In the present book I have tried by means of diaries and memory to go back to the vivid impressions of my first year among the Eskimos for the story of what I saw and heard. I have tried to tell the story as I would have told it then, except that the mature knowledge of ten succeeding years has been used to eliminate early faults of observation and conclusion.A good many interesting stories found in the diaries of my first arctic voyage do not appear in this book because I now know them to have been based on misapprehensions. In a sense, the book is therefore less interesting than if I had published it fourteen years ago - but less interesting only to the extent in which it is more true.V.Stefansson
