The North Pole, Robert E. Peary [e book reader android .TXT] 📗
- Author: Robert E. Peary
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I shall not dwell at great length upon the first stage of the journey from Sydney to Cape York, Greenland, for the reason that it is only a pleasant summer cruise at that season of the year, such as any fair-sized yacht may undertake without peril or adventure; and there are more interesting and unusual things to write about. In passing through the Straits of Belle Isle, "the graveyard of ships," where there is always danger of encountering icebergs in the fog, or being swung upon the shore by the strong and capricious currents, I remained up all night, as any man would who had care for his ship. But I could not help contrasting that easy summer passage with our return in November, 1906, when the Roosevelt was standing on end half the time, and the rest of the time was rolling the rail under water, losing two rudders, being smashed by the sea, creeping along the Labrador coast in the berg season, through dense fog, and picking up Point Amour Light only when within a stone's throw of the shore, guided only by the sirens at Point Amour and Bald Head, and the whistles of the big steamships lying at the entrance of the strait, afraid to attempt the passage.
CHAPTER IV UP TO CAPE YORKOn Sunday, July 19, we sent a boat ashore at Point Amour Light with telegrams back home—the last. I wondered what my first despatch would be the following year.
At Cape St. Charles we dropped anchor in front of the whaling station. Two whales had been captured there the day before, and I immediately bought one of them as food for the dogs. This meat was stowed on the quarter-deck of the Roosevelt. There are several of these "whale factories" on the Labrador coast. They send out a fast steel steamer, with a harpoon gun at the bow. When a whale is sighted they give chase, and when near enough discharge into the monster a harpoon with an explosive bomb attached. The explosion kills him. Then he is lashed alongside, towed into the station, hauled out on the timberways, and there cut up, every part of the enormous carcass being utilized for some commercial purpose.
We stopped again at Hawks Harbor, where the Erik, our auxiliary supply steamer, was awaiting us with some twenty-five tons of whale meat on board; and an hour or two later, a beautiful white yacht followed us in. 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, 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.
Mr. Harkness and a party of friends, including several ladies, came on board the Roosevelt, and the dainty dresses of our feminine guests further accentuated the blackness, the strength, and the not over cleanly condition of our ship.
We stopped once more at Turnavik Island, a fishing station belonging to Captain Bartlett's father, and took on a consignment of Labrador skin boots, for which we should have use in the North. Just before reaching the Island we encountered a furious thunderstorm. It was the most northerly thunderstorm which I remember having experienced.
I recall, however, that on our upward voyage in 1905 we ran into very heavy thunderstorms with electrical displays quite as sharp as any encountered in Gulf storms on voyages in southern waters, though the storms of 1905 were met in the neighborhood of Cabot Strait, far south of those of 1908.
Our voyage to Cape York was a peaceful one, lacking even the small excitement of the same journey three years before, when, not far from Cape St. George, all hands were startled by an alarm of fire which started in one of the main deck beams from the uptake of the boilers. Nor were we so plagued with fog in the early stages of our journey as we were in 1905. In fact, every omen was auspicious from the very start, so auspicious indeed that perhaps the more superstitious of the sailors thought our luck was too good to last, while one member of our expedition was continually "knocking on wood," just as a precaution, as he expressed it. It would be rash to say that his forethought had much to do with our success, but it eased his mind, at all events.
As we steamed steadily northward the nights grew shorter and shorter, and lighter and lighter, so that when we crossed the Arctic Circle, soon after midnight on July 26, we were in perpetual daylight. I have crossed the Circle some twenty times, going and coming, so the fine edge of that experience has been somewhat dulled for me; but the arctic "tenderfeet" among my party, Dr. Goodsell, MacMillan, and Borup, were appropriately impressed. They felt as one feels in crossing the equator the first time—that it is an event.
The Roosevelt, steaming ever northward, was now well on her way to one of the most interesting of all arctic localities. It is the little oasis amid a wilderness of ice and snow along the west coast of northern Greenland midway between Kane Basin on the north and Melville Bay on the south. Here, in striking contrast to the surrounding country, is animal and vegetable life in plenty, and in the course of the last hundred years some half dozen arctic expeditions have wintered here. Here, too, is the home of a little tribe of Eskimos.
