My attainment of the Pole

by Frederick Albert Cook

The following days were days of desperation. The food for man and dog was reduced, and the difficulties of ice travel increased dishearteningly. We traveled twenty days, not knowing our position. A gray mystery enshrouded us. Terror followed in our wake. Beneath us the sea moved—whither it was carrying us I did not know. That we were ourselves journeying toward an illimitable, hopeless sea, where we should die of slow, lingering starvation, I knew was a dreadful probability. Every minute drew its pangs of despair and fear.

The gray world of mist was silent. My companions gazed at me with faces shriveled, thinned and hardened as those of mummies. Their anguish was unspeakable. My own vocal powers seemed to have left me. Our dogs were still; with bowed heads, tails drooping, they pulled the sledges dispiritedly. We seemed like souls in torment, traveling in a world of the dead, condemned to some Dantesque torture that should never cease.

After the mental torment of threatened starvation, which prevented, despite the awful languor of my tortured limbs, any sleep; after heart-breaking marches and bitter hunger and unquenched thirst, the baffling mist that had shut us from all knowledge at last cleared away one morning. Our hearts bounded. I felt such relief as a man buried alive must feel when, after struggling in the stifling darkness, his grave is suddenly opened. Land loomed to the west and south of us.

Yet we found we had been hardly dealt with by fate. Since leaving the eighty-fourth parallel, without noticeable movement, we had been carried astray by the ocean drift. We had moved with the entire mass that covered the Polar waters. I took observations. They gave latitude 79° 32ʹ, and longitude 101° 22ʹ. At last I had discovered our whereabouts, and found that we were far from where we ought to be. But our situation was indeed nearly hopeless. The mere gaining a knowledge of where we actually were, however, fanned again the inextinguishable embers of hope.

We were in Crown Prince Gustav Sea. To the east were the low mountains and high valleys of Axel Heiberg Land, along the farther side of which was our prearranged line of retreat, with liberal caches of good things and with big game everywhere. But we were effectually barred from all this.

Between us and the land lay fifty miles of small crushed ice and impassable lines of open water. In hard-fought efforts to cross these we were repulsed many times. I knew that if by chance we should succeed in crossing, there would still remain an unknown course of eighty miles to the nearest cache, on the eastern coast of Axel Heiberg Land.

We had no good reason to expect any kind of subsistence along the west coast of Axel Heiberg Land. We had been on three-fourths rations for three weeks, and there remained only half rations for another ten days. Entirely aside from the natural barriers in the way of returning eastward and northward, we were now utterly unequal to the task, for we had not the food to support us.

The land to the south was nearer. Due south there was a wide gap which we took to be Hassel Sound. On each side there was a low ice-sheeted island, beyond the larger islands which Sverdrup had named Ellef Ringnes Land and Amund Ringnes Land. The ice southward was tolerably good and the drift was south-south-east.

In the hope that some young seals might be seen we moved into Hassel Sound toward the eastern island. To satisfy our immediate pangs of hunger was our most important mission.

The march on June 14 was easy, with a bright warm sun and a temperature but little under the freezing point. In a known position, on good ice, and with land rising before us, we were for a brief period happy and strong, even with empty stomachs. The horizon was eagerly sought for some color or form or movement to indicate life. We were far enough south to expect bears and seals, and expecting the usual luck of the hungry savage, we sought diligently. Our souls reached forth through our far-searching eyes. Our eyes pained with the intense fixity of gazing, yet no animate thing appeared. The world was vacant and dead. Our beating hearts, indeed, seemed to be the only palpitating things there.