THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 5 



adequate quantity for the support of traveling parties. For cen- 

 turies Eskimos had been known to subsist on the shores of the 

 polar sea, but it was believed that this was existing rather than 

 living, and that the people were different, although enough like 

 us to be as wretched as we believed we would have been under 

 arctic temperature, arctic night, scarce and undesirable food, and 

 other difficult living conditions. Now and then a traveler had 

 come forward with reverse testimony that the Eskimos were healthy 

 and happy, and that life by their method was as comfortable in the 

 Arctic when you once become used to it as the life of a primitive 

 tropical people was when you become used to that. 



The Eskimos themselves considered it impossible to make a 

 living by their method anywhere except on land or on the ocean 

 near land. The explorers all fell in with this view and so did 

 geographers and others who theorized about it. Sir Clements 

 Markham, himself an arctic explorer and over a long lifetime in 

 close touch with polar progress, toward the end of his career in his 

 "Life of Sir Leopold McClintock," speaks of "the polar ocean with- 

 out life" (page 166), and at various times in other places referred 

 to the "fact" that, while people could subsist on certain arctic 

 lands, subsistence on the high sea was not possible. Similarly Nan- 

 sen on his great journey over the ice after leaving the Fram killed 

 his dogs one by one, feeding the dead to the living, because he did 

 not conceive it possible to secure food for them. Even Peary, 

 though he did not usually deliberately plan to kill his dogs, says 

 in his last book, "The North Pole," that he expected to drive them 

 so hard and feed them so little that sixty per cent, of them would 

 die on the journey. 



But it is obvious that were this opinion of the Eskimos and 

 the explorers wrong, then a further advance in the method of polar 

 exploration was still possible, and without the aid of new mechanical 

 invention. The men of early time had shown that travel on the 

 ice is possible in summer, although difficult and disagreeable. The 

 men of the Peary stage had shown that traveling on the sea ice 

 in winter is far easier and more agreeable than traveling in sum- 

 mer and that the only limitation to the length of journey was 

 through the difficulty of transporting enough food. Now if it could 

 be demonstrated that food suitable to sustain indefinitely both 

 men and dogs could be secured anywhere on the polar sea, then 

 obviously journeys over the ice would cease to be limited either in 

 time or distance. Any part of the polar sea would then become 

 accessible to whoever was willing to undergo the supposed hard- 



