stefansson-wrangel-09-26-001-011

7

before 1930.

During more than eleven years of actual residence in the Arctic,
the problems of the North were constantly before me, and I was therefore in a
position to be one of the first to realize that the dream of the Elizabethan
navigators was about to come true. The idea came to me vaguely about ten years
ago; it was put into print tentatively In the National Geographic Magazine for August, 1922 in 1921, and more fully that same year in a book called
"The Northward Course of Empire". in 1922. I had been urging it upon the Canadian
Government in writing since 1918.

As we have said above, the difficulty in getting the ordinary
educated person to take a fully rational view of the polar regions is due partly
to the recrudescence during the last seventy-five years of ancient beliefs about
the polar regions. This is the fault of our school and college education. The
Popes of Rome were in the habit of mentioning in bulls issued during the Middle
Ages that Greenland exported butter and cheese, but the children of our schools
to-day are in most places given the impression that Greenland is all covered with
ice and snow. I have questioned a number of school children in Canada and England
and have found them uniformly of that impression, although they are usually
unable to say exactly where they got the idea. In the United States, there is
a song in popular use in the kindergartens and primaries with the refrain, "For
in Greenland there is nothing green, you know"! Other parts of the Arctic resemble even
less than does Greenland the conventionally desolate Arctic.

Another reason for the misconceptions about the Arctic is that
few care to read anything about distant countries except stories of adventure.
If you spend five years in Spain, you may find when you come back that your
friend the magazine editor does not care to print anything you have to say about
climate or agriculture but that he will be glad to publish an account of how you
watched a bull-fight and what you thought of it. Similarly, an explorer may go
through many placid years in the remotest Arctic to find that the editor does not
care to print anything except the story of a narrow escape from being eating by
a polar bear. It is as if you were to tell Englishmen the story of a year in