ARCTIC RESOURCES 213 



original contributions about the same time as M'Clintock, without 

 having thus far shared with him adequately in the glory. 



Every advance of knowledge compelled a further retreat of the 

 lifeless polar regions, and still each traveler seems to have thought, 

 whatever his turning point, that he was beginning his retreat about at 

 the dividing line between the life he had observed in the district 

 traversed and the death which he knew must be ahead. This is well 

 stated in the "Life of Admiral Sir Leopold McClintock, " published 

 in 1909, by Sir Clements Markham, a former President of the Royal 

 Geographical Society, a distinguished explorer himself, and the per- 

 sonal friend and recipient of the confidences of most of the great 

 explorers of his time, where he says of Prince Patrick Island that: " It 

 forms the boundary between the Arctic paradise of Melville Island 

 and the polar ocean without life" (p. 172). 



There were, of course, other travelers who imagined themselves to 

 have penetrated into and later escaped from a realm of lifelessness. 



Recent Areal Reduction in the Application 

 OF the Theory 



Within the last few decades the lifeless region, apart from mountain 

 tops and such ice caps as that of Greenland, has been supposed to 

 consist exclusively of a part of the Arctic Sea and possibly of some 

 hitherto undiscovered islands within it. The extreme boundaries 

 were seldom put down exactly, even for a segment of the circumference, 

 yet there was an approximate agreement on the size and limits of the 

 dead patch. In part the bounds were set to conform with the opinion 

 of local Eskimos or other natives who were accepted by travelers, and 

 in turn by scientific men, as authorities on the limits of sea life. 



On the basis of many careful discussions with the Eskimos of the 

 north coast of Alaska east of Point Barrow, I concluded that they 

 believed animal life to go something like ten or fifteen miles beyond 

 the coast. Apparently the American whalers in Alaska had adopted 

 a modification of that view, supposing a considerable abundance of 

 seals might go about as far north as the navigable waters in favorable 

 seasons, which would be, say, fifty miles from the coast. 



I judge that scientific men may have given some weight also to the 

 depth of the ocean, apparently considering life less probable beyond 

 the continental shelf. At any rate, the opinions given to the Canadian 

 Government, as well as many others expressed by polar authorities 

 during the time when Storker Storkerson, Ole Andreasen, and myself 

 were supposed to be dead (from about May, 1914, to September, 1915), 

 based the confirmation of our death on the view that we had traveled 

 north from Alaska into a region containing no game and could, there- 

 fore, not possibly have lived by hunting, as we had announced we 



