Thus they marched for a month; party after party had been sent back, till the last supporting party had gone and Peary was left with his black servant, Henson, and four Eskimos. He had five sledges, forty picked dogs, and supplies for forty days when he started off alone to dash the last hundred and thirty-three miles to the Pole itself. Every event in the next week is of thrilling interest. After a few hours of sleep the little party started off shortly after midnight on 2nd April 1909. Peary was leading.
"I felt the keenest exhilaration as I climbed over the ridge and breasted the keen air sweeping over the mighty ice, pure and straight from the Pole itself."
They might yet be stopped by open water from reaching the goal. On they went, twenty-five miles in ten hours, then a little sleep, and so on again, then a few hours' rest and another twenty miles till they had reached latitude 89 degrees.
Still breathlessly they hurried forward, till on the 5th they were but thirty-five miles from the Pole.
"The sky overhead was a colourless pall, gradually deepening to almost black at the horizon, and the ice was a ghastly and chalky white."
On 6th April the Pole was reached.
"The Pole at last!" writes Peary in his diary. "The prize of three centuries! My dream and goal for twenty years. Mine at last! I cannot bring myself to realise it. It all seems so simple and commonplace."
Flags were at once hoisted on ice lances, and the successful explorer watched them proudly waving in the bright Arctic sunlight at the Pole. Through all his perilous expeditions to the Arctic regions, Peary had worn a silken flag, worked by his wife, wrapped round his body. He now flew it on this historic spot, "which knows no North, nor West, nor East."
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PEARY'S FLAG FLYING AT THE NORTH POLE, APRIL 1909. By the courteous permission of Admiral Peary, from his book The North Pole, published by Messrs. Hodder & Stoughton. |