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Thoughts through Space – Sir Hubert Wilkins and Harold M Sherman

Sherman continued:

“I came upon a dance and social taking place in basement or ground floor of a church or community center – there is a white tower, square, in front. I would say it is a two-and-a-half stories high building. You and crew or members of it have been over and looked in on event."

All this was quite correct. The Eskimos were having a meeting in the church building, and we had dropped in for a few minutes.

Sherman: "See some fishing through ice."

This also was true, for the women had been, that day, fishing in front of the village through the ice for a fish known as tom-cod. They often fish- although not every day-through the ice near Point Barrow, but I doubt that Sherman knew it as a result of anything he had heard or read.

He wrote: "Scrub-like trees. . . several small docks."

Such things do not exist at Point Barrow, but Sherman also included:

"Some old boats frozen in ice . . . lights in town on high thin poles . . . a road that seems to run a little distance back from the river bank, making a turn around a curvature of land, as river seems to widen out beyond into quite a bay . . . most of houses and stores of any consequence along it."

That is a rather accurate description of the conditions at Point Barrow- conditions which Sherman had never actually seen, nor had he seen a photograph of Point Barrow.