did. In this judgment Nansen is not at his best as a student of human
nature. Nor does he show thorough familiarity with the writings of his contemporaries, for there are on record a number of them who without question have seen with the eyes of the body that the periods of the sun’s invisibility and visibility are unequal, but whose mental eyes have been holden so that they thought they had observed the periods to be equal.
We could go into a long catalogue of instances but shall actually use but a single example which, although typical in a sense, is striking for three reasons among others: that the witness is a Russian and therefore a member of a northern people who ought to understand northern conditions, that his general scientific work is looked upon by his colleagues as good, and that he has undoubtedly spent long periods within the Arctic Circle. The quotation we are about to give was published on pp. 581-2 of the _American Anthropologist_, for October-December, 1929. The author is Waldemar G. Bogoras, who says:
“The north polar circle forms the southern border of the area which has in midsummer the continuous day and in midwinter the continuous night. And so, for instance, on 68-70 degrees of north latitude, we have in the polar zone three or four weeks of continuous night in winter and as many weeks of continuous sunshine in summer.”
Unaware of the laws of refraction and forgetful of what they knew concerning the brightness of the twilight before sunrise and after sunset, Europeans throughout the Middle Ages and down to our time have assumed generally that darkness comes in the Arctic when the sun dips below the horizon. This belief is popularly translated into saying: “In the Arctic there are six months of daylight and six months of darkness.” That most people hold this belief is shown by the frequency with which the idea appears in school texts, in serious newspapers, and in the humorous journals. The average reader supposes the humor to rest upon some basis of fact when an Eskimo wife who sits up to await her husband’s homecoming starts scolding and he replies: “Why, my dear, it is only half past October.” The father of a baby with the colic walks the floor with it through the night and is then referred to as being on a six months’ tramp. A funny paper tells that Macpherson operates his business from San Francisco during the summer and from Point Barrow during the winter. You want to know why he goes north in winter and are told he conducts his business a good deal by telegraph and uses the Barrow office six months to get the benefit of night rates.
That great universities and leaders in science are still teaching the view on which the humorists base their quips, was brought in upon me through a talk I gave at the Explorers Club in New York. There I cited one traveler after another who had reported from various places within the Arctic Circle, some of them far north, that they had observed the sun to be fully visible in summer and wholly invisible in winter for equal periods. These men, I contended, had reported what neither they nor anyone else can ever have seen.
A few days later a troubled voice called me on the telephone for an appointment with regard to a situation at Columbia University. On arrival he proved to be a student in a course on meteorology. He had heard my talk and had reported to his instructor my saying that there was no spot on earth where the days of the sun’s complete visibility and invisibility could be equal in number. The instructor had not been impressed, and had pointed out that the author of a book they were using in the class, Robert DeCourcy Ward, Professor of Climatology in Harvard University, likely knew what he was talking about when in defining the zones he said:
“In the polar zones, the sun is below the horizon for twenty-four hours at least once in winter, and is above the horizon for the same length of time at least once in summer.”
I had Ward’s _Climate: Considered Especially in Relation to Man_ in its 1908 edition. Sure enough, on p. 20 were the lines cited by the Columbia instructor. I procured a “Second Edition, Revised” which says in a note dated August 1917:
“I have taken the opportunity offered by the publication of a second edition of this volume to make some revision of the chapters on ‘The Characteristics of the Polar Zones’....”
In that edition I found, unchanged, the statement we have quoted.
Professor Ward had, then, taken special thought of his chapter on the polar zones and had nevertheless repeated himself verbatim. No wonder the Columbia instructor was also firm.
Some textbooks, with a pretense to meticulous accuracy that makes them more effectively deceptive than others, will contain such statements as: “Among the Eskimos there is continuous darkness for three months.” There are, of course, no Eskimo settlements that have continuous darkness for even three days, or one day.
The textbook writers are in a vicious circle. Embryo explorers learn from school texts about the continuous Arctic winter darkness; they come back some years later from an Arctic expedition with testimony of having observed the said darkness, and this testimony becomes in turn the basis of new incorrect textbooks. A case is Elisha Kane, the most famous of American polar explorers before Peary. He reported having wintered at a place where there was no trace of daylight in a clear sky at the winter solstice. For comment on this it suffices to quote Captain George E. Tyson, who says: “Have passed Rensselaer Harbor, where Dr. Kane wintered during 1853-55. I am surprised that in the latitude of Rensselaer Harbor (N. Lat. 78⅔°) he should have found the darkness so intense as he describes it. It was not totally dark with us at high meridian at any time in clear weather....”[11]
In Heft 1/2, 1930, of the international scientific journal _Arktis_, Dr. Wilh. Meinardus of Göttingen, has published a diagram of the distribution of daylight and darkness within the polar regions throughout the year which shows not only that Kane (as Tyson implies) must have had a lot of daylight at noon on the shortest day of the year but also that no polar explorer except members of one Nansen and one Peary expedition have ever been so far north (or south) in midwinter that they could say accurately that there was no trace of daylight in a clear southern sky at the solstice. Yet there are dozens of explorers who have said so in books or reports which have been believed. Many of these were as respectable and respected as Nansen or Peary. They were not liars; rather they were observers and reporters who had been hypnotized by a belief.
It may be said in the defense of these travelers that when they said “no daylight” they meant “only a little daylight.” But would we similarly excuse a chemist after an autopsy if he said “no trace of arsenic” and really meant “only a little arsenic”? Explorers are putting themselves forward as scientists. If we are to take them seriously and at their own evaluation, we should require of them the standards not only of truthfulness but also of precision that we require of chemists or astronomers.
