686 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



house was the courtesy, the boundless hospitality, the considerate 

 kindness that can never be forgotten. To name all who were kind 

 would be a long roster and would tax the reader's patience; to name 

 any and not others would be invidious. 



After a convalescence of three months at St. Stephen's Hos- 

 pital, the journey was simple — by river steamers up the Yukon to 

 Dawson and White Horse; by railway south to Skagway and more 

 frontier hospitality at the frontier's most southerly outpost, and by 

 ship to Vancouver and Victoria where I met the crew of the Polar 

 Bear to pay them off at the Navy Yard from which we had sailed 

 nearly five and a half years before. They had sailed the Polar Bear 

 from her winter quarters at Barter Island, to Nome. There she had 

 been sold and the crew had come south from Nome to Seattle by 

 passenger steamer. 



There were left in the Far North still carrying on the work of 

 the expedition only Storkerson and his four faithful comrades, the 

 story of whose travels over the polar sea for eight months, with an 

 ice floe for a ship, is told in the Appendix to this volume. 



I reached New York in time to join there in the true joy of the 

 False Armistice, and helped in Toronto to celebrate the real ending 

 of the war from which we had been more nearly shielded than any 

 citizens of the civilized world. 



It is difficult to summarize briefly scientific work that requires 

 a number of volumes for its proper elucidation. The large scien- 

 tific staff of the expedition brought back information in many 

 fields. This is now being published by the Department of the Naval 

 Service at Ottawa, Three octavo volumes are already printed and 

 the work is going forward steadily. At least fifteen more volumes 

 are already partly or wholly written. It is probable that the com- 

 plete scientific results will be more than twenty volumes and per- 

 haps towards thirty. It will naturally take a number of years to 

 get all of these ready for the press. 



Men will differ according to their viewpoint on the comparative 

 importance of the various results. The botanical and zoological re- 

 ports and the geological ones are more easily than others translated 

 into terms of money and economic progress. The discovery of new 

 land gives a few more spots of color to our maps and forms, there- 

 fore, a substantial addition to our knowledge of the world we live 

 in, substantial not only in that whoever chooses can go to these 



