And yet, man alone stands ready to risk his life for an idea, to brave the most direful perils, to endure the most poignant suffering that the world’s store of knowledge may be increased, that science may be advanced, that just one more fact may be added to the things actually known.  If the record of man in the tropics has been stained by theft, rapine, and murder, the story of his long struggle with the Arctic ice, offers for his redemption a series of pictures of self-sacrifice, tenderness, honor, courage, and piety.  No hope of profit drew the seamen of all maritime nations into the dismal and desolate ice-floes that guard the frozen North.  No lust for gold impelled them to brave the darkness, the cold, and the terrifying silence of the six-months Arctic night.  The men who have—­thus far unsuccessfully—­fought with ice-bound nature for access to the Pole, were impelled only by honorable emulation and scientific zeal.

The earlier Arctic explorers were not, it is true, searchers for the North Pole.  That quest—­which has written in its history as many tales of heroism, self-sacrifice, and patient resignation to adversity, as the poets have woven about the story of chivalry and the search for the Holy Grail—­was begun only in the middle of the last century, and by an American.  But for three hundred years English, Dutch, and Portuguese explorers, and the stout-hearted American whalemen, had been pushing further and further into the frozen deep.  The explorers sought the “Northwest Passage,” or a water route around the northern end of North America, and so on to India and the riches of the East.  Sir John Franklin, in the voyage that proved his last, demonstrated that such a passage could be made, but not for any practical or useful purpose.  After him it was abandoned, and geographical research, and the struggle to reach the pole, became the motives that took men into the Arctic.

“But why,” many people ask, with some reason, “should there be this determined search for the North Pole.  What good will come to the world with its discovery?  Is it worth while to go on year after year, pouring out treasure and risking human lives, merely that any hardy explorer may stand at an imaginary point on the earth’s surface which is already fixed geographically by scientists?”

Let the scientists and the explorers answer, for to most of us the questions do not seem unreasonable.

Naturally, with the explorers’ love for adventure, eagerness to see any impressive manifestations of nature’s powers, and the ambition to attain a spot for which men have been striving for half a century, are the animating purposes.  So we find Fridjof Nansen, who for a time held the record of having attained the “Furthest North,” writing on this subject to an enquiring editor:  “When man ceases to wish to know and to conquer every foot of the earth, which was given him to live upon and to rule, then will the decadence of the race begin.  Of itself,