414 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCLENCE. 
SCHWATKA’S ARCTIC SEARCH. 
AMERICAN AND ENGLISH METHODS OF ARCTIC EXPLORATION. 
The Herald editorially sums up the results of Lieutenant Schwatka’s sledge 
journey over 3,000 miles of snow, as follows: 
‘‘Tn a field that seemed to have been already overworked, in which so many 
hardy adventurers before him had done their utmost to wrest the secret of Frank- 
lin’s fate from the icy grasp of the polar world, Schwatka went as a late gleaner, 
and gathered an amount of information that greatly increases the general capacity 
to understand the story of Franklin’s fate. Admiral McClintock, whose own 
name is famous in the story of Arctic exploration, puts his finger on an important 
point made clear by Schwatka’s experience. Admiral McClintock says: ‘ What 
I regard at this moment as the most striking feature of the report you have read 
for me is the success of Lieut. Schwatka’s plan of living on the produce of the land 
through which he traveled. It isthat that distinguishes his expedition from others. 
All other explorers making sledge journeys have relied chiefly on the supplies 
carried with them. The Schwatka party, according to this report, was nearly a 
year absent from its base of supplies, and took only one month’s food with it. In 
adapting themselves to the life of the natives, as they did, Lieut, Schwatka and 
his followers accomplished something remarkable. This point is fully worthy all 
the importance that the Admiral gives it. Hereis a party of men who go from an 
American city with infinitely less of the apparatus of Arctic adventure than is 
usual, making sledging the great element of their operation, live with the Esqui- 
maux as much as they can, accustom themselves to the habits of life and the diet 
of this mild savage, and they live and are at their ease, and come and go, and are 
ijn every way successful in that very district in which the last of Franklin’s men 
perished in the Arctic summer. This contrast presents in the most notable way 
the difference between two widely varying methods of exploration—methods that 
may be called respectively the English method and the American method. The 
Englishman starts with a resolute will to be all and do all; he has a robust seif- 
sufficiency that is the basis of great successes and the limits of whose usefulness he 
does not recognize. One may read a great many English volumes of Arctic dis- 
covery and rise from the perusal with the imagination that all that polar world is 
a void, an absolutely unpeopled region. On the other hand, the American is 
adaptable, and is ready to use for his purpose whatever elements present them- 
selves. He makes use of an encampment of Esquimaux to help him over a diff- 
culty just as he would make use of a turn of the tide to move his boat out of a bad 
place. He divides Nature and uses one part of her forces to overcome the other, 
and the Esquimaux are forces that Nature has put within his reach. And from 
an American narrative of how men get on in the Arctic world we rise with the im- 
agination, not that it is an uninhabitable region, but that it is only another part of 
the Indian country, and that the Esquimaux are unusually placid and tractable 
