My attainment of the Pole

by Frederick Albert Cook

I was consumed for hours by but one yearning—a yearning that filled and intoxicated me—to go on, and on, and ever onward, where no man had ever been. Perhaps it is the human desire to excel others, to prove, because of the innate egotism of the human unit, that one possesses qualities of brain and muscle which no other possesses, that has crazed men to perform this, the most difficult physical test in the world. The lure of the thing is unexplainable.

During those dizzy hours on deck I thought of those who had preceded me; of heroic men who for three centuries had braved suffering, cold and famine, who had sacrificed the comforts of civilization, their families and friends, who had given their own lives in the pursuit of this mysterious, yea, fruitless quest. I remembered reading the thrilling tales of those who returned—tales which had flushed me with excitement and inspired me with the same mad ambition. I thought of the noble, indefatigable efforts of these men, of the heart-sickening failures, in which I too had shared. And I felt the indomitable, swift surge of their awful, goading determination within me—to subdue the forces of nature, to cover as Icarus did the air those icy spaces, to reach the silver-shining vacantness which men called the North Pole.

As we cut the shimmering waters, I felt, as it were, the wierd, unseen presence of those who had died there—died horribly—men whose bodies had withered, with slow suffering, in frigid blasts and famine, who possibly had prolonged their suffering by feeding upon their own doomed companions—and of others who had perished swiftly in the sudden yawning of the leprous white mouth of the hungry frozen sea. It is said by some that souls live only after death by the energy of great emotions, great loves, or great ambitions generated throughout life. It seemed to me, in those hours of intoxication, that I could feel the implacable, unsatisfied desire of these disembodied things, who had vibrated with one aim and still yearned in the spirit for what now they were physically unable to attain. It seemed that my brain was fired with the intensity of all these dead men's ambition, that my heart in sympathy beat more turbulently with the throb of their dead hearts; I felt growing within me, irresistibly, what I did not dare, for fear it might not be possible, to confide to Bradley—a determination, even in the face of peril, to essay the Pole!

From this time onward, and until I turned my back upon the fruitless silver-shining place of desolation at the apex of the world, I felt the intoxication, the intangible lure of the thing exhilarating, buoying me gladsomely, beating in my heart with a singing rhythm. I recall it now with marveling, and am filled with the pathos of it. Yet, despite all that I have suffered since because of it, I regret not those enraptured hours of perpetual glitter of midnight suns.

One morning we reached the northern shore of Melville Bay, and the bold cliffs of Cape York were dimly outlined through a gray mist. Strong southern winds had carried such great masses of ice against the coast that it was impossible to make a near approach, and as a strong wind continued, there was such a heavy sea along the bobbing line of outer ice as to make it quite impossible to land and thence proceed toward the shore.

We were desirous of meeting the natives of Cape York, but these ice conditions forced us to proceed without touching here, and so we set our course for the next of the northernmost villages, at North Star Bay. By noon the mist had vanished, and we saw clearly the steep slopes and warm color of crimson cliffs rising precipitously out of the water. The coast line is about two thousand feet high, evidently the remains of an old tableland which extends a considerable distance northward. Here and there were short glaciers which had worn the cliffs away in their ceaseless effort to reach the sea. The air was full of countless gulls, guillemots, little auks and eider-ducks.

As the eye followed the long and lofty line of crimson cliffs, there came into sight a towering, conical rock, a well-known guidepost for the navigator. Continuing, we caught sight of the long ice wall of Petowik Glacier, and behind this, extending far to the eastward, the scintillating, white expanse of the overland-ice which blankets the interior of all Greenland.

The small and widely scattered villages of the Eskimos of this region are hemmed in by the ice walls of Melville Bay on the southward, the stupendous cliffs of Humboldt Glacier on the north, an arm of the sea to the westward, and the hopelessly desolate Greenland interior toward the east.

There is really no reason why many Eskimos should not live here, for there is abundant food in both sea and air, and even considerable game on land. Blue and white foxes are everywhere to be seen. There is the seal, the walrus, the narwhal, and the white whale. There is the white bear, monarch of the Polar wilds, who roams in every direction over his kingdom. The principal reason why the population remains so small lies in the hazardous conditions of life. Children are highly prized, and a marriageable woman or girl who has one or more of them is much more valuable as a match than one who is childless.

The coast line here is paradoxically curious, for although the coast exceeds but barely more than two hundred miles of latitude it presents in reality a sea line of about four thousand miles when the great indentations of Wolstenholm Sound, Inglefield Gulf, and other bays, sounds and fiords are measured.