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brought from home, the story of the Karluk party on Wrangell Island
seems one of unrelieved and inevitable tragedy. Of twenty-five
persons involved, eight had been lost during the sixty-mile Journey
from the shipwreck to the island, and three on the island itself.
Nearly every venture in hunting and travel had turned out badly.

But Hadley had lived in the Arctic for a quarter of
a century, taking part sometimes in the various activities necessary
for self support and always associated more or less directly with
natives or white people who were making their living by hunting,
sealing or fishing. On the basis of what he knew about the north
coast of Canada and Alaska and about Victoria, Banks and other
islands where we had been living by hunting for years, Hadley insist-
ed that Wrangell Island was by nature one of the most favorable loca-
tions in the polar regions for self support by people who knew how
to avoid becoming victims of their environment, capitalizing the
very conditions that to the inexperienced are handicaps and hardships.
Drift logs for the building of comfortable cabins and for indefinite
fuel supply are found in Wrangell Island but in none of the other
islands to the north of North America; in that important respect
Wrangell, therefore, excels all other islands. Hadley had never seen
walrus so abundant and so easy to get (with a skin-boat); polar bears
seemed more numerous than in any locality where he had been. Walrus
and polar bears are the biggest game animals in the Arctic and the
easiest for the skilled hunter to secure. Seals, more elusive to
even the best hunters, were abundant around Wrangell Island and ob-
tainable, of course, on the same basis there as in any other arctic
country. In winter the island was separated from Siberia by only a hundred
miles of average sea ice such as we are accustomed to travel over at