It follows naturally from what we have said above how ridiculous it is to suppose, as many school textbooks still assert or imply, that you have “six months of daylight and six months of darkness at the North Pole.” If you mean by daylight what Captain Tyson means in criticizing Dr. Kane, then we have at the North Pole more nearly four months of darkness (from October 6 to February 5) and eight months of daylight (from February 6 to October 5). If, on the other hand, you mean ability to read ordinary print throughout a clear day out-of-doors, then the division must be something like 5 months of darkness and 7 months of daylight.
A further corollary is equally plain. It is that we are being misled when it is constantly being stated or implied that there is less daylight per year in the polar regions than in the tropics or temperate zone. You can perhaps defend that old view if you say that by daylight you mean the quantity of sunlight delivered per unit of earth’s surface per year, but that is not really at all what we mean when we say daylight. For instance, you will hardly say that daylight is lacking when there is so much of it that you have to wear colored glasses to protect your eyes and must be careful to sleep in dark places so as not to go snow-blind while in bed. Judged by ability to read print out-of-doors, there is more daylight at an average Arctic station per year than there is in the temperate zone or in the tropics. (We are not here entering into niceties of how dark it is in Arctic mountain canyons or how light on snow-clad tropical peaks.)
There was a time when it was commonly believed in Europe (by those who did not identify travelers’ tales with fish stories) that the people of a certain remote land had ears so conveniently large that in sleeping they used one for a mattress and the other for a quilt. This we now consider a strictly medieval belief. But it is thoroughly modern to believe that Eskimo women carry babies in the hoods of their coats. We shall cite you eminent men, many of whom are living, who have asserted that they themselves have seen Eskimo women carry babies in their hoods, but first, departing from the main chronological order of our discussion, we give the testimony of the man indisputably the best authority on this subject.
Knud Rasmussen was born in Greenland of a Danish father and a mother who was part Eskimo. He was brought up by the Eskimo women somewhat as our Southern babies are by their Negro mammies. He was raised bilingual, his two mother tongues Danish and Eskimo. He associated with Danes in the house and played with Eskimo children out of doors. In due course he was taken to Copenhagen where he went through that university and other training which has made him both a well-equipped scholar and a cosmopolitan gentleman.
Quite apart from his childhood, which is in this connection the most significant period, Rasmussen has spent more time in the countries inhabited by Eskimos than any other man who is ordinarily classified as an explorer. He is the only one of us explorers who has visited every Arctic Eskimo territory and practically every Arctic Eskimo people from the east coast of Greenland to the west coast of Alaska and to the East Cape district of Siberia. He is primarily an anthropologist and geographer. For his sound work in these fields, and especially for his interpretation of the Eskimos to the learned world, he has been awarded gold medals by nearly every important geographical society in Europe and in the United States.
On the basis of the studies for which Rasmussen has really deserved these medals, he says about the belief that Eskimo women carry babies in their hoods: “The women in Greenland have never in the past carried their children in their hoods, nor do they do so now ... the child is decidedly not (carried) in the hood, as that would simply choke the mother.” (Letter to Vilhjalmur Stefansson, 3rd May, 1930.)
Now we turn to the history of the belief. The early travelers through Eskimo lands described from most if not all districts a custom whereby women’s coats were made especially roomy in the back so that a baby could be slipped up under the coat and supported by a belt. The child was then held by the coat and belt against the small of the woman’s back. Usually in removing the child the mother would undo the belt and let the baby slide down, but the neck of the coat was naturally made roomy to enable the child to breathe and sometimes the mother would reach in that way and pull it up and out. It is not impossible, but was at least geographically rare, that mothers inserted the baby into the coat from above. But whatever the method of ingress or egress, the baby, according to early northern books, was always carried inside the body of the coat, never inside the hood.
Since there are now living men who hold distinguished professorships in great universities and others of equal rank who say that they themselves have seen babies carried in hoods, I am planning one day to write almost a book on this subject, citing, so far as my researches allow, practically every traveler who has said anything about how Eskimo babies are carried. Here I give only a few typical cases, generally men who are not only entitled to respect but who have received it from the learned world.
Taking them chronologically, the first writers examined are the following:
Hans Egede: _A Description of Greenland_, first published in 1757 (pp. 132 and 148 in the London, 1818, edition).
David Crantz: _The History of Greenland_, London, 1767. Vol. I, pp. 138 and 162.
Hans Egede Saabye: _Greenland ... in the Years 1770 and 1778_, London, 1818, pp. 13 and 259.
Vol. XIX of the _Continuation of the General History of Voyages_, Paris, 1770, in which there is a “History of Greenland” by an anonymous author.
All of this early Greenland evidence agrees with Rasmussen--the manner in which the child is carried and the coat in which it is carried are described in almost the same terms as he uses.
But there existed a stream of contradictory testimony. Henry Ellis published his _Voyage to Hudson’s Bay_ at London in 1748. There you find on p. 136:
“The Difference between the Dress of the Men and the Women is, that the Women have a Train to their Jackets, that reaches down to their Heels. Their Hoods are also larger and wider at the Shoulders, for the sake of carrying their Children in them more conveniently on their Backs.”
On pp. 495 and 496 of Sir Edward Parry’s _Journal of a Second Voyage_, London, 1824, the hood-carrying is weightily reinforced.
