THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 573 



ened through the better health and spirits of men and dogs brought 

 about by the fresh meat. His longest trip, that from winter quarters 

 in 1900 on the south shore of Jones Sound to latitude 81 on the 

 west side of Axel Heiberg Island, was, according to his own sum- 

 mary, lengthened out by only thirteen days through the use of game. 



It does not seem reasonable to me, but I have heard it objected 

 to my method that it is too destructive of the game in the country 

 traversed. You might almost as well complain if fishermen were 

 to choose to live on their voyages entirely on fish. When tens 

 of thousands of seals are killed annually for their skins and thou- 

 sands of walrus for their ivory, it might not seem unreasonable to 

 allow a polar expedition to kill just enough seals or caribou or 

 ovibos to support life in the exploration of lands the very existence 

 of which was unknown before. Moreover, our method is eco- 

 nomical of game because we use few dogs. On his longest journey 

 Sverdrup had over twenty dogs in his advance party where we had 

 seven, and although he does not say how many were used al- 

 together, he appears to have had two or three times that many, with 

 the result that it was necessary to kill as many animals to lengthen 

 his journeys by fifteen or twenty per cent, as to lengthen our jour- 

 neys by several hundred per cent. Our supply bases were in Banks 

 and Victoria Islands and, from that point of view, we were still on 

 a journey not finished though we had made camp for the winter. 

 The total length of the journey from supply base to supply base 

 proved to be more than a year and five months, where four months 

 would have been its maximum length had we depended solely on 

 provisions hauled along. 



There are also people who resent the noble sport of polar ex- 

 ploration being made too easy. It is as if one were to catch salmon 

 with some unlawfully simple tackle. But I have never been able 

 to see why exploration should be primarily a sport, or any sound 

 reason for retaining artificial difiiculties just so as to leave one 

 part of the world where the imagination may, unhandicapped by 

 facts, suggest heroic stories and movie plays. In the past we have 

 scared people away from it and kept secret the knowledge of its 

 friendliness to whoever has been willing to adapt himself to it, mak- 

 ing it the exclusive property of the few. If we insist on the North 

 remaining unknown, it will be necessary to make it an international 

 reserve, a northern Thibet, a Forbidden Land by universal agree- 

 ment and prevent any one from going there, or at least from 

 staying so long that he learns to like it. 



Even without recourse to Malthusian theories, whoever will 



