674 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



conclusion that a party of men could be as safe and comfortable 

 without a ship as with it, that on any ice field you will find snow for 

 a sanitary and excellent house, and that for adequate food and fuel 

 there will be seals and polar bears. 



Apart entirely from its novelty, accomplishing such a drift with- 

 out a ship has definite advantages. Any ship drift, by the very 

 nature of the polar sea (the currents of which we know well enough 

 to make this prediction) must duplicate in succession the drifts of the 

 Karluk, Jeannette and Fram. The ice may be considered as a huge 

 disk revolving about an axis not far from the Pole of Inaccessibility 

 (and not about the geographic Pole). A ship must freeze in near 

 the margin of this disk and must stay near the margin till the drift 

 is finished. But a party traveling with sledges can march any con- 

 venient distance into the area of revolving ice. Their drift, if 

 plotted on the sea bottom, would (I reasoned) form a curved line 

 about as much nearer to the center of the ice than the ship drift 

 as they had traveled many miles into the ice. This would enable 

 them to cut a new swath, whereas a ship must follow the old and 

 beaten path. Men drifting in a ship must stay by the ship unless 

 they are willing to cut their journey short as Nansen did, or willing 

 to "live off the country" as we do. But if willing to live off the 

 country at all, why not refrain from the expense and bother of freez- 

 ing a ship into the ice? 



As compared with a party drifting in a ship, the drifting sledge 

 party will have not only the inside track (both literally and figura- 

 tively) to begin with, but they can move when they like. In Feb- 

 ruary of any year such a drifting party could leave their home on 

 the ice floe and come ashore where they liked. One year of drifting 

 might take them from a point two hundred miles north of our pres- 

 ent harbor to a point somewhere west of Wrangel Island and one 

 or two hundred miles north of the Jeannette course. They could 

 then travel over the ice in February, March and April, and land 

 perhaps late in that month or early in May near the Kolyma delta 

 or the delta of the Lena. If the drift were continued a second year, a 

 landing would presumably have to be made farther west. 



All this was assuming a westward drift roughly parallel to the 

 drifts of the Karluk, Jeannette and Fram. But should there be 

 no drift, the party could come ashore in Alaska; and were the 

 drift to the north or northeast, they could land on Banks Island, 

 Prince Patrick Island, Borden Island or even in Greenland. 



This was a plan the carrying out of which I had had in mind 

 for several years; indeed, ever since we had found on the Martin 



