On page 316, he says: "It was almost exactly six o'clock on the morning of April 23 when we reached the igloo of 'Crane City,' at Cape Columbia, and the work was done."
Mr. Peary left 85° 8ʹ on April 17, according to his statement, and traveled 121 miles to Cape Columbia in six days, arriving on April 23. This last stretch was at the rate of twenty miles a day. To sum up, he traveled from the North Pole, according to his statements, to land, as follows:
The first 133 nautical miles southward in two days, at the rate of 66 nautical miles, or 76½ statute miles, a day; the last 279 nautical miles in fourteen days, an average of 20 miles a day.
According to Peary's book, Bartlett left him at 87° 46ʹ, and Mr. Peary started on his final spurt to the Pole a little after midnight on the morning of April 2. By arriving at the point where he left Bartlett on the evening of April 9, he would have made the distance of 270 miles to the Pole from this point and back, in a little over seven days.
In the New York World of October 3, 1910, page 3, column 6, Matthew Henson makes the following statement: "On the way up we had to break a trail, and averaged only eighteen to twenty miles a day. On the way back we had our own trail to within one hundred miles of land, and then Captain Bartlett's trail. We made from twenty to forty miles a day."
At the rate of twenty miles a day on the way up, which Henson claims was made, it would have taken 6 days and 18 hours to cover the distance of 135 miles from 87° 47ʹ to the Pole. Adding the thirty hours Mr. Peary claims he spent at the Pole for observations, eight days would have elapsed before they started back. Peary says the round trip of 270 miles from 87° 47ʹ N. to the Pole and the return to the same latitude was done in seven days and a few hours.
Why has Mr. Peary never been asked to explain his miraculous speed and the discrepancy between his statement and Henson's?
Henson was Mr. Peary's sole witness. When Mr. Peary, in a framed-up document, endeavors to disprove my claim by quoting my Eskimos, it would be just as fair to apply Henson's words to disprove Peary.
Moreover, inasmuch as Mr. Peary's partisans attacked my speed limits when I made my first reports, does it not seem curious indeed that they now accept as infallible, and ex cathedra, the published reports of the almost supernatural feat in covering distance made by Mr. Peary?