THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 385 



far as the rendezvous where we were waiting for the Star, but only 

 to Kellett, more than a hundred miles farther south. This poor 

 ship might'have been expected to fail even with proper orders, leav- 

 ing us in difficulties through the failure of support we had counted on. 



The Arctic is considered by many an unpleasant place to wait 

 for a ship that has never been sent. Certainly Greely found it so 

 at Cape Sabine when he lost 18 out of 25 men through the mis- 

 carriage and disobedience of orders by those who were to meet him 

 or to make a depot for him at an appointed place, and his was but 

 one of many similar arctic tragedies. My own faith that we should 

 not starve so long as we had ammunition could have been little 

 comfort to those whose conviction of our death was based on dis- 

 belief in the prevalence of game in the Arctic, and disbelief in the 

 ability of white men to get what game there is. Furthermore, as 

 McConnell said, we had when we started only 400 rounds of ammu- 

 nition to feed three men and six dogs for more than a year, and this 

 might have been expected to need supplementing if we made no con- 

 nection with one of our ships. 



The star on the Sun map where the Star was supposed to meet 

 us and didn't try to, was the only danger sign in the whole situa- 

 tion, but nobody saw the meaning of it. 



I am truly grateful to McConnell for his good intentions and his 

 efforts to publish the truth. But I cannot think of anything less 

 tempting in itself than being rescued. It was bad enough to be 

 saved from imminent starvation by Captain Lane with a can of 

 warmed-up corn. It would have been worse to have an airplane 

 swoop down on you just when you were comfortably winding in the 

 wire after a three-mile sounding and sniffing the fragrance of boiling 

 fresh seal meat. 



So far I have considered these rescue proposals from the point 

 of view of my party of three. As for the eight men that were lost, 

 their situation will be made clear in that section of the Appendix 

 given to Captain Hadley's story of the Karluk. I shall say here 

 merely that I concur in the belief that long before McConnell could 

 have launched his expedition they were dead. 



The only concession made by the Government to the demands 

 for a rescue expedition was that they requested all whalers and 

 traders who go up in the western Arctic to keep a lookout for us 

 or traces of us. Captain Lane had held these requests in mind 

 ,1 while on the western part of his cruise. When once he got as far 

 east as the vicinity of Banks Island the possibility of finding any 



