary could speak to his Eskimos in 

 the jargon which he used for intercourse with them and while 

 they would always understand him and be able to reply in the same 

 jargon, he never tried to learn their language, or, as he calls it, 

 their ''secret language." * At the end of a day's travel the Eskimos 

 might very well have discussed with each other in the vernacular 

 or "secret language" the seal signs they had noticed during the 

 day and Peary would not have known what they were talking 

 about. For it would not have occurred to him to ask, having con- 

 cluded a 'priori that there were no seals; and it would not have 

 occurred to them to speak, for they would not have supposed him 

 to be interested. Peary's Eskimos, too, were usually in a hurry to 

 get back home, and if they had supposed him interested and had 

 told him about the presence of seals it might have delayed the 

 journey and kept them away longer than they liked. Possibly the 

 conditions out at sea were so different from those they were used to 

 around Smith Sound that they themselves may have failed to notice 

 the seal signs. On this point I cannot speak, for I have never vis- 

 ited Smith Sound, and no one who has has had enough command 

 of the technique of seal hunting to write instructively about it. At 

 any rate, no such observations have been published. 



It is possible for a business man to buy a passage from New 

 York to Liverpool and to cross the Newfoundland banks without 

 ever seeing a codfish or any evidence to lead him to think that 

 codfish are there. But a fisherman on the banks would have no 

 doubt of the presence of codfish nor any trouble in getting them. 



♦See "The North Pole," by Robert E. Peary, p. 50. 



