126 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



cold and Burberry tents when it was warmer. At the start we 

 would cook food brought from Nome with primus kerosene stoves, 

 in the manner of Nansen or Scott. So far there was no difficulty, 

 no reluctance among the men. 



But here strange issues arose. Other explorers had planned 

 to turn back before the food and fuel brought along had been ex- 

 hausted; we planned to go ahead without either, relying on the 

 sea ice or on undiscovered and uninhabited lands to supply both 

 indefinitely. This was where our plans branched off from those 

 of previous explorers and where our men were dubious — or more 

 than that. It was the striking out along a new path that I had 

 to try to justify before I could expect any one to volunteer for the 

 undertaking. 



I think any lawyer or other person used to pleading a cause 

 will agree that the first principle of good argumentation is to con- 

 cede in the beginning every point which the opposition are even- 

 tually going to make you concede. Accordingly, I admitted freely 

 at the start that my plan of traveling away from land an indefinite 

 distance over moving sea ice, relying for food and fuel on animals 

 to be secured by hunting, was considered unsound by, so far as I 

 knew, every polar explorer and every critical authority on polar 

 exploration. We were going to traverse the Beaufort Sea west of 

 Banks and Prince Patrick Islands. This is the very region referred 

 to specifically by Sir Clements Markham in his "Life of Admiral 

 McClintock" as "the polar ocean without life" when he is con- 

 ■".rasting the comparatively fertile regions around Melville Island 

 where musk oxen and caribou can be killed on shore and where 

 there are resources of a sort, with the region west of Prince Patrick 

 Island which, according to him, is devoid of all things that may 

 sustain human life.* Markham could not be dismissed as an 

 "armchair explorer," for he had been a member of one of the 

 successful British polar expeditions at the time of the Franklin 

 search and had later, in his position of President of the Royal 

 Geographical Society and leading authority on polar matters, been 

 in personal contact with every arctic explorer of note from the 

 middle of the Nineteenth Century, up to and including Nansen 

 and Peary. 



And, indeed, the testimony of Nansen and Peary was neither 



♦Markham says about Prince Patrick Island: "It forms the boundary 

 between the arctic paradise of Melville Island and the polar ocean (west of 

 it) without life." Op. cit., p. 172. 



