After preparing lunch of corn-meal mush and tea, we started for the ascent.
From the summit 2,000 feet above the sea-level and of a more truly Alpine character than any that I have seen in northern Greenland, or Grant Land, the view was more than interesting. East lay the wide white zone of the ice-foot; west the unbroken surface of Nansen’s Strait, and beyond it the northern part of that western land which I saw from the heights of the Ellesmere Land ice-cap in July, 1898, and named Jesup Land, though Sverdrup has later given it the name of Heiberger Land. South, over and beyond some intervening mountains and valleys, lay the southern reaches of Nansen’s Strait. North stretched the well-known ragged surface of the polar pack, and northwest it was with a thrill that my glasses revealed the faint white summits of a distant land which my Eskimos claimed to have seen as we came along from the last camp.
From this point I followed the western shore of Grant Land south until it began to trend eastward, hoping to find Sverdrup’s cairn and record, but without success, though we all searched the shore carefully.
I then headed directly across the strait to the northern extremity of the western land. The ice in the Strait was to all appearance a continuation of that forming the glacial fringe of the Grant Land coast.
Again I quote from my Journal:
June 28th.—Two red-letter days which have seen the realisation of another of the objects of this present trip, i. e., the attainment of the northern point of Jesup Land.
With my feeling of satisfaction is a feeling of sadness and regret that this may be the end of my Arctic work. From now on may simply be putting in shape what I have already done. Twenty years last month since I began, and yet I have missed the prize.
Oh, for the untiring energy and elasticity of twenty years ago with the experience of to-day.
It seems as if I deserved to win this time.
The fog which all day of the 26th hid Jesup Land, dissipated before we got under way and showed the entire coast clearly.