CHAPTER X THE POLAR METEORITES
Eskimo Iron—A Mystery of 1818—Search and Failure—Peary and his Huskies—The Secret revealed—An Eskimo Legend—At the Iron Mountain—Removing the Trophies—A Massive Giant—Attack and Defence—The Giant Objects—A Narrow Escape—Conquered.
When Captain Ross was in the Arctic regions in the year 1818, he encountered, in Melville Bay, a tribe of Eskimos who lived near Cape York, entirely cut off from communication with all other tribes, and who had not, so far as he could learn, ever met white men before. He was, therefore, astounded to find them in possession of iron implements. These consisted of rudely made knives, the cutting edges of which were fashioned out of very hard iron; harpoons and spears, tipped with iron points. Questioning the natives as to how they had become possessed of the iron, they explained that it had been obtained from what they termed the "iron mountain" on the coast near the bay. Ross sought for the mountain, and tried to induce the Eskimo to tell him exactly where it was situated, but failed in each case. He secured some of the iron knives and spear heads, and, on his return to Great Britain, the articles were submitted to analysis, when the metal was found to contain a percentage of nickel mixed with the iron.
Considerable curiosity was excited over the matter, and every succeeding British exploration party proceeding to the Arctic kept a sharp lookout for any trace of iron in the possession of Eskimo which could not have been obtained from whalers or visiting ships, as well as making every inquiry in order to ascertain where the mysterious iron mountain was situated. In no instance were they successful, and the question where the Cape York Eskimo had obtained their supply of iron became one of the riddles of the North.
When Peary went to the neighbourhood of Cape York to establish the station from whence he started on his brilliant march across the ice-cap, he came closely in contact with the tribe of Eskimo living there. The members of this tribe, isolated from the world and out of communication with all their kindred tribes, were, he felt assured, the descendants of those with whom Ross was associated earlier in the century. In his successive visits to the place Peary became on very friendly terms with the people, and gained their confidence in a way that no other explorer had yet done. This is hardly to be wondered at, when it is remembered that his presence among them, from time to time, raised them from the stress of hardship and poverty, often starvation itself, into a happy, well-to-do, and, for an Eskimo tribe, prosperous community. When he first went among them, the man who owned a wooden shaft for his harpoon was regarded as a rich man, while the woman who had a steel sail-needle was an heiress for whose hand the bravest and best strove in fierce rivalry. The possession of a gun was beyond the wildest dreams of the most imaginative, just as the possession of a steel knife was the highest glory to which ambition aspired. When Peary left his encampment, at the end of his first visit, the timber of the house and fittings left behind alone made the tribe wealthy, for they believed the world must have been ransacked to bring so much wood together; while the distribution of needles, knives, scissors, and such like trifles, changed the whole status of the people and made them rich beyond their fondest hopes.
On the next visit, Peary took some guns and ammunition for the leading men of the tribe, and there was then nothing they were not prepared to do for their benefactor. They worked, hunted, acted as guides, porters—anything, in fact, the white men wanted them to do. It was at this time Peary sought for information about the mysterious iron mountain, and, as may be expected, got it.
First he was told the story of the origin of the iron, a story they had had from their fathers, as those fathers, in their turn, had had it from theirs. The iron lay across the bay where a high peak stood out against the sky, pointing the way to the Saviksoahs. These—the "Iron Ones"—rested on the mountain where they had fallen, ages and ages ago, when they were thrown out of their village in the sky by Tornarsuk, the enemy. There were three of them, a man, a woman, and a dog. The man was deep in the ground, the woman partly so, and the dog lay on the surface. As the woman fell, she sat up, and her head had first been seen. A strange tribe came over the ice one year and, in greed, broke off the head and sought to carry it away with them in their kayaks, so that they should have a store of the iron always with them. But Tornarsuk would not allow this to be, and as soon as the kayaks, lashed together to make them strong enough to carry the head, were out in deep water, the head plunged through them, sinking out of sight and smashing the kayaks so that the men who were in them barely escaped with their lives. After that no one tried to take away a larger supply of iron than they actually wanted for knives and harpoon tips. Later, when whaler and other ships came to the seas in the summer time, there was no need to go to the Saviksoahs for iron, though all the tribes knew where they were.
In the spring of 1894 Peary induced one of the tribe to lead him to the place where the Saviksoahs were. The journey led them to a hill, on the summit of which there was an overhanging mass of rock which justified the Eskimo description of it. Describing the discovery, Peary wrote: "After passing some five hundred yards up a narrow valley, Tallakotteah began looking about until a bit of blue trap-rock, projecting above the snow, caught his eyes. Kicking aside the snow, he exposed more pieces, saying this was a pile of the stones used in pounding fragments from the iron mountain. He then indicated a spot four or five feet distant, as the location of the long-sought object. Returning to the sledge for the saw-knife, he began excavating the snow, and at last, after digging a pit, some three feet deep and five feet in diameter, just at 5.30 Sunday morning, May 27, 1894, the brown mass, rudely awakened from its winter sleep, found, for the first time in its cycles of existence, the eyes of a white man gazing upon it."
