Robert E. Peary

“ Off Milne Bay, July 11th.—Another day of watery hell, beating out in fog and driving snow, through the devil-inspired labyrinth of lakes and rivers set in a morass of knee-deep slush which fills this bay.
Nine and one-half hours of uninterrupted travel brought us out to the series of “rafters” which form the line of demarcation between the edge of the bay-ice and the pack. Here the roar of some river or lake which was pouring through a crack to the sea, filled our ears. ”

“ During the summer months the sun shines continuously, and this continuous brilliancy is intensified a hundredfold by the reflection from endless fields of glistening, sparkling snow, unrelieved by a single object. The strongest eyes can stand such a blinding glare only a few hours without protection. We always wore heavy-smoked glasses, and when in camp found it impossible to sleep without still further protecting our eyes by tying a narrow band of fur about them to exclude the light. Only when a storm is brewing does this intense light become subdued. ”

“ Imagine about three hundred and fifty miles of almost solid ice—ice of all shapes and sizes, mountainous ice, flat ice, ragged and tortured ice, ice that, for every foot of height revealed above the surface of the water, hides seven feet below—a theater of action which for diabolic and Titanic struggle makes Dante's frozen circle of the Inferno seem like a skating pond.
Then imagine a little black ship, solid, sturdy, compact, strong and resistant as any vessel built by mortal hands can be, yet utterly insignificant in comparison with the white, cold adversary she must fight. ”

“ The ice outside of us was constantly in motion, more or less active with the currents of the tides, and about the middle of October the young ice incessantly forming between the large floes became of such thickness, that its crushing up rendered the movement of the ice very audible. First as a loud murmur, later with increasing cold as a hoarse roar, sometimes continuous, sometimes intermittent, like heavy surf upon the shore, which kept the air vibrating, and coming as it did through the darkness and frequently snow-filled air, contained a peculiarly savage and foreboding note. ”

“ And on this little ship are sixty-nine human beings, men, women, and children, whites and Eskimos, who have gone out into the crazy, ice-tortured channel between Baffin Bay and the Polar Sea—gone out to help prove the reality of a dream which has bewitched some of the most daring minds of the world for centuries, a will-o'-the-wisp in the pursuit of which men have frozen, and starved, and died. ”

“ At other times, the blue face of a big floe as high as the plank sheer grinding against either side, and the ship inching her way through, her frames creaking with the pressure, the big engines down aft running like sewing-machines, and the twelve-inch steel shaft whirling the wide-bladed propeller, till its impulse was no more to be denied than the force of gravity. ”

“ Among the fauna of this country are the reindeer (the Greenland caribou) , the fox—both blue and white—the arctic hare, the Polar bear, and perhaps once in a generation a stray wolf.
But in the long sunless winter this whole region—cliffs, ocean, glaciers—is covered with a pall of snow that shows a ghastly gray in the wan starlight. When the stars are hidden, all is black, void, and soundless. When the wind is blowing, if a man ventures out he seems to be pushed backward by the hands of an invisible enemy, while a vague, unnamable menace lurks before and behind him. ”

“ As to the quality of the personnel of a polar expedition, my experience has proved over and over again the accuracy of my theory that it should be made up wholly of young men, of first-class physique, perfect health, education, and attainment. Such men, interested in their work and the success of the expedition, with resources within themselves and plans for the future, are able to resist in a large measure the depressing effects of the long polar night, and in field-work their enthusiasm more than makes up for lack of experience or toughened endurance. ”

“ Then with a mighty tremor and a sound which reminded me of an athlete intaking his breath for a supreme effort, the ship shook herself free and jumped upward till her propeller showed above water. The big floe snapped against the edge of the ice-foot forward and aft and under us, crumpling up its edge and driving it inshore some yards, then came to rest, and the commotion was transferred to the outer edge of the floe which crumbled away with a dull roar, as other floes smashed against it, and tore off great pieces in their onward rush, leaving the Roosevelt stranded but safe. ”

“ It is not well for an arctic explorer to be too fastidious. A night in one of these igloos, with the family at home, is an offense to every civilized sense, especially that of smell; but there are times when a man, after a long sledge journey in the terrible cold and wind, hungry and footsore, will welcome the dim light shining through the translucent window of an igloo as one welcomes the light of home. ”

“ A trail oftentimes must be hewed out with pick-axes, and the heavily loaded sledges pushed, pulled, hoisted, and lowered over the hummocks and steep acclivities, even unloaded, and the equipment carried over on one’s back. On our return from farthest north in 1906 we encountered a seemingly endless and indescribable chaos of broken and shattered ice at the place where we had been held up by the big lead on our upward march, and it took hours of grim and exhausting work to carry us through it. ”

