Chapter IV: Travelers’ Tales (1)

What we now call a fish story the Elizabethans spoke of as a traveler’s tale. I shall discuss whether there are many fish stories among the travelers’ tales of today, whether they have an important effect on the sciences which gather their data in part from the reports of explorers, and whether we ought to do anything about it. These questions are more important in our time than in Elizabeth’s, for the explorers were mere travelers then. Now they all claim to be scientists or at least to be the leaders of scientific expeditions.

I address you both as an expert and as Exhibit A. For my own expeditions have been insistently, if not so very effectively, publicized as scientific; and I am one of the travelers who, by my own contention and the claims of my friends and backers, should be taken as a scientific explorer.

I begin, then, by discussing the extent to which my own books and other protestations are to be taken seriously.

In a way this exposition is the direct result of a talk which I gave in 1907-8 before the Century Association of New York City. It is my necessary introduction to repeat in condensed form what I said there and to tell you what the Centurions thought about it.

So far as I remember, I began by explaining to the Century Association that I was an exceptionally reliable witness, and particularly so with regard to the Arctic. My father and mother had both been born on the north coast of Iceland on the very edge of the polar circle, and that furnished me with a useful background. I myself had been born in Manitoba where winter temperatures run down to 55° F. below zero, which is about as low as they get on the north coast of Canada--as a matter of fact lower than any official record, for the lowest of these to date is -52°. I had read the northern literature from infancy and had always been so soaked in it that my first published article labeled scientific (apart from a brief linguistic study) was “The Icelandic Colony in Greenland,” _American Anthropologist_, April-June, 1906. In North Dakota I had seen blizzards as bad as any I had experienced on my first Arctic expedition, which I was then describing to the Century, and the prairies of my childhood Dakota, when snow-covered in winter or green in summer, were much like the Eskimo prairies of northern Canada, so that I had been quite at home in the Arctic from the first, gathering information more reliable than if I had been a nervous visitor who was frightened by conditions different from those of his childhood--as might easily be the case with, say, a Frenchman.

Such preliminaries being disposed of, I launched into what I still believe was to the Century Association a convincing first-hand picture of how things are with the Eskimos of the Mackenzie River.

I told how I was taken into an Eskimo home where 22 people and myself lived in one room through the middle of the winter and where my life with the people was intimate throughout the year. I enjoyed being there and they apparently enjoyed having me with them. I entered both into their routine and into the spirit of their beliefs, so that they began to discuss things with me or in my presence quite as freely as if no stranger had been near. In fact, no stranger was near--I had become as one of them.

On the basis of this I regaled the Century with many amusing and allegedly important contributions to the ethnology of the Mackenzie Eskimos. I shall here review only one topic.

One of the Eskimos, Memoranna, wore an eagle feather on the left shoulder of his reindeer-skin coat. I asked him once why he did this and he said there were two reasons:

In Memoranna’s childhood the people of his native village had been more numerous than now; and, besides, there were many visitors. Athletic games were common and the people took off their coats perhaps when wrestling or running foot races, throwing them in a pile. Every coat was of deerskin and most of them had the same trimmings, but they were not all of the same size or workmanship and some were newer than others. It was, then, important that when the games were over each man should be able to find his own coat. “Therefore we each had a mark on our coats. One man would have a weasel tail in the middle of his back, another perhaps a strip of wolf skin on his sleeve. I had an eagle feather on my left shoulder.”

The second reason for these marks was that when everyone was dressed alike and when there were hundreds together you could not recognize a man unless you saw his face. But with the eagle feather on the shoulder of the coat anybody could tell that the wearer was Memoranna.

The chief reason why I repeat all this is that at the end of my talk Dr. Franklin H. Giddings, Professor of the History of Civilization at Columbia University, a foremost figure in American sociology, came to me. He had been making a study of property marks, he had been much interested in this particular contribution of mine, and he was satisfied of its accuracy not only because of my careful methods of observation and my intimate life with the people but also because it fitted in with his studies of the origin and development of property marks among primitive people.

This address of mine before the Century was based on a year with the Eskimos of the Mackenzie River. I returned north in six months and spent four years more, making five all together. In the last of those years I finally acquired such a control over the language that I could speak with the people almost as freely as they spoke with each other. Then at last I learned that the eagle feather was a talisman, with no intentional property mark connection.

Some weeks after I learned this I met Memoranna and asked him why he had deceived me four years ago. He replied in substance that he had been almost brought up as a cabin boy on whaling ships and had besides associated with missionaries, so that he knew the white man’s point of view. If an Eskimo told his real beliefs, a sailor would call him a damn fool and a missionary would explain how wrong and wicked they were. Through long experience he had learned the kind of explanation a white man likes; giving that kind saved a lot of trouble. He had not meant specially to deceive me; he was merely treating me as just one more white man.

There are within the social sciences few more broad-minded or with a keener sense of humor than Professor Giddings. Still, it is my impression that he felt just a little bit more enlightened and pleased when he heard the original incorrect property mark explanation of the eagle feather, which agreed with his own theories, than he did when later I told him the final and as I still believe correct explanation--which did not fit into his sociology quite so neatly.