Between Parry’s time and about 1855 I have found the following references:
BABIES CARRIED IN HOODS:
G. F. Lyon: _The Private Journal_, London, 1824, p. 315.
John Franklin: _Narrative of a Second Expedition in the Years 1825, 1826, 1827_, London, 1828, p. 118.
John Rae: _Narrative of an Expedition to the Shores of the Arctic Sea in 1846 and 1847_, London, 1850, p. 39.
John Richardson: _Arctic Searching Expedition_, London, 1851, Vol. I, pp. 252 and 369; also _The Polar Regions_, Edinburgh, 1861, p. 306.
Berthold Seemann: _Narrative of the Voyage of the H.M.S. Herald during the Years 1845-51_, London, 1853, Vol. II, p. 53.
BABIES NOT CARRIED IN HOODS (BUT CARRIED INSIDE COATS):
Captain W. A. Graah, _Narrative of an Expedition to the East Coast of Greenland_, London, 1837, p. 118.
Thomas Simpson: _Narrative of the Discoveries on the North Coast of America_, London, 1843.
Joseph Bellot: _Memoirs of Lieutenant Joseph René Bellot_, London, 1855, Vol. I, p. 186.
Around 1850 there was living in Greenland a man who knew the Greenland Eskimos at least as well as even Rasmussen does now. This was Samuel Kleinschmidt, born of missionary parents and brought up there until he had learned Eskimo as one of his mother tongues. He was then educated in Germany and went back to Greenland to spend the rest of his life, much of which he devoted to the preparation of an Eskimo-German grammar and an Eskimo-Danish dictionary.
In some Eskimo dialects _amaut_, _amaun_, or some variant of that word is the name of an enlargement for child accommodation in the back of a woman’s coat, or it may be the name for an entire coat which contains this enlargement. In many districts the nursing mother wears a coat of no special design but one simply large enough so the child is well accommodated. The name of the coat is still _amaun_. This is, then, a word referring to the purpose for which the coat is used, not to its design. _Amaun_ is never used as the name for a hood, of a woman’s coat or of any other garment.
In _Den Gronlandske Ordbog_, Copenhagen, 1871, p. 24, Kleinschmidt defines the verbal form _amarpok_, “carries a child on her back in a roomy coat designed for that purpose”; and the noun form _amaut_, “such a coat for carrying the baby.” Thus we see that while most of the travelers had by this time been converted to the Ellis-Parry hood carrying and were testifying that they had themselves observed it, Kleinschmidt, working as a missionary and scholar in his native Greenland, had either never heard about the belief that children are carried in hoods or else considered it so absurd as not to be worth noticing in his dictionary.
In 1927 Schultz-Lorentzen published a dictionary which in many respects is an improvement on Kleinschmidt’s. At that stage, as we shall show in a moment, the books were favoring by a substantial majority the Ellis-Parry view, at least if you merely count noses among the testifiers. Greenland books, among others, were favoring it and on p. 16 of the Schultz-Lorentzen dictionary we find: _amaut_, “fur jacket with hood for carrying child.”
But this is really an ambiguous definition. If you think already that babies are carried in hoods, you will read that meaning into Schultz-Lorentzen’s words; but if you think that babies are not thus carried, you will understand him to mean that the coat is for carrying the baby and that this coat also has a hood. It is therefore fair to him to cite some of his allied definitions: _amaq_, “child carried in fur jacket with hood”; _amarpa_, “takes him on his back; carries him on his back”; _amarpoq_, “carries a child in fur jacket with hood.”
From about 1855 down to about 1888 the evidence of explorers who had traveled among Eskimos is divided as follows:
BABIES CARRIED IN HOODS:
Charles Francis Hall, 1865. Isaac I. Hayes, 1867. Dr. Henry Rink, 1877.
AMBIGUOUS:
A. W. Greely, 1886.
BABIES CARRIED INSIDE COATS:
No testimony during this period.
Now we come to what makes our discussion really worth while. It is that one of those who report Eskimo babies carried in hoods is Franz Boas, Professor of Anthropology in Columbia University and President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Boas is, if not the most eminent living anthropologist, which he very well may be, at least the most distinguished of those who are also Arctic explorers and who have made some specialty of Eskimo studies (we classify Rasmussen here as a traveler or geographer rather than as an anthropologist). Moreover, the Smithsonian Institution, through which Boas published a book on the Eskimos on Baffin Island and neighboring districts, is in one sense at least our foremost scientific body. It is then significant that on p. 556 of the _6th Annual Report, Bureau of Ethnology_, 1884-85, in the Section, _The Central Eskimo_, by Boas, we have:
“The women’s jacket ... has a wide and large hood reaching down almost to the middle of the body.... If the child is carried in the hood, a leather girdle fastened with a buckle is tied around the waist and serves to prevent the child from slipping down....”
Boas spent a winter with the Eskimos at Baffin Island and undoubtedly had hundreds of opportunities of seeing how the women carried their babies. He was there for the purpose of studying just such things and there is no doubting his sincere desire to record and interpret rightly everything he saw.
But Boas had in a considerable part of his Eskimo work the collaboration of a man who testifies directly against him, a man, too, of keen observation, shrewd judgment, and much longer experience among Eskimos. This is Captain George Comer, who lives at East Haddam, Conn., co-author with Boas of _The Eskimo of Baffin Land and Hudson Bay_, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, Vol. XV, 1901. On the subject of the belief that Eskimo women carry babies in their hoods, Captain Comer says:
“... (The statement that) Eskimo women carry their babies in the hood of their garment is perfectly absurd.... Once when I spoke of the child being carried in the hood it made the women laugh.” (Letter to Vilhjalmur Stefansson, May 22, 1930.)
