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
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.