If this property mark tale were an isolated case it would not be worth repeating, but it is typical of my work. The impressions and conclusions of my first year in the Arctic were, I now think, mostly wrong. Luckily for me I did not publish a book at the end of the first expedition but placed the diaries of it in storage with the American Museum of Natural History of New York City. They remained there during my second expedition of four years and while I wrote my first published book, called _My Life With the Eskimo_, 1913. They remained there also during my third expedition of five years and while I wrote my second book, called _The Friendly Arctic_, 1921.

It was only in 1922 that I got out the diaries of the first expedition and studied them as the basis of my third book, _Hunters of the Great North_. In the introduction to that volume, I said: “As I look over my diaries I shudder to think how vastly I might have augmented the already great misknowledge of the Arctic had I published everything I imagined I had seen and everything I thought I knew.”

You may think this autobiographical preface strange. But I shall presently be dealing with names far more eminent and respected than my own, even with those holding membership in this oldest of the great scientific societies of America, and I need myself as the thin entering wedge for a general discussion.

The introductory remarks closed, I turn to what I intend as a criticism of the social sciences in so far as they depend for their data on the findings of explorers.

If I were giving a course of lectures, and had at my disposal ten evenings instead of one, I should like to consider under three heads the misinformation contained in the books and reports of travelers. The first would be intentional misrepresentation, the deliberate drawing of the long bow; the second would be that unintentional misrepresentation which results from careless observation or from misplaced confidence in witnesses; the third would be that subdivision where the traveler states as a fact which he has observed a thing which he cannot possibly have observed but in which he believes because it conforms to, or is part of, a belief which he holds and has never questioned.

Since I have only one evening, too short for me although it may be too long for you, I shall not merely confine myself to the third heading but shall discuss only a few typical cases under it. What I said awhile ago, then, about property marks does not belong to our subject and has its use merely as part of the introductory approach.

We turn, then, first to a large body of false testimony which is nevertheless a small subdivision of the last third of our subject, and consider some of the things that have been testified to about animal and plant life in that small but typical sample of our world, the Far North.

The foundation of European belief about the distribution of life over the earth was laid by the Pythagorean Greeks, if not by someone else from whom the Pythagoreans borrowed the idea. Essentially it was that terrestrial life depends on heat from the sun. This heat, when it is of a degree called warmth, permits life in a belt called the temperate zone. To the south of the temperate zone there was, according to orthodox Greek belief, a burning region where the rocks were red-hot and the oceans boiling. North of the temperate zone was a region frozen solid. One of the ancient authorities has it that in the North life is as impossible because of the freezing as it is in the South because of the burning.

It is not a part of my northern specialty to review what is so well-known to historians, that from the Greek learned period before Christ to the age of Prince Henry the Navigator, and therefore through almost 2000 years, it was nearly or quite the unanimous opinion of the learned world that no human beings would ever cross the lifeless, burning and boiling tropics. It is more within my field as an Arctic explorer to point out that the accepted Greek belief was at one time that because of the cold no living thing could exist north of Scotland. Then the Irish discovered Iceland, 600 miles north of Scotland, and the Icelanders, or someone else, discovered Spitsbergen, another 600 miles still farther north.

The average January temperature of Reykjavik is about the same as that of January for Milan in Italy or Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, and the tourist companies which contract with their passengers to show them pack ice are forced, some years, to carry them 200 miles beyond Spitsbergen to keep their promise. But at every advance of knowledge, which in this case has been the northward advance of travel, it has been discovered with profound surprise that life was there ahead of the traveler. The interpretative scientists have been driven to every expedient of logic to explain the contradiction between what they believed and what they saw. This effort, in turn, has been the foundation of much false testimony by those of them who were explorers.

Take the case of perhaps the most solidly famous and respected of the British polar explorers, Sir Edward Parry. He landed on Melville Island the summer of 1819 and found musk oxen grazing there. This was startling, but had to be accepted. Presently he went into winter quarters, practically hibernating with his men for several months. When they emerged in the spring they saw musk oxen. Hereupon Lieutenant Sabine, himself later a distinguished explorer in his own right but acting for the time as naturalist in the publication of the scientific results of Parry’s voyage, wrote as follows:

“They (the musk oxen) arrived in Melville Island in the middle of May, crossing the ice from the southward, and quitted it on their return towards the end of September.”[4]

This was accepted by the entire learned world because it fitted in with two of their preconceptions--that Parry and Sabine were reliable witnesses, and that the Far North was by nature hostile to animal life. It had been believed earlier that no animals could exist, at any season, as far north as Melville Island. Now, when they had been found to be there in summer, the scientists executed a strategic retreat by saying: “The beasts make a summer foray deep into the Arctic, but they flee from the winters to the hospitable shelter of the temperate zone.” The theory of the complete absence of grazing animals from this part of the Arctic was thus replaced by an elaborate theory of seasonal migration.

For a quarter century after Parry’s first voyage there seems to have been practically if not complete unanimity among the explorers and the stay-at-home scientists alike that the musk oxen, in spite of short legs, made each year a 1200-mile round trip between the winter shelter of the forest on the North American continent and the summer stamping grounds in Melville Island.

