As soon as he had won the rank of Lieutenant, his first task was to estimate carefully the cost of building a huge pier at Key West, Florida. When the estimate was handed in, the contractors said that it could not be built for that amount. Since Lieutenant Peary insisted that it could, the government told him to engineer the building of the pier himself. This he did so skillfully that he saved for the government thirty thousand dollars.
So brilliant was this success that he was sent to Nicaragua to engineer the survey for the Inter-Oceanic Canal. Here his experience in equipping an expedition, and in managing half-civilized men, further fitted him for his great work in the north land.
Prior to this time he seems never to have thought of arctic explorations, for he writes: “One evening in one of 111 my favorite haunts, an old book store in Washington, I came upon a fugitive paper on the Inland Ice of Greenland. A chord, which as a boy had vibrated intensely in me at the reading of Kane’s wonderful book, was touched again. I read all I could upon the subject, noted the conflicting experiences of the explorers, and felt that I must see for myself what the truth was of this great mysterious interior.” Then it was, as he tells us later, that he caught the “Arctic Fever” which he never got over until he had discovered the North Pole. As a result of this fever he has made nine trips into the north land, and these expeditions have consumed so much time that, though he had been married twenty-one years when he reached the Pole, only three of these years had been spent in the quiet of his home with his family.
Interested as we are in all these expeditions, we are most interested, I am sure, in the one in which he reached his goal.
Embarked on the good ship Roosevelt, his expedition had no trouble in reaching Etah Fiord on the north coast of Greenland. This place interests us because it is the northernmost Eskimo village and is within seven hundred miles of the Pole.
In speaking of these Eskimos, Mr. Peary says: “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 112 to our standard, yet they exhibit a remarkable degree of intelligence. In temperament like children, with a child’s delight in little things, they are nevertheless enduring as the most mature of civilized men and women, and the best of them are faithful unto death. Without religion and having no idea of God, they will share their last meal with anyone who is hungry. They have no vices, no intoxicants, and no bad habits––not even gambling. Altogether they are a people unique upon the face of the earth.”
In his journeys into the far North Mr. Peary enjoyed many a walrus hunt. How should you like to hunt walruses? Before you answer read the following description of a walrus hunt:
“Walrus-hunting is the best sport in the shooting line that I know. There is something doing when you tackle a herd of fifty-odd, weighing between one and two tons each, that go for you whether wounded or not; that can punch a hole through eight inches of young ice; that try to get into the boat to get at or upset you,––we could never make out which, and didn’t care, as the result to us would have been the same,––or else try to raise your boat and stave holes in it.
“Getting 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 113 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 Roosevelt after leaving Etah Fiord was able to go as far north as Cape Sheridan, about 500 miles from the North Pole. Here, on February 15, 1909, the little party left the ship for the long journey over a wide waste of ice. The army that was to fight the bitter polar cold was made up of six white men, one negro, fifty-nine Eskimos, one hundred forty dogs, and twenty-three sledges.