THE LILY-HANDED COMMANDER.

With Stefansson in the Arctic.; By Harold Noice. (Harrap lb Co. 7s. 6d. net.) HAROLD NOICE had as good fortune as any boy of twenty could wish. He went North in 1915 to make moving-pictures of the Arctic: Stranded' and penniless in Nome, Alaska, he

decided to sign on with Lane; one' of the best ice ,pilots and whalers ever known. As the `. Polar Bear ' beat

further north, then west,- stopping at scattered settlements along the coast, Noice with the rest of them eagerly listened to rumours and discuisions about the fate of the Canadian Arctic Expedition that had set Out in 1914 under Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who was " not . . . the typical explorer of the old school who carried with him carefully measured rations . . . to last the entire length of the journey. On the contrary, pinning his faith to a theory, he had expected to find in the bewildering mazes of the shifting ice-pack bath food and fuel. . . . The thing was unheard of ; and Eskimos and whites alike had thought him mad." •

Certainly one or two of Stefansson's friends here and there insisted that he and his party were still alive. But 'all the rest were just as sure that he had " committed suicide " by putting into practice his theory that it is possible to travel in the North and find your food as you go along. Hadn't all the newspapers, even, reported the " tragedy " of their death and written Stefansson's obituary ? Besides, as Captain Wolki, with twenty-six years' Arctic experience behind him,- said of the dead man .

" Say, did you ever, shake, hands with him ? He's got a hand as soft as 'a woman's . . . As for his being clever, I never could-see it. Just having a lot of theories no one else agrees with don't mako a man clever, not necessarily. I'll eat my shirt if he ever comes back."

The ' Polar Bear ' continued N.W., looking out for whales and for signs of the ship ' Sachs' which was searching for the remains of the lost commander and his party. On

August 11th, 1915, as they neared Banks Island, the Eskimo look-out sighted a man on shore. A whale-boat was put off When it returned with the stranger, the white men would not believe the delighted cries of their Eskimo crew, who recognized him. " Sitepasin ! Sitepasin ! "

The much dead Stefansson climbed on board, in Noice's words, " not a bit like a starving Arctic explorer," and after hearty greetings all round positively stated that he was not hungry, and indeed it was fairly obvious that he was not in any way distressed, and that the ' Polar Bear ' had not rescued him, for he was very well where he was on un- inhabited Banks Island. He did, however, need additional men : after he had chartered the ' Polar Bear' Noice and a friend joined his expedition and all of them sailed back to Herschel Island, where the resurrection of the suicide caused a sensation. The newcomers constantly discussed the Com- mander, who frankly puzzled them. Like everybody else, they had their picturesque ideas of what Arctic heroes were like ; and contact with the real article was a shock. Even the men who knew and respected him best did not seem to understand him. They said :—

" What do you know about a man that doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, doesn't dance . . . had never been known to sing or even hum a tune ; detested athletics, loathed cards, never made a bet ? "

It must have been disappointing to Noice to find that Stefansson was not an Arctic hero at all_: just a scientist. The story of the conclusion of the Canadian Arctic Expedi- tion has been told already in Stefansson's own book, The Friendly Arctic, and of definite facts there is nothing new in Mr. Noice's book. Nor is there overmuch about Stefansson. Noice tells us much more what he himself did and thought through the next two seasons of exploration. Only from his obviously sincere but meagre comments on the man who taught him how to exist under the unfamiliar conditions can the reader divine Stefansson's aims and the difficulties, mostly psychological, which he constantly encountered. Even retrospectively, Noice does not regard his Commander as a -normal creature, and long after he proved its wisdom he still resented Stefansson's favourite saying " An adventure is a -,sign of incompetence."

It is strange that Noice did not quite appreciate his own good fortune, that he should have been so antagonized by the calmness and long-sightedness, the isolation of his leader. For here was no adventurer in search of reclame or excite-

ment, but a strange pioneer with a peculiar vision. Stefansson had long before 1915 determined to " abolish " the polar regions, that is, the polar regions of fiction with their per- petual snow, eternal darkness, unbroken silence and absolute barrenness. Instead, he was trying to give the world a new idea, an Arctic habitable under given conditions, cold certainly, but no colder than many inhabited regions of

Europe and America ; and not merely habitable, but fruitful. Everyone knows now why Stefansson " committed suicide " by crossing the Beaufort Sea in 1914-15 without rations, why he wrote his books, The Friendly Arctic and The North- ward Course of Empire, why he fought the lost battle for Wrangel Island. Everyone knows now his reasonable grounds for seeing in those northern pasturelands a potential store- house for the world's meat supply, for seeing in outposts like Wrangel strategic points in the trans-continental airways of a perhaps not very distant future.

Yet Mr. Noice, writing his adventures to-day, seems to have forgotten all this. Instead of acting as an interpreter for his Commander, telling us fully about the man who tells us so little of -himself in his awn books, he only tells us how vexed he was when, in the winter camp on Melville Island, Stefansson sat eagerly reading the news-clippings of his own " tragic death " : it seemed " rather a childish thing for Stefansson to be doing." True, Noice admits " I did not then know the whole story . . . or r might have inter- preted differently the causes of his triumphant glee." Later, during a cross-country journey, he admits, too, that he dis- covered the Commander was not so inhuman as people said, for he actually recited comic poems to them one night when they were all tired out and depressed. His confidence in his leader rose, too, when he discovered that " the lily-white

hands, which so far had done nothing . . but pound away on his little typewriter " were perfectly able to supply them with food. Even Stefansson's apparent callousness had its effect when the first freeze-up came :-

" The ice became more and more closely packed. The ship groaned and creaked with the terrible pressure. Small cakes were tilted up on edge, and ice commenced to work underneath us until we found ourselves being slowly lifted bodily out of the water . . . my heart was in my throat all night . . . The Commander seemed indifferent to the ship's peril. He merely remarked that it looked as if we were to have an early fall, and then went below to read a novel."

So with his detestation of " adventures," for when three of the men were making an ice crossing they neglected to use the compass, and followed the direction of the wind without realizing it had veered, with the result that the sledges, dogs and men all but crashed through a slush of sea-ice, whereas they should have been following firm ice around the shore. They rushed back to safety, eager to relate their adventure, which Noice felt somehow had " put one over on Stefansson " " It dawned on me that the Commander's silence was not due to awe. In a voice like the tinkle of ice, he said : Noice, you and Knight are youngsters, and novices ; therefore your enchanted pride in your stupidity is perhaps .pardonable. But you, Thomsen—' Then he proceeded to give Thomsen the most scathing dressing-down. I had ever heard. . . . The two young ' heroes ' sat silent and abashed for the rest of the evening."

Finally, when Stefansson showed a little huillan weakness, Noice " quite liked him."

The author of With Stefansson in the Arctic had enviable fortune in joining what was certainly the most interesting though by no means the most spectacular of recent polar expeditions. StefanSson himself has been less fortunate in gaining recognition for his original point of view and his achievements. Perhaps everyone, like Noice, would prefer him if he did not happen to possess, in defiance of all the rules, such white hands, and if, consequently, he were rather more like the heroes of fiction.