Lieutenant Sherard Osborn, who both shared in and wrote books about the Franklin Search, appears to have been the most thoughtful of those officers. Yet in 1856 he published _The Discovery of the North-West Passage_ ... and assumed in it that the grazing animals of the islands north of Canada migrate south to the mainland in the Autumn to return each Spring. But in 1857 he published a second edition with a new Chapter, XVII, on “The Migration of Animals Theory.” For the views there expressed he says he has been “nearly excommunicated as a heretic.” In this chapter he points out the manifest theoretical absurdity of the postulated migrations and cites a little testimony he had been able to get which tended to show that there was no migration.

Thirty years later Greely was sure that the musk oxen of the Arctic islands do not migrate south[5] and most observers are now agreed that they do not move from one Arctic island to another at any time in any direction. Yet there are still in use in the English-speaking countries, among others, textbooks of recent copyright which retain the Parry statement and the Parry explanation--that the musk oxen migrate and that they do it because they need the shelter of the forest against the severe climate of the northern winters.

When the scientists were finally converted to believing that the musk oxen do live in the remote Arctic permanently, they and the travelers cast about for some more explanations--the philosophical scientists are continually busy trying to reconcile new knowledge with ancient theory. They now hit upon something clever. People had believed, they explained, that grazing animals could not exist without grass, and that was why they had thought there would be no such animals in the Arctic. They were right in part; there was no grass. What they could not have foreseen was that in the Arctic the place of the flowering plants is taken by mosses and lichens. The musk oxen live on mosses and lichens!

The musk ox still lives on mosses and lichens in the usual reference works; he is mounted with his mouth stuffed with them in the usual museums. This is in part because many explorers have supported the philosophizing scientists by testifying that lichens are verily the food of the musk ox.

But many explorers have denied this flatly. Greely said[6] “... in no case did I ever note the musk-ox feeding on the latter vegetation (lichens), although in many places near Conger the ground was covered with scanty, minute lichens for acres in extent.” Roderick MacFarlane says[7] that musk oxen live mainly if not wholly on flowering plants, and I have said the same.[8]

But the traditional belief is still being advanced by explorers as testimony and as observed fact. For instance, a statement implying that musk oxen do live on mosses and lichens was issued within the year by the Northwest Territories and Yukon Branch of the Department of the Interior of Canada, for they published a photograph of musk oxen with an accompanying letterpress which said that they were here shown grazing on mosses and lichens. I wrote at once to a friend, O. S. Finnie, who is official head of this department although not personally responsible for the picture and description. I asked him how did they know that these animals were feeding on lichens and whether their botanists could not (by examining the original photograph and perhaps enlarging it) determine what plants were really visible along with the animals. Finnie then submitted the photograph to A. E. Porsild, the distinguished Danish-Canadian botanist and specialist in Arctic flora, whose verdict came in a letter of February 27, 1930:

“There is a firm and rather hard turf composed chiefly of grasses and sedges with a slight admixture of flowering plants. Most predominant is the Alpine Foxtail grass (_alopecurus alpinus_) which probably has a higher food value than any other Arctic grass. With the foxtail grow a few sedges (_Carex_). In the foreground to the right are flowers of the Alpine Chickweed (_Cerastium alpinum_). A few twigs of a decumbent willow (_Salix_) show in the center of the photo.”

Not only these recent Canadian Government observers but also many scores of normally honest travelers have, then, testified, because of a solidly founded belief, that musk oxen live exclusively or mainly on a food which in fact they rarely eat--and then probably not by choice.

One of the most interesting of the systematic fabrications about the polar regions is within the observational domain of the exact sciences, although its effects are noticed chiefly in the social sciences. This is the statement that at a certain place a certain observer has noted that the midnight sun was visible for a given number of days in summer and that correspondingly the noonday sun was invisible at the same place for the same number of days in winter. All statements ever made to this effect are false. They could not be true anywhere in the world unless at least one important fact were changed and some laws of nature altered or abolished. The fact needing change is that the sun would have to be contracted down to a pinpoint; the laws needing change are those governing refraction.

A medieval writer, Jordanes, says:[9]

“In its northern part (of Norway) live the people Adogit, who, it is said, in the middle of the summer have continuous light for forty days and nights, and likewise at the time of the winter solstice do not see the light for the same number of days and nights.”

On this Nansen comments[10] to the effect that there can never have been any such place. For, says he, if the sun was visible at midnight 40 days in summer then it never disappeared at all in winter. Or if it was invisible 40 days in winter then it was visible 63 days in summer.

Nansen conjectures for the writers of this immediate group, the commentators on northern Norway, that they had heard for a given place that the sun was invisible for a certain number of days in winter and had then added a gloss (in conformity with Greek theory) to the effect that the midnight sun was visible for the same length of time in summer. Nansen seems to believe, then, that had the writers themselves been residents of northern Norway, or had they spent a year well beyond the Arctic Circle, they could not have written as they did. In this judgment Nansen is not at his best as a student of human nature. Nor does he show thorough familiarity with the writings of his contemporaries, for there are on record a number of them who without question have seen with the eyes of the body that the periods of the sun’s invisibility and visibility are unequal, but whose mental eyes have been holden so that they thought they had observed the periods to be equal.

