80 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 
a word, we are rather encouraged to regard the polar regions as places 
apart, extraneous to the real comity of the world. 
It is perhaps a natural but nevertheless a lamentable fact that imme- 
diately one speaks of values the listener interprets it in pounds, shillings 
and pence, and indeed many will never get farther than that, and can hardly 
conceive of a value that cannot be stated in the terms of the economist. 
We will therefore first consider the kind of value of the polar regions 
which appeals most quickly to the public. 
There is little need to sketch the history of man’s attempts to achieve 
economic gain from the polar regions. From the days when Martin 
Frobisher attempted to find a quick route westwards to the Spice Islands 
via the North-West, and Barents a similar route eastward, down to more 
recent times when, though the routes had lost value, the products of 
hunting, fishing and mining attracted venturers with similar motives, 
the chief aim of promoters of polar expeditions has been one of ultimate 
gain. It is true that many of the leaders of the expeditions had little care 
for the commercial side, but the money that sent them forth was, in the 
greater number of cases, put out in the time-honoured hope of all ages 
that it would bring in interest in some form or another. 
There is certainly such a thing as the romance of commerce in the 
North, for most of its industries have something peculiar and unusual 
aboutthem. Wemay instance the cryolite mines of Ivigtut in Greenland,— 
a strange mineral found in quantity nowhere else in the world, which 
however is almost essential to the large-scale production of aluminium. 
Again, until recently a large proportion of the ivory for use in northern 
China did not come from the present-day elephants of the rain forest 
belt of Asia, but from the mammoths of primeval times whose tusks lay 
for many thousands of years buried in the mud of the great Siberian 
rivers flowing into the Arctic Ocean. 
Romantic or not, the story of Arctic trade has a grim and melancholy 
side, in that several of its most promising ventures have died a slow and 
painful death by reason of the cupidity of man and his unwillingness to 
co-operate either to preserve life or even to preserve it sufficiently for 
his own benefit. The history of the whaling industry in the Arctic is 
an instance of this incapacity of man to co-operate in taking the most 
common-sense measures to cherish a valuable industry. There is every 
reason to hope that the day of non-co-operation has passed and that a 
similar fate to whaling in the Antarctic will not take place, for it is prob- 
ably common knowledge that many bodies, in which we may include the 
League of Nations, the Norwegian whalers themselves and the Discovery 
Committee of the British Government, are at work in their various 
spheres to prevent any extermination of the southern whales, and at 
the same time to regularise an industry which, even in these days of 
synthetic materials, still has its vital uses to man. How large that in- 
dustry now is may be gathered from the fact that the annual catch of whales 
in the southern seas is about 20,000: how mindful it now is of its own future 
may be seen from the fact that whereas the average whale used to provide 
only 60 or 70 barrels of oil it is now made to yield nearly 120 barrels of 
oil besides other products. 
