The North Pole, Robert E. Peary [e book reader android .TXT] 📗
- Author: Robert E. Peary
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It will scarcely be considered strange that I have grown to love this childlike, simple people, as well as to value their many admirable and useful qualities. For it must be borne in mind that for nearly a quarter of a century they have been more thoroughly known to me than any other group of human beings in the world. The present generation of able-bodied Eskimos has practically grown up under my personal observation. Every individual member of the tribe—man, woman, and child—is known to me by name and sight as thoroughly as the patients of an old-fashioned family physician are known to him, and perhaps the feeling existing between us is not so very different. And the knowledge of individuals gained in this intimate way has been priceless in the work of reaching the Pole.
Take, for example, the quartet of young Eskimos who formed a portion of the sledge party that finally reached the long-courted "ninety North." The oldest of the four, Ootah, is about 34 years of age. This young man is one of the sturdiest of the tribe. He stands about 5 feet 8 inches and is a fine hunter. When I first saw him he was a young boy. Egingwah, another of the group, is about 26 years old, a big chap weighing about 175 pounds. Seegloo and Ooqueah are about 24 and 20 respectively. All four of them have been brought up to regard me as the patron, protector, and guide of their people. Their capacities, peculiarities, and individual characteristics were perfectly known to me, and they were chosen out of the whole tribe for the final great effort because I knew them to be most perfectly adapted to the work in hand.
Before taking up the story of our advance from Cape York, a word ought to be said about those remarkable creatures, the Eskimo dogs, for without their help success could never have crowned the efforts of the expedition. They are sturdy, magnificent animals. There may be larger dogs than these, there may be handsomer dogs; but I doubt it. Other dogs may work as well or travel as fast and far when fully fed; but there is no dog in the world that can work so long in the lowest temperatures on practically nothing to eat. The male dogs average in weight from eighty to one hundred pounds, though I had one which weighed one hundred and twenty-five pounds. The females are somewhat smaller. Their special physical characteristics are a pointed muzzle, great breadth between the eyes, sharp-pointed ears, very heavy coat underlaid with a thick, soft fur, powerful, heavy-muscled legs, and a bushy tail or brush similar to that of the fox. There is only one breed of Eskimo dogs, but they are variously marked and of different colors, black, white, gray, yellow, brown, and mottled. Some scientists believe that they are the direct descendants of the Arctic wolf, yet, as a rule, they are as affectionate and obedient to their masters as our own dogs at home. Their food is meat, and meat only. That they cannot live on any other food I know, for I have made the experiment. For water they eat snow.
The dogs are not housed at any season of the year; but summer and winter they are tied somewhere near the tent or igloo. They are never allowed to roam at large, lest they be lost. Sometimes a special pet, or a female that has young puppies, will be taken into the igloo for a time; but Eskimo puppies only a month old are so hardy that they can stand the severe winter weather.
Enough has been said to give the reader a general idea of these strange people, that have been so valuable to me in my arctic work. But I want to say again, at the risk of being misunderstood, that I hope no efforts will ever be made to civilize them. Such efforts, if successful, would destroy their primitive communism, which is necessary to preserve their existence. Once give them an idea of real-estate interest and personal-property rights in houses and food, and they might become as selfish as civilized beings; whereas now any game larger than a seal is the common property of the tribe and no man starves while his neighbors are gorging themselves. If a man has two sets of hunting implements, he gives one of them to the man who has none. It is this feeling of good-fellowship which alone preserves the race. I have taught them some of the fundamental principles of sanitation and the care of themselves, the treatment of simple diseases, of wounds, and other accidents; but there I think their civilization should stop. This opinion is not based on theory or prejudice, but on eighteen years of intimate study and experience.
CHAPTER VIII GETTING RECRUITSWhen on August 1 the Roosevelt steamed out from Cape York, she had on board several Eskimo families which we had picked up there and at Salvo Island. We also had about one hundred dogs, bought from the Eskimos. When I say "bought," I do not mean paid for with money, as these people have no money and no unit of value. All exchange between them is based on the principle of pure barter. For instance, if one Eskimo has a deerskin which he does not need, and another has something else, they exchange. The Eskimos had dogs which we wanted, and we had many things which they wanted, such as lumber, knives and other cutlery, cooking utensils, ammunition, matches, et cetera. So, as the Yankees say, we traded.
