THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 455 



The sensible thing to do was to stop where I was until the weather 

 cleared and find the ship on the way back. 



The best of all means for passing time is sleep. I felt neither 

 sleepy nor tired, but I lay down on top of a little knoll with my 

 back to the wind and tried to sleep, covering my face with my 

 arm in such a way as to keep off the drifting snow. 



A belief that has in the past handicapped polar explorers is 

 that when you are lost in the Arctic you must not go to sleep. 

 It is said that if you do go to sleep you never wake. This belief 

 seems to be a complication of several beliefs. Not only is it 

 thought that you will not waken as you become colder, but it is 

 actually supposed that the cold itself tends to make you sleepy. 

 I used to think so myself, for it was a part of my childhood edu- 

 cation. Coming home in sleighs from dances and parties I used 

 to imagine that it was the bitter Dakota cold, which I feared 

 through having read so much about it in magazines printed in 

 New York, that was making me sleepy when I now know it was 

 merely that my usual bedtime hour had passed. 



One of the commonest experiences of humanity is that when 

 you are cold in bed you have difficulty in sleeping. The same 

 applies whether you are sleeping on a porch "for the good of your 

 health" with insufficient covers, or whether you lie down on an 

 arctic snowfield in clothes that are not quite adequate to keep 

 you warm when motionless. The first result of sleepiness or going 

 to sleep is a slowing down of the pulse, which seems to be the 

 proximate cause of general lowering of body temperature. People 

 who are awakened from sleep by being too cold in bed become 

 warm through mere wakefulness, providing the cold to which they 

 are exposed is not too intense. That is exactly what happens to 

 a person who lies down as I did now. The approach of sleep 

 brings on a chill that wakes you up, so that I have never under 

 such conditions been able to sleep more than a quarter of an 

 hour or so at a time and more often I have not been able to go to 

 sleep at all. With clothing a little warmer I could have taken 

 longer naps. 



As soon as one brings common sense and experience to bear on 

 a situation of this sort it becomes evident how dangerous is the 

 ordinary procedure of trying to keep awake at all costs. It has 

 been the cause of probably dozens of deaths that I have heard 

 about in connection with the whaling fleet at Herschel Island. 

 Men would get lost, and, with the obsession that going to sleep 



