384 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



expeditions. Subsequently I wrote at his suggestion a letter ad- 

 dressed to him, giving my opinion that if our expedition, or any part 

 of it, were not heard from for a year or two no alarm need be felt 

 and nothing should be done towards the rescue of any one whose 

 approximate position and actual distress had not been directly and 

 credibly reported. As for my own section, I gave it as my opinion 

 that if we got into difficulties from which we could not extricate 

 ourselves it was unlikely that any one could find us in time to help 

 us and without exposing his party to at least as great a danger as 

 we were in ourselves. It was my belief that in case of voluntary 

 or involuntary separation from our ships our party could live on 

 game and walk out to some outpost of civilization on the north 

 coast of Asia or America or on the west coast of Greenland. 



Mr. Desbarats explained when approached by McConnell that 

 his department had my own written opinion that no "rescue" should 

 be attempted. He considered the probability small that if our 

 definite location were unknown any one could find and help us. 

 So his reply was in substance that, apart from accidents, they had 

 confidence in our ability to look after ourselves and that their sup- 

 port of a rescue expedition would be inconsistent with a policy for- 

 mulated by me and agreed on by them and me before our expedi- 

 tion sailed. 



As for the eight men of the Karluk, Mr. Desbarats relied on the 

 opinion given him by Captain Bartlett that these men had not 

 been properly outfitted when they were separated from the rest of 

 his party and must for that reason have died long before. 



While McConnell seems to have pinned his faith to the argu- 

 ments advanced by Captain Pedersen, he published the statement 

 frequently that it had been my intention not to come back to Alaska 

 but to proceed to Banks Island. This was most explicitly set forth 

 in an article by H. E. Rood in the New York Sunday Sun accom- 

 panied by a map showing a star at northwest Banks Island where 

 the North Star was to look for us in the summer of 1914. But 

 somehow this point of McConnell's failed to impress itself on those 

 most interested in our fortunes, probably for two reasons. First, 

 McConnell himself was not proposing to search for us in Banks 

 Island. And second, everybody who knew the truth had sup- 

 pressed the information that my orders had been disobeyed and 

 that the chief danger to my party lay in the fact that our poorest 

 ice ship, the Sachs, instead of our best one, the Star, had been sent 

 to Banks Island. The Sachs did not even have orders to come as 



