stefansson-wrangel-09-31-023v

12 THE ADVENTURE OF WRANGEL ISLAND

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
the summer of 1923 that carrying mails from England
to Japan by way of the Arctic was a probability of the
next ten years. Rear-Admiral William A. Moffett, chief
of the Bureau of Aeronautics of the United States Navy,
has announced that the American dirigible Shenandoah
will cross the Arctic probably from Alaska to Europe
the summer of 1924,³ and has said that “it must be real-
ized that polar routes by air connecting England, Japan,
Alaska, and Siberia are possibilities in the near future
and that they will be of incalculable value in cutting
down time and distance between those points.” Since
these men are in high authority in two of the most pro-
gressive countries of the world, what they have said is
more significant than my having said the same thing a
year earlier (August, 1922).⁴ I was merely the prophet
of the change; such men as Brancker and Moffett are
It takes either capitalists or men in
authority in the air ministries of wealthy nation to
actually bringing the change about.

No single event ever caused such a profound revolution
in human thought as did the voyage of Magellan around
the world, for it transformed the earth from a stationary
pancake, housed under a firmament, into one of a family
of little spherical planets tagging along behind a some-
what larger sun on a possibly eternal journey through a
perhaps infinite universe. When the new views of the
Arctic get so firm a hold that they lead to action, as
the Copernican doctrine of a round world led to the

³ A later announcement said that preparations could not be made in time
for 1924, but that the plan of a transarctic voyage would probably be made had not been given up by the
U. S. Navy in 1925although no date has been set.

⁴ See chapter on “Transpolar Commerce by Air” in The Northward Course
of Empire, and article on same subject in The National Geographic Magazine
for August, 1922.