CHAPTER IV.

TRAVELERS’ TALES

What we now call a fish story the Elizabethans spoke of as a traveler’s tale. I shall discuss whether there are many fish stories among the travelers’ tales of today, whether they have an important effect on the sciences which gather their data in part from the reports of explorers, and whether we ought to do anything about it. These questions are more important in our time than in Elizabeth’s, for the explorers were mere travelers then. Now they all claim to be scientists or at least to be the leaders of scientific expeditions.

I address you both as an expert and as Exhibit A. For my own expeditions have been insistently, if not so very effectively, publicized as scientific; and I am one of the travelers who, by my own contention and the claims of my friends and backers, should be taken as a scientific explorer.

I begin, then, by discussing the extent to which my own books and other protestations are to be taken seriously.

In a way this exposition is the direct result of a talk which I gave in 1907-8 before the Century Association of New York City. It is my necessary introduction to repeat in condensed form what I said there and to tell you what the Centurions thought about it.

So far as I remember, I began by explaining to the Century Association that I was an exceptionally reliable witness, and particularly so with regard to the Arctic. My father and mother had both been born on the north coast of Iceland on the very edge of the polar circle, and that furnished me with a useful background. I myself had been born in Manitoba where winter temperatures run down to 55° F. below zero, which is about as low as they get on the north coast of Canada--as a matter of fact lower than any official record, for the lowest of these to date is -52°. I had read the northern literature from infancy and had always been so soaked in it that my first published article labeled scientific (apart from a brief linguistic study) was “The Icelandic Colony in Greenland,” _American Anthropologist_, April-June, 1906. In North Dakota I had seen blizzards as bad as any I had experienced on my first Arctic expedition, which I was then describing to the Century, and the prairies of my childhood Dakota, when snow-covered in winter or green in summer, were much like the Eskimo prairies of northern Canada, so that I had been quite at home in the Arctic from the first, gathering information more reliable than if I had been a nervous visitor who was frightened by conditions different from those of his childhood--as might easily be the case with, say, a Frenchman.

Such preliminaries being disposed of, I launched into what I still believe was to the Century Association a convincing first-hand picture of how things are with the Eskimos of the Mackenzie River.

I told how I was taken into an Eskimo home where 22 people and myself lived in one room through the middle of the winter and where my life with the people was intimate throughout the year. I enjoyed being there and they apparently enjoyed having me with them. I entered both into their routine and into the spirit of their beliefs, so that they began to discuss things with me or in my presence quite as freely as if no stranger had been near. In fact, no stranger was near--I had become as one of them.

On the basis of this I regaled the Century with many amusing and allegedly important contributions to the ethnology of the Mackenzie Eskimos. I shall here review only one topic.

One of the Eskimos, Memoranna, wore an eagle feather on the left shoulder of his reindeer-skin coat. I asked him once why he did this and he said there were two reasons:

In Memoranna’s childhood the people of his native village had been more numerous than now; and, besides, there were many visitors. Athletic games were common and the people took off their coats perhaps when wrestling or running foot races, throwing them in a pile. Every coat was of deerskin and most of them had the same trimmings, but they were not all of the same size or workmanship and some were newer than others. It was, then, important that when the games were over each man should be able to find his own coat. “Therefore we each had a mark on our coats. One man would have a weasel tail in the middle of his back, another perhaps a strip of wolf skin on his sleeve. I had an eagle feather on my left shoulder.”

The second reason for these marks was that when everyone was dressed alike and when there were hundreds together you could not recognize a man unless you saw his face. But with the eagle feather on the shoulder of the coat anybody could tell that the wearer was Memoranna.

The chief reason why I repeat all this is that at the end of my talk Dr. Franklin H. Giddings, Professor of the History of Civilization at Columbia University, a foremost figure in American sociology, came to me. He had been making a study of property marks, he had been much interested in this particular contribution of mine, and he was satisfied of its accuracy not only because of my careful methods of observation and my intimate life with the people but also because it fitted in with his studies of the origin and development of property marks among primitive people.

This address of mine before the Century was based on a year with the Eskimos of the Mackenzie River. I returned north in six months and spent four years more, making five all together. In the last of those years I finally acquired such a control over the language that I could speak with the people almost as freely as they spoke with each other. Then at last I learned that the eagle feather was a talisman, with no intentional property mark connection.

Some weeks after I learned this I met Memoranna and asked him why he had deceived me four years ago. He replied in substance that he had been almost brought up as a cabin boy on whaling ships and had besides associated with missionaries, so that he knew the white man’s point of view. If an Eskimo told his real beliefs, a sailor would call him a damn fool and a missionary would explain how wrong and wicked they were. Through long experience he had learned the kind of explanation a white man likes; giving that kind saved a lot of trouble. He had not meant specially to deceive me; he was merely treating me as just one more white man.

There are within the social sciences few more broad-minded or with a keener sense of humor than Professor Giddings. Still, it is my impression that he felt just a little bit more enlightened and pleased when he heard the original incorrect property mark explanation of the eagle feather, which agreed with his own theories, than he did when later I told him the final and as I still believe correct explanation--which did not fit into his sociology quite so neatly.

