Chapter IV: Travelers’ Tales (2)

The walrus in southern waters has apparently not been reported again since the French government’s original note; but the polar bears, once introduced (and protected by gunboats in Madagascar only a few thousand miles away) have been doing well in our Antarctic mental world. True, they appear as yet with comparative rarity in print; but they appear frequently in pictures--not in photographs, of course, but in drawings. A sample contribution was a cartoon of the _New York World_, spring 1930. Formerly in such drawings, penguins by themselves had symbolized the Antarctic; now they were joined by the polar bear. Father Knickerbocker was shown standing at the New York waterfront to welcome Byrd home from his southern adventures. The boat conveying the hero toward shore was rowed by a crew of polar bears and steered by penguins.

These same late years that have been so propitious to the Antarctic have seen a reciprocal enrichment of the Arctic. As there had been no bears in the South so had there been no penguins in the North. Or, rather, there had been a sort of penguin, the Great Auk, which became extinct a century ago. It would manifestly add charm to have penguins, and so they have been appearing more and more frequently in references to the North. As with bears in the South, they are most frequent in drawings. There is, however, a growing demand for photographs of them. It happens to me, for instance, with increasing frequency that lecture committees bargaining for talks on the Arctic request that I shall use movies, or at least stills, showing penguins.

I get friendly advice, too, after my talks--what I said was interesting and they didn’t realize before they saw my pictures that there are flowers in the Arctic. But why did I not also show the penguins?--they are so solemn, so funny and so human.

Next after the official Government agencies in the Santa Claus propaganda, with regard to Arctic and Antarctic, may be ranked our great universities. Few of them are greater (and I remind you again I am not trying to be satirical) than the University of Chicago. In the spring of 1928 that university informed us through what appears to be an official press release that a graduate student of theirs, Cornelius Osgood, was going to live on Great Bear Lake. They said:

“If he is successful, young Osgood, ... will be the first white man ever to live in the Great Bear Lake region. Two missionaries who tried it in 1912 were slain by the natives. Armed only with rifles, cameras, note-books, recording phonograph disks and a sleeping bag to withstand the 79 degrees below zero weather, Osgood will seek to win the confidence of the natives, living their lives, helping in their work and eating their food.... The only other white men who have penetrated the district are Steffanson, the Arctic explorer, and his companion D’arcy Arden, a famous figure of the North, and a Northwest Mounted Policeman who captured the murderers of the missionaries.”

The stodgy fact is, of course, that John Franklin wintered at Fort Franklin on Great Bear Lake a hundred years ago, that the Hudson’s Bay Company operated on the lake thereafter, that Richardson and Rae, three quarters of a century ago, built their Fort Confidence on Great Bear Lake, and that white men too numerous for easy cataloguing have been there off and on ever since. I was so overborne by this knowledge that when I was there in 1910-11 I lacked the courage, or something, to claim I was the first white man ever to winter.

The bit “Steffanson ... and his companion D’arcy Arden” will be news to him, as it is to me. We never met at or near Great Bear Lake. I believe he began his long residence in that district a year or so after I left there. The lake is big, however, and the country is big--he may have been to the west somewhere in 1910 without my knowing it.

It is perhaps heaping Pelion on Ossa to prove further the thesis of this paper, that even scientists will constantly and solemnly report, as having been observed, things for which there is no foundation but an inherited belief. I might have resisted the temptation except that a beautiful example has just fallen into my hands.

In Canada, Dr. F. G. Banting, Professor of Medical Research, Toronto University, Nobel Prize winner, is the country’s foremost scientist in that more people know his name than that of any other Canadian scientist now living. The Canadian Government has deservedly recognized his position by what the papers say is a lifetime stipend. There is in Canada now an organization called the Canadian Geographical Society, a purpose of which is the increase and diffusion of knowledge of Canada. I shall list for you a few of Dr. Banting’s observations on a summer trip North, as chronicled in Volume I, No. 1 (May 1930), of the official organ of the Society, the _Canadian Geographical Journal_:

1. “The thickness of the pans (of sea ice) varied from twenty to forty feet, depending on whether they were one-year-old or two-year-old ice.”

Many Northern explorers, prominent among them Nansen, have studied the time required for the thickening of sea ice. Their reports are of the order that the first winter’s freezing is from seven to nine feet, that of the second winter adding one to three feet, the third perhaps less than a foot.

2. “On the surface of the older pans were pools of fresh blue water, while on the year-old pans the pools were of salt water.”

