Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/677

Rh have I felt it, and that was in the middle of summer, when as a very young man I was fool enough to try and walk fifty miles in a day without any previous training. During the last mile or two my companions had hard work to keep me on my feet, and at the end of the journey I subsided into a chair and went fast asleep, and in that condition was carried to bed, where I slept for twenty-four hours. I was simply "played out," and it is that—not cold—which produces the drowsiness so often referred to. More than once since then I have walked fifty miles on snowshoes and never felt anything of the kind, but I made it a rule to stop every four hours and brew some tea and eat a good square meal. When this practice is followed, it is astonishing how far a man can go without excessive fatigue. The "fatal drowsiness," as it is so often called (which is surely a near relation of "that tired feeling"), is nothing but Nature's final rebellion against a reckless overtaxing of the muscular power without renewing the waste, which of course goes on most quickly in cold weather.

A more recent example of the staying powers of Canadian surveyors is furnished by the exploration of the "Barren Lands" and Chesterfield Inlet just brought to a successful completion by the Tyrrell brothers for the Dominion Geological Survey. The party consisted of the two Tyrrells and six Indian canoemen, a model party for exploring purposes. The total distance covered by them in canoes from Athabasca Landing to Fort Churchill on Hudson Bay was two thousand two hundred miles, and thence to Winnipeg on foot or by dog train one thousand miles. Of the two thousand two hundred miles, eight hundred and fifty was through an entirely new country never before traveled by white men, and five hundred miles was over the open sea of Hudson Bay at the very worst season of the year, between the middle of September and the middle of October. It was during this trip down Hudson Bay that they endured the greatest hardships. They ran out of provisions, there was no wood along the coast, and on one occasion they were unable to land for forty-eight hours on account of the heavy sea. None but Canadians would ever have ventured on such a trip in canoes; none but Indians could have carried it through successfully. All the stirring incidents of this daring journey have been fully published by the press throughout the continent, and need not be recapitulated here. They prove conclusively that the boast of the Ontario Land Surveyors is based on recorded facts, of which any nation might be proud.

In considering the record of past failures in the arctic regions—for,in spite of the magnificent heroism displayed,they were nothing but failures—two points stand out clear and distinct, viz., that the pole will never be reached in ships, and that it can