We could go into a long catalogue of instances but shall actually use but a single example which, although typical in a sense, is striking for three reasons among others: that the witness is a Russian and therefore a member of a northern people who ought to understand northern conditions, that his general scientific work is looked upon by his colleagues as good, and that he has undoubtedly spent long periods within the Arctic Circle. The quotation we are about to give was published on pp. 581-2 of the _American Anthropologist_, for October-December, 1929. The author is Waldemar G. Bogoras, who says:

“The north polar circle forms the southern border of the area which has in midsummer the continuous day and in midwinter the continuous night. And so, for instance, on 68-70 degrees of north latitude, we have in the polar zone three or four weeks of continuous night in winter and as many weeks of continuous sunshine in summer.”

Unaware of the laws of refraction and forgetful of what they knew concerning the brightness of the twilight before sunrise and after sunset, Europeans throughout the Middle Ages and down to our time have assumed generally that darkness comes in the Arctic when the sun dips below the horizon. This belief is popularly translated into saying: “In the Arctic there are six months of daylight and six months of darkness.” That most people hold this belief is shown by the frequency with which the idea appears in school texts, in serious newspapers, and in the humorous journals. The average reader supposes the humor to rest upon some basis of fact when an Eskimo wife who sits up to await her husband’s homecoming starts scolding and he replies: “Why, my dear, it is only half past October.” The father of a baby with the colic walks the floor with it through the night and is then referred to as being on a six months’ tramp. A funny paper tells that Macpherson operates his business from San Francisco during the summer and from Point Barrow during the winter. You want to know why he goes north in winter and are told he conducts his business a good deal by telegraph and uses the Barrow office six months to get the benefit of night rates.

That great universities and leaders in science are still teaching the view on which the humorists base their quips, was brought in upon me through a talk I gave at the Explorers Club in New York. There I cited one traveler after another who had reported from various places within the Arctic Circle, some of them far north, that they had observed the sun to be fully visible in summer and wholly invisible in winter for equal periods. These men, I contended, had reported what neither they nor anyone else can ever have seen.

A few days later a troubled voice called me on the telephone for an appointment with regard to a situation at Columbia University. On arrival he proved to be a student in a course on meteorology. He had heard my talk and had reported to his instructor my saying that there was no spot on earth where the days of the sun’s complete visibility and invisibility could be equal in number. The instructor had not been impressed, and had pointed out that the author of a book they were using in the class, Robert DeCourcy Ward, Professor of Climatology in Harvard University, likely knew what he was talking about when in defining the zones he said:

“In the polar zones, the sun is below the horizon for twenty-four hours at least once in winter, and is above the horizon for the same length of time at least once in summer.”

I had Ward’s _Climate: Considered Especially in Relation to Man_ in its 1908 edition. Sure enough, on p. 20 were the lines cited by the Columbia instructor. I procured a “Second Edition, Revised” which says in a note dated August 1917:

“I have taken the opportunity offered by the publication of a second edition of this volume to make some revision of the chapters on ‘The Characteristics of the Polar Zones’....”

In that edition I found, unchanged, the statement we have quoted.

Professor Ward had, then, taken special thought of his chapter on the polar zones and had nevertheless repeated himself verbatim. No wonder the Columbia instructor was also firm.

Some textbooks, with a pretense to meticulous accuracy that makes them more effectively deceptive than others, will contain such statements as: “Among the Eskimos there is continuous darkness for three months.” There are, of course, no Eskimo settlements that have continuous darkness for even three days, or one day.

The textbook writers are in a vicious circle. Embryo explorers learn from school texts about the continuous Arctic winter darkness; they come back some years later from an Arctic expedition with testimony of having observed the said darkness, and this testimony becomes in turn the basis of new incorrect textbooks. A case is Elisha Kane, the most famous of American polar explorers before Peary. He reported having wintered at a place where there was no trace of daylight in a clear sky at the winter solstice. For comment on this it suffices to quote Captain George E. Tyson, who says: “Have passed Rensselaer Harbor, where Dr. Kane wintered during 1853-55. I am surprised that in the latitude of Rensselaer Harbor (N. Lat. 78⅔°) he should have found the darkness so intense as he describes it. It was not totally dark with us at high meridian at any time in clear weather....”[11]

In Heft 1/2, 1930, of the international scientific journal _Arktis_, Dr. Wilh. Meinardus of Göttingen, has published a diagram of the distribution of daylight and darkness within the polar regions throughout the year which shows not only that Kane (as Tyson implies) must have had a lot of daylight at noon on the shortest day of the year but also that no polar explorer except members of one Nansen and one Peary expedition have ever been so far north (or south) in midwinter that they could say accurately that there was no trace of daylight in a clear southern sky at the solstice. Yet there are dozens of explorers who have said so in books or reports which have been believed. Many of these were as respectable and respected as Nansen or Peary. They were not liars; rather they were observers and reporters who had been hypnotized by a belief.

