10 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



This is the passage which Peary has called the "American route to 

 the Pole," the narrow series of straits between Greenland and 

 Ellesmere Land. There is frequently a current running south 

 through this strait. The huge masses of ice from the polar ocean 

 to the north would like to accompany this current south into the 

 strait, but in their eagerness they crowd each other in its northern 

 mouth, like a mob of people jammed in the narrow exit of a build- 

 ing. While the ice cakes on the surface are jammed and only some 

 fragments get through, the water underneath them flows south 

 freely, so that in many seasons those straits are blue water in late 

 summer, though the latitude is higher than that which ships can 

 navigate anywhere else. It was through this circumstance that 

 Peary was able to get a ship up the north coast of Grant Land, 

 less than five hundred miles from the Pole. 



It is a commonplace of arctic lore and indeed self-evident that 

 so long as sledges hauled by dogs, men or motors are used for 

 arctic exploration, that point will be most difficult to reach which 

 is farthest away from the ultimate goal of a ship where the sledge 

 traveling has to begin. If this ultimate ship base is 450 miles from 

 the Pole in Grant Land, or Franz Josef Land, about 800 miles at 

 Cape Chelyuskin on the nortii tip of Siberia, and over 1,100 miles 

 near Point Barrow on the north tip of Alaska, it becomes evident 

 that the point in the Arctic hardest to get at, which we may call the 

 "Pole of Inaccessibility," by no means coincides with the North 

 Pole but lies about four hundred miles away from it in the direction 

 towards Alaska. This coincided roughly with the center of the 

 unexplored area in the polar regions when we sailed north, an area 

 of over a million square miles then, and still to be reckoned as at 

 least seven hundred thousand square miles. The region is unex- 

 plored, partly through its inherent inaccessibility, but partly also 

 for two other reasons. 



The first of these reasons is that the civilization of our time has 

 developed on the two shores of the Atlantic, and that the sailors 

 of this ocean have been the chief explorers of the North. It was 

 natural they should attack the problem along the frontier nearest 

 home, and that is one reason why knowledge has advanced into the 

 inaccessible area more rapidly from the Atlantic than from the 

 Pacific side. Incidentally, those who went north with a desire to 

 find a way from their homes to the Indies naturally struck into 

 the unexplored area on a promising route to attain this purpose, 

 which again was the frontier nearest home. 



But a second reason has been the glamour of the search for the 