“Pans” several years old and those a year old will both have on them pools of water fresh to the taste in summer, if the spray has not reached them. It is ice much younger, only a few weeks or months old, that has salty pools.

3. “Varieties of saxifrage, fireweed and stunted willow spring up beneath the snow and ice.”

Probably what Banting means is that during the winter they had been under snow, as plants are in Minnesota. Some of the spring processes may conceivably quicken a little while the snow is still above the plants, but, if so, how could Banting learn this on a summer trip? Since he distinguishes between ice and snow, what can he mean by their springing up beneath the ice? What ice other than snow would there be?

4. He lauds Franklin and his men who, on Franklin’s last expedition, “in tiny sailing vessels, ventured through these perilous waters.”

Franklin’s _Erebus_ was 370 tons and his _Terror_ was 340 tons, large to date for ships which have gone in among the islands that are north of Canada. Amundsen’s _Gjoa_, by which he navigated the Northwest Passage, was 47 tons. The largest of the six ships of my own third expedition was the _Karluk_, 247 tons; the smallest, the _North Star_, about 30 tons.

5. “In protected spots the flowering mosses of various colors ... reminded us of a summer day at home.”

Either Banting here made some startling discoveries or he was a bit confused as to the nature of mosses. Not a few works of reference divide plants into flowering and non-flowering, putting the mosses on the non-flowering side of the fence.

6. “During these blizzards the land animals huddle together with their backs to the storm and allow the snow to drift around them.”

Banting must have been thinking of cows and horses down Ontario way. The ordinary report of hunters and naturalists is that both caribou and musk oxen feed into the wind and are more likely than otherwise to travel into it.

7. “... thunder is so rarely heard that the natives are frightened by it.”

I know people in New York who are frightened by thunder, and have seen the like farther south.

8. “The married women wear larger hoods which are used for carrying the baby.”

We have earlier in this paper dealt with the question of whether babies are ever carried in hoods.

9. “... the Eskimos live in igloos made from blocks of hard snow.”

We consider this under two heads:

(a) If Banting means that an Eskimo calls his dwelling an igloo, then he is of course right; the Eskimo word _iglu_ means dwelling. A lot of people in a lot of countries live in dwellings.

(b) If by igloo Banting means a snow house, then he should not have said “the Eskimos.” Certainly there are Eskimos who live in snow houses in winter; but it is equally certain that the number of Eskimos who have never lived in a snow house is larger than that of those who have lived in them. This statement goes not only for the 20th century but, so far as we believe, for the 19th, 18th, and 17th centuries at the least. In fact, there are good reasons to consider that the snow house was geographically more widespread in 1900 than it was in 1600.

10. “... the native has _no_ natural immunity.”

The only necessary comment is to say that the italization in this quotation is ours.

11. “In a country where there is no sunshine for three months of the year the people are dependent on their food for their vitamins ...”

The inference seems to be that if there were more sunshine these remarkable people would not have to depend on food for any of their vitamins. The recipient of one Nobel Prize for endocrine studies may then well be candidate for another in comparative racial physiology and in deficiency diseases.

12. “Perhaps the most important introductions (from whites to the Eskimos) are the darning needle, which has been the greatest help to the women in making the clothes and boots, and matches for igniting their lamps.”

The testimony of many travelers has been that Eskimos felt it a hardship to sew with copper or bone needles which almost necessarily were too large for their purpose. Accordingly, the needles which the Eskimos most valued when the whites arrived were those that were smaller than darning needles. No. 1 needles are much smaller than darning size but are, nevertheless, about the largest that I have found the Eskimos of my territories to value at all appreciably. No. 3 was a rather large needle for most of the seamstresses whom I have known, who did most of their sewing with size 5 or smaller. So far as my experience goes, it has been a standing marvel with white women, and with white men used to sewing, that the western Eskimos sew with such small needles. I do not recall ever seeing one use a darning needle for anything but darning or sewing heavy cloths, like tenting.

As to the preciousness of matches to the Eskimos: I have reported that the Stone Age people of Coronation Gulf, with whom we spent the summer 1910, often got their camp fires lighted with blocks of iron pyrites quicker than we did ours with matches. On days of strong wind pyrites has particular advantages, so that it seemed to me the Eskimos needed matches less, and appreciated them less, than they did many of our other contributions to their way of life.

The issue is not so clear with the matches as with the needles. It is ludicrous to claim that darning needles supplied a keenly felt want. Whether the matches did is in the field of legitimate dispute.

