THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 667 



any food or clothing or other articles he has, but when anything 

 has once been turned into money it never gets away from him. 

 Some say he is worth ten thousand dollars and others say forty 

 thousand. 



In 1917 his hair had turned nearly white and he was getting 

 to be an old man. Although I am a great believer in the North it 

 struck me one day that it might be no bad speculation for Jim 

 Fiji to go back with some of his riches to the Samoa Islands and 

 settle down. I suggested to him that a good thing to do would be 

 to go south with us to San Francisco, put most of his money into 

 Liberty Bonds, take a few thousand dollars to the Samoas and 

 buy an estate on which he could live. This idea struck him very 

 favorably and thereafter we had many talks about what he was 

 going to do. He told me how you could get a man down there to 

 work for you all day for five cents, and he had great visions of what 

 he was going to do as a landlord. Among other things, I was to 

 come and visit him some time down there. He knew how fond 

 I was of the Eskimo foods and he described in detail the peculiar 

 Samoan foods which he was going to give me to see how I liked them. 



At the end of the expedition I came east to Ottawa and New 

 York and Jim Fiji went to San Francisco. Some months later I 

 went out to San Francisco and the day after I got there Jim Fiji 

 called on me. I was surprised to find him still there, but he ex- 

 plained that when he got there he heard that one of his cousins was 

 on the way from the Samoas and so he thought he would await 

 his arrival before starting for home. When this cousin arrived 

 he told him, among other things, that wages had gone up and 

 that you no longer were able to hire a man for five cents per day. 

 Various other things had changed for the worse, but the main 

 thing that worried Jim was that he found he could not stand very 

 well the heat of San Francisco and, as he imagined that the Samoas 

 would be even hotter, he had decided that he did not care to go 

 back after all and his intentions now were to buy another trapping 

 outfit and go to the Arctic again. 



This is what he has done. In the spring of 1919 he was taken 

 north by Captain Pederscn of the Herman, and Captain Pedersen 

 tells me he landed Jim on Cape Bathurst, the second most northerly 

 point on the Canadian mainland. He expects to live there the rest 

 of his life. 



There was nothing before us now except to get out into the 

 Pacific before the ice stopped us somewhere on the north coast of 

 Alaska. Some of our men were very glad of the prospect of getting 



