THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 323 



caribou killed before leaving Melville Island on the outward journey, 

 and after reaching it on his way home. 



But he goes on to say:* "But no fuel of any kind could be 

 got (in Prince Patrick Island)." This brings out strikingly what 

 it would have meant to him had some one in his party understood 

 sealing. In his table of "Animals Seen" he notes eighteen seals, 

 none of which could be killed. A good seal hunter should have 

 secured at least twelve of them, yielding 600 to 900 pounds of blub- 

 ber, about equal in heat value to that much of the fuel McClintock 

 had brought from his ship to last for over a hundred days. In 

 other words, these seals represented more fuel than he used on his 

 whole journey, fuel which could have been picked up along the 

 way when needed instead of being laboriously hauled by man-power 

 through hundreds of miles of soft snow. And if McClintock, when 

 he was not particularly looking for seals, saw eighteen, he would 

 have seen many times that number had he been depending on 

 them. 



It does seem a pity that progress has to be so slow. If the men 

 of the Franklin Search could only have rid themselves wholly, as 

 McClintock did in part, of the idea that the Arctic is insufficiently 

 stocked with food and fuel, it would have changed the whole aspect 

 of the Search. A few score young men needed only to spend sev- 

 eral months learning native Eskimo methods of hunting, house- 

 building, etc. — they did not have to learn how to burn seal oil, 

 for seal oil is but train oil, which they already knew how to burn 

 for it was commonly used for light in those days. Then they could 

 have traveled where they needed to travel, comfortable, well-fed 

 and safe. 



And if the idea of the barrenness of the Arctic could have been 

 shed a decade earlier there would have been no Franklin Search, 

 for Franklin's men would not have starved to death, as we now 

 know they did, in a region where game is abundant.** 



* "Further Papers Relative to the Recent Arctic Expeditions in Search 

 of Sir John Franklin," p. 585. 



** I have said something of this sort before and a critic has replied under 

 three heads: (1) "He who says Franklin's men could have lived by hunting 

 overlooks the terrible handicap of numbers" — but the crews could have scat- 

 tered in small parties; also Eskimos sometimes live in parties more numerous 

 than Franklin's crews. (2) "Eskimos are skilled hunters, but Englishmen 

 are not," — but I have seen young boys from cities become expert sealers in 

 a few weeks. (3) "Franklin's men were weakened by scurvy," — but they 

 would have had no scurvy had they lived on fresh game. (On the last head see 

 my article on scurvy in the "Journal of the American Medical Association," 

 November 23, 1918). 



