stefansson-wrangel-09-25-004-024

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saying that his next ambition was to go back to Wranggell Island to establish
himself there permanently. We talked much of his doing this with my co-operation.
I was as much in love with the Arctic after eleven years as he was after
twenty. In our mind’s eye we could see the northward march of civilization
down the great rivers of Canada and Siberia constantly coming nearer that
island-dotted Mediterranean bewteen the Old world and the New which we call
the Arctic Ocean. We foresaw that air navigation by dirigibles and planes
would have a special field in this new development and that the arctic islands
would, therefore, acquire a positional value in addition to whatever intrin-
six value they might have by reason of their mineral riches or their vegeta-
tion and animal life. I took it for certain that the first permanent trans-
arctic air route for fast mail and for passengers in a hurry would be
north from London and then south to Tokyo. This route would mean a saving
of several thousand miles in distance and, in our opinion, would be prefer-
able in some ways to any other flying route between these two great cities.
It would, however, lie far from Wrangell Island and would at first sight
appear to have no bearing upon its value. But we knew that for a hundred
years the treeless prairies of North America had been considered worthless
because they had no trees, and then the point of view had suddenly changed
so that the farmers actually began to prefer the prairie to the forest. When
they that change in mental attitude appeared in one part of the American continent
it spread rapidly to every other part. Similarly, the success of a London
to Tokyo flight would almost instantaneously change the world’s point of
view with regard to the polar regions, making those lands coveted that had
previously been despised, and that no matter how far they lay from the
routes immediately practicable commercially.