This discussion has been based on the easiest reading of Boas, which is that he means to say the Eskimo babies are carried in the hoods of the women’s coats. However, the part about the leather girdle serving “to prevent the child from slipping down” may be taken to show what Boas really meant was that the child is carried not in the hood, but inside the coat as described by Rasmussen. For an examination of Baffin Island women’s coats in museums, or an examination of the pictures from Boas and others which give the women’s coats of Baffin Island, will show that if a child (or anything else) is in the hood, then there is no chance of its sliding down along the woman’s back whether or not she wears a girdle.
Continuing our studies, we have made the following classification of the reports on the Eskimo manner of carrying babies by travelers later than Boas.
BABIES CARRIED IN HOODS:
Lucien M. Turner (Bureau of Ethnology), 1894. David Hanbury, 1904. E. W. Hawkes (Canadian Dept. of Mines), 1916. Donald MacMillan, 1918.
BABIES CARRIED INSIDE COATS:
Alfred H. Harrison, 1908. John W. Kelly (U. S. Bureau of Education), 1890. Fridtjof Nansen, 1893.
AMBIGUOUS:
Ejnar Mikkelsen--expedition 1906-08 (book undated).
John Murdoch (Bureau of Ethnology)--reports them carried in coat for those Eskimos he visited but says that among the eastern Eskimos (whom he had not visited) the baby is carried in the hood--1892.
Josephine Peary--describes method of carrying, showing that child is really carried in coat; but she calls it the hood--1893.
Henry Rink--same as above, description correct for carrying in coat but speaks of it as hood--1877.
You may think that in spite of the distinction of some of the advocates, the carrying of babies in hoods has by now been relegated generally to the domain of folklore and that this discussion has therefore grown academic. But until within the last twelve months several of the foremost up-to-the-minute authorities have in reality been influenced to believe that the baby hood-carrying is a fact.
For with Rasmussen and Boas in knowledge of the Eskimo we might well group Diamond Jenness, Chief Anthropologist of the Canadian Government at Ottawa, who, as anthropologist on the staff of the expedition which I commanded from 1913-18, spent three years in studying the Eskimos from western Alaska eastward along the north Canadian coast as far as Coronation Gulf. Since then, through his continued studies and official position, he has been in close touch with anthropologists and with the development of Eskimo research. On March 29, 1930, he wrote me in substance that, although he was convinced those early travelers who had testified that babies were carried in hoods in the districts which he had himself later investigated were mistaken, nevertheless he was willing to believe other travelers who said that in certain districts which he had not visited the babies were so carried. It was only when Rasmussen and Comer testified about those very districts in which Jenness still credited the hood-carrying that he realized the belief had a folklore nature outside his own territories as well as within them.
There is plenty of evidently correct testimony that Eskimo women do carry certain things in their hoods. Among things frequently mentioned are cigarettes (in recent times), needle cases, dolls or other playthings for their babies, and small stolen articles. Why is it not, then, reasonable that they might carry babies similarly?
The reply is that the admittedly hood-carried articles are light. A baby is so heavy even at birth that (as Rasmussen points out) it would choke, or at least seriously incommode, the mother if its weight reposed in the hood. (Babies are carried on women’s backs until they are three or four years old, making the weight increase considerably each year.)
The second paragraph in rebuttal will be that most testimony represents the babies in the hoods as usually naked, at least while very young. If you study the construction of the hoods on women’s coats in any of our museums, you will find not only that a weight in them would press against the mother’s throat with choking action, but also that they are so open at the top that a naked baby would necessarily suffer a great deal from cold, at least in winter, even if it were not frozen to death.
It may be suggested that when Boas, for instance, speaks of a hood he is actually referring to the enlargement farther down in the coat which makes it commodious, as described by many travelers and easily seen in museums.
The reply is that this might not be a bad defense argument for Greenland, where the women frequently have coats without hoods, but that Boas is dealing with Baffin Island and other neighboring districts where the women’s coats, at least usually, have hoods. Since Boas does not describe the coat he has in mind as having two hoods, we are inclined to feel that by hood he means what the rest of us do.
Then it may be advanced that there are motion pictures and other photographs in existence which show Eskimo babies actually in the hoods of women’s coats. This would serve as good argument, if not full proof, were it not that we know the circumstances under which those photographs were taken, which are that to oblige the photographers, or for pay, the women consented to place the babies in the hoods for the time of as much photographing as the explorer needed to show graphically on his return what he believes to be the custom of a primitive people.
In other words, we are driven to the conclusion that the many travelers who have said they have seen Eskimo babies carried, as a matter of widespread custom, in the hoods of women’s coats, have all testified to having seen things they did not see. The merited eminence of some of these unreliable witnesses comforts the rest of us who, led by faith, have said or implied in print that we have seen certain objectively non-existent things. For it is not only misery but error that loves company. People like Dr. Franz Boas and Sir Edward Parry are very good company indeed.
The importance of the babies-in-hoods case is in that it shows strikingly the danger to which the social sciences are exposed when they include the testimony of explorers among their data.
There are bound to be many in every scientific audience who feel that the misrepresentations and misstatements of their own science are as serious as any that will fall within the domain of the geographers and anthropologists. They may be right, which, if they are, makes the case more interesting. What we cite are then not exceptions but fair samples of the body of knowledge.
