The Golden North
True North. By Elliott Merrick. (Scribner& 10s. 6d.) The Quest for Polar Treasures. By- Jan Welzl. With an Introduction by Bedrick Golombek and Edvard Valente. (Allen and Unwin. 10s. 6cL) Mn. MERRICK tired of selling brass piping for Bing and Bing, Inc. So he went to Labrador as a Grenfell Mission school teacher and married- one of their. nurses. True North is the diary of a 700-mile winter journey up-country that these two made with a party of trappers. It is a story of great courage The inhabitants of Labrador are the rapidly. dwindling nomadic Indians, and the half-white trappers who are descen- dants of the Scots who came out to -work for the Hudson Bay Company nearly a hundred years ago. The old Scottish fear- of-God Christianity has been inherited by the present genera. tion, who will not trap on Sunday, Or kill game on that day
unless they are starving. Scottish Presbyterian ancestors are ancestors indeed ; the Eskimo and Cree strain is powerless against them. This book is mainly, an account of these little known Labrador backwoodsmen. We are given a good
description., of the hardships of the long journey to the fur grounds, up-river in canoes and back by sledge after the freeze- up.. It speaks well for Mr. Merrick that although he gives to his story in diary form, the book loses nothing by this treat- ment. We have a clear picture of his struggles and 'those of his wife, but their doings and reactions are always subjective to the engrossing interest of the trappers and the country they
live in. However much we are compelled to admire the author, our admiration is overshadowed by that for the Australian girl who went with him. "Carrying 70 lbs. regu. larly " she shared with him the back-breaking toil, the hunger
and wet, the aching, knotted muscles. They had gone in search of beauty and they found it. But, like the reviewer, when trave.11ing at forty below, hungry and tired and buffeted and frozen, they discovered that pain and not beauty—say what you trill—is the only reality.
I'he Quest' for Polar Treasures is a- continuation of Thirty Years in the Golden North. It purports to be the garrulous chatter of one JanWelz1, an arctic Aloysius Horn, whose expe riences were taken down by two journalists in an interwien that lasted two months. It is a' collection of reminisceneu with no attempt made at connected narrative. We are lea at the end with a truly remarkable picture of the Gelded North, where men fall madly in love with the girl on the soap wrapper, and shoot themselves when they have toothache. In Thirty Years in the Golden North Messrs. Golombek and Valenta tried our credulity somewhat highly. There, amo other things, we were informed that an Eskimo girl general] has her first child between the ages of six and eight, and t it is usually born in the sixth month, and out on the ice at that I The- book under review is even more fantastic. Although not unconunon in the Antarctic, an iceberg ilk, miles long has never been seen in the Arcticorince the lastIce age at all events (black icebergs, incidentally, are eauti glaciers) -and it is hard to -put faith in a 200 lb. salmon or4 10-ton walrus. We are told that, in the course of his trading, Jan Welzl made numerous journeys by sledge over the sea-ice from Siberia to Alaska and Northern Canada. His account, of these expeditions were taken down "word for word ' shorthand," and it is plain that the narrator has no know of Polar travel. We would go a long way to see him drive team of 500 dogs harnessed "one behirid the other." On out of these journeys he claims to have reached 86° 69' N., a highe, latitude than any man except Peary.
The Quest for Polar Treasures cannot be accepted as a serious contribution- to polar literature. But, to give tit author his due, he has provided us with an entertainment afta the manner of Miinchhausen, and while we discredit his fact we must credit him with being no ordinary inventor. Finally, the publishers are unjustified in assuming that the reader, likc Jan Welzl, is a simple and uneducated man who "cam*
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