Page:Proposed Expedition to Explore Ellesmere Land - 1894.djvu/5

6 the race for the Pole the shores of Smith Sound were traced 660 miles north from the same point.

Between these two lines of search lies a triangular area of about 100,000 square miles (or twice the size of the State of New York), which, lying neither in the direction of the north-west passage nor in the direction of the Pole, has been almost entirely neglected. Jones Sound and Smith Sound were both discovered by Baffin in 1616, but while Smith Sound, opening northward, has been thronged with explorers, Jones Sound, opening westward, has been visited only three times, each time only for two days, and expl6red only 160 miles westward.

The northwest passage was discovered only to prove impracticable for vessels; and as for the attainment of the Pole, scientific men are unanimous in regarding it as of no practical value except for geodesy. All authorities are agreed that researches in physics and natural history as influenced by Arctic conditions are of the highest value; but for this purpose any point within, say, the 76th parallel is practically as good as any other. As a necessary prerequisite to such researches, the distribution of land and water must be known. Thus the legitimate objects of Arctic research are the filling of the blank space with shorelines, and, so far as possible, with contours of height and depth; and, on the basis of this pioneer work, observations of natural phenomena of all kinds. The easy and definite problems ought to be solved before the difficult and indefinite. No one ought to plunge without definite prospect into unknown wastes of ice until every easily accessible shoreline has been traced to its end.

Now there is not in all the Arctic an unknown area offering so definite a prospect as the triangular area between Ellesmere-Grinnell Land and the Parry archipelago. On one side of that triangle, Ellesmere-Grinnell Land, having an eastern shore 495 miles long in a straight line (140 miles longer than England), must have a western shore at least as long; while on the other side, North Kent, North Cornwall, Seymour, Paterson, Finlay, Vesey Hamilton, Markham, Emerald, and Fitzwilliam Owen islands, forming a line 390 miles long, peep with their southern brows out of the unknown, inviting exploration of their northward-trending flanks. Along both these lines (which are almost