It may be said in the defense of these travelers that when they said “no daylight” they meant “only a little daylight.” But would we similarly excuse a chemist after an autopsy if he said “no trace of arsenic” and really meant “only a little arsenic”? Explorers are putting themselves forward as scientists. If we are to take them seriously and at their own evaluation, we should require of them the standards not only of truthfulness but also of precision that we require of chemists or astronomers.

It follows naturally from what we have said above how ridiculous it is to suppose, as many school textbooks still assert or imply, that you have “six months of daylight and six months of darkness at the North Pole.” If you mean by daylight what Captain Tyson means in criticizing Dr. Kane, then we have at the North Pole more nearly four months of darkness (from October 6 to February 5) and eight months of daylight (from February 6 to October 5). If, on the other hand, you mean ability to read ordinary print throughout a clear day out-of-doors, then the division must be something like 5 months of darkness and 7 months of daylight.

A further corollary is equally plain. It is that we are being misled when it is constantly being stated or implied that there is less daylight per year in the polar regions than in the tropics or temperate zone. You can perhaps defend that old view if you say that by daylight you mean the quantity of sunlight delivered per unit of earth’s surface per year, but that is not really at all what we mean when we say daylight. For instance, you will hardly say that daylight is lacking when there is so much of it that you have to wear colored glasses to protect your eyes and must be careful to sleep in dark places so as not to go snow-blind while in bed. Judged by ability to read print out-of-doors, there is more daylight at an average Arctic station per year than there is in the temperate zone or in the tropics. (We are not here entering into niceties of how dark it is in Arctic mountain canyons or how light on snow-clad tropical peaks.)

There was a time when it was commonly believed in Europe (by those who did not identify travelers’ tales with fish stories) that the people of a certain remote land had ears so conveniently large that in sleeping they used one for a mattress and the other for a quilt. This we now consider a strictly medieval belief. But it is thoroughly modern to believe that Eskimo women carry babies in the hoods of their coats. We shall cite you eminent men, many of whom are living, who have asserted that they themselves have seen Eskimo women carry babies in their hoods, but first, departing from the main chronological order of our discussion, we give the testimony of the man indisputably the best authority on this subject.

Knud Rasmussen was born in Greenland of a Danish father and a mother who was part Eskimo. He was brought up by the Eskimo women somewhat as our Southern babies are by their Negro mammies. He was raised bilingual, his two mother tongues Danish and Eskimo. He associated with Danes in the house and played with Eskimo children out of doors. In due course he was taken to Copenhagen where he went through that university and other training which has made him both a well-equipped scholar and a cosmopolitan gentleman.

Quite apart from his childhood, which is in this connection the most significant period, Rasmussen has spent more time in the countries inhabited by Eskimos than any other man who is ordinarily classified as an explorer. He is the only one of us explorers who has visited every Arctic Eskimo territory and practically every Arctic Eskimo people from the east coast of Greenland to the west coast of Alaska and to the East Cape district of Siberia. He is primarily an anthropologist and geographer. For his sound work in these fields, and especially for his interpretation of the Eskimos to the learned world, he has been awarded gold medals by nearly every important geographical society in Europe and in the United States.

On the basis of the studies for which Rasmussen has really deserved these medals, he says about the belief that Eskimo women carry babies in their hoods: “The women in Greenland have never in the past carried their children in their hoods, nor do they do so now ... the child is decidedly not (carried) in the hood, as that would simply choke the mother.” (Letter to Vilhjalmur Stefansson, 3rd May, 1930.)

Now we turn to the history of the belief. The early travelers through Eskimo lands described from most if not all districts a custom whereby women’s coats were made especially roomy in the back so that a baby could be slipped up under the coat and supported by a belt. The child was then held by the coat and belt against the small of the woman’s back. Usually in removing the child the mother would undo the belt and let the baby slide down, but the neck of the coat was naturally made roomy to enable the child to breathe and sometimes the mother would reach in that way and pull it up and out. It is not impossible, but was at least geographically rare, that mothers inserted the baby into the coat from above. But whatever the method of ingress or egress, the baby, according to early northern books, was always carried inside the body of the coat, never inside the hood.

Since there are now living men who hold distinguished professorships in great universities and others of equal rank who say that they themselves have seen babies carried in hoods, I am planning one day to write almost a book on this subject, citing, so far as my researches allow, practically every traveler who has said anything about how Eskimo babies are carried. Here I give only a few typical cases, generally men who are not only entitled to respect but who have received it from the learned world.

Taking them chronologically, the first writers examined are the following:

Hans Egede: _A Description of Greenland_, first published in 1757 (pp. 132 and 148 in the London, 1818, edition).

David Crantz: _The History of Greenland_, London, 1767. Vol. I, pp. 138 and 162.

Hans Egede Saabye: _Greenland ... in the Years 1770 and 1778_, London, 1818, pp. 13 and 259.

Vol. XIX of the _Continuation of the General History of Voyages_, Paris, 1770, in which there is a “History of Greenland” by an anonymous author.

All of this early Greenland evidence agrees with Rasmussen--the manner in which the child is carried and the coat in which it is carried are described in almost the same terms as he uses.

