stefansson-wrangel-09-38-004-006

- 6 -

a station on one of the great interhemispherean aerial
routes of the future. From London to Tokio, for
instance, the distance is 3,500 miles less across the
polar ocean than by going around from east to west. And
the distance between other important points in the
Eastern and Western hemispheres is proportionately
lessened by travelling north. He believed that the time
would come when many of the principal aerial routes
between Europe and Asia end America would lead north.

For that reason he had come to believe that all of
the islands in the Arctic Ocean were bound to become of
great value. Most of these islands belonged already to
Canada, three new ones having been discovered by
Stefansson himself on his latest Arctic expedition. But
they were nearly all grouped south and east of Beaufort
Sea. Wrangel Island, however, lay far westward, where
there was less land. Seeing that it had belonged to two
countries at different times in the past, each of which
had apparently not appreciated its value, Stefansson
thought that it should belong to the country that could.
He had been in the employ of the Canadian government for
some years, and had found the men at the head of affairs
at Ottawa generally alive to the value of the north.

Since his return in 1918 he had frequently sought
to impress the Canadian government with the value of the