128 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



only before he left the ship on the particular journey, but even 

 before he left Norway. He calls these the ''stern necessities of 

 polar travel." 



From the point of view of the moralist, there are many angles 

 from which to consider Nansen's plan and procedure. But from 

 our present point of view the lesson is clear. No man with the 

 sympathetic attitude toward dogs which Nansen describes himself 

 as having would have killed them for food had there been any other 

 food available. No matter how sympathetic a man may be 

 towards all creation, he would surely rather kill a seal that is a 

 perfect stranger than a dog he has brought up from puppyhood 

 and that has been faithfully serving him for months. So it is 

 clear that there were no seals for dog-feed that Nansen might 

 have secured with his English rifle which he tells us was so good 

 and had cost so much. In reading his book we all accept as neces- 

 sary though deplorable the killing of dog to feed dog until the last 

 survivor was killed for the explorers themselves (presumably) to 

 eat. For it is a commonplace of our knowledge that, as Markham 

 puts it, the polar ocean is "without life." 



It may be said about Nansen that he did not have the advan 

 tage of understanding Eskimo metlwds of seal hunting and possibly 

 seals were there though he was unable to secure them. But here 

 the testimony of Peary to the contrary is explicit. 



Peary was a great admirer of Eskimo methods of travel and 

 employed them generally in his work. In outfitting his ships, for 

 instance, he carried on some voyages little meat and on others none 

 at all, for he relied on his Eskimo hunters to supply him with fresh 

 meat for his crew and food of some sort, usually walrus, for his 

 dogs. On all of his later journeys he had Eskimos with him to 

 build the snowhouses, drive the dogs and to do practically all the 

 menial work. He had spent nine winters in the North when he 

 wrote his book, "The North Pole," describing his last and success- 

 ful journey. In summing up his "fundamental principles" of suc- 

 cessful traveling over the north polar pack, he says that when you 

 start on a journey you must have in your sledges enough food to 

 take you all the way to where you are going and all the way back 

 to land. He says that you must similarly have enough fuel to 

 take you where you are going and back again to shore. He was 

 fully aware of the fact that the ocean waters near land are com- 

 monly well supplied with game and that both in them and on the 

 land you may expect to secure meat to eke out your stock of 

 provisions. He always made use of this principle on his journeys, 



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