I have, in reality, never met any specialist who thought that fully half of what is now being taught in the schools about his subject was contrary to fact or definitely misleading; but that proportion fits my opinion with regard to my specialty and I shall use the last few minutes of my time in dwelling upon it.
The first reason for there being abroad fewer “untrue facts” about the Temperate than the other zones is that ours is a temperate zone civilization and that to our forefathers (and, to an extent, ourselves) the two regions of unrestrained imagination were the tropics and the Arctic. Five hundred years ago the percentage of misinformation was no doubt approximately the same with regard to the zones north and south of the North Temperate, but of late books and ideas about the tropics have become relatively correct. For the crossing of the tropics has been a commonplace these 400 years, while the crossing of the Arctic was not accomplished until within our own time and is not yet a commonplace, though it soon will be.
The tropic myths have been dispelled by the frequent journeys of investigators and by the necessities of commercial development. The Arctic myths have not been dispelled by these or any other causes, or at least not to the same extent. Moreover, the human mind appears to crave some district where the fancy may roam. Our favorite character of the imagination is Santa Claus and we are perhaps right in feeling subconsciously that it is fitting and necessary for him to reside in an imaginary world. Moreover, our present attitude towards explorers makes them the grown-ups’ equivalent of childhood’s Santa Claus. The explorers, then, need an imaginary world for a satisfying background.
I might confess here that to the extent that I am successful in talks such as this, I feel as if I were stealing candy from a child when I make it increasingly difficult for the rest of the world to swallow the good old hokum about the Arctic. Fortunately, I have never been very successful.
But it is equally fortunate that I am not very serious about Truth--fortunate at least for me. I am no Jeremiah declaiming against iniquity. I like to contrast my benevolence with the misanthropy of the satirists, and I go on now to point out the amusing but effective ways which the scientific organizations, some of them nearly as lofty and respected as the American Philosophical Society, have discovered for keeping Santa Claus in his Arctic so that all may be well with the imaginary world.
One of the branches of our government is the Geological Survey and another branch is the Signal Corps. Lieutenant P. H. Ray, of the United States Army, discovered on the Signal Corps expedition to Point Barrow (1881-2) that “willows” 20 feet in height grow a little way inland from Barrow, more than 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle. But it is out of character to picture such large vegetation in the Arctic, and so the Geological Survey now comes to the rescue by issuing through the journal _Science_, the official organ of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and through _Science Service_, a statement that in the great triangle north of the Endicott Mountains in Alaska (an area larger than that of the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania) there is no tree-like growth bigger than a lead pencil.
Before any of us were born the Hudson’s Bay Company had a trading post called La Pierre’s House, on the Bell branch of the Porcupine River, and at Fort Yukon, where the Porcupine enters the Yukon. Ever since then missionaries, traders, and white men and women of nearly every condition and description, have been traveling up and down that river or residing upon it. Now the United States Bureau of Education, among its other contributions to the Santa Claus background, tells that one of its agents will go northward and associate on this river with Indians who are untouched by the white man’s civilization. The implication is that some of them will never have seen a white man until the Bureau representative gets there. Really he will find there Athapaska Indians speaking English with a Scotch accent, their inheritance from the Orkneyman “servants” of the Company.
We have been listing a few of the notable contributions from scientific departments of the American Government to our knowledge of the Arctic. There are naturally similar contributions from the governments of other countries. We close our remarks on this subdivision of our topic with a note on the Antarctic which appeared in _Science_ on February 27, 1925:
“The Minister of the Colonies, by a decree dated December 30, has created a large game sanctuary in France’s Antarctic possessions ... the principal animals protected are polar bears, walrus, sea lions and penguins. The French naval station in Madagascar will be responsible for the patrol of the new preserve.”
In this French decree we seem to have the first published reference to walrus south of the equator. The polar bear citation is even more remarkable, for up to this time there had been discovered in the Antarctic no land mammal, small or big.
The walrus in southern waters has apparently not been reported again since the French government’s original note; but the polar bears, once introduced (and protected by gunboats in Madagascar only a few thousand miles away) have been doing well in our Antarctic mental world. True, they appear as yet with comparative rarity in print; but they appear frequently in pictures--not in photographs, of course, but in drawings. A sample contribution was a cartoon of the _New York World_, spring 1930. Formerly in such drawings, penguins by themselves had symbolized the Antarctic; now they were joined by the polar bear. Father Knickerbocker was shown standing at the New York waterfront to welcome Byrd home from his southern adventures. The boat conveying the hero toward shore was rowed by a crew of polar bears and steered by penguins.
These same late years that have been so propitious to the Antarctic have seen a reciprocal enrichment of the Arctic. As there had been no bears in the South so had there been no penguins in the North. Or, rather, there had been a sort of penguin, the Great Auk, which became extinct a century ago. It would manifestly add charm to have penguins, and so they have been appearing more and more frequently in references to the North. As with bears in the South, they are most frequent in drawings. There is, however, a growing demand for photographs of them. It happens to me, for instance, with increasing frequency that lecture committees bargaining for talks on the Arctic request that I shall use movies, or at least stills, showing penguins.
I get friendly advice, too, after my talks--what I said was interesting and they didn’t realize before they saw my pictures that there are flowers in the Arctic. But why did I not also show the penguins?--they are so solemn, so funny and so human.
