THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 129 



going so far to seaward that in one or two notable cases he had 

 just barely enough food to reach land and had to get his first 

 meals on shore from musk oxen or caribou. Peary also says that 

 it is essential to success that your plans shall command the confi- 

 dence of enough Eskimos to help you to carry them out. 



There is then no denying that Peary's testimony is against such 



ventures as I was planning. We were going north from Alaska into 



the Beaufort Sea which has been uniformly described by the British 



explorers and by the American, Leffingwell, and the Dane, Mikkel- 



sen — which means all the explorers who have been there — as the 



region of the heaviest polar ice known. This is presumably the 



least promising part of the whole polar regions for the method 



df living by forage; this is the section specifically described by 



Vlarkham as "the polar ocean without life." Seals might be 



ound in shallow waters in certain parts of the polar basin even at 



;ome distance from land but they certainly would not be found 



n abysmal depths. Leffingwell and Mikkelsen's soundings, taken 



m their journey north of 72° N. latitude in 1907, had given the 



^resumption that the ocean north of Alaska would be deep, thus 



applying with one more argument those who believed food could 



ot be secured. 



To make the case against me all the stronger, there were the 

 Eskimos. As mentioned above, Peary thinks that it is one of the 

 ssentials of a successful journey over the moving pack that you 

 lall have Eskimos with you. And no Eskimo in northern Alaska 

 /as willing to go with us. Many of them were good friends of 

 bine and some had worked for me on other expeditions. Nat- 

 usiak, for instance, had been with me for four years and was 

 nxious to enter our service again. But he specified that he would 

 ot under any conditions go out on the moving ice. And so said 

 1 his compatriots. They considered being out on the sea ice dan- 

 Tous enough through the accidents that are possible when, under 

 ress of wind or current, the ice floes crush each other, rising on 

 Ige and going through other antics that are admittedly threaten- 

 lig in spite of their ponderous slowness. But the main obstacle 

 is the fear of starvation. Most of them said they would not go 

 th us at all, and the most venturesome said that they would not 

 <nsider going any farther than until half the food carried in the 

 fudges had been eaten. They wanted to have the other half to 

 ling them back ashore again, or to bring them at least into the 

 1 miliar shore waters where there were seals. 



I used to tell them that both they and we knew how to get 



