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