Next after the official Government agencies in the Santa Claus propaganda, with regard to Arctic and Antarctic, may be ranked our great universities. Few of them are greater (and I remind you again I am not trying to be satirical) than the University of Chicago. In the spring of 1928 that university informed us through what appears to be an official press release that a graduate student of theirs, Cornelius Osgood, was going to live on Great Bear Lake. They said:
“If he is successful, young Osgood, ... will be the first white man ever to live in the Great Bear Lake region. Two missionaries who tried it in 1912 were slain by the natives. Armed only with rifles, cameras, note-books, recording phonograph disks and a sleeping bag to withstand the 79 degrees below zero weather, Osgood will seek to win the confidence of the natives, living their lives, helping in their work and eating their food.... The only other white men who have penetrated the district are Steffanson, the Arctic explorer, and his companion D’arcy Arden, a famous figure of the North, and a Northwest Mounted Policeman who captured the murderers of the missionaries.”
The stodgy fact is, of course, that John Franklin wintered at Fort Franklin on Great Bear Lake a hundred years ago, that the Hudson’s Bay Company operated on the lake thereafter, that Richardson and Rae, three quarters of a century ago, built their Fort Confidence on Great Bear Lake, and that white men too numerous for easy cataloguing have been there off and on ever since. I was so overborne by this knowledge that when I was there in 1910-11 I lacked the courage, or something, to claim I was the first white man ever to winter.
The bit “Steffanson ... and his companion D’arcy Arden” will be news to him, as it is to me. We never met at or near Great Bear Lake. I believe he began his long residence in that district a year or so after I left there. The lake is big, however, and the country is big--he may have been to the west somewhere in 1910 without my knowing it.
It is perhaps heaping Pelion on Ossa to prove further the thesis of this paper, that even scientists will constantly and solemnly report, as having been observed, things for which there is no foundation but an inherited belief. I might have resisted the temptation except that a beautiful example has just fallen into my hands.
In Canada, Dr. F. G. Banting, Professor of Medical Research, Toronto University, Nobel Prize winner, is the country’s foremost scientist in that more people know his name than that of any other Canadian scientist now living. The Canadian Government has deservedly recognized his position by what the papers say is a lifetime stipend. There is in Canada now an organization called the Canadian Geographical Society, a purpose of which is the increase and diffusion of knowledge of Canada. I shall list for you a few of Dr. Banting’s observations on a summer trip North, as chronicled in Volume I, No. 1 (May 1930), of the official organ of the Society, the _Canadian Geographical Journal_:
1. “The thickness of the pans (of sea ice) varied from twenty to forty feet, depending on whether they were one-year-old or two-year-old ice.”
Many Northern explorers, prominent among them Nansen, have studied the time required for the thickening of sea ice. Their reports are of the order that the first winter’s freezing is from seven to nine feet, that of the second winter adding one to three feet, the third perhaps less than a foot.
2. “On the surface of the older pans were pools of fresh blue water, while on the year-old pans the pools were of salt water.”
“Pans” several years old and those a year old will both have on them pools of water fresh to the taste in summer, if the spray has not reached them. It is ice much younger, only a few weeks or months old, that has salty pools.
3. “Varieties of saxifrage, fireweed and stunted willow spring up beneath the snow and ice.”
Probably what Banting means is that during the winter they had been under snow, as plants are in Minnesota. Some of the spring processes may conceivably quicken a little while the snow is still above the plants, but, if so, how could Banting learn this on a summer trip? Since he distinguishes between ice and snow, what can he mean by their springing up beneath the ice? What ice other than snow would there be?
4. He lauds Franklin and his men who, on Franklin’s last expedition, “in tiny sailing vessels, ventured through these perilous waters.”
Franklin’s _Erebus_ was 370 tons and his _Terror_ was 340 tons, large to date for ships which have gone in among the islands that are north of Canada. Amundsen’s _Gjoa_, by which he navigated the Northwest Passage, was 47 tons. The largest of the six ships of my own third expedition was the _Karluk_, 247 tons; the smallest, the _North Star_, about 30 tons.
5. “In protected spots the flowering mosses of various colors ... reminded us of a summer day at home.”
Either Banting here made some startling discoveries or he was a bit confused as to the nature of mosses. Not a few works of reference divide plants into flowering and non-flowering, putting the mosses on the non-flowering side of the fence.
6. “During these blizzards the land animals huddle together with their backs to the storm and allow the snow to drift around them.”
Banting must have been thinking of cows and horses down Ontario way. The ordinary report of hunters and naturalists is that both caribou and musk oxen feed into the wind and are more likely than otherwise to travel into it.
7. “... thunder is so rarely heard that the natives are frightened by it.”
I know people in New York who are frightened by thunder, and have seen the like farther south.
8. “The married women wear larger hoods which are used for carrying the baby.”
We have earlier in this paper dealt with the question of whether babies are ever carried in hoods.
9. “... the Eskimos live in igloos made from blocks of hard snow.”
We consider this under two heads:
(a) If Banting means that an Eskimo calls his dwelling an igloo, then he is of course right; the Eskimo word _iglu_ means dwelling. A lot of people in a lot of countries live in dwellings.
(b) If by igloo Banting means a snow house, then he should not have said “the Eskimos.” Certainly there are Eskimos who live in snow houses in winter; but it is equally certain that the number of Eskimos who have never lived in a snow house is larger than that of those who have lived in them. This statement goes not only for the 20th century but, so far as we believe, for the 19th, 18th, and 17th centuries at the least. In fact, there are good reasons to consider that the snow house was geographically more widespread in 1900 than it was in 1600.
