THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 183 



stopped to watch for them an hour at a time. This was discon- 

 certing and gave us a good deal of concern. With the decrease in 

 game signs there came back to our memories with increasing weight 

 the statements of the Eskimos on shore that we vv^ould find no seals 

 at a great distance from land, and the arguments by which our 

 whaler friends had bolstered up these views originally borrowed 

 from the Eskimos. There came to mind with increasing force the 

 dicta of geographers and explorers summarized in encyclopaedias and 

 reiterated in every polar book, "the polar ocean without life." I 

 had answered their arguments readily enough on shore, but was our 

 verbal logic to be disproved by the superior logic of events? My 

 diary shov/s that our faith was at times shaken, though never badly 

 enough for us to talk seriously of turning back. 



My companions were as eager as I to make a success of the 

 journey, and what worried us more than s'^arcity of game signs 

 was the implacable advance of the sun in the heavens. It was get- 

 ting perceptibly higher each day and there was no longer any dark- 

 ness at night. The temperature still kept mercifully well below 

 zero, but we knew it was only a question of days until the wind 

 would change to the east and the first thaw of spring be upon us. 

 Accordingly we said little of the danger of running out of food 

 and much of the necessity of hurrying on, but most frequent were 

 the remarks on our misfortune that we had not been able to start 

 the journey a month earlier. It is doubtless true that there is no 

 use crying over spilt milk, but it is equally true that there is noth- 

 ing more human than to do so. 



The scarcity of game signs would have troubled us less had we 

 had that understanding of the polar sea which we acquired during 

 the next five years. We now know what we then but believed 

 upon reasoning with which the authorities disagreed, that the 

 presence or absence of seals has nothing to do with latitude as 

 such, but mainly with the mobility of the ice. In any region where 

 we have violent ice movement and consequently much open water, 

 we have a large number of seals. Food they can find everywhere 

 in the ocean but in certain places they lack the easy opportunity 

 to come up and breathe. During the summer they congregate in 

 regions of open water, deserting those where the ice lies approxi- 

 mately unbroken. Then in the autumn when young ice forms they 

 make for themselves breathing holes which they use all winter. 

 If this young ice remains stationary the seal remains stationary 

 with it. If it floats in any direction he travels along, for his life 

 depends upon his never going far from his breathing hole so long 



