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an event to be carefully guarded against here although not serious in the arctic
north and northwest of Europe. If you get your ship fast in the ice of the
European arctic you drift south into open water and freedom. If you get fast in
the ice to the north of Alaska or eastern Siberia yoix drift with it to the north-
west, being inevitably frozen in and carried across the polar ocean unless the ship
is broken and sunk. This has been proved by scores of whaling ships and by
De Long's Jeannette, Nansen's Fram, my own Karluk, and more recently by Amundsen's
Maud.

Had the Teddy Bear been frozen in, it would have meant not only
the loss of the ship but also that she would have been powerless to help the men
on Wrangell Island. No one could be better aware of this than Captain Bernard,
and so he was wise in running no risk of being caught. He retreated again and
again barely in time and followed along westward until he came to where further
progress was impossible because the ice touched the Siberian coast. He climbed
high headlands in one or more places and saw the ice lying heavily packed twenty
or thirty miles out to sea. There arose later rumors that Bernard could have
reached the island had he tried harder. These must have originated among people
who did not understand the conditions, and they were eventually completely removed
by the testimony of the Wrangell Island party itself, who watched from the hills
of the island the same ice that Captain Bernard saw from the hills of the continent.

On September 23, 1922, Captain Bernard returned to Nome and the
Lomen Brothers reported to me by wireless his failure to reach the island. This
did not cause me any great worry, for I knew that, barring accident or sickness,
the men were safe. The chances of accident were not many for careful men; the
chances of good health are nowhere in the world better than in the Arctic. It
is, in fact, one of the chief reasons why arctic explorers always go north again.
You cannot be unhappy when you are exuberantly healthy. Describe a blizzard

The text of Captian Bernard's report is printed in the Appendix to this book.