REVIEWS 



The Friendly Arctic. By Vilhjalmur Stefansson. (With a 



Foreword by Gilbert Grosvenor, President of the National 



Geographic Society, and an Introduction by Rt. Hon. Sir 



Robert Borden, Prime Minister of Canada.) Macmillan, 



1922. Pp. xxx+784, illustrated. 



When the explorer Nansen made the "Fram" fast to an ice floe near 



the New Siberian Islands and began his zigzagging four years' drift 



across the northern polar sea, he was pinning his faith to a simple but 



convincing deduction from observed fact. This was the finding on the 



west coast of Greenland of driftwood derived from the " Jeanne tte" 



which had been crushed in the ice four years before near these islands, 



so that the course of the driftwood must have been in the pack itself 



across the frozen sea. The result of his adventure was a splendid 



vindication of his scientific reasoning, with which, however, those of his 



colleagues familiar with the facts generally concurred, even though 



unwilling to stake their lives and their scientific reputations upon it. 



Stefansson when he introduced into polar exploration an entirely 

 new method, launching himself boldly out upon the apparently barren 

 Beaufort Sea without adequate supplies and with the necessity of later 

 finding his means of sustenance in the sea itself, he was by so doing setting 

 his own judgment squarely against that of practically all other scientists 

 as well as arctic explorers, and the gauges which he threw down were his 

 life and his scientific reputation. The best proof that his method was 

 believed impracticable is that when nothing was heard from him he was 

 so generally given up for dead. 



The Friendly Arctic, in which the account of the latest arctic expedi- 

 tion is now given to the world, is an attempt by this ultra-modest explorer 

 to convince his readers that his achievements were commonplace and 

 required nothing of the extraordinary or heroic; but in spite of this the 

 book is one of the most romantic and gripping to be found in the whole 

 field of arctic adventure, and it has been listed among the best sellers 

 during the summer season. Throughout its nearly 800 pages, the inter- 

 est never for a moment flags, and one lays down the book feeling that 

 he has come into intimate contact with a remarkable though very human 



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