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HISTORY OF WRANGEL ISLAND DOCUMENTS 171

ters the previous year they had eaten more underdone seal meat and
less preserved fruits from England. They could have
saved themselves by abandoning at once their comrade
Evans who, they knew, had only a short while to live in
any case; Oates should have found the courage to sac-
rifice himself a few days sooner than he did, letting Scott,
Bowers and Wilson through. So say the critics now, and
they have many other reasons why the Antarctic party
died. But even the critics find that more of nobility
than of fault emerges from their deepest studies and they
conclude at the end what we felt in the beginning, that
this is one of the supreme hero tales of the ages.

The thrill and profit of the Scott tragedy could never
have reached the whole world if the criticisms and fault-
findings had come first and the nobler side had appeared
only tardily as the result of erudite study. The men
who died in the Antarctic and the world were fortunate
that those who told us the story first gave it to us in its
simple and severe outline of unselfish courage and nobil-
ity in the face of death. But the men who died in the
Arctic and the world were unfortunate in that when
their story was written for the press their heroic sacrifice
for an ideal was obscured behind criticisms of alleged
faulty planning and conduct, criticisms which, even if
they had been true, should have been withheld for a time
in the case of Crawford as they were in the case of Scott.

These are now academic considerations and we must
face the fact that although Mr. Noice in his newspaper
narratives and criticisms that have been read by millions
of people scattered through every civilized land, refers
frequently to various admirable qualities, he neverthe-
less tells the Wrangel tragedy so as to make it seem that
most troubles came from inexperience (the inexperience