130 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 





seals and that we would find no trouble in securing enough meat 

 for food and blubber for both food and fuel, and that it would be 

 much easier to travel light, relying on killing bears, than to haul 

 sledges loaded heavily with provisions. But their answer was that 

 there would be no seals or bears to kill. I tried to argue that they 

 had no means of knowing there would be none, for neither they 

 nor their ancestors had, so far as we knew, been in the habit of 

 going more than five or at the most ten miles from land. Their 

 reply was that their ancestors never went farther because they 

 knew there was no food to be secured on the deep sea, and that 

 their ancestors' wisdom was good enough for them. I tried to bribe 

 them by promising more pay for a day at sea than they were getting 

 for a week's work ashore, and got in answer the question: "What 

 is the use of big pay if you die?" 



I could get no more support for my plans from the Eskimos 

 than I could from geographers and explorers. 



Neither were the whalers more favorable. Many of them had 

 been in these waters for twenty years and they were all of the 

 same opinion as the Eskimos. The reason for this was that they 

 had borrowed their opinions from the Eskimos. It appeared to 

 them that ideas which they had borrowed twenty years ago and 

 had held ever since without investigation had somehow received 

 conclusive confirmation through the mere lapse of time. They 

 told me that it "stood to reason" and was "well known" that the 

 polar ocean in winter far from land was a barren and desolate 

 waste without any resources. They were far more pessimistic than 

 any ordinary explorer, for among us as a class it is conceded that 

 men can travel with dogs and sledges over the ice. But the whalers 

 commonly said that such journeys as Peary's could not be made in 

 the waters north of Alaska. Not only would the difficulties of 

 travel be so much greater that, even granting safety, progress 

 would be much slower, but also the ice was so mobile that you 

 would be in continual danger north of Alaska when you might be 

 in comparative safety on the heavy and sluggish ice north of 

 Greenland. 



The reply to their argument had to be based on the journeys 

 of Baron Wrangel north of eastern Siberia and Leffingwell and 

 Mikkelsen north of Alaska. Judging from their narratives and 

 from Peary's, it is indeed much more difficult to make a good 

 mileage near Alaska or Siberia than north of Greenland, mainly 

 because of the strenuous currents that multiply by ten or by a 

 hundred in the vicinity of Alaska and northeast Asia the leads 