10. “... the native has _no_ natural immunity.”
The only necessary comment is to say that the italization in this quotation is ours.
11. “In a country where there is no sunshine for three months of the year the people are dependent on their food for their vitamins ...”
The inference seems to be that if there were more sunshine these remarkable people would not have to depend on food for any of their vitamins. The recipient of one Nobel Prize for endocrine studies may then well be candidate for another in comparative racial physiology and in deficiency diseases.
12. “Perhaps the most important introductions (from whites to the Eskimos) are the darning needle, which has been the greatest help to the women in making the clothes and boots, and matches for igniting their lamps.”
The testimony of many travelers has been that Eskimos felt it a hardship to sew with copper or bone needles which almost necessarily were too large for their purpose. Accordingly, the needles which the Eskimos most valued when the whites arrived were those that were smaller than darning needles. No. 1 needles are much smaller than darning size but are, nevertheless, about the largest that I have found the Eskimos of my territories to value at all appreciably. No. 3 was a rather large needle for most of the seamstresses whom I have known, who did most of their sewing with size 5 or smaller. So far as my experience goes, it has been a standing marvel with white women, and with white men used to sewing, that the western Eskimos sew with such small needles. I do not recall ever seeing one use a darning needle for anything but darning or sewing heavy cloths, like tenting.
As to the preciousness of matches to the Eskimos: I have reported that the Stone Age people of Coronation Gulf, with whom we spent the summer 1910, often got their camp fires lighted with blocks of iron pyrites quicker than we did ours with matches. On days of strong wind pyrites has particular advantages, so that it seemed to me the Eskimos needed matches less, and appreciated them less, than they did many of our other contributions to their way of life.
The issue is not so clear with the matches as with the needles. It is ludicrous to claim that darning needles supplied a keenly felt want. Whether the matches did is in the field of legitimate dispute.
To guard against misunderstanding I close this discussion of the Banting paper by reminding you, and insisting upon it, that I am on the whole one of his great admirers. It appears to me that his career and character are both of a high order. That is my point. We get from eminent and deservedly respected men substantial contributions of misinformation useful in maintaining the general unreality (or shall we say poetic quality, imaginative charm?) of our world outlook.
Before introducing the next example of how the great stand with us shoulder-to-shoulder in the battle to keep the world unreal, we mention that the North Pole of reality lies in a deep ocean and is removed some 400 miles from the nearest land. During a hundred years there have been numerous explorers studying this ocean. No one has during this century, or at any other time, seen an iceberg within 300 miles of the North Pole; few have been seen within 600 miles. We know, too, the conditions under which icebergs are formed. So it appears both from well-established theory and from uniform observation that there are not and cannot well be icebergs anywhere near the North Pole.
Now we come to a statement that could not be introduced to you more impressively than by a simple recital of facts. The publication is the September 20, 1928, number of _Science_. The original author of the statement is Sir James H. Jeans, who, according to _Who’s Who_, is M.A., D.Sc. from Oxford, LL.D. from Aberdeen, F.R.S. and secretary of the Royal Society. He is quoted with implied approval by Robert A. Millikan, who, according to _Who’s Who in America_, is A.B., A.M., Ph.D. from Columbia, studied at Berlin and Göttingen, is D.Sc. from Oberlin, Northwestern, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Amherst, Dublin and Yale, and LL.D. from California, as well as holder of the Nobel Prize.
And this is what Millikan says, quoting Jeans: “Our position is that of polar bears on an iceberg that has broken loose from its ice pack surrounding the pole.”
Millikan and Jeans consider, then, that icebergs come from the vicinity of the pole. But if you could take a census of icebergs as we take a census of the human population of the United States, you would find more of them in the temperate zone than in the Arctic; if you could determine the population center of icebergs as we determine the population center of the United States, you would find this center is nearer the British Isles, where Sir James lives, than to the North Pole. Or, speaking astronomically, since Jeans is an astronomer, it would be as correct to imply that Saturn is the center of our solar system as it is to imply that the North Pole is the center of icebergs.
Jeans tells us in a recent work on _Cosmogony_ that light, which goes eight times around our earth in a second, requires 140,000,000 years to reach us from the farthest celestial object that our telescopes now show. With his intellect and with that marvelous tool of the intellect, mathematics, he probes these depths. The while he probes the vulgar onlooker speculates as to how accurate Jeans may be about those distant reaches when he is so far from being accurate about things that are, comparatively speaking, within a stone’s throw of his house.
It may be said that many people have heard of icebergs who have never heard of sea ice, and that Millikan and Jeans were perhaps just catering to their audience in using the better-known word. For it is a common view that scientists, addressing the laity, have an obligation to translate their rigorous phrasing into the looser forms of common speech. But when Millikan referred to the iceberg as “broken loose from its ice pack surrounding the pole,” he was, according to _Science_, giving not a popular talk but an “Address before the Society of Chemical Industry, New York, September 4, 1928, on the occasion of the conferring on Dr. Robert A. Millikan of the Messel Medal in honor of his work on the structure and relations of atoms.” We are too polite to believe it was necessary to talk down to that audience.
Jeans and Millikan were no doubt really thinking of floe ice when they said iceberg. Their precision of speech would then be like my referring to Halley’s planet or calling the moon a nebula. An iceberg differs as much from sea ice as a comet does from a planet.
