The Geographical Journal (Journal of the Royal Geographical Society): Volume IX, No. 4 [‎188r] (46/172)

THE FIRST CROSSING OF SPITSBERGEN—DISCUSSION.
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were dropped to pack the baggage and make the required observation,
whilst Garwood and Trevor-Battye went down to Horn sound and
made the first ascent of Hedgehog mountain (or Horn Sunds Tind),
whereof an account has been published in the pages of the Alpine Journal.
Before the reading of the paper, the President said : There is no occasion to
introduce to you our friend Sir Martin Conway, who is so well known for his
excellent work in the Karakoram, and I am quite sure he has done equally good
work in Spitsbergen.
After the reading of the paper, the following discussion took place :—
Dr. J. W. Gregory : After the long account Sir Martin Conway has given of
the narrative of our expedition, it may be better if I refer for a minute or two to
some of the scientific problems we went to study, as these were responsible to a
large extent for the fact that we did not cover so much ground as we had hoped
when leaving England. We never left the bog-filled valleys for the ice without
feeling relief, and we never went from the ice to the valleys without regrets. Ne
doubt it would have been easier and pleasanter to have spent the time scampering
over the inland ice rather than working in the valleys and on the margins of the ice-
sheet. We soon found that if we wanted to do any serious work we must keep in the
valleys and on the margins of the ice-sheet. To take one illustration. In a paper
read here two or three years ago, Professor Bonney denied that glaciers can do any
important work in the way of erosion. In a paper read shortly afterwards by
Admiral Markham, he treated this view as beneath criticism, and suggested it was
impossible for any man who has seen the glaciers of Greenland to doubt that they
had eroded the valleys in which they lie : accordingly, we wished to settle whether
the fjords of Spitsbergen had been formed by glacial erosion or in some other way.
In England we thought the most suggestive evidence would be obtained by ex
amination of the watershed The boundary between adjacent drainage basins. at several points at a considerable distance from one
another, but we had not arrived a week before we saw we should have to tackle
the question in a different way. What was wanted was an accurate map of a belt
across the island, and not a sketch-map of the ridges. Sir Martin Conway altered
his plans, and has made a map which throws much light on the topography and
geography of Spitsbergen, and will serve as a basis for the geological map Mr.
Garwood and I hope to work out during the coming summer. We don’t bring
back, I am afraid, any very startling biological novelties; but this will cause little
surprise, as biologists have learned to expect as little from arctic work as the
Pharisees expected from Nazareth.
There is little apparent connection between dragging sledges through peat bogs
and the ordinary work in a museum ; but, as a matter of fact, the knowledge gained
and the general idea the journey gave me as to the conditions of life in a high
arctic latitude will be of very great help in my daily task of trying to decipher
the evidence of fossils as to former geographical changes. We also hoped to get a
good deal of information as to the ways of arctic ice, and to detect characters by
which to determine whether certain English glacial deposits had been formed by
land ice, marine ice, or a central ice-cap. In Spitsbergen we could see these forms
working side by side. It gave us information which both Mr. Garwood and I
thought threw a flood of light on the ordinary phenomena of English glacial geology.
We often hear very exaggerated stories about the changes of climate that
have taken place in the arctic regions. We hear of the shores of the Arctic Ocean
having been fringed by coral reefs, while along the shores grew groves of palms;
but I am afraid the collections we made do not support these exaggerated and