stefansson-wrangel-09-31-004v

viii PREFACE

between the lines of the mutilated and tragic diary of
Lorne Knight. That defect of over-restraint, clear now
too late when the book lies printed before me, I must at
least explain in this preface written at the last moment.

We five were dreamers who would not believe what
some told us, that the romance of territorial expansion by
discovery and colonization is now a century out of date.
So we planned exploits like those of Drake and John
Smith and Captain Cook. We saw no reason why such
adventures should cease, for the world still has an un-
colonized fringe in the north, and beyond it lies the last
remnant of the geographically unknown. Every book on
international law we could find said that an island pre-
viously uninhabited and beyond the defined limit of
any country’s territorial waters, belonged to the nation
that first effectively occupied it, and doubly so if the occu-
pying nation happened to be the one which discovered
it. We knew of an island a hundred miles from any occu-
pied country, British by discovery, American by first ex-
ploration, and now unoccupied by any nation. We decided
to colonize that island to prevent some third nation from
making it legally theirs by occupying it ahead of us.

We found no authority who doubted the British right
to plant a colony, but it seemed that the Canadian Gov-
ernment, in whose service three of us had already dis-
covered and explored arctic lands, did not consider Wran-
gel Island worth the bother of colonizing. We may have
understood the Government wrongly, for I did not have
a chance the summer of 1921 to talk with the Prime Min-
ister or Cabinet and letters are unsatisfactory. But we
felt sure that on the same legal basis they would have
colonized an otherwise correspondingly placed tropical
island. In other words, we thought they agreed with us