stefansson-wrangel-09-24-002-003

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get north.

Lorne Knight, a veteran of even longer polar service,
was tired of the cities and forests of Oregon, and kept beg-
ging to go north.

It was partly this stimulus, and partly my knowledge of
the developments and prospects of aerial transport, that
forced Wrangell Island upon my attention continually. I
knew many of the terrors of the Arctic to be mythical.
Through twelve years of polar work I realised that the most
difficult northern problems are simple in comparison with
the average man’s idea of them, for the better you are
"educated” in the orthodox way the more "things that are not"
do you know about the far north. Most people, for instance,
seem to regard the Polar Ocean as a barrier. In my view it
is a connecting link between Europe and northeast Asia. The
sea which separates Spain and Africa after all connects
them no less.

When you consider flying the ocean, you consider next
landing-places. In a direct line from England across the
Pole lay Wrangell Island, a British discovery originally, a
British territory more recently through our own occupation
and through Maurer's hoisting of the flag in 1914. At
present it was valued only by a few men far-sighted enough
to have earned the name of visionaries, but in a decade it
was certain to be valued by the whole world. It is not