220 POLAR PROBLEMS 



For Nansen's ship was embedded in the drifting ice almost as 

 securely as a boulder is embedded in the surface of the rotating earth. 

 If there were seals in his vicinity, they were prisoners, too, not fettered 

 quite motionless but, in effect, tethered. We must remember, too, 

 that the way seals live under the ice and how they can be found is 

 not necessarily known to an Arctic explorer or even to every Eskimo 

 who makes his living by sealing. I knew, for instance, an American 

 whaling captain of twenty years' experience in the Arctic who had 

 Eskimos aboard that had been brought up in Alaska sealing methods 

 and who was wintering in Walker Bay, Victoria Island, without any 

 suspicion either on the part of whites or Eskimos that any seals could 

 be secured, or indeed that any existed, within ten to thirty miles. And 

 yet when skillful seal hunters visited the ship who believed seals to 

 be present and knew a technique unknown to the ship's Eskimos, a 

 dozen were captured within a mile from the ship.^ 



There is not in Nansen's books, so far as I have been able to see, 

 any indication that he was at the time of the Fram expedition familiar 

 with the particular technique here involved. Certainlyif he had applied 

 it in a search for seals he would have mentioned it somewhere. We 

 can take it as proved, then, unless he makes a statement hereafter 

 to the contrary, that no search of a nature that would have revealed 

 seals, had there been any within the radius of observation from the 

 ship, was ever made by himself or his companions. Their negative 

 testimony, therefore, means no more than Benjamin Franklin's 

 failure to commercialize oil in Pennsylvania. 



The ice areas visible from the masthead of the Fram were always 

 practically the same from the beginning of the drift to the end. It 

 was as if a farm had been drifting intact across an ocean, somewhat 

 in the manner imagined by Jules Verne in his famous account of the 

 drifting away of the tip of Cape Bathurst. It may have happened 

 that no seals were in this floe at the beginning of the drift, in which 

 case there would be none at the end. But if there were one or more 

 at the start, they would have remained confined to their excavated 

 homes under the ice, with breathing apertures an inch in diameter 

 hidden by inches or feet of snow, unable permanently to abandon 

 these to go far on pain of stifling but able to leave them for ten or 

 fifteen-minute intervals to get shrimps, fish, or other food — if the 

 food was there — which, of course, is the question here at issue. 



On our Arctic Sea journeys when we have been living by hunting 

 in some cases hundreds of miles away from land over an ocean thou- 

 sands of feet deep, we have opened the stomachs of nearly all the seals 

 we have killed and have found that most of them were feeding on 

 shrimps and other Crustacea, the presence of fish fragments in their 



w MS. account of the wintering of the Olga in 1907-1908, by W. J. Baur, of whicli a photostat copy 

 is deposited with the American Geographical Society. 



