2l8 POLAR PROBLEMS 



roofing as we have on the Arctic Sea. It is the same if you assume 

 that lake animals and plants get enough light through fresh ice but that 

 sea life does not get enough through salt ice, and so on with the less 

 formidable arguments, which we have not space to consider here 

 though I have dealt with them elsewhere, chiefly incidentally, in the 

 course of travel narratives describing how we have lived an aggregate 

 of years by hunting the animals that live in the "lifeless polar sea." 



The Views of Explorers on the "Lifeless Polar Sea" 



Although the facts are apparently against it now, the universal 

 belief that the Arctic lifelessness existed was formerly supported also 

 by extensive "proof" from the experience of explorers. 



As said before, we cannot here undertake to explain why such 

 travelers as Peary did not observe any animal life under the ice in 

 places where I at least believe it to be abundant, because the subject 

 has been thoroughly covered in my published books. But it is perti- 

 nent to say that Peary himself was one of the first to express a doubt 

 that there was anywhere a lifeless polar sea, in the sense in which 

 that view has been generally held and in the sense in which he himself 

 had held it up to the publication of his last book. Confirmation of this 

 is found in his speech delivered at the January, 1919, meeting of the 

 National Geographic Society, quoted in the April, 1920, issue of the 

 National Geographic Magazine. 



It has been said that Peary contradicted his books in that speech. 

 But he was in reality merely saying that new evidence had appeared 

 which justified a new opinion. He had himself overthrown several 

 conclusions previously held by explorers and scientific men, and he 

 saw no reason why some of his own earlier conclusions, or rather some 

 assumptions which he had never tested or questioned, should not be 

 similarly overthrown. In 1909 he had considered the seal which he 

 met near latitude 86° N. as a rare visitor to that region, but by 191 9 

 he had come to wonder whether he himself instead of the seal had not 

 been the surprising stranger there. 



Nobody who understands the habits of seals and the hunting 

 methods of polar bears looks upon the absence of bears as any indica- 

 tion of the presence or absence of seals in places where there is little 

 or no open water. And so with all the other stock arguments about sea 

 life.8 



Nansen's Views 



But there remains to be seriously considered the testimony in 

 favor of the old view given by Fridtjof Nansen in his well-known books 

 and apparently still held by him, to judge from an article in the 



8 For detailed analysis of this, see "The Friendly Arctic, " especially Chapter 13. 



