stefansson-wrangel-09-26-001-012

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Chicago wholly in terms of the Stockyards, motor accidents and deaths from
sunstroke.

Probably the most insidious and effective opponent of a rational
view of the earth is Mercator with his grotesque chart. The earth is flat in the
idiom of our speech, it is flat when you look out through your window, and it is
flat when you glance at a wall where hangs a map with Greenland
looking bigger than South America and with the north coasts of Alaska, Canada
and Siberia stretching horizontally from east to west. It is simple and natural
to consider the earth as flat. The sailor knows how simple it is in theory to
cross the ocen on the presumption of flatness, but he knows also that nobody
but a fool would do it. Hence that pictureesque expression "plane sailing" which ?
describes a thing so easy that any fool can do it.

The navigators are among the few people who have to apply day by
day their knowledge that the earth is round. Most of the rest of us, including
politicians, are under no such compulsion. We speak of the "top" of the earth,
and we have on our wall Mercator's chart with Canada and Siberia at the top. We
see the arctic islands lying between continents on one side and the ceiling on
the other, and we ge the idea that they lie between Canada and Siberia on one side
and infinity or nothingness on the other. This misleading presentation has
actually led to the half-formulation of a doctrine of international law to the
effect that one land belongs to another because of lying to the north. That
would be logical if the earth were flat and had a farther edge. It looks logical
on Mercator's chart, but the logic wholly disappears when you consider the map of
the northern hemisphere. Such maps are rare. In the summer of1923, I visited every
well-known shop in London and was unable to buy a map of the northern hemisphere
except on a small and practically diagrammatic scale as a sort of footnote to a
map of the eastern and western hemispheres. Even the firstmap collections
in the United states