FOREWORD
David has asked me to write a foreword for his book, which I have seen him working at during these last three months as we sailed northward. Yesterday I read the manuscript which had just been typewritten from those painstaking penciled pages of the boy’s.
As I read I thought more than ever how fortunate David is, first to go with “Uncle Will” (Dr. Beebe) as far south as the Galápagos Islands on the Equator last year, and now to North Greenland. For anyone, of thirteen or thirty-nine, that’s a pretty fine spread and a great experience.
I must confess that it was with some misgivings I thought of the youngster going with us. While it was only a summer trip, almost anything is likely to happen in the Arctic and there’s always a chance of having a pretty [[vi]]rough time—hard, anyway, for a boy. But right here, as the expedition is drawing to a close (and some of it was fairly strenuous), I must say these misgivings did not materialize.
David is a thoroughbred and has a real sane idea of getting along. No one who reads his bully story can fail to realize this. From start to finish I have watched him closely and he has measured up handsomely to all, and more, that any observer could require.
And David is still a boy. He has learned much on the Beebe trip and on this one, things that will sink deep into his young soul. I believe in the years to come he will reap well of what he has sown, and what has been sown for him. School is fine and school must come first. But surely if opportunity offers to combine such experiences as these with “book learning,” it seems to me the grandest sort of education.
I have heard it said that this youngster is having no real boy’s life. Anyone who feels [[vii]]that just doesn’t know David. They haven’t seen him with lads of his own age, as I have, on the football field with his friends at home or with young Eskimos on the Morrissey and ashore in Greenland.
David is still a boy, but a boy who has happened to have a rather wide experience. He’s not a paragon. He’s just plain B-O-Y. And for many years to come he will remain young, with a young heart and the natural unspoiled freshness and happiness of youth. And to me, who have not had many boys around me as I’ve knocked about, it’s been a real pleasure to have him along.
I wonder if many boys who read David’s simple story here, with its many interesting incidents, won’t become jealous. I’m sure I should, if I could turn the clock back more years than one likes to think about. What youngster wouldn’t want to go hunting three thousand miles from home, and see walrus and polar bear and narwhal and all the rest of it? [[viii]]
That’s really what this book should do. Not really make less lucky boys jealous, you understand, but stir up their blood and make them realize that there’s lots in life over the hill and beyond the horizon. A stirring-up like that won’t hurt them. It’s good tonic for the youngsters who are lounging away their youth and getting bad starts fussing around dances and clubs and autos and all that sort of thing, when they ought to be out getting their hands dirty, their muscles hard and their minds cleaned out with the honest experiences of the sea and far places.
I hope the boys who read their way to Greenland with David in this little book (and their Dads, too) will become imbued with David’s spirit and find for themselves worthwhile Ultima Thules.
Robert A. Bartlett.
On Board the Morrissey,
Baffin Bay,
September 5, 1926. [[ix]]
