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during the war, to the north of Europe. Between what I knew of the nature and
distribution of arctic ice and what Commander Bower knew about the general
capabilities of the submarine and its particular adaptability to ice-covered
areas, we were able to arrive jointly at the conclusion that a submarine voyage
north from England to the Bering Straits and the Pacific could and would be made
whenever the need arose.

Now that I found myself in England, I used the opportunity to
visit Commander Bower aboard his ship, the Cyclops, and he used to call on me
when passing through London. We talked about every detail of a transarctic journey
by submarine, how much it would cost to build one specially adapted to the task,
how difficult it would be to remodel the best of the modern submarines, how
feasible it might be to propose to the Government that, instead of scrapping some
sound submarine that was obsolete for war purposes, it they should be remodeled it, replace the
torpedo tubes replaced with oil fuel tanks, and a call made for volunteers from the
submarine service for the first sea voyage north and south between England and
Japan. Since I have already dealt with the subject in another book*, I shall not
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*Pp. 189-199, The Northward Course of Empire, Harrap, London, 1923.
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repeat here the facts and theories upon which these speculations were based.

I find that submarine men who know nothing about ice usually dis-
miss the suggestion of under-ice navigation as ridiculous. I have found also that
most polar explorers ridicule the suggestion because they have not supplemented
their knowledge of ice by a study of the submarine. But among the few who have
a knowledge in both fields I think there would be fairly unanimous approval of a
dialogue which took place at one of our meetings. There were one or two other
submarine officers present besides Bower when I asked him which he considered
more dangerous and probably more uncomfortable, such voyages as the Norsemen used
to make nearly every year from Norway to Greenland during the eleventh, twelfth
and thirteenth centuries and their occasional voyages to America, or a voyage in