Photograph from Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.
ROBERT E. PEARY
Discoverer of the North Pole
ROBERT E. PEARY
Robert E. Peary was born at Cresson Springs, Pennsylvania, May 6th, 1856. When he was but three years of age his father died and his young mother moved back to her old home at Portland, Maine. Here his boyhood days were spent in fishing and swimming in the bay, or in roaming over the hills and through the forests. True, the fields with their birds and flowers interested him to some extent, but the mighty ocean, heaving with its mysterious tides and beset with treacherous gales, interested him most. Never did he tire of the stories of danger and hardship as told by the sturdy, adventurous fishermen. So eager was he to learn the mysteries of the mighty deep that he would sit for hours at a time listening to the sailors as they explained the tides and shifting winds. Little did he realize in those early days that this was precisely the knowledge that he would later need in his work as an arctic explorer.
But the fishermen were not his only teachers; for so faithful was he in his regular school work that, at the age of seventeen, he was ready to enter college. Bowdoin, the oldest and best known college in the state, was chosen. Upon his graduation, at the age of twenty-one, he was ready to start in life. But where should he go and what should he do? Odd as it then seemed to his friends, he chose the little village of Fryeburg, away back amid the mountains of Maine. Here he hung out his 110 sign as land surveyor. As practically no one in that little town wanted land surveyed, he had much leisure time which he spent in long hikes over the mountains and along the trout streams. This experience further fitted him for his tasks as an arctic explorer.
That he had always been an energetic student was shown by his success in passing the United States Civil Service examination which he took at the age of twenty-five. This examination, given by the Navy Department, was for the purpose of choosing civil engineers. Out of forty who took the examination only four passed, and Mr. Peary was the youngest of the four.