stefansson-wrangel-09-31-022r

THE BACKGROUND OF THE STORY 9

of the Far North 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 today 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 convention-
ally desolate North.

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 eaten by a polar bear. It is as if you were
to tell Englishmen the story of a year in Chicago wholly
in terms of the stockyards, motor accidents, and deaths
from sunstroke.

Probably the most insidious and effective opponent of