stefansson-wrangel-09-27-064

- 35 -

98

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 unconvinced
of their fundamental soundness.

It may seem that Canadians ought to know more about Canada than
any other people. But that is a view not based upon observation. It is a common-
place with travelers 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 Natal 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 greedily every opportunity to converse or read about the interior of
Africa. The same is true in Canada where the railway trains fly like shuttles
back and forth across the transcontinental railways that follow the southern fringe
of the country. You pass 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.
and you imagine They clim into the trains continental trains expecting to see Canada and they climb out again a few days later,
imagining that you they know Canada. It is not uncommon to find even these "traveled" Canadians who
referring to such places as Edmonton or Cochrane as being in northern Canada. Our
Scotchman who depends upon the map knows better. If you try it out it will be
your experience as it has been mine, that if you visit in corresponding clubs in of
London and Toronto you will find a far higher average of members with intelligent
opinions about the whole of Canada in the English London club than you will in the Canadian.

If we you remember, then, the principle that ignorance of the land
beyond the frontier is always densest on the frontier, you will know the
fundamental reason why it is in particular difficult to interest Canadians in an
arctic enterprise and why it is in general difficult to get the people of any a pioneer
country to take an interest in parts of it they have not seen. This explains, at least