stefansson-wrangel-09-25-003-009

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9

wholly disappears when you look at envision the map of the northern hemisphere
which we print with this article. Such maps are rare. This summer
I visited every well-known shop in London and was unable to buy a map
of the northern hemisphere, except on a small and practically diagram-
matic scale as a sort of footnote to a map of the eastern and western
hemispheres. You will fare almost as badly on a search in NewYork. The only American map
available much larger than this a grapefruit has recently been published by the U.S. weather
Bureau.

The map collection of the American Geographical Society
is considered the finest in the United States, and it has no good-
sized modern map of the Northern Hemisphere.
Such are the Mercators results and of of the simple-looking the doctrine
of that the Arctic is an insurmountable as a barrier. have muddled even our cartographers!

On the map of the Northern Hemisphere you will see that the north-
ern arctic frontier of the great land masses does not run in a straight hori-
zontal line as on a Mercator, but forms instead a horseshoe. This
horseshoe is much smaller than you would have thought, for the Arctic
Ocean
is tiny when compared with any of the other oceans. If it were
dreadful and uncrossable by air-craft it could be avoided. If you can
not cross the Desert of Gobei you can always go around it.

Maps of the northern and southern halves of the earth show that
the great land masses of the world are in the northern hemisphere. It
is important from the political and economic point of view (since we do
not inhabit the ocean) that the Arctic on such a map or on a globe looks
like a hub from which the continents radiate like the spokes of a wheel.
This gives it the immediate importance which is bound to increase as the
settlements creep northward along the great Siberian and Canadian rivers.
Major-General Sir Sefton Brancker, Director of Civil Aviation for Great
Britain, said in a speech at Sheffield last summer that carrying mails
from England to Japan by way of the Arctic was a probability of the next
ten years. Rear-Admiral William A. Moffet, the head of the air sect-
ion of the United States Navy, has said in an annouceding a project that the American dirigible
Shenandoah will should cross the Arctic probably from Alaska to Europe the
summer of 1924 and has said that "It must be realized that Polar routes
by air connecting England, Japan, Alaska and Siberia are possibilities

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