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CHAPTER V

The Planning of the Expedition

The sailing of our expedition for Wrangell Island in September,
1921, was due to the strong conviction that the world is at the dawn of a
revolution in transportation ideas similar to that initiated heralded by Copernicus and
Columbus. When the nations of Europe discovered four hundred years ago that the
earth was round, they found it necessary to modify not only their intellectual
concepts but also their diplomacy, their foreign policy and their commercial
endeavors. It appeared to us that a similar, if less conspicuous, change would
come when the nations realized that the earth is round from north to south from
the point of view of the transportation engineer as well as from that of the
astronomer and geodecist. Nations that had been far from each other as measured
from east to west were about to become neighbours across the northern sea.

On a Mercator's map the Arctic looks like an area of vast extent,
and seems to be located between continents on the south and nothingness on the north. But on a
map which has the equator for circumference and the North Pole for center, the
Arctic looks like a small hub from which the land masses radiate like the spokes
of a great wheel. It may be said taht on a spherical world any point is central
if we choose to consider it so. Mathematically that is right, but from the human point of view it That is specious reasoning, because for we inhabit
the land and not the sea. It is possible to determine the center of distribution
of the land masses. While this does not coincide with the Arctic, it does fall
so near the Arctic that the validity of our figure remains undisturbed. The
polar sea does hold a position analogous to that of the hub as related to the
rest of a wheel.

There must have been a time, before navigation began, when from
the practical point of view the Mediterranean was a barrier between, the peoples of Afica and
Europe. But navigation developed through centuries. We cannot say in which