“ The night of the 11th was a perfect Arctic autumn night. To the south over the land the sky pearl-white; west and northwest, about the couchant mass of Cape Joseph Henry, orange-yellow; north, over the Polar Sea, gray-white; east and southeast the snow-clad Greenland coast lay under the purple shadows of the coming “Great Night.” On the 12th a fresh southerly wind set the snow drifting savagely on all the uplands, flung out a long snow-banner from the summit of Rawson, and formed a 58broad lane of water reaching from behind Rawson past us and on toward Cape Henry. ”

“ BUILDING A POLAR SHIP Of all the special tools that a polar explorer requires for the successful prosecution of his work, his ship stands first and preëminent. This is the tool which is to place him and his party and supplies within striking distance of his goal, the tool without which he can accomplish nothing.
The builder of a polar ship should live with his craft from the time the keel is laid till she is complete and has made her trial trips. He should see that every timber that goes into her is sound, tough, and seasoned. ”

“ I myself dropped twenty-five pounds of flesh between my departure from the ship and my return to it.
But fortitude and endurance alone are not enough in themselves to carry a man to the North Pole. Only with years of experience in traveling in those regions, only with the aid of a large party, also experienced in that character of work, only with the knowledge of arctic detail and the equipment necessary to prepare himself and his party for any and every emergency, is it possible for a man to reach that long sought goal and return. ”

“ We had already made a good day’s march. Now we had to duplicate it without rest or food. When at last we stumbled into camp I was nearly blind from the effects of the cutting snow and wind, and completely done up with the long continued exertion. The interest and excitement of the advance were gone, the reaction had come, and my feet dragged like lead. As a matter of fact the return journey, after the eagerness and excitement of pushing ahead is over, is always the hardest part of the work. ”

“ Owing to the stupendous and resistless character of the heavier ice, a ship would be utterly helpless if she were ever caught fairly and squarely between two giant floes. In such a case there would be no escape for any structure which man could design or build. More than once a brief nip between two big blue floes has set the whole one hundred and eighty-four-foot length of the Roosevelt vibrating like a violin string. At other times, under the pressure on the cylinders of the by-pass before described, the vessel would rear herself upon the ice like a steeplechaser taking a fence. ”

“ In an attack by fifty or more of these infuriated beasts a small whale-boat is no place for a nervous person, and I have known Eskimos, accustomed for years to such encounters, when surrounded by these huge, ivory-tusked creatures, with angry, bloodshot eyes, emitting vicious roars through thick, stiff-bearded lips, and making savage attempts to get at the occupants of the boat, to lose their heads so completely as to drop their harpoons, begin to yell, and even to spit at their formidable foes. ”

“ The two Eskimos who had the dogs were just ahead of me, Ahngmalokto beside me, and the other four lying on the ice-foot getting their breath. Mounting the crest I saw the musk-oxen in the usual stellar group of shaggy forms, white horns and gleaming eyes; the body of the bitch lying a short distance away, and the gray dog worrying the bull and dodging his vicious charges. ”

“ When the little auks fly high against the sunlit sky, they appear like the leaves of a forest when the early frost has touched them and the first gale of autumn carries them away, circling, drifting, eddying through the air. The desert of northern Africa may be as beautiful as Hichens tells us; the jungles of Asia may wear as vivid coloring; but to my eyes there is nothing so beautiful as the glittering Arctic on a sunlit summer day. ”

“ One storm will play more havoc with the dogs and their harnesses and traces than the work of two weeks’ continuous traveling. To get the sledges and the dogs and tent dug out, to say nothing of untangling and repairing the dogs’ traces, which become terribly twisted and tangled, is enough to keep two men busy for hours. After almost every snowfall we had to help the dogs drag the sledges. For this purpose a long line of walrus hide was tied to the front of the sledge, running out over the dogs, so that one of us could attach it to our shoulders and pull in advance of the team. ”

“ Again I quote from my journal: “A wild morning with snow driving in horizontal sheets across the deck, the water like ink, the ice ghastly white, and the land invisible except close to us as we almost scrape against it on the port side. Summer is at an end and winter has commenced.” Scarcely had we made fast to the ice-foot when the ice filled the bay completely.
With the ebb-tide at night much of the ice inside of us passed out, grazing against our side, but no lead formed at the Cape and no opportunity occurred to get north. ”

“ Looking at its pallid and spectral face, from which the brighter light of the sun had stolen the color, it seemed hard to realize that its presence there had power to stir the great ice-fields around us with restlessness—power even now, when we were so near our goal, to interrupt our pathway with an impassable lead. ”

“ The causes of death among the men come largely under the terse Western expression, ‘with their boots on.’
“A kayak capsizes, and the occupant is hurled into the icy water; a hunter harpoons a walrus or bearded seal from the ice, a bight of the line catches round arm or leg, and the big brute drags him under to his death; an iceberg capsizes as he is passing it; a rock or snowslide from the steep shore cliffs crushes him; or a bear tears him mortally with a stroke of his paw: and so on. Occasionally, in the past, starvation has wiped out an entire village. ”

