222 POLAR PROBLEMS 



The enthusiasm of the over-converts can best be checked by pre- 

 senting an analogy with overland expeditions such as those of Lewis 

 and Clark across the North American continent a century ago. As 

 they proceeded west, they found less game and more game and then 

 less game again. But when their advance was showing a gradual 

 decrease of game, there was no sound reason to think that they were 

 coming to the western limit of animal life; nor when they found a 

 gradual increase of game as they marched was there any reason to 

 jump to the conclusion that game would continue to increase steadily 

 no matter how far they went. If they found themselves in an area 

 where game was absent, that gave them no logical cause to fear that 

 the gamelessness would extend all the way to the Pacific. 



Similarly, when you have once begun to doubt that life is bound 

 to decrease as the latitude increases, then an observed decrease in 

 animals as you travel north becomes exactly the same type of evi- 

 dence that a similar decrease was to Lewis and Clark when they were 

 traveling west. 



In the narrative of my book "The Friendly Arctic" and earlier 

 still in an article in the Geographical .Review^^ entitled "The Region 

 of Maximum Inaccessibility in the Arctic, " I make it clear that we 

 more than once staked our lives on the theory that we could find food 

 wherever we went; and I make it equally clear that we expected to 

 find regions where life would be scarce if not wanting altogether. 

 When we came to such an area it was to us only as if we had come to a 

 desert in exploring an unknown continent. We then merely had to 

 decide whether to turn back, attempt to skirt the "desert," or try to 

 march rapidly across it. We really had this all thought out before 

 starting, the plan being to treat a dash across as one of the legitimate 

 risks of polar exploration. However, each time animals seemed to be 

 getting scarcer we used to discuss the case. These discussions never 

 resulted in our turning back but only in a more careful search for game 

 and a more penurious husbanding of whatever food we happened to 

 have on the sledges. 



The only time we turned back in an area of little game was when 

 two out of four in our party developed a serious illness. ^^ The invalids 

 were not in favor of retreating, thinking that we should be able to get 

 across the "sea desert" to a game district on the other (north) side. 

 I decided against trying it because I thought their disease to be pro- 

 gressive and expected our traveling speed, therefore, to lessen from 

 day to day. This turned out to be so. 



It is, of course, possible to say that the desert where we turned 

 back might have proved the real beginning of the "lifeless polar sea." 

 By analogy with other oceans it may indeed have been an extensive 



"Vol. 10, 1920, pp. 167-172; reference on pp. 171-172. 

 '2 The Friendly Arctic, p. 615. 



