stefansson-wrangel-09-31-086v

134 THE ADVENTURE OF WRANGEL ISLAND

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
work, but the rest of my life I have lived in the
United States. Most of my best friends are naturally
where I have lived but I could not go appeal to them 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 un-
convinced of their fundamental soundness.

It may seem that Canadians ought to know more about
Canada than any other people, about even the remotest parts of Canada. But that is a view not
based upon observation. It is a commonplace with trav-
elers 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 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 books 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 trains fly like shut-
tles back and forth across the transcontinental rail-
ways that follow the southern fringe of the country.
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. They climb into the transcontinental trains
expecting to see Canada and they climb out again a few