To guard against misunderstanding I close this discussion of the Banting paper by reminding you, and insisting upon it, that I am on the whole one of his great admirers. It appears to me that his career and character are both of a high order. That is my point. We get from eminent and deservedly respected men substantial contributions of misinformation useful in maintaining the general unreality (or shall we say poetic quality, imaginative charm?) of our world outlook.

Before introducing the next example of how the great stand with us shoulder-to-shoulder in the battle to keep the world unreal, we mention that the North Pole of reality lies in a deep ocean and is removed some 400 miles from the nearest land. During a hundred years there have been numerous explorers studying this ocean. No one has during this century, or at any other time, seen an iceberg within 300 miles of the North Pole; few have been seen within 600 miles. We know, too, the conditions under which icebergs are formed. So it appears both from well-established theory and from uniform observation that there are not and cannot well be icebergs anywhere near the North Pole.

Now we come to a statement that could not be introduced to you more impressively than by a simple recital of facts. The publication is the September 20, 1928, number of _Science_. The original author of the statement is Sir James H. Jeans, who, according to _Who’s Who_, is M.A., D.Sc. from Oxford, LL.D. from Aberdeen, F.R.S. and secretary of the Royal Society. He is quoted with implied approval by Robert A. Millikan, who, according to _Who’s Who in America_, is A.B., A.M., Ph.D. from Columbia, studied at Berlin and Göttingen, is D.Sc. from Oberlin, Northwestern, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Amherst, Dublin and Yale, and LL.D. from California, as well as holder of the Nobel Prize.

And this is what Millikan says, quoting Jeans: “Our position is that of polar bears on an iceberg that has broken loose from its ice pack surrounding the pole.”

Millikan and Jeans consider, then, that icebergs come from the vicinity of the pole. But if you could take a census of icebergs as we take a census of the human population of the United States, you would find more of them in the temperate zone than in the Arctic; if you could determine the population center of icebergs as we determine the population center of the United States, you would find this center is nearer the British Isles, where Sir James lives, than to the North Pole. Or, speaking astronomically, since Jeans is an astronomer, it would be as correct to imply that Saturn is the center of our solar system as it is to imply that the North Pole is the center of icebergs.

Jeans tells us in a recent work on _Cosmogony_ that light, which goes eight times around our earth in a second, requires 140,000,000 years to reach us from the farthest celestial object that our telescopes now show. With his intellect and with that marvelous tool of the intellect, mathematics, he probes these depths. The while he probes the vulgar onlooker speculates as to how accurate Jeans may be about those distant reaches when he is so far from being accurate about things that are, comparatively speaking, within a stone’s throw of his house.

It may be said that many people have heard of icebergs who have never heard of sea ice, and that Millikan and Jeans were perhaps just catering to their audience in using the better-known word. For it is a common view that scientists, addressing the laity, have an obligation to translate their rigorous phrasing into the looser forms of common speech. But when Millikan referred to the iceberg as “broken loose from its ice pack surrounding the pole,” he was, according to _Science_, giving not a popular talk but an “Address before the Society of Chemical Industry, New York, September 4, 1928, on the occasion of the conferring on Dr. Robert A. Millikan of the Messel Medal in honor of his work on the structure and relations of atoms.” We are too polite to believe it was necessary to talk down to that audience.

Jeans and Millikan were no doubt really thinking of floe ice when they said iceberg. Their precision of speech would then be like my referring to Halley’s planet or calling the moon a nebula. An iceberg differs as much from sea ice as a comet does from a planet.

The iceberg is formed on land; floe ice at sea. The iceberg begins as snow and gradually acquires the semblance of common ice through time, pressure, etc., while sea ice forms directly from liquid water. The iceberg has been fresh since it started; the floe ice began salty and, if fresh now, has attained that state through a long process. The ice destined to be a berg gradually approaches the sea; the floe ice was on the sea from the start. These are but a few of the differences.

It is possible, however, that Jeans and Millikan were not confusing an iceberg with any form of sea ice. For it appears to be the view of the average scientist who is not a geographer that the northern polar sea is just filled full of icebergs. For instance, practically everybody whom I ever heard objecting to the use of submarines in the northern polar basin will say that you are bound to collide with icebergs even if you can navigate deep enough so that there is no chance of colliding with sea ice.

It may be said, finally, that since Jeans is an astronomer, and Millikan a physicist, you can’t expect them to know much about the earth. But why not? I find in several of Jeans’ books which I own, and have even read, that he talks a lot about the earth in general. He analogizes from earth to moon and to various other bodies. And Millikan should know something of land, sea and air, for he and his agents scale mountains and go aloft in aircraft to study his later rays, sometimes crossing oceans to do so. Meteorology and geography should be to him, then, not wholly alien professionally.

