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made in those articles towards the support of the Crusades. The early
fur traders who sailed from England and France to Hudson Bay may have
related a tall story now and then, but in the main they described the
profits in furs and the feasibility of making money. It was probably
the canny directors of the companies who sat in offices in London and
Paris who first brought about devised the policy by which the later fur traders
represented the country they were exploiting as a frozen wilderness--
the directors knew that if farmers were to throng in, the fur animals
would disappear. The early seventeeth century voyage of Hudson to Spitsbergen began a gigantic
whale-fishing industry which prospered for more than 200 years, and
again profits and the rosy aspect were put forwardon every tounge

The northwest passage was discovered by Sir John Franklin’s exped-
ition 75 years ago and the northeast passage by the expedition of Baron
Nordenskiold about 30 years later. Various commercial companies are
gradually developing these waters although the northeast and northwest
passages in their entirety are seldom used.

A change came upon polar exploration after the Franklin tragedy.
The explorers were thereafter no longer pioneers of commerce and but began to compete
with each other not as men do in business but rather as athletes in a
race or sportsmen eager to be first to scale a mountain. This tended
to strengthen the general conception that the Arctic was ferocious and
barren.

With a passion for symmetry and simplicity, all but a few scholars
now assumed that the frozen region was approximately circular with a
"North Pole” for center that corresponded to the top of a mountain.
On this idea was based the struggle to reach the North Pole, it being
assumed that he who got there first would correspond (on a far greater
scale) to the man who first climbed Mont Blanc. We have evidence of
this, not only in the firm general idea which still holds, but also in