need to cover about 10,000 fewer miles. Every capital of 
Europe is as close to Chicago as is Buenos Aires. 
‘The extensive searches for the Northeast and Northwest 
passages which followed Columbus’ demonstration of a 
New World failed, not because of any geographic miscon- 
ceptions, but because their methods were inadequate. ‘The 
ships of the air provide techniques of exploration not af- 
forded by the ships of the sea. Mercator’s chart was suit- 
able for the westward thrust of European civilization in the 
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but presented a com- 
pletely inadequate concept of the polar regions. We are 
again forced to discover in our air age that the Mercator 
chart in itself did not change the world — it is still round, 
and there is no longer any limitation to the application of 
this fact to the most effective means of transportation and 
communication. 
Lloyd points out that the recognition of the strategic im- 
portance of the Arctic approach to Canada is not new.* One 
of the early explorers of the Canadian Arctic mainland was 
the Scotsman, Mackenzie. When Napoleon read his trav- 
elogue almost 150 years ago, he gave Marshall Bernadotte 
the job of attacking eastern Canada from the rear by way 
of watercourses described by Mackenzie. For 150 years fol- 
lowing the establishment of the Hudson’s Bay Company in 
1670, western Canada was settled from the Arctic. Traders, 
trappers, and the settlers came that way — even as far south 
as the Red River that forms the boundary between Min- 
nesota and North Dakota. 
The first American to call attention to Arctic strategy 
was Secretary Seward of Lincoln’s Cabinet, who sponsored 
the purchase of Alaska in 1867 and who would also have 
had us secure Iceland and Greenland by purchase from 
8 
