THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 161 



bears which approached their camp but consented to be scared away. 

 After nine marches they reached shore on April 16th, where they 

 fell in with Constable Parsons of the Royal Northwest Mounted 

 Police, on his way to Herschel Island from a visit to the Belvedere. 

 He told them that all the people along the coast, whalers and trap- 

 pers and Eskimos alike, had given our party up for dead after the 

 gale which carried us off from the shore ice. 



Since that time we have traveled over the ice north of Alaska 

 so long and so safely that it now seems curious even to these same 

 Eskimos and whalers, as I know from conversation with them, that 

 they could in 1914 have had such exaggerated notions of the dangers 

 of ice travel. I remember especially one conversation in 1914, 

 just before we left the Alaska coast, with Captain Mogg, a whaler 

 of more than twenty years' experience, which illustrates the then 

 common point of view. The captain told me that one day just about 

 Christmas he had gone to the top of Herschel Island, which is about 

 five hundred feet high, and had looked to the north without seeing 

 any sign of open water or of anything except firm and stationary 

 sea ice. The next day when the weather had cleared after a brief 

 gale he had gone to the top of the island and had seen a belt of ice 

 about a mile wide still clinging to the shore and beyond that open 

 ocean, the pack having "gone abroad" before the gale. After a 

 dramatic recital Captain Mogg turned to me and said, "Supposing, 

 with your scientific notions, you had been off on that ice the 

 day before when the gale struck — where in hell would you have been 

 then?" It was obvious that Captain Mogg supposed I would have 

 been at the sea bottom. It did not occur to him that a cake of ice 

 may be a very seaworthy craft, and that when you are floating 

 away on a large one you may have no more evidence that you are 

 moving than do the people who sleep peacefully at night on shore 

 while the earth is spinning on its axis. 