But there existed a stream of contradictory testimony. Henry Ellis published his _Voyage to Hudson’s Bay_ at London in 1748. There you find on p. 136:

“The Difference between the Dress of the Men and the Women is, that the Women have a Train to their Jackets, that reaches down to their Heels. Their Hoods are also larger and wider at the Shoulders, for the sake of carrying their Children in them more conveniently on their Backs.”

On pp. 495 and 496 of Sir Edward Parry’s _Journal of a Second Voyage_, London, 1824, the hood-carrying is weightily reinforced.

Between Parry’s time and about 1855 I have found the following references:

BABIES CARRIED IN HOODS:

G. F. Lyon: _The Private Journal_, London, 1824, p. 315.

John Franklin: _Narrative of a Second Expedition in the Years 1825, 1826, 1827_, London, 1828, p. 118.

John Rae: _Narrative of an Expedition to the Shores of the Arctic Sea in 1846 and 1847_, London, 1850, p. 39.

John Richardson: _Arctic Searching Expedition_, London, 1851, Vol. I, pp. 252 and 369; also _The Polar Regions_, Edinburgh, 1861, p. 306.

Berthold Seemann: _Narrative of the Voyage of the H.M.S. Herald during the Years 1845-51_, London, 1853, Vol. II, p. 53.

BABIES NOT CARRIED IN HOODS (BUT CARRIED INSIDE COATS):

Captain W. A. Graah, _Narrative of an Expedition to the East Coast of Greenland_, London, 1837, p. 118.

Thomas Simpson: _Narrative of the Discoveries on the North Coast of America_, London, 1843.

Joseph Bellot: _Memoirs of Lieutenant Joseph René Bellot_, London, 1855, Vol. I, p. 186.

Around 1850 there was living in Greenland a man who knew the Greenland Eskimos at least as well as even Rasmussen does now. This was Samuel Kleinschmidt, born of missionary parents and brought up there until he had learned Eskimo as one of his mother tongues. He was then educated in Germany and went back to Greenland to spend the rest of his life, much of which he devoted to the preparation of an Eskimo-German grammar and an Eskimo-Danish dictionary.

In some Eskimo dialects _amaut_, _amaun_, or some variant of that word is the name of an enlargement for child accommodation in the back of a woman’s coat, or it may be the name for an entire coat which contains this enlargement. In many districts the nursing mother wears a coat of no special design but one simply large enough so the child is well accommodated. The name of the coat is still _amaun_. This is, then, a word referring to the purpose for which the coat is used, not to its design. _Amaun_ is never used as the name for a hood, of a woman’s coat or of any other garment.

In _Den Gronlandske Ordbog_, Copenhagen, 1871, p. 24, Kleinschmidt defines the verbal form _amarpok_, “carries a child on her back in a roomy coat designed for that purpose”; and the noun form _amaut_, “such a coat for carrying the baby.” Thus we see that while most of the travelers had by this time been converted to the Ellis-Parry hood carrying and were testifying that they had themselves observed it, Kleinschmidt, working as a missionary and scholar in his native Greenland, had either never heard about the belief that children are carried in hoods or else considered it so absurd as not to be worth noticing in his dictionary.

In 1927 Schultz-Lorentzen published a dictionary which in many respects is an improvement on Kleinschmidt’s. At that stage, as we shall show in a moment, the books were favoring by a substantial majority the Ellis-Parry view, at least if you merely count noses among the testifiers. Greenland books, among others, were favoring it and on p. 16 of the Schultz-Lorentzen dictionary we find: _amaut_, “fur jacket with hood for carrying child.”

But this is really an ambiguous definition. If you think already that babies are carried in hoods, you will read that meaning into Schultz-Lorentzen’s words; but if you think that babies are not thus carried, you will understand him to mean that the coat is for carrying the baby and that this coat also has a hood. It is therefore fair to him to cite some of his allied definitions: _amaq_, “child carried in fur jacket with hood”; _amarpa_, “takes him on his back; carries him on his back”; _amarpoq_, “carries a child in fur jacket with hood.”

From about 1855 down to about 1888 the evidence of explorers who had traveled among Eskimos is divided as follows:

BABIES CARRIED IN HOODS:

Charles Francis Hall, 1865.
Isaac I. Hayes, 1867.
Dr. Henry Rink, 1877.

AMBIGUOUS:

A. W. Greely, 1886.

BABIES CARRIED INSIDE COATS:

No testimony during this period.

Now we come to what makes our discussion really worth while. It is that one of those who report Eskimo babies carried in hoods is Franz Boas, Professor of Anthropology in Columbia University and President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Boas is, if not the most eminent living anthropologist, which he very well may be, at least the most distinguished of those who are also Arctic explorers and who have made some specialty of Eskimo studies (we classify Rasmussen here as a traveler or geographer rather than as an anthropologist). Moreover, the Smithsonian Institution, through which Boas published a book on the Eskimos on Baffin Island and neighboring districts, is in one sense at least our foremost scientific body. It is then significant that on p. 556 of the _6th Annual Report, Bureau of Ethnology_, 1884-85, in the Section, _The Central Eskimo_, by Boas, we have:

“The women’s jacket ... has a wide and large hood reaching down almost to the middle of the body.... If the child is carried in the hood, a leather girdle fastened with a buckle is tied around the waist and serves to prevent the child from slipping down....”