If this property mark tale were an isolated case it would not be worth repeating, but it is typical of my work. The impressions and conclusions of my first year in the Arctic were, I now think, mostly wrong. Luckily for me I did not publish a book at the end of the first expedition but placed the diaries of it in storage with the American Museum of Natural History of New York City. They remained there during my second expedition of four years and while I wrote my first published book, called _My Life With the Eskimo_, 1913. They remained there also during my third expedition of five years and while I wrote my second book, called _The Friendly Arctic_, 1921.

It was only in 1922 that I got out the diaries of the first expedition and studied them as the basis of my third book, _Hunters of the Great North_. In the introduction to that volume, I said: “As I look over my diaries I shudder to think how vastly I might have augmented the already great misknowledge of the Arctic had I published everything I imagined I had seen and everything I thought I knew.”

You may think this autobiographical preface strange. But I shall presently be dealing with names far more eminent and respected than my own, even with those holding membership in this oldest of the great scientific societies of America, and I need myself as the thin entering wedge for a general discussion.

The introductory remarks closed, I turn to what I intend as a criticism of the social sciences in so far as they depend for their data on the findings of explorers.

If I were giving a course of lectures, and had at my disposal ten evenings instead of one, I should like to consider under three heads the misinformation contained in the books and reports of travelers. The first would be intentional misrepresentation, the deliberate drawing of the long bow; the second would be that unintentional misrepresentation which results from careless observation or from misplaced confidence in witnesses; the third would be that subdivision where the traveler states as a fact which he has observed a thing which he cannot possibly have observed but in which he believes because it conforms to, or is part of, a belief which he holds and has never questioned.

Since I have only one evening, too short for me although it may be too long for you, I shall not merely confine myself to the third heading but shall discuss only a few typical cases under it. What I said awhile ago, then, about property marks does not belong to our subject and has its use merely as part of the introductory approach.

We turn, then, first to a large body of false testimony which is nevertheless a small subdivision of the last third of our subject, and consider some of the things that have been testified to about animal and plant life in that small but typical sample of our world, the Far North.

The foundation of European belief about the distribution of life over the earth was laid by the Pythagorean Greeks, if not by someone else from whom the Pythagoreans borrowed the idea. Essentially it was that terrestrial life depends on heat from the sun. This heat, when it is of a degree called warmth, permits life in a belt called the temperate zone. To the south of the temperate zone there was, according to orthodox Greek belief, a burning region where the rocks were red-hot and the oceans boiling. North of the temperate zone was a region frozen solid. One of the ancient authorities has it that in the North life is as impossible because of the freezing as it is in the South because of the burning.

It is not a part of my northern specialty to review what is so well-known to historians, that from the Greek learned period before Christ to the age of Prince Henry the Navigator, and therefore through almost 2000 years, it was nearly or quite the unanimous opinion of the learned world that no human beings would ever cross the lifeless, burning and boiling tropics. It is more within my field as an Arctic explorer to point out that the accepted Greek belief was at one time that because of the cold no living thing could exist north of Scotland. Then the Irish discovered Iceland, 600 miles north of Scotland, and the Icelanders, or someone else, discovered Spitsbergen, another 600 miles still farther north.

The average January temperature of Reykjavik is about the same as that of January for Milan in Italy or Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, and the tourist companies which contract with their passengers to show them pack ice are forced, some years, to carry them 200 miles beyond Spitsbergen to keep their promise. But at every advance of knowledge, which in this case has been the northward advance of travel, it has been discovered with profound surprise that life was there ahead of the traveler. The interpretative scientists have been driven to every expedient of logic to explain the contradiction between what they believed and what they saw. This effort, in turn, has been the foundation of much false testimony by those of them who were explorers.

Take the case of perhaps the most solidly famous and respected of the British polar explorers, Sir Edward Parry. He landed on Melville Island the summer of 1819 and found musk oxen grazing there. This was startling, but had to be accepted. Presently he went into winter quarters, practically hibernating with his men for several months. When they emerged in the spring they saw musk oxen. Hereupon Lieutenant Sabine, himself later a distinguished explorer in his own right but acting for the time as naturalist in the publication of the scientific results of Parry’s voyage, wrote as follows:

“They (the musk oxen) arrived in Melville Island in the middle of May, crossing the ice from the southward, and quitted it on their return towards the end of September.”[4]

This was accepted by the entire learned world because it fitted in with two of their preconceptions--that Parry and Sabine were reliable witnesses, and that the Far North was by nature hostile to animal life. It had been believed earlier that no animals could exist, at any season, as far north as Melville Island. Now, when they had been found to be there in summer, the scientists executed a strategic retreat by saying: “The beasts make a summer foray deep into the Arctic, but they flee from the winters to the hospitable shelter of the temperate zone.” The theory of the complete absence of grazing animals from this part of the Arctic was thus replaced by an elaborate theory of seasonal migration.