The iceberg is formed on land; floe ice at sea. The iceberg begins as snow and gradually acquires the semblance of common ice through time, pressure, etc., while sea ice forms directly from liquid water. The iceberg has been fresh since it started; the floe ice began salty and, if fresh now, has attained that state through a long process. The ice destined to be a berg gradually approaches the sea; the floe ice was on the sea from the start. These are but a few of the differences.
It is possible, however, that Jeans and Millikan were not confusing an iceberg with any form of sea ice. For it appears to be the view of the average scientist who is not a geographer that the northern polar sea is just filled full of icebergs. For instance, practically everybody whom I ever heard objecting to the use of submarines in the northern polar basin will say that you are bound to collide with icebergs even if you can navigate deep enough so that there is no chance of colliding with sea ice.
It may be said, finally, that since Jeans is an astronomer, and Millikan a physicist, you can’t expect them to know much about the earth. But why not? I find in several of Jeans’ books which I own, and have even read, that he talks a lot about the earth in general. He analogizes from earth to moon and to various other bodies. And Millikan should know something of land, sea and air, for he and his agents scale mountains and go aloft in aircraft to study his later rays, sometimes crossing oceans to do so. Meteorology and geography should be to him, then, not wholly alien professionally.
The fact is, of course, that this whole reasoning is beside the mark. Jeans and Millikan, leaders in science, are simply acting, too, as leaders in that great effort where we all collaborate, the struggle to keep the world unreal.
Or, declining to close with a negative statement, we affirm that all the way through from my telling the Eskimo method of property identification to Millikan’s telling of icebergs breaking loose from an ice pack surrounding the pole--through that whole gamut we multitudinous scientists are champions of a higher knowledge which I have advocated in _The Standardization of Error_, knowledge derived from facts-by-definition.
There is a perhaps subconscious awareness that lands near home are getting dull through excessive familiarity and it may be this feeling which prompts many who are not scientists to join them towards keeping the ends of the earth from becoming too ordinary. There are many examples in recent polar exploration and we take a few.
The New York newspapers carried one day a statement that Byrd had flown over the North Pole and that the temperature of the air had been 10° F. above zero. Now that is a commonplace temperature, without fascination; for every state north of the Mason and Dixon Line has had it, as well as a good many states farther south. This cheapening of the North Pole needed counteracting. Accordingly, there was an editorial the next day to the effect that in properly evaluating Byrd’s achievement we must remember that the flight was performed in cold so intense as to be unimaginable to New Yorkers.
The reports from most of the winter flights in the Arctic or Antarctic have been that the planes flew in warmer air than on the ground. There have been instances where they flew at 40° or 50° warmer; in one case the temperature was 79° higher at the plane than on the ground below. Reports of this kind we neutralize in our discussions by assuming, without citing figures, that (because high mountains are snow-capped and for various other reasons) the heroic polar flyers contend during their journeys with temperatures even colder than those endured by their earth-bound predecessors who explored by dog and afoot.
A danger well-known to the air mail between New York and Cleveland, too well-known in most parts of the so-called temperate zone, is that of ice forming on wings to make the plane heavy and, what is more serious, to change its aerodynamics so that it becomes unmanageable. This occurs in what the people of New York and Cleveland think of as cold weather. Accordingly, in our discussions of polar flying we just assume that because it is much colder the danger to the flyers, through ice formation, must be that much greater than on the New York-Cleveland winter run. This gets by 90 per cent of the readers and is one of our most effective devices in keeping the polar districts unreal. The fact is, of course, that ice forms on wings chiefly at temperatures between freezing and fifteen degrees below that point (between 30° above zero and 15° above). When it gets colder you have comparatively little icing trouble with a plane.
The Arctic and Antarctic have their chief social usefulness as proving grounds for heroes. The stay-at-homes are thrilled by that courage, that devotion to the aims of science, which leads men to expose themselves to the terrors of a frozen and lifeless wilderness. In order that the said terrors shall have their maximum appeal to the reading public there should be a good many of them. One of the things commonly dreaded is illness, and it is therefore desirable to have it believed that the polar risks include the greatest possible number of diseases. Recent deficiency-disease study has been helpful through showing that one at least of the vitamins can be produced by sunlight falling on the human skin. Obviously, then, the members of exploring parties are going to suffer great deprivation, are going to be in imminent risk of their lives, because of the long absence of the sun in winter. This belief has been utilized in two chief ways: You take along ultra-violet lamps and then make a great play on the forethought of a commander who enlists the newest powers of science towards protecting from disease the members of his courageous band. Or else you have the expedition go into the field without the lamps, and then work up a suspense on whether by cleanliness, regular exercise, amusements, and strict medical supervision it may turn out possible for the men to retain their health until the sun comes back after the Long Polar Night.
On the whole, disease scares have been managed satisfactorily by the public relations departments of at any rate the larger expeditions; but until just recently there was a serious exception. It had been found by many explorers, and had been so often reported as to reach the public consciousness, that head colds and the related diseases of the pulmonary passages were rare on polar journeys. Some said they had been practically absent. For instance, it was reported on one of the British expeditions that nobody had a cold for several winter months, that everybody then caught cold from germs which emerged when boxes of clothing were unpacked, and that when this flare-up was over no more head colds appeared through the rest of the year.
Obviously the polar explorer is deprived of half his chance to be courageous if the life and the climate are represented as normally healthful. The growing awareness that cold prevents colds had to be dealt with. Simplest was, no doubt, to counteract this through the old belief that cold produces colds. Notable help in the campaign was received from the cough-drop industry.