Boas spent a winter with the Eskimos at Baffin Island and undoubtedly had hundreds of opportunities of seeing how the women carried their babies. He was there for the purpose of studying just such things and there is no doubting his sincere desire to record and interpret rightly everything he saw.

But Boas had in a considerable part of his Eskimo work the collaboration of a man who testifies directly against him, a man, too, of keen observation, shrewd judgment, and much longer experience among Eskimos. This is Captain George Comer, who lives at East Haddam, Conn., co-author with Boas of _The Eskimo of Baffin Land and Hudson Bay_, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, Vol. XV, 1901. On the subject of the belief that Eskimo women carry babies in their hoods, Captain Comer says:

“... (The statement that) Eskimo women carry their babies in the hood of their garment is perfectly absurd.... Once when I spoke of the child being carried in the hood it made the women laugh.” (Letter to Vilhjalmur Stefansson, May 22, 1930.)

This discussion has been based on the easiest reading of Boas, which is that he means to say the Eskimo babies are carried in the hoods of the women’s coats. However, the part about the leather girdle serving “to prevent the child from slipping down” may be taken to show what Boas really meant was that the child is carried not in the hood, but inside the coat as described by Rasmussen. For an examination of Baffin Island women’s coats in museums, or an examination of the pictures from Boas and others which give the women’s coats of Baffin Island, will show that if a child (or anything else) is in the hood, then there is no chance of its sliding down along the woman’s back whether or not she wears a girdle.

Continuing our studies, we have made the following classification of the reports on the Eskimo manner of carrying babies by travelers later than Boas.

BABIES CARRIED IN HOODS:

Lucien M. Turner (Bureau of Ethnology), 1894.
David Hanbury, 1904.
E. W. Hawkes (Canadian Dept. of Mines), 1916.
Donald MacMillan, 1918.

BABIES CARRIED INSIDE COATS:

Alfred H. Harrison, 1908.
John W. Kelly (U. S. Bureau of Education), 1890.
Fridtjof Nansen, 1893.

AMBIGUOUS:

Ejnar Mikkelsen--expedition 1906-08 (book undated).

John Murdoch (Bureau of Ethnology)--reports them carried in coat for those Eskimos he visited but says that among the eastern Eskimos (whom he had not visited) the baby is carried in the hood--1892.

Josephine Peary--describes method of carrying, showing that child is really carried in coat; but she calls it the hood--1893.

Henry Rink--same as above, description correct for carrying in coat but speaks of it as hood--1877.

You may think that in spite of the distinction of some of the advocates, the carrying of babies in hoods has by now been relegated generally to the domain of folklore and that this discussion has therefore grown academic. But until within the last twelve months several of the foremost up-to-the-minute authorities have in reality been influenced to believe that the baby hood-carrying is a fact.

For with Rasmussen and Boas in knowledge of the Eskimo we might well group Diamond Jenness, Chief Anthropologist of the Canadian Government at Ottawa, who, as anthropologist on the staff of the expedition which I commanded from 1913-18, spent three years in studying the Eskimos from western Alaska eastward along the north Canadian coast as far as Coronation Gulf. Since then, through his continued studies and official position, he has been in close touch with anthropologists and with the development of Eskimo research. On March 29, 1930, he wrote me in substance that, although he was convinced those early travelers who had testified that babies were carried in hoods in the districts which he had himself later investigated were mistaken, nevertheless he was willing to believe other travelers who said that in certain districts which he had not visited the babies were so carried. It was only when Rasmussen and Comer testified about those very districts in which Jenness still credited the hood-carrying that he realized the belief had a folklore nature outside his own territories as well as within them.

There is plenty of evidently correct testimony that Eskimo women do carry certain things in their hoods. Among things frequently mentioned are cigarettes (in recent times), needle cases, dolls or other playthings for their babies, and small stolen articles. Why is it not, then, reasonable that they might carry babies similarly?

The reply is that the admittedly hood-carried articles are light. A baby is so heavy even at birth that (as Rasmussen points out) it would choke, or at least seriously incommode, the mother if its weight reposed in the hood. (Babies are carried on women’s backs until they are three or four years old, making the weight increase considerably each year.)

The second paragraph in rebuttal will be that most testimony represents the babies in the hoods as usually naked, at least while very young. If you study the construction of the hoods on women’s coats in any of our museums, you will find not only that a weight in them would press against the mother’s throat with choking action, but also that they are so open at the top that a naked baby would necessarily suffer a great deal from cold, at least in winter, even if it were not frozen to death.

It may be suggested that when Boas, for instance, speaks of a hood he is actually referring to the enlargement farther down in the coat which makes it commodious, as described by many travelers and easily seen in museums.

The reply is that this might not be a bad defense argument for Greenland, where the women frequently have coats without hoods, but that Boas is dealing with Baffin Island and other neighboring districts where the women’s coats, at least usually, have hoods. Since Boas does not describe the coat he has in mind as having two hoods, we are inclined to feel that by hood he means what the rest of us do.