This little refuge is about a 3,000 mile sail from New York and about 2,000 miles as the bird flies. It is about 600 miles north of the Arctic Circle and about half way from that great latitudinal mark to the Pole itself. Here the great arctic night averages one hundred and ten days in winter, during which time no ray of light falls upon the sight, save that of the moon and the stars, while in summer the sun is visible every moment for an equal number of days. Within the limits of this little country is found the favorite haunt of the reindeer, which find sufficient pasturage. But we are interested for the present in this unique spot only in passing and for the reason that here we picked up the little denizens of the frigid zone who were to help us in our struggle farther north.
Before we reached this odd little oasis, but several hundred miles beyond the Arctic Circle, we came to a most significant point in our upward journey, marking as it did the grimness of the task before us. No civilized man can die in this savage Northland without his grave having a deep meaning for those who come afterwards; and constantly, as we sailed on, these voiceless reminders of heroic bones told their silent but powerful story.
At the southern limit of Melville Bay we passed the Duck Islands, where is the little graveyard of the Scotch whalers who were the pioneers in forcing the passage of Melville Bay and who died there, waiting for the ice to open. These graves date back to the beginning of the nineteenth century. From this point on, the arctic highway is marked by the graves of those who have fallen in the terrible fight with cold and hunger. These rude rock piles bring home to any thoughtful person the meaning of arctic exploration. The men who lie there were not less courageous, not less intelligent, than the members of my own party; they were simply less fortunate.
Let us look along that highway for a moment and consider these memorials. At North Star Bay are one or two graves of men from the British ship North Star, which wintered there in 1850. Out on the Cary Islands is the nameless grave of one of the ill-fated Kallistenius Expedition. Still farther north, at Etah, is the grave of Sontag, the astronomer of Hayes's Expedition; and a little above it, that of Ohlsen of Kane's party. On the opposite side are the unmarked places where sixteen of Greely's ill-fated party died. Still farther north, on the eastern or Greenland side, is the grave of Hall, the American commander of the Polaris Expedition. On the western, or Grant Land side, are the graves of two or three sailors of the British Arctic Expedition of 1876. And right on the shore of the central Polar Sea, near Cape Sheridan, is the grave of the Dane, Petersen, the interpreter of the British Arctic Expedition of 1876. These graves stand as mute records of former efforts to win the prize, and they give a slight indication of the number of brave but less fortunate men who have given the last possession of mortal life in their pursuit of the arctic goal.
The first time I saw the graves of the whalers on Duck Islands I sat there, in the arctic sunlight, looking at those headboards, sobered with a realization of what they meant. When I first saw Sontag's grave, at Etah, I carefully replaced the stones around it, as a tribute to a brave man. At Cape Sabine, where Greely's party died, I was the first man to step into the ruins of the stone hut after the seven survivors were taken away years before—the first man, and I stepped into those ruins in a blinding snowstorm late in August, and saw there the mementos of those unfortunates.
Passing the Duck Islands on the upward voyage, approaching Cape York in 1908, and thinking of the graves there, I little dreamed that a loved member of my own party, Professor Ross G. Marvin, who ate at my table and acted as my secretary, was fated to add his name to this long list of arctic victims, and that his grave, in uncounted fathoms of black water, was to be the most northerly grave on this earth.
We reached Cape York on the first day of August. Cape York is the bold, bluff headland which marks the southern point of the stretch of arctic coast inhabited by my Eskimos, the most northerly human beings in the world. It is the headland whose snowy cap I have seen so many times rising in the distance above the horizon line of Melville Bay as my ships have steamed north. At the base of the headland nestles the most southerly of all the Eskimo villages, and it has marked the point of meeting, year after year, between the members of this tribe and myself.
At Cape York we were on the threshold of the actual work. I had on board the ship when I arrived there all the equipment and assistance which the civilized world could yield. Beginning there, I was to take on the tools, the material, the personnel, that the arctic regions themselves were to furnish for
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