Commander Cheyne has gone to America to seek the modest equipment
that his own countrymen are unable to supply. He proposes now that
his expedition shall be “Anglo-American.” I have been asked to join
an arctic council, to coöperate on this side, and have refused on
anti-patriotic grounds. As a member of the former arctic committee, I
was so much disgusted with the parsimony of our millionaires and the
anti-geographical conduct of the Savile Row Mutual Admiration Society,
that I heartily wish that in this matter our American grandchildren
may “lick the Britishers quite complete.” It will do us much good.
My views, expressed in the “Gentleman’s Magazine” of July 1880,
and repeated above, remain unchanged, except in the direction of
confirmation and development. I still believe that an enthusiastic,
practically trained, sturdy arctic veteran, who has endured hardship
both at home and abroad, whose craving eagerness to reach the Pole
amounts to a positive monomania, who lives for this object alone, and
is ready to die for it, who will work at it purely for the work’s
sake—will be the right man in the right place when at the head of
a modestly but efficiently equipped Polar expedition, especially if
Lieutenant Schwatka is his second in command.
They will not require luxurious saloons, nor many cases of champagne;
they will care but little for amateur theatricals; they will follow the
naval traditions of the old British “sea-dogs” rather than those of our
modern naval lap-dogs, and will not turn back after a first struggle
with the cruel arctic ice, even though they should suppose it to be
“paleocrystic.”