never be reached by any such parties as have hitherto been sent out. The men who so freely risked their lives were not to the manner born, and what they were called upon to endure was so violently opposed to all their ordinary experience that they were heavily handicapped at the very start. With the uneducated seamen the resulting mental depression must have been a most difficult thing to combat, thus creating a double tax on the already strained nervous courage of their more highly educated leaders. British seamen are fine fellows and possess in a high degree the courage of their race, but nothing would induce a Canadian surveyor to lead a gang of them into the arctic regions, or even take them out on an ordinary bush survey. They would simply be useless. What are wanted are trained voyageurs who are equally at home in canoes or on snowshoes; and not too many of them. With the exception of Dr. Kane's (by far the most successful), arctic exploring parties have been too unwieldy. The one hundred and five ill-fated souls who abandoned the Erebus and Terror starved to death where a party like the Tyrrells' would probably have won their way back to civilization. Had Kane been backed up as he should have been, he would most likely have reached the pole, and when that point is attained, as it certainly will be, it will be over the course followed by him, and by means of dog trains and canoes or boats.
In spite of probable criticism, I am going to sketch a plan for reaching the north pole, drawing on my own experience and that of Canadian surveyors and explorers. I assume at starting that expense is simply no consideration whatever. If a feasible scheme is put forward, I believe that there is enough enterprise, private and governmental, among Anglo-Saxons to carry it through, even if it cost a million.
The exploring party would be carried by steamer to the head of summer navigation on Baffin Bay, where a depot would be established as a base of operations. Here provisions, houses, steam launches, sailboats, canoes, dogs and sleighs, fuel, and all the other accessories, with the exploring party, would be landed, and the steamer could return to winter at Upernavik or Disco. The former place is only one thousand miles from the pole, the distance covered on foot by the Tyrrells, in the middle of winter, with the thermometer often at -40° F., and without tents. A point to be considered is, whether it would not be well to have a second steamer built on the principle of the St. Ignace, the steam ferry at the strait of Mackinac. This boat made an extraordinary record on her trial trip, shearing through ice three feet thick with the greatest ease. With such a vessel, it might be possible to push a long way up Smith's Sound. That point could be determined by a preliminary survey of the head of Baffin Bay.
