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lead to the domestication of the ovibos,or musk ox, a project the importance of which is outlined in one of my books, "The Northward Course of Empire." Besides these I had to earn money not only for a living but also for paying into a bank monthly the salaries of the Wrangell Island party of five. These things kept me so busy that I had no time to go to Ottawa for a full discussion of the Wrangell Island situation with the new Liberal Government of the Honorable W. L. Mackenzie King which had replaced the Conservative regime of the Honorable Arthur Meighen with whom I had previously been dealing.

I was also hampered by a naive faith in the inevitable triumph of a good cause. It seemed to me the facts were all on our side with us and that people would eventually take the time to look into them, whereupon everyone they would flock to our side. This occured to me I thought this especially certain in a country like Canada where within living memory the Prairie Provinces have changed from the supposedly frozen wilderness of fifty years ago to the "bread basket of the world," and where the development of Alaska from "Seward’s Ice Box” to an empire of wealth was about as well known as it is in the United States. But I found that both lessons that lesson seems to have been lost upon the majority of Canadian editors and that they seldom analogize from the Manitoba or Alaska of yesterday to the Frozen North in which they believe today. There were are also those who seem to realize the coming value of the remote north but who simply do not have the imagination to see their own advantage in developments which probably will not yield profits for twenty or thirty years. These people are logical according to their lights in refusing to do anything for posterity on the ground that posterity has never done anything for them.

For years I had been writing long letters to the prime ministers of Canada, to the Secretaries ministers of the interior and to other influential people setting forth in what appeared to me conclusive terms the background of our northern work. It was another piece of childlike simplicity to feel that all I had to do now would be to refer to this correspondence which the new

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Government would find in the files of their predecessors, and to rely on their reading it and doing something about it. In a way I knew how busy cabinet ministers are, for I have associated with them enough for that; but I somehow expected an exception in this case.

Eventually when correspondence failed to get results, I

did go to Ottawa. There were Before my arrival several types of opposition had been expressed. The speechesof certain members of Parliament showed that tney felt that it would make Canada and the Empire seemridiculous to try make any effort to retain on the basis of its supposed value an island well known to be undesirably cold, and, in consequence, worthless. Other members seemed to have the feeling that if the Government didnot advance the money for a relief ship I would find some way of securing it privately. This may have beenthe chief of the reasons why the Government were so slow to act. Or it may have been only that they were too busy with other things. There probably never was anything to the explanation that has since been advanced - that I had members of the Government so thoroughly converted to the Arctic as a paradise that they found my appeal for a relief ship in contradiction with what they believed to be my views. There is, of course, always a danger that the convert may develop a faith more passionate and bigoted than that of the missionary.

In the mnegotiations with the government, one of the first inquiriesof the Minister of the Interior was what financial return I would expect if the government decided to stand on the its legal rights with regard to Wrangell Island. After making it clear that retaining this originally and still British land within the Empire was more important to me than any money that could be involved, I went on to say that I hoped the government would return without interest, or with bank interest, the money my friends and I had

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put into the enterprise. In this connection we would wantour books carefully audited to make it clear beyond question that we had neither profited nor tried to profit throughdoing what we thought foresighted and patriotic. But if the government preferred, either for economy in order to save money or to demonstrate the value of the island, we would take a long lease on it and get ourmoney back by subletting theisland to some one of themany arctic commercial companies. I made it very clear that we would, much prefer the refund of what we had money actually spent, for receiving a lease would expose us to newspaper allegations that we had been working for money all the time. The very same papers that were now protesting against the retention of Wrangell Island on the ground that because it was worthless would accuse us of fattening at the public expense if we were given got a lease of it.

When pleading with theCanadian government the spring of 1922 for help (since my money and borrowing power were exhausted) so that a supply ship could be sent to Wrangell, I had made the alternative proposals that they should sendin a ship themselves, give us money to send in a ship, or give us a lease to the island whichwe could sell or otherwise use to raise money for a ship.

While negotiating withthe Canadian government I had been negotiating also by cable withNome and had found available the schooner Teddy Bear, whose captain, Joe Bernard, was an old friend. I had known him andhis ship since 1910

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when the Teddy Bear was the first craft to enter Coronation Gulf from the west since Collinson was there in 18512 (?). The ship was good and the commander ideal. Acting through other old friends the Lomen Brothers of Nome, I made a bargain with Captain Bernard that he would try his best to reach Wrangell Island, receiving a certain sum if he failed but double that amount if he succeeded. The suggestion of doubling the amount had come from me after Bernard had submitted a tentative minimum figure. It seemed to me that the price he first suggested gave too low a wage to one so skillful, and in any case success was worth to us a price immeasurably beyond the reasonable wages of a faithful failure.

One thing I seemed to be unable to make impressive enough at Ottawa was how rapidly the summer was passing and that it was now or never. The friendly attitude of the Prime Minister and the Minister of the Interior, the Honourable Charles Stewart, and his deputy, the Honourable W. W. Cory, when coupled with my inability to get action, made me more and more desperate until I finally appealed for merely to a personal friend to a personal friend and secured it on the plea on the score of life and death. I said to him in substance that, while we could assume the safety and comfort of everyone on Wrangell Island on the basis of continued good health and absence of any accident, there were dangers of sickness and accident sufficient to warrant my saying that there was a possibility if not a probability that lives might be sacrificed if nothing were done that year. I had not appealed to this friend earlier partly because he was an American citizen and, although I thought him friendly sympathetic to my plans in every way, I did suppose he would have the feeling that there ought to be enough wealth and public spirit in the British Empire to finance so small and altruistic a public British enterprise. This same feeling had prevented me from appealing to any of my other American friends. I have been in British service either partly or wholly during the entire time of my polar service work, but the rest of my forty years I had lived in the United States. Most of my best friends are naturally where I have lived and I could not appeal to them

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on the score of national interest. Those in Great Britain or Canada to whom I could appeal on a patriotic basis were in the main strangers to me personally, completely out of touch with the developments I was advocating and unconvinced of their fundamental soundness.

It may seem that Canadians ought to know more about Canada than any other people. But that is a view not based upon observation. It is a commonplace with travelers that the ignorance about the interior of Africa is nowhere so dense as in the cities along the African coast. If you live in Durban Natal or Cape Town you are tempted to assume that you know Africa because you are an African and you take no interest in meeting travelers who have been in the interior, or in reading hooks about their journeys. But if you live in Scotland you are vividly conscious of your lack of knowledge and, if you have an inquiring mind at all, you will grasp every opportunity to converse or read about the interior of Africa. The same is true in Canada where the railway trains fly like shuttles back and forth across the transcontinental railways that follow the southern fringe of the country. You pass Most Canadians who travel in Canada merely attach themselves to these shuttles and dart with them through the industrial cities of the East, the grain fields of the prairies, and through the magnificent forests of British Columbia. and you imagine They clim into the [trains] continental trains expecting to see Canada and they climb out again a few days later [inuaqiurry] that you they know Canada. It is not uncommon to find even these "traveled" Canadians who referring to such places as Edmonton or Cochrane as being in northern Canada. Our Scotchman who depends upon the map knows better. If you try it out it will be your experience as it has been mine, that if you visit in corresponding clubs in of London and Toronto you will find a far higher average of members with intelligent opinions about the whole of Canada in the English London club than you will in the Canadian.

If we you remember, then, the principle that ignorance of the land beyond the frontier is always densest on the frontier, you will know the fundamental reason why it is in particular difficult to interest Canadians in an arctic enterprise and why it is in general difficult to get the, people of any a pioneer country to take an interest in parts of it they have not seen. This explains, at least