Before us stretched new lands and waters, to which, with the explorer’s prerogative, I gave names, as follows: the bay at our feet, opening into the Arctic Ocean half-way between the 81st and 82d parallels of latitude, was named Independence Bay in honor of the day, July 4th; the red-brown land beyond the fjord which had stopped our forward northward progress was called Heilprin Land; and a still more distant land beyond the entrance of a second fjord, Melville Land. The enormous glacier at our right, flowing due north into Independence Bay, received the name of Academy Glacier, and the bold rugged land beyond it, Daly Land.
It was almost impossible for us to believe that we were standing upon the northern shore of Greenland as we gazed from the summit of this bronze cliff, with the most brilliant sunshine all about us, with yellow poppies growing between the rocks around our feet, and a herd of musk-oxen in the valley behind us. Two of these animals we had killed, and their bodies were now awaiting our return for a grand feast of fresh meat. Down in that same valley I had found an old friend, a dandelion in bloom, and had seen the bullet-like flight and heard the energetic buzz of the bumble-bee.
The Academy Glacier.
For seven days we remained in this northern land, more than six hundred miles of pathless icy sea separating us from the nearest human being, and then we began our return march. This return march, much shorter than the upward one, was uneventful and monotonous. For about two weeks we were about a mile and a half above the sea-level, literally in the clouds, and day after day, in every direction, stretched only the steel-blue line of the snow horizon. The snow was soft and light, and without our “ski,” or Norwegian snow-skates, and Indian snow-shoes we should have been almost helpless in it; but at last, after passing the latitude of the Humboldt Glacier, when we were only about a mile above the sea-level, the traveling became better. The slight downgrade assisted us, and for seven days we averaged thirty miles a day, increasing our distance on each successive day, showing that both men and dogs were in perfect training, and, like the scientific athlete, had still the reserve force necessary for a grand spurt on the home stretch.
MAP OF
INDEPENDENCE BAY
EAST COAST OF GREENLAND
July 4th 1892
R. E. Peary, U.S. Navy
Observation Spot on Navy Cliff
Lat. 81° 37′ 5″ N.
Long. 34° 5′ W.
The night of the 5th to the 6th of August was an exquisitely clear and perfect one. From eight to eleven Astrup and myself and our remaining five dogs toiled up the north slope of the largest of the ice-domes between the head of McCormick Bay and the edge of the true interior ice—one to which I had given the name “Dome Mountain.” As I rose over the crest of the great white mass and looked down and forward upon our course, there, some two miles away, upon the slope of the next dome, were two or three dark, irregular objects. Even as I looked at them they moved and separated, until I could count several detached bodies. They could be but one thing—men; and as there were so many of them, and as I was sure that none of the Eskimos could have been persuaded by my boys to set foot upon the inland ice, I knew in an instant that some ship was lying in the bay waiting for us. It was but a little while later, both parties descending rapidly toward each other, that we met in the depression between the two domes, and I grasped again the hand of Professor Heilprin, who had been the last to say good-by to me a year before, as I lay a cripple in my tent, and who now had come again to meet me and bring us back. It was a strange and never-to-be-forgotten meeting. In the ship lying at anchor at the very head of the bay I found the woman who had been waiting for me for three months, and two days later we were back again in the little house which had sheltered us through a year of Arctic vicissitudes.
Such, in brief, is the outline of the inland-ice journey from McCormick Bay to the northern shore of Greenland and back. Its important results are already well known, and it is not necessary to revert to them here. I will attempt, however, to give some adequate impression of the unique surroundings in which our work was done, and also to make clear the real character of this great interior ice-plateau, a natural feature so entirely different from any with which we are acquainted in better known portions of the globe that I have sometimes found it difficult to convey, even to the most cultivated minds, a really adequate conception of what the great ice-cap is like.
The terms “inland ice” and “great interior frozen sea,” two of the more common names by which the region traversed by us is generally known, both suggest to the majority of people erroneous ideas. In the first place, the surface is not ice, but merely a compacted snow. The term “sea” is also a misnomer in so far as it suggests the idea of a sometime expanse of water subsequently frozen over. The only justification for the term is the unbroken and apparently infinite horizon which bounds the vision of the traveler upon its surface. Elevated as the entire region is to a height of from 4000 to 9000 feet above the sea-level, the towering mountains of the coast, which would be visible to the sailor at a distance of sixty to eighty miles, disappear beneath the landward convexity of the ice-cap by the time the traveler has penetrated fifteen or twenty miles into the interior, and then he may travel for days and weeks with no break whatever in the continuity of the sharp, steel-blue line of the horizon.