He is typically American, tall, lean, wiry, muscular, keen-eyed, alert, positive, and possessed of that indomitable will which conquers or dies. Born in Cresson, Pennsylvania, May 6, 1856, he had early the misfortune to lose his father, and his widowed mother, with her boy of three, returned to her relatives and friends in New England and made her home in Portland, Maine. Here Peary, the lad, grew up, fond of the sea and the woods, loving the wild roar of the ocean as it beat upon the rocky coast, or the gentle summer winds whispering amid the northern pines.
He loved to roam, to explore, to find adventure, and to lead others to it, and in his schoolboy days he was noted for his athletic tastes and powers of endurance. At twenty-one years of age he completed his college life at Bowdoin, graduating second in a class of fifty-one, and four years later had passed the examinations which made him Civil Engineer in the United States Navy. From duty in Florida he was transferred to the Nicaragua Canal zone, where he remained engaged in the Interocean Ship-canal Survey from 1884 to 1885.
He returned under government orders to Washington in the fall of that year, and during a leisure hour, in an old book-store, he accidentally came upon a paper on the Inland Ice of Greenland. Remembering the adventures of Dr. Kane which had thrilled him as a boy, and reading the experiences of Nordenskjöld, Jensen, and the rest, Peary felt he must know for himself what was the truth of this great mysterious interior.
Thus early had the seed of ambition to explore the land of the mysterious north germinated in his active mind.
The “Roosevelt” drying her Sails
Courtesy of F. A. Stokes Company
FIRST VISIT TO THE ARCTIC
The following year he received permission from the Department for leave of absence to make a reconnoissance of the Greenland ice-cap, east of Disco Bay, 70° north latitude.
Accompanied by Christian Maigaard, a Dane, and eight natives, Peary examined the coast and fiords, penetrated the inland ice, and visited among other interesting spots the Tossukatek Glacier, the base of Noursoak Peninsula, and the fossil beds of Atanekerdluk. “Here,” he says, “I found fragments of trees, black petrifactions with the grain of the wood and the texture of the bark showing clearly. Pieces of sandstone split readily into sheets, between which were to be seen sharp, clear impressions of large net-veined leaves, every tiniest veinlet and minute serratum of the edges distinct as the lines of a steel engraving; long, slender, parallel-veined leaves and exquisite feathery forms.”