“ When, on board the Roosevelt in winter quarters, I was suddenly aroused from sleep by the crack of rifles, I did not think there was a mutiny aboard—only that Tornarsuk had ridden by upon the wind.
When the ice presses hard against the ship, an Eskimo will call on his dead father to push it away; when the wind blows with special violence, ancestors are again appealed to. Passing along a cliff, on a sledge journey, a man will sometimes stop and listen and then say: "Did you hear what the devil said just then?" ”

“ Our camp at the end of this march was at Repulse Harbour. All the way from the western end of the cliffs to the harbour we faced a strong and bitter wind and drift. We were now where Beaumont wrote and left his magnificent record of human endurance and courage ending with “God help us.” We were not as bad off as he and his party. We could all of us walk yet and I believed would all be able to walk to the ship, but it was essential that we get across the channel at once. We were getting weaker every day. ”

“ Get in a mix-up with a herd, when every man in the whale-boat is standing by to repel boarders, hitting them over the head with oars, boat-hooks, axes, and yelling like a cheering section at a football game to try to scare them off; with the rifles going like young Gatling guns, and the walruses bellowing from pain and anger, coming to the surface with mad rushes, sending the water up in the air till you would think a flock of geysers was turned loose in your immediate vicinity—oh, it's great! ”

“ The wind not quite so violent, but still continuing with a heavy drift that made travelling out of the question.
Temporarily at least I had got past chafing at the delay and simply longed for the cessation of the infernal music, and to see the bright sun glinting on the ice-fields again, as a thin-blooded invalid in winter longs for the soft breath of summer.
I cheated as much of the time away as possible, planning what I would do when I got back, and then I ran against the black wall, unless I win here, all these 128things fall through. Success is what will give them existence. ”

“ As far as the evidence of our senses went, we might be encamped on the edge of that open polar sea which myth-makers have imagined as forever barring the way of man to the northern end of the earth's axis. It was heart-breaking, but there was nothing to do but wait. After breakfast we overhauled the sledges and made a few repairs, dried out some of our garments over the little oil lamps which we carried for that purpose, and Bartlett made a sounding of 1,260 fathoms, but found no bottom. ”

“ It has been said that well-directed labor toward a given end is an excellent kind of prayer for its attainment. If that be so, then prayer has been my portion for many years. Through all the seasons of disappointment and defeat I had never ceased to believe that the great white mystery of the North must eventually succumb to the insistence of human experience and will, and, standing there with my back to the world and my face toward that mystery, I believed that I should win in spite of all the powers of darkness and of desolation. ”

“ Success crowned the work, it is true, but, for all that, it is a genuine pleasure to reflect that even had we failed, I should have had nothing to reproach myself with in the way of neglect. Every possible contingency that years of experience had taught me to expect was provided for, every weak spot guarded, every precaution taken. I had spent a quarter of a century playing the Arctic game. I was fifty-three years old, an age beyond which, perhaps, with the one exception of Sir John Franklin, no man had ever attempted to prosecute work in the Arctic regions. ”

“ From Cape Columbia we were to go straight north over the ice of the Polar Sea,—four hundred and thirteen geographical miles. Many persons whose memories go back to the smooth skating ponds of their childhood, picture the Arctic Ocean as a gigantic skating pond with a level floor over which the dogs drag us merrily—we sitting comfortably upon the sledges with [194] hot bricks to keep our toes and fingers warm. Such ideas are distinctly different from the truth, as will appear.
There is no land between Cape Columbia and the North Pole and no smooth and very little level ice. ”

“ Whenever I caught myself building air castles, I would either attack some work requiring intense application of the mind, or would go to sleep—it was hard sometimes to fight back the dreams, especially in my solitary walks on the ice-foot under the arctic moon. ”

“ A man's first night in a canvas tent in the Arctic is likely to be rather wakeful. The ice makes mysterious noises; the dogs bark and fight outside the tent where they are tethered; and as three Eskimos and one white man usually occupy a small tent, and the oil-stove is left burning all night, the air, notwithstanding the cold, is not over-pure; and sometimes the Eskimos begin chanting to the spirits of their ancestors in the middle of the night, which is, to say the least, trying. Sometimes, too, the new man's nerves are tried by hearing wolves howl in the distance. ”

“ APPROACHING A LEAD THROUGH ROUGH ICE
During this march we saw, above the summits of the great land mountains which were still visible to the south of us, a flaming blade of yellow light which reached half way to the zenith—in other words, after nearly five months, we could almost see the sun again as he skimmed along just under the southern horizon. Only a day or two more, and his light would shine directly upon us. The feeling of the arctic traveler for the returning sun after the long darkness is a feeling hard to interpret to those who are accustomed to seeing the sun every morning. ”