The fact is, of course, that this whole reasoning is beside the mark. Jeans and Millikan, leaders in science, are simply acting, too, as leaders in that great effort where we all collaborate, the struggle to keep the world unreal.

Or, declining to close with a negative statement, we affirm that all the way through from my telling the Eskimo method of property identification to Millikan’s telling of icebergs breaking loose from an ice pack surrounding the pole--through that whole gamut we multitudinous scientists are champions of a higher knowledge which I have advocated in _The Standardization of Error_, knowledge derived from facts-by-definition.

There is a perhaps subconscious awareness that lands near home are getting dull through excessive familiarity and it may be this feeling which prompts many who are not scientists to join them towards keeping the ends of the earth from becoming too ordinary. There are many examples in recent polar exploration and we take a few.

The New York newspapers carried one day a statement that Byrd had flown over the North Pole and that the temperature of the air had been 10° F. above zero. Now that is a commonplace temperature, without fascination; for every state north of the Mason and Dixon Line has had it, as well as a good many states farther south. This cheapening of the North Pole needed counteracting. Accordingly, there was an editorial the next day to the effect that in properly evaluating Byrd’s achievement we must remember that the flight was performed in cold so intense as to be unimaginable to New Yorkers.

The reports from most of the winter flights in the Arctic or Antarctic have been that the planes flew in warmer air than on the ground. There have been instances where they flew at 40° or 50° warmer; in one case the temperature was 79° higher at the plane than on the ground below. Reports of this kind we neutralize in our discussions by assuming, without citing figures, that (because high mountains are snow-capped and for various other reasons) the heroic polar flyers contend during their journeys with temperatures even colder than those endured by their earth-bound predecessors who explored by dog and afoot.

A danger well-known to the air mail between New York and Cleveland, too well-known in most parts of the so-called temperate zone, is that of ice forming on wings to make the plane heavy and, what is more serious, to change its aerodynamics so that it becomes unmanageable. This occurs in what the people of New York and Cleveland think of as cold weather. Accordingly, in our discussions of polar flying we just assume that because it is much colder the danger to the flyers, through ice formation, must be that much greater than on the New York-Cleveland winter run. This gets by 90 per cent of the readers and is one of our most effective devices in keeping the polar districts unreal. The fact is, of course, that ice forms on wings chiefly at temperatures between freezing and fifteen degrees below that point (between 30° above zero and 15° above). When it gets colder you have comparatively little icing trouble with a plane.

The Arctic and Antarctic have their chief social usefulness as proving grounds for heroes. The stay-at-homes are thrilled by that courage, that devotion to the aims of science, which leads men to expose themselves to the terrors of a frozen and lifeless wilderness. In order that the said terrors shall have their maximum appeal to the reading public there should be a good many of them. One of the things commonly dreaded is illness, and it is therefore desirable to have it believed that the polar risks include the greatest possible number of diseases. Recent deficiency-disease study has been helpful through showing that one at least of the vitamins can be produced by sunlight falling on the human skin. Obviously, then, the members of exploring parties are going to suffer great deprivation, are going to be in imminent risk of their lives, because of the long absence of the sun in winter. This belief has been utilized in two chief ways: You take along ultra-violet lamps and then make a great play on the forethought of a commander who enlists the newest powers of science towards protecting from disease the members of his courageous band. Or else you have the expedition go into the field without the lamps, and then work up a suspense on whether by cleanliness, regular exercise, amusements, and strict medical supervision it may turn out possible for the men to retain their health until the sun comes back after the Long Polar Night.

On the whole, disease scares have been managed satisfactorily by the public relations departments of at any rate the larger expeditions; but until just recently there was a serious exception. It had been found by many explorers, and had been so often reported as to reach the public consciousness, that head colds and the related diseases of the pulmonary passages were rare on polar journeys. Some said they had been practically absent. For instance, it was reported on one of the British expeditions that nobody had a cold for several winter months, that everybody then caught cold from germs which emerged when boxes of clothing were unpacked, and that when this flare-up was over no more head colds appeared through the rest of the year.

Obviously the polar explorer is deprived of half his chance to be courageous if the life and the climate are represented as normally healthful. The growing awareness that cold prevents colds had to be dealt with. Simplest was, no doubt, to counteract this through the old belief that cold produces colds. Notable help in the campaign was received from the cough-drop industry.