2 14 POLAR PROBLEMS 



expected to do.^ None of these authorities is known to me to have 

 stated a 50-mile Hmit in so many words, or to have placed it exactly 

 at the edge of the continental shelf, but some such idea was clearly in 

 all their minds. 



As with our expeditions in Alaska and western Arctic Canada, 

 Peary and his men were told by the Eskimos of northwest Greenland 

 that animal life did not go far from land. He stated it in just those 

 terms to me verbally and is not otherwise definitely on record as to 

 mileage from shore or as to ocean depth. But the tenor of his writings 

 would indicate that, following Eskimo information and ancient theory 

 alike, he considered the limit beyond which a skillful man could not 

 live by hunting to be, say, twenty to fifty miles from land (at any rate 

 in the region north of Greenland or Grant Land). 



It used to be agreed that Eskimo belief and the inherited "scien- 

 tific" theory coincided. But they really did not, the difficulty being 

 that the explorers who thought they found agreement were misunder- 

 standing the language of the Eskimos. They had pointed and asked 

 some Eskimo, "What is your name for that direction?" Whereupon 

 the Eskimo had replied with a word which was taken to mean the 

 equivalent of one of our cardinal points. But a comparison shows 

 that what is said to mean north in the record of one traveler means 

 east, west, or south in the records of others. Intrepreting these words 

 in terms of the map, each in the district where it was picked up by the 

 traveler, you discover that instead of meaning north, south, east, and 

 west, they mean "up the coast," "down the coast," "inland," and 

 "out to sea," for the Eskimo tongue, which is one from Greenland to 

 Siberia, has no word for north or any other of our cardinal points. 



Peary, then, standing on the north coast of Greenland or Grant 

 Land, or a whaling captain looking north from Alaska, was being 

 told by the native that animal life did not exist far out to sea, a view 

 with which these travelers would not have agreed had they so under- 

 stood the statement. But, being predisposed to think that there was 

 a northern limit to animal life somewhere not far beyond Alaska and 

 Greenland, they accepted the Eskimo dictum as confirming that view. 

 It was probably the discovery of this linguistic confusion which first 

 led me to suspect that the European belief in a lifelessness beyond a 



5 The Government of Canada, represented by the Department of the Naval Service, quite rightly 

 refused to send out a rescue expedition in 1915 when we had gone by sledges into the Beaufort Sea area 

 and not been heard from for a year. The active head of the Department, G. J. Desbarats, its Deputy 

 Minister, based his refusal on two points: (i) If I were right in what I had told him, verbally and in 

 writing, before I left, then my party were in no danger; but if (2) the polar authorities were right in 

 thinking the Beaufort Sea to be without life, then my companions and I were dead of hunger long ago 

 and the rescue expedition, therefore, as such, without point. 



But we made our Arctic journeys in fact so easily over the previously "lifeless polar sea, " both 

 that year and succeeding j-ears, and have reported them to have been so easy, that the number of people 

 who now think that they previously thought we would be able to do it has increased far beyond the 

 number who actually expressed that opinion. As said above, no opinion by any oceanographic or 

 exploration authority is known to be on record from any date before 1914 to the effect that such a 

 journey was possible, while there is an abundance of recorded opinion as to its impossibility. 



