FLOWERS FLOURISH IN ARCTIC CIRCLE

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6946, 27 June 1929, Page 8

FLOWERS FLOURISH IN ARCTIC CIRCLE

Iceland Only in Name

FACTS THAT ARE SPOILING EXPLORER’S GAME LONDON. June 9. “Iceland is Iceland only in name,” said Mr Vitkijalmur Stefansson, tho Canadian explorer, lecturing at the examination schools on ' ‘ Abolishing the Arctic.” The average January temperature in Iceland, he said, was only one degree colder than in Milan. As a child in his home in North America he had often walked to school on days which wero as cold ns any ho encountered in the Polar regions. “On my first journey to the Arctic,” h u continued, “I did not escape the summer heat. A hundred miles after I had passed the Arctic Circle the temperature was over 80 degrees. The Eskimos were standing at the river edges perspiring and waving bandana handkerchiefs around t-hedr heads to keep the mosquitoes and flies away. _ “That was not a special show which the Lord had put there for my benefit. The Eskimos have been perspiring there for thousands of years.” The snowfall at the North Foie was extremely light and many times less than that in the North of Scotland, he continued. Our school text books still said that the vegetation of the Arctic was mosses, and lichens, yet on the north coast of the northernmost island of the world could be found 120 species of flowers including primroses, daisies and bluebells, and 30 varieties of ferns. Spoiling the Explorers’ Game. “As to the belief that the Eskimos live in snow houses, out of 14,700 Eskimos in Greenland fewer than 300 have ever seen a snow house. More than half have never heard of a snow house, unless they have been to school. One of the tilings that everybody wants to sec is an Eskimo drink oil. I once saw an American with his wife and daughter oiler a boy a dollar to show them how he drank oil. The Eskimo boy drank > a spoonful of something which looked like oil, made a wry face and ran away with the dollar. That is the only Eskimo I ever saw drinking oil.” “Why does everyone believe these things? We explorers are to blame. We have not been trying very hard to undeceive the public. If the Aretic is a terrible place, then explorers are heroes, and it pays to be a hero. The greatest hero factory of the world has always been the far North. “Now, however, when they have found gold, and petroleum and other things in the Arctic, ordinary men with wives and families aro beginning to gc there, and the American government is even sending school marms to Alaska. That is spoiling the explorers’ game.”