ON TOP OF THE WORLD.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19904, 25 September 1926, Page 19

ON TOP OF THE WORLD.

CANADIANS ON ELLESMERE ISLAND. A REMARKABLE ACHIEVEMENT. The exploits of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have caught the attention of the novelist and the scenario writer, but the most remarkable achievement of that corps d’elite has hitherto remained obscure. It is the occupation for Canada of Ellesmere Island, the last land south of the Pole. Possession was taken by a small police patrol of three white men, and six Eskimo auxiliaries, stationed at Craig Harbour. ‘'We were” (says Mr

Herbert Patrick Lee, in “Blackwood's Magazine” for July), “with the exception of two small families of North Greenland Eskimos brought down from Etah, the only inhabitants of the 76,000 square miles of Ellesmere Land, that last stretch of land before the Pole. Northward no human being existed. It was thrilling to stand outside the tiny shack on the barren shore of Jones Sound and gaze northward, to feel that for those 700 miles to the Pole, and 1000 miles and more down the other side of the earth to the Siberian Plains, no human being existed. Westward stretched 1,000,000 square miles in which no man dwelt, white man or native. We know that it would be possible to leave post and travel on the same degree of latitude completely round the earth before other human beings would be encountered, and they a tiny tribe of Eskimos clinging precariously to the western coast of North

Greenland. To the north-west lay a vast area which had never yet been scanned by the eye of white man, a huge expanse of frozen sea and barren island, stretching far out into the unknown. Southward lay 650 miles of rugged ice and treacherous open water before one could reach Pons Inlet, on the northern tip of _ Baffin's Land, itself almost as completely isolated as our own wretched habitation. There at Pon s Inlet was a small Eskimo village, a Hudsonis Bay post, and a mounted police detachment. To the south for 700 miles stretched Baffin Land. In all its 210,000 square miles there were only 1400 Eaimos, half a dozen trading posts, and two of our own. . . . It is imposeible, by the mere telling of a story, to bring home the realisation of the utter desolation, the bitter loneliness, and terrible isolation of that post at Craig Harbour. , , . .. . Once a year the relief ship accomplishes her dangerous race with the ice. The

year’s waiting was not simply passive. Iho long winter, with its months of darkness, was felt as a ceaseless nerve strain. There was always the fear that some bad summer would grip the ship, and another endless year would close on unrelieved men. They climbed each day at the season of expectancy, a thousand feet of cliff, to watch for the smoke or the black spars outlined against the white of a distant berg. The journey home to “civilisation” would take two years by sledge. Football with the Eskimos by moonlight at 50 degrees below zero helped to pass the time in winter. There were traps to visit also when the moon was full. Night and day became arbitrary divisions of time, for in summer it was always light, in winter always dark. In bright sunlight midnight expeditions would set out. The Canadian Government demanded that every year a patrol should bo made to Cape Sabine, 250 miles north of Craig Harbour. Every year a cartridge case is placed under a cairn signifying that the patrol has been made, and thus the Empire preserves its title to its northernmost point. Mr Lee isi. jealous of the title, “Barren Lands, applied to the northern strip of Canadian mainland. “Barren lands whore one could pick up a ton of driftwood on each mile of beach, where trees grew a few miles farther south in the river bottoms, where there were lakes full of fish, and countless herds of caribou roamed the uplands, barren lands where in summer Stofansson remarked on the heat, the myriads of mosquitos.” This is “paradise _ ono. thinks Mr Lee, compared with the infinite ice and naked rock of Ellesmere Island.