“THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC.”

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 23 August 1924, Page 14

“THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC.”

A CLIMATIC OPTIMIST. ATP. . STEFANSSON’S VIEWS. PEOPLING THE WORLD’S WASTES

Every country has its optimists and pessimists as to its future, even New Zealand. People will tell you that such and such a district will never he occupied—the land is too poor, or the climate is unsuitable; vet as the years go by the pioneer goes in and makes a success of his venture; others follow, and presently there is civilisation where there was waste before. Thus our swamps and gum lands and pumice plains, the wet West Coast and dry Central Otago, come into production, and the service of mankind. But the greatest of the world’s climatic optimists is surely the distinguished explorer and author, Mr. Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who does not despair either of the frigid Arctic or the torrid desert of Central Australia. His faith in the Far North of Canada has been justified not only by his books, “The Friendly Arctic,” and “The Northward Course of Empire,” known to most readers, hut by his long residence also in those so-called inhospitable regions among the Eskimos and icebergs, while his recent visit to Central Australia, the opposite extreme, inspires similar hopes that it will not forever he deemed uninhabitable by white mankind.

Air. Stefansson is now returning to America, the home of his birth —for he is a Canadian, hailing from Manitoba in the first place—after a most successful lecturing tour un Australia.! He was to have lectured in New Zealand also, hut all the time he could spare tin this quarter of the globe was taken up by Australia, and even then he was unable to visit two or three cities set down in his original itinerary, such were the demands of the public in Melbourne and Sydney. He hopes to return here about this time next year, and make sure of at least a short sojourn in the Dominion. It was in connection with his plans for the next trip, in which he desires to include a flying visit to the Fiord Country to see how the wapiti and moose, presented by the late President Roosevelt, are getting on, that he told a Wellington Post interviewer on hoard the Tahiti that you could hardly say of any country that it was uninhabitable. The reference was to the rugged fiords, and who shall say really, if the scheme for the utilisation of the vast water powers in that region matures, that here will not be another Norway? The mention of Norway brought up the question of the Norwegian whaling expeditions to the Antarctic in New Zealand’s zone of the Far South, and Air. Stefansson remarked with surprise that New Zealanders themselves had not thought it worth while to develop the whaling industry in those seas. While admitting the existence of a local whaling industry in Cook Strait, he said that, if it paid an expedition to come all the way from Norway, it would .surely-.pay to work from’ New Zealand

Personally, the visitor said, he had not the same interest in the Far South as he had in the Far North, hut he was not prepared to say that Antarctica. would never he inhabited. But it was a mountainous country, far different from the Canadian Arctic. Emphasising the healthiness of the “friendly Arctic,” he mentioned the case of tlie New Zealander, Diamond Jenness, Mho was his ethnologist in the expedition of 1913, and of whom he spoke, in the highest terms. Jenness had contracted malaria in New Guinea, and M’as far from Avell when he went north with the Arctic expedition. After a few months he completely recovered his health, and became as hard as nails and capable of great endurance. The secret of health in the Arctic, as of health in the desert, was the absence of noxious bacteria, which could not live either in a dry cold atmosphere or a dry hot one.

The visitor was asked as to the prospects of the great oilfield discovered iu the Mackenize River basin in the jar. north of Canada. He said that the intention was to reserve the field for the present, pending the cheaoer developments in Mesopotamia aud'Persia. Piobably in about ten years’ time the opportunity would he ripe for developing the Mackenzie field with hotter communications M'ith civilisation. As evidencing the northward trend of development, Mr. Stefansson mentioned the historical fact that in the negotiations with France, which folhnved the conquest of Canada in 1763, the British deemed Canada so valueless that they wanted the little West Indian island of Guadeloupe instead The trench preferred Guadeloupe, too,' and it was only the representations of' Benjamin Franklin, on behalf of the British colonies of North America, that carried the day in favour of Canada, and even then the reasons were military and political rather than economic, for all sides appeared to regard C anada as worthless except for fish and fur. To-day the real estate in Portage Avenue, u single street in Wirmineg, a City only about sixty vears old is worth more than all Guadeloupe. Thus the climatic optimist won the day.'