Robert E. Peary

“ The preceding summer we had driven the ship through the almost solid ice of the channels lying between Etah and Cape Sheridan; we had hunted through the long twilight of the autumn to supply ourselves with meat; we had lived through the black and melancholy months-long arctic night, sustaining our spirits with the hope of final success when the returning light should enable us to attack the problem of our passage across the ice of the polar sea. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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?" ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The minor discomfort of building every night our narrow and uncomfortable snow houses, and the cold bed platform of that igloo on which we must snatch such hours of rest as the exigencies of our desperate enterprise permitted us, seem hardly worth mentioning in comparison with the difficulties of the main proposition itself.
At times one may be obliged to march all day long facing a blinding snowstorm with the bitter wind searching every opening in the clothing. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But while it is true that so far as plan and method are concerned the discovery of the North Pole may fairly be likened to a game of chess, there is, of course, this obvious difference: in chess, brains are matched against brains. In the quest of the Pole it was a struggle of human brains and persistence against the blind, brute forces of the elements of primeval matter, acting often under laws and impulses almost unknown or but little understood by us, and thus many times seemingly capricious, freaky, not to be foretold with any degree of certainty. ”

“ I began to wonder whether we should have enough dogs left for the spring journey toward the Pole.
It is absolutely impossible to figure on the Eskimo dog's uncertain tenure of life. The creatures will endure the severest hardships; they will travel and draw heavy loads on practically nothing to eat; they will live for days exposed to the wildest arctic blizzard; and then, sometimes in good weather, after an ordinary meal of apparently the best food, they will lie down and die. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There are some feelings which a man cannot express in words. Such were mine as the mooring lines went out onto the ice foot at Cape Sheridan. We had kept the scheduled time of our program and had negotiated the first part of the difficult proposition—that of driving a ship from New York to a point within striking distance of the Pole. All the uncertainties of ice navigation—the possible loss of the Roosevelt and a large quantity of our supplies—were at an end. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As we approached Cape York, which is farther from the Pole in actual distance than New York is from Tampa, Florida, it was with a peculiar feeling of satisfaction that I saw the foremost of our Eskimo friends putting out to meet us in their tiny kayaks, or skin canoes. Here is the southernmost of the Eskimo villages, by which a permanent settlement is not meant, for these barbarians are nomads. One year there may be two families there; another year ten; and still another season none at all, for the Eskimos seldom live more than a year or two in one place. ”

“ A man less quick and muscular than Borup might have lost the whole team as well as the sledge laden with five hundred pounds of supplies, which, considering our position far out in that icy wilderness, were worth more to us than their weight in diamonds. Of course, had the sledge gone in, the weight of it would have carried the dogs to the bottom of the sea. We drew a long breath, and, reaching the solid ice on the other side of this pontoon bridge, plunged on to the north. ”

“ 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! ”

“ Old age has few terrors for the Eskimo, for he seldom lives to reach it. He dies, as a rule, in harness, drowned by the capsizing of his skin canoe, caught by the overturning of an iceberg, or crushed by a snow-slide or a rock-slide. It is seldom that an Eskimo lives to be more than sixty years of age.
Strictly speaking, the Eskimos have no religion, in the sense in which we use the word. But they believe in the survival of the person after death, and they believe in spirits—especially evil spirits. ”

“ The ice of the polar sea is not an immovable surface. Twenty-four hours—or even twelve hours—of strong wind, even in the depth of the coldest winter, will set the big floes grinding and twisting among themselves, crushing up into pressure ridges in one place, breaking into leads in another place. ”

“ I recognized her as Harkness's Wakiva of the New York Yacht Club. Twice during the winter she had lain close to the Roosevelt in New York, [35] at the East Twenty-fourth Street pier, coaling between her voyages; and now, by a strange chance, the two vessels lay side by side again in this little out-of-the-way harbor on the Labrador coast. No two ships could be more unlike than these two: one white as snow, her brasswork glittering in the sun, speedy, light as an arrow; the other black, slow, heavy, almost as solid as a rock—each built for a special purpose and adapted to that purpose. ”

“ The edge of the moving pack was only a few yards from the ship, but we were fairly well protected by large pieces which had grounded outside of us. Every little while a big floe came rushing past, crowding everything out of its way and giving our protectors a shove that set them and us nearer the shore. From the crow's nest we could see a little open water near the east coast of the channel, but there was none in our vicinity—only ice, ice, ice, of every imaginable shape and thickness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Behind me lay the civilized world, which was now absolutely useless, and which could give me nothing more. Ahead of me lay that trackless waste through which I must literally cut my way to the goal. Even the ship's journey from Cape York to winter quarters on the north coast of Grant Land is not "plain sailing"; in fact, it is not sailing at all during the later stages; it is jamming and butting and dodging and hammering the ice, with always the possibility that the antagonist will hit back a body blow. ”

“ It was snowing lightly all day long; but I went ashore, walking along the ice-foot to the next river, and up to the summit of Black Cape. An occasional walk on land was a relief from the stench and disorder of the ship, for the dogs kept the Roosevelt in a very unclean condition. Many persons have asked how we could endure the presence of nearly two hundred and fifty dogs on the deck of a small ship; but every achievement has its drawbacks, and it must not be forgotten that without the dogs we could not have reached the Pole. ”

“ I could see Cape Hecla to the rear and the Parry Peninsula. In advance the twin peaks of Cape Columbia beckoned us on to the second point of departure in the Commander's northward march. To the north as we progressed, beyond the comparatively smooth glacial fringe loomed the floes and pinnacles of rough ice which will try us all to the utmost for weeks to come. [160] To the south the circumference of the horizon was bounded by the sharp, jagged, serrated mountain ranges, mostly parallel to the coast. Every day we have a glorious dawn lasting for hours. ”

“ I jumped to the up-standers of the flying sledge, leaving Egingwah to throw himself on it and get his breath, and away we went, wild with excitement, across the snow-covered surface of the fiord.
When we got to the middle the snow was deeper, and the dogs could not go so fast, though they strained [147] ahead with all their might. Suddenly they scented the trail—and then neither deep snow nor anything else could have held them. Ooblooyah, with a crazy team and only himself at the up-standers, distanced the rest of us, arriving at the farther shore almost as soon as the leaping bear. ”

“ The members of this little tribe or family, inhabiting the western coast of Greenland from Cape York to Etah, are in many ways quite different from the Eskimos of Danish Greenland, or those of any other arctic territory. There are now between two hundred and twenty and two hundred and thirty in the tribe. They are savages, but they are not savage; they are without government, but they are not lawless; they are utterly uneducated according to our standard, yet they exhibit a remarkable degree of intelligence. ”