For a quarter century after Parry’s first voyage there seems to have been practically if not complete unanimity among the explorers and the stay-at-home scientists alike that the musk oxen, in spite of short legs, made each year a 1200-mile round trip between the winter shelter of the forest on the North American continent and the summer stamping grounds in Melville Island.

Lieutenant Sherard Osborn, who both shared in and wrote books about the Franklin Search, appears to have been the most thoughtful of those officers. Yet in 1856 he published _The Discovery of the North-West Passage_ ... and assumed in it that the grazing animals of the islands north of Canada migrate south to the mainland in the Autumn to return each Spring. But in 1857 he published a second edition with a new Chapter, XVII, on “The Migration of Animals Theory.” For the views there expressed he says he has been “nearly excommunicated as a heretic.” In this chapter he points out the manifest theoretical absurdity of the postulated migrations and cites a little testimony he had been able to get which tended to show that there was no migration.

Thirty years later Greely was sure that the musk oxen of the Arctic islands do not migrate south[5] and most observers are now agreed that they do not move from one Arctic island to another at any time in any direction. Yet there are still in use in the English-speaking countries, among others, textbooks of recent copyright which retain the Parry statement and the Parry explanation--that the musk oxen migrate and that they do it because they need the shelter of the forest against the severe climate of the northern winters.

When the scientists were finally converted to believing that the musk oxen do live in the remote Arctic permanently, they and the travelers cast about for some more explanations--the philosophical scientists are continually busy trying to reconcile new knowledge with ancient theory. They now hit upon something clever. People had believed, they explained, that grazing animals could not exist without grass, and that was why they had thought there would be no such animals in the Arctic. They were right in part; there was no grass. What they could not have foreseen was that in the Arctic the place of the flowering plants is taken by mosses and lichens. The musk oxen live on mosses and lichens!

The musk ox still lives on mosses and lichens in the usual reference works; he is mounted with his mouth stuffed with them in the usual museums. This is in part because many explorers have supported the philosophizing scientists by testifying that lichens are verily the food of the musk ox.

But many explorers have denied this flatly. Greely said[6] “... in no case did I ever note the musk-ox feeding on the latter vegetation (lichens), although in many places near Conger the ground was covered with scanty, minute lichens for acres in extent.” Roderick MacFarlane says[7] that musk oxen live mainly if not wholly on flowering plants, and I have said the same.[8]

But the traditional belief is still being advanced by explorers as testimony and as observed fact. For instance, a statement implying that musk oxen do live on mosses and lichens was issued within the year by the Northwest Territories and Yukon Branch of the Department of the Interior of Canada, for they published a photograph of musk oxen with an accompanying letterpress which said that they were here shown grazing on mosses and lichens. I wrote at once to a friend, O. S. Finnie, who is official head of this department although not personally responsible for the picture and description. I asked him how did they know that these animals were feeding on lichens and whether their botanists could not (by examining the original photograph and perhaps enlarging it) determine what plants were really visible along with the animals. Finnie then submitted the photograph to A. E. Porsild, the distinguished Danish-Canadian botanist and specialist in Arctic flora, whose verdict came in a letter of February 27, 1930:

“There is a firm and rather hard turf composed chiefly of grasses and sedges with a slight admixture of flowering plants. Most predominant is the Alpine Foxtail grass (_alopecurus alpinus_) which probably has a higher food value than any other Arctic grass. With the foxtail grow a few sedges (_Carex_). In the foreground to the right are flowers of the Alpine Chickweed (_Cerastium alpinum_). A few twigs of a decumbent willow (_Salix_) show in the center of the photo.”

Not only these recent Canadian Government observers but also many scores of normally honest travelers have, then, testified, because of a solidly founded belief, that musk oxen live exclusively or mainly on a food which in fact they rarely eat--and then probably not by choice.

One of the most interesting of the systematic fabrications about the polar regions is within the observational domain of the exact sciences, although its effects are noticed chiefly in the social sciences. This is the statement that at a certain place a certain observer has noted that the midnight sun was visible for a given number of days in summer and that correspondingly the noonday sun was invisible at the same place for the same number of days in winter. All statements ever made to this effect are false. They could not be true anywhere in the world unless at least one important fact were changed and some laws of nature altered or abolished. The fact needing change is that the sun would have to be contracted down to a pinpoint; the laws needing change are those governing refraction.

A medieval writer, Jordanes, says:[9]

“In its northern part (of Norway) live the people Adogit, who, it is said, in the middle of the summer have continuous light for forty days and nights, and likewise at the time of the winter solstice do not see the light for the same number of days and nights.”

On this Nansen comments[10] to the effect that there can never have been any such place. For, says he, if the sun was visible at midnight 40 days in summer then it never disappeared at all in winter. Or if it was invisible 40 days in winter then it was visible 63 days in summer.

Nansen conjectures for the writers of this immediate group, the commentators on northern Norway, that they had heard for a given place that the sun was invisible for a certain number of days in winter and had then added a gloss (in conformity with Greek theory) to the effect that the midnight sun was visible for the same length of time in summer. Nansen seems to believe, then, that had the writers themselves been residents of northern Norway, or had they spent a year well beyond the Arctic Circle, they could not have written as they