Steaming in a northwesterly course from Cape York, we passed the "Crimson Cliffs," so named by Sir John Ross, the English explorer, in 1818. This vivid name was applied to the cliffs by reason of the quantities of "red snow" which can be seen from a ship miles out at sea. The color is given to the permanent snow by the Protococcus nivalis, one of the lowest types of the single, living protoplasmic cell. The nearly transparent gelatinous masses vary from a quarter inch in diameter to the size of a pin-head, and they draw from the snow and the air the scanty nourishment which they require. Seen from a distance, the snow looks like blood. This red banner of the Arctic has greeted me on all my northern journeys.
Sailing by these cliffs, which extend for thirty or forty miles, my thoughts were busy with the work before us. First and most necessary of all was the task of gathering our arctic personnel of Eskimos and dogs, already begun before we left Cape York.
Our next stop, after Cape York, was on August 3, at North Star Bay, Oomunnui, as the natives call it, on Wolstenholm Sound. Here I found the Erik, which had become separated from us in Davis Strait several days before during heavy weather. At Oomunnui we took on two or three families of Eskimos and more dogs. Ooqueah, one of my North Pole party, came aboard at this place; Seegloo had joined us at Cape York.
On the night of August 5, a clear and sunshiny night, between Hakluyt and Northumberland Islands I left the Roosevelt and transferred to the Erik, taking Matt Henson with me, for a reconnaissance of the various Eskimo settlements on Inglefield Gulf and along the coast. This detour was for the purpose of picking up more Eskimos and dogs. The Roosevelt was sent ahead to Etah, to get in shape for her coming battle royal with the ice in Kane Basin and the channels beyond.
There was for me a strange mingling of pleasure and sadness in this gathering together of our brown-skinned helpers, for I felt that it was for the last time. The business consumed several days. I went first to Karnah, on the Redcliffe Peninsula, thence to Kangerdlooksoah and Nunatoksoah, near the head of the gulf. Returning on our course, we came back to Karnah, then went south to the neighborhood of the Itiblu Glacier, then northwest again by a devious course around the islands and the points to Kookan, in Robertson Bay, then to Nerke, on C. Saumarez, then on to Etah, where we joined the Roosevelt, having obtained all the Eskimos and dogs we needed,—two hundred and forty-six of the latter, to be exact.
There was no intention of taking to the far North all the Eskimos taken aboard the Erik and the Roosevelt—only the best of them. But if any family wanted transportation from one settlement to another, we were glad to accommodate them. It is to be doubted if anywhere on the waters of the Seven Seas there was ever a more outlandishly picturesque vessel than ours at this time—a sort of free tourist steamship for traveling Eskimos, with their chattering children, barking dogs, and other goods and chattels.
(246 IN ALL) ON SMALL ISLAND, ETAH FJORD
Imagine this man-and-dog-bestrewn ship, on a pleasant, windless summer day in Whale Sound. The listless sea and the overarching sky are a vivid blue in the sunlight—more like a scene in the Bay of Naples than one in the Arctic. There is a crystalline clearness in the pure atmosphere that gives to all colors a brilliancy seen nowhere else—the glittering white of the icebergs with the blue veins running through them; the deep reds, warm grays, and rich browns of the cliffs, streaked here and there with the yellows of the sandstone; a little farther away sometimes the soft green grass of this little arctic oasis; and on the distant horizon the steel-blue of the great inland ice. 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.
On August 11 the Erik reached Etah, where the Roosevelt was awaiting her. The dogs were landed on an island, the Roosevelt was washed, the boilers were blown down and filled with fresh water, the furnaces cleaned, and the cargo overhauled and re-stowed to put the vessel in fighting trim for her coming encounter with the ice. About three hundred tons of coal were transferred from the Erik to the Roosevelt, and about fifty tons of walrus and whale meat.
Fifty tons of coal were cached at Etah for the Roosevelt's expected return the following year. Two men, boatswain Murphy and Pritchard, the cabin boy, with full provisions for two years, were left in charge. Harry Whitney, a summer passenger on the Erik, who was ambitious to obtain musk-oxen and polar bears, asked permission to remain with my two men
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