Chapter XIII: Conclusion

At the request of friends I have turned away briefly from other work to take up the threads of the past and write this book.

That other work which has been demanding my attention has a very pronounced bearing on polar exploration, and in fact upon all exploration.

Five years ago at the annual dinner of the Explorers’ Club I ventured the prophecy that in a few years the polar regions would be reconnoitered and explored through the air. The last three years of warfare abroad have forced the development of the aeroplane to such a degree that the time is now very near when aeroplanes will have such extended radius of certain flight as will make the preliminary reconnaissance of the unknown areas in the north and south polar regions a matter of a few weeks instead of several years.

The sheltered inlets of Bowdoin and McCormick Bays in Whale Sound, Greenland, are readily accessible every summer to a ship like the _Roosevelt_ and an ice master like Bartlett. In these inlets during August there are days and days of brilliant, calm, warm weather, with temperature above the freezing point, and it is continuous daylight throughout the entire twenty-four hours all through the month.

Four hundred miles due north--four hours’ aeroplane flight--is Cape Columbia, the most northerly point of the North American world segment, and less than 500 miles from the pole.

A squadron of aeroplanes starting from Bowdoin or McCormick Bays would reach Cape Columbia in a few hours with the whole panorama of Grant Land and the American gateway to the pole passing beneath, could alight on the firm level “glacial fringe” at Cape Columbia, unload their supplies and gasoline, and the supporting machines be back at their base in less than a day.

From Cape Columbia it is less than 1400 miles in a straight line directly across and over the pole to Cape Chelyuskin on the Siberian Coast, the most northern point of Eurasia. To Wrangel Island across Crocker Land and the entirely unexplored region between the pole and Bering Strait it is about 1500 miles.

From Cape Columbia to Spitzbergen, it is 900 miles, to Franz Josef Land less than 1000 miles, and to Point Barrow about 1400 miles.

The present average speed of aeroplanes is about 100 miles per hour. By the time this meets the reader’s eye continuous flights of 1000 miles or more will be a matter of record. In the near future, continuous flights of 2000 miles will be made.

A squadron of aeroplanes with base at Cape Columbia, flying in pairs and making simultaneous trips could with good fortune make the reconnaissance indicated above in two weeks, then return to Bowdoin or McCormick Bays and take their ship home.

From the base in Bowdoin or McCormick Bays a week of successive flights northeast, east and southeast, would clear up all the interior features of the great island continent of Greenland.

In the South Polar regions with a base at McMurdo Sound in Ross Sea, south of New Zealand,--the favorite base of Scott and Shackleton,--a flight of 1800 miles across and over the South Pole would reach the known portion of Weddel Sea on the opposite side, and flights of 2000 miles would command the entire Antarctic continent.

In the very near future the biting air above both poles will be stirred by whirring aeroplane propellers, and when that time comes the inner polar regions will quickly yield their last secrets.

Looking forward to this certain materialization, it is a source of satisfaction that the two last great physical adventures, the winning of the North Pole and the South Pole,--the feats which clinched and made complete man’s conquest of the globe,--were accomplished without the aid of such modern devices and inventions.

It seems entirely fitting that these tests of brute physical soundness and endurance which have engaged the attention of the world for several centuries, should have been won by brute physical soundness and endurance, by the oldest and most perfect of all machines--the animal machine--man and the Eskimo dog.

FOOTNOTES

[1] The sixth of the month is a date of rather special interest to the writer. To begin with, it is his birthday. Then it is the day on which the _Roosevelt_ steamed north on the successful quest for the pole; the day on which the pole was reached, and the day on which the wireless message of success was flashed over the world from the bleak Labrador station. Later it was the day on which the writer was made _grand officier_ of the Legion of Honor by the President of France, the day on which he began his efforts for air preparedness for this country, and the day (ninth anniversary of discovery of the pole) on which this country, by the President’s signature, formally entered the greatest of all wars.

[2] Greenland is the largest island in the world. Its total length from Cape Farewell, its southern extremity in 60° N. latitude, to Cape Morris K. Jesup, its northern extremity in 83½° N. latitude is in round numbers 1500 miles, almost exactly the same as the length of the United States on the 97th meridian, from the mouth of the Rio Grande to where our northern boundary crosses the Red River of the North. The greatest width of Greenland is about the name as the distance from New York to St. Louis.

In regard to its area, the figures of various authorities vary widely. It may be sufficient to say that as regards area it can be grouped in size with the United States east of the Mississippi; Alaska; Mexico; Columbia; Persia; Portuguese West Africa; Turkey in Asia. Its interior is covered with a great sheet of ice rising to elevations of probably 10,000 feet in places and several thousand feet in thickness. The available ice-free land is a strip of varying width along the coast, intersected by numerous deep fiords.

Geographically, Greenland belongs to North America and the Western Hemisphere, over which we have formally claimed a sphere of influence by our Monroe Doctrine. Its possession by us will be in line with the Monroe Doctrine, and will eliminate one more possible source of future complications for us from European possession of territory in the Western Hemisphere. Will turning Greenland over to Denmark now mean our repurchase of it later, or will obtaining it now mean closing the incident and placing Greenland where it must ultimately belong?

Greenland is comparatively near to us. For years American ships have conveyed cryolite from the Ivigtut Mines to Philadelphia. There is coal and cryolite, probably graphite and mica, possibly gold, in its rocks. Danish capital has apparently not been sufficient to exploit the country’s resources. With our unlimited means, it may, like Alaska, prove a sound and most valuable business investment.

The abundance of native coal and the numerous glacial streams which come tumbling into the southern fiords from the great interior ice sheet represent enormous potential energy, which might be translated into nitrate and electrical energy, to make Greenland a power-house for the United States.

Greenland represents ice, coal, and power in inexhaustible quantities. And stranger things have happened than that Greenland, in our hands, might furnish an important North Atlantic naval and aeronautical base.

A North Pacific naval base for the United States in the Aleutian Archipelago is a recognized possibility. Why not a similar base in the North Atlantic? Cape Farewell in Greenland is but little north of Sitka. It is in the same latitude as St. Petersburg; Christiania, Great Britain’s naval base in the Orkneys, and the northern entrance to the North Sea, which Great Britain has incessantly patrolled with her war-ships summer and winter for two years.

There are fiords in southern Greenland which would hold our entire navy, with narrow, deep water, impregnable entrances.

Thirty-hours steaming due south from Cape Farewell by thirty-five-knot war-craft would put them in the transatlantic routes midway between New York and the English Channel.

With the rapid shrinking of distance in this age of speed and invention, Greenland may be of crucial importance to us in the future.

--From Peary letter, September, 1917, suggesting Denmark give the
United States Greenland with the Danish West Indies.

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.

Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs and outside quotations. In versions of this eBook that support hyperlinks, the page references in the List of Illustrations lead to the corresponding illustrations.

Page 7: Caption reading “October, 1904” corrects a misprint of “October, 1914”.