Then it may be advanced that there are motion pictures and other photographs in existence which show Eskimo babies actually in the hoods of women’s coats. This would serve as good argument, if not full proof, were it not that we know the circumstances under which those photographs were taken, which are that to oblige the photographers, or for pay, the women consented to place the babies in the hoods for the time of as much photographing as the explorer needed to show graphically on his return what he believes to be the custom of a primitive people.

In other words, we are driven to the conclusion that the many travelers who have said they have seen Eskimo babies carried, as a matter of widespread custom, in the hoods of women’s coats, have all testified to having seen things they did not see. The merited eminence of some of these unreliable witnesses comforts the rest of us who, led by faith, have said or implied in print that we have seen certain objectively non-existent things. For it is not only misery but error that loves company. People like Dr. Franz Boas and Sir Edward Parry are very good company indeed.

The importance of the babies-in-hoods case is in that it shows strikingly the danger to which the social sciences are exposed when they include the testimony of explorers among their data.

There are bound to be many in every scientific audience who feel that the misrepresentations and misstatements of their own science are as serious as any that will fall within the domain of the geographers and anthropologists. They may be right, which, if they are, makes the case more interesting. What we cite are then not exceptions but fair samples of the body of knowledge.

I have, in reality, never met any specialist who thought that fully half of what is now being taught in the schools about his subject was contrary to fact or definitely misleading; but that proportion fits my opinion with regard to my specialty and I shall use the last few minutes of my time in dwelling upon it.

The first reason for there being abroad fewer “untrue facts” about the Temperate than the other zones is that ours is a temperate zone civilization and that to our forefathers (and, to an extent, ourselves) the two regions of unrestrained imagination were the tropics and the Arctic. Five hundred years ago the percentage of misinformation was no doubt approximately the same with regard to the zones north and south of the North Temperate, but of late books and ideas about the tropics have become relatively correct. For the crossing of the tropics has been a commonplace these 400 years, while the crossing of the Arctic was not accomplished until within our own time and is not yet a commonplace, though it soon will be.

The tropic myths have been dispelled by the frequent journeys of investigators and by the necessities of commercial development. The Arctic myths have not been dispelled by these or any other causes, or at least not to the same extent. Moreover, the human mind appears to crave some district where the fancy may roam. Our favorite character of the imagination is Santa Claus and we are perhaps right in feeling subconsciously that it is fitting and necessary for him to reside in an imaginary world. Moreover, our present attitude towards explorers makes them the grown-ups’ equivalent of childhood’s Santa Claus. The explorers, then, need an imaginary world for a satisfying background.

I might confess here that to the extent that I am successful in talks such as this, I feel as if I were stealing candy from a child when I make it increasingly difficult for the rest of the world to swallow the good old hokum about the Arctic. Fortunately, I have never been very successful.

But it is equally fortunate that I am not very serious about Truth--fortunate at least for me. I am no Jeremiah declaiming against iniquity. I like to contrast my benevolence with the misanthropy of the satirists, and I go on now to point out the amusing but effective ways which the scientific organizations, some of them nearly as lofty and respected as the American Philosophical Society, have discovered for keeping Santa Claus in his Arctic so that all may be well with the imaginary world.

One of the branches of our government is the Geological Survey and another branch is the Signal Corps. Lieutenant P. H. Ray, of the United States Army, discovered on the Signal Corps expedition to Point Barrow (1881-2) that “willows” 20 feet in height grow a little way inland from Barrow, more than 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle. But it is out of character to picture such large vegetation in the Arctic, and so the Geological Survey now comes to the rescue by issuing through the journal _Science_, the official organ of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and through _Science Service_, a statement that in the great triangle north of the Endicott Mountains in Alaska (an area larger than that of the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania) there is no tree-like growth bigger than a lead pencil.

Before any of us were born the Hudson’s Bay Company had a trading post called La Pierre’s House, on the Bell branch of the Porcupine River, and at Fort Yukon, where the Porcupine enters the Yukon. Ever since then missionaries, traders, and white men and women of nearly every condition and description, have been traveling up and down that river or residing upon it. Now the United States Bureau of Education, among its other contributions to the Santa Claus background, tells that one of its agents will go northward and associate on this river with Indians who are untouched by the white man’s civilization. The implication is that some of them will never have seen a white man until the Bureau representative gets there. Really he will find there Athapaska Indians speaking English with a Scotch accent, their inheritance from the Orkneyman “servants” of the Company.

We have been listing a few of the notable contributions from scientific departments of the American Government to our knowledge of the Arctic. There are naturally similar contributions from the governments of other countries. We close our remarks on this subdivision of our topic with a note on the Antarctic which appeared in _Science_ on February 27, 1925:

“The Minister of the Colonies, by a decree dated December 30, has created a large game sanctuary in France’s Antarctic possessions ... the principal animals protected are polar bears, walrus, sea lions and penguins. The French naval station in Madagascar will be responsible for the patrol of the new preserve.”

In this French decree we seem to have the first published reference to walrus south of the equator. The polar bear citation is even more remarkable, for up to this time there had been discovered in the Antarctic no land mammal, small or big.