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Appendix VII
Plover Land

By VILHJALMTJR STEFANSSON ¹

[Reprinted from The Geographical Review, Vol. XI, No. 2,
April, 1921.]

In the Arctic, real lands have surpassing skill in hiding them-
selves, while lands that never existed appear clear and indubitable
to the eyes of the keenest and most experienced explorers.

In 1826 Sir John Richardson, then on his first Arctic voyage,
sailed close by Clerk Island in Dolphin and Union Straits. On
his second voyage in 1848 he tells us that because of unfavorable
conditions he passed Clerk Island without seeing it. No one has
seen it since. In 1911 I traveled by sled over the site of it. Down
to that time Clerk Island appeared on the Canadian Government
maps, but it will not appear in future.

Several other Arctic lands, after being reported by men of
authority, have kept their places on the chart for one or several gen-
erations but are now gone forever. Others have been rendered

¹It appears in the body of this book and also in the appendix section
on the “Fragmentary Papers of Milton Galle” that when in September,
1922, Galle first heard Crawford and Knight discussing their plans to make
a journey away from Wrangel Island in January, 1923, he put on record
that he did not believe this journey would be towards Siberia. From
Galle’s notes themselves it is not possible to make out where he supposed
they were going, but thinking back to the many discussions of Crawford,
Knight and Galle when they were with me on the Chautauqua circuit in
1922, I feel certain that he imagined they were going in search of “Plover
Land/’ or “Borden Land,” as it was named by John Hadley and William
Laird McKinlay when they saw it or thought they saw it from Wrangel
Island the spring of 1914. Partly from the intrinsic interest of the subject
itself and partly on account of its bearing upon these ideas of Galle
and upon the general situation in Wrangel Island from September to
December, 1922, we are reprinting here a paper embodying the information
furnished by Hadley and McKinlay which was originally published in the
Geographical Review of the American Geographical Society, Volume XI,
No. 2, April, 1921, under the title of “Plover Land and Borden Land.”
In this appendix we are using the title “Plover Land” because since the
paper was written a large island discovered by us in 1915 many hundred
miles from Hadley’s “Borden Land” has received the official designation
of Borden Island.