136 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



It seemed to me that in an analogous way even keen observers like 

 Nansen and Peary, preoccupied with the carrying-out of plans 

 having nothing to do with seals, might have traveled for months 

 over an ocean full of them without ever suspecting their presence. 



But our plans did have to do with seals very definitely. By 

 the theory that governed them seals were there. We would there- 

 fore look for them, and if they were there we should know how 

 to get them. The conclusion to me had an appearance of soundness. 

 If it were to work out, we would have solved the problem of com- 

 missariat, hitherto the crucial difficulty in polar exploration. 



But at the end of the most elaborate and logical argument the 

 ordinary' "hard-headed" listener would still demur on the changeless 

 ground that all eye witnesses were on the other side. If the thing 

 contended for were so, some one would have discovered it long 

 ago; there must be a flaw in the reasoning somewhere. Most of 

 the men said they declined to go on any such enterprise, and that 

 public opinion would sustain them in their refusal. 



Perhaps they were right about public opinion. Perhaps they 

 were right in their own decision. Whether we think so or don't is 

 a matter of temperament. 



It was on the basis of this reasoning as I have stated it that 

 some of my local judges came to the conclusion that my plan 

 of an extended journey where men and dogs would live on seals 

 or die without them amounted to insanity and justified them in 

 their general lack of confidence in all my plans, at least in so far 

 as they hinged in any way on this central idea. As a matter of 

 fact, most of them did hinge on it. 



I pointed out that when those plans had been laid before the- 

 National Geographic Society in Washington, the Museum of Nat- 

 ural History in New York, the Geographic Congress at Rome, and 

 Sir Robert Borden and his Cabinet at Ottawa, the proposal to 

 try "living by forage" had always been the central idea and it 

 was exactly this that the Canadian Government had sent me North 

 to try out. 



The Karluk had carried a sumptuous outfit of the orthodox 

 kind with which we could have outfitted parties for ice exploration 

 by any of the well-known and often-tried methods. It had in fact 

 been my intention to use substantially the Peary methods when 

 within 500 or 600 miles of our base, and then to extend the length 

 of the journeys both in mileage and time by continuing ahead and 

 living by forage instead of turning back when the last of perhaps 

 twenty sleds we had started with were empty. But the Karluk 



