Secrets of Polar Travel

by Robert E. Peary

The Erie Railroad caboose mentioned above, which was used as a deck-house on the Windward during the winter of 1898–99, served also a second season at Etah. In the summer of 1899, after the Windward broke out of the ice at Cape D’Urville, she returned to Etah, and here I had the caboose hoisted over the side, floated ashore, and hauled up to a place which I had selected. From one end of this a long workroom was built with the boxes of provisions, and roofed over with a sail. The Eskimos of my immediate party constructed their winter houses with entrances leading into this common workroom, and the whole group was then buried deep in snow, forming an entirely comfortable habitation for the entire party.

Another experience was at Payer Harbor. When the remodeled Windward went north in 1901 she had a commodious and well-built deck-house forward that had been constructed for quarters for her officers. On my decision to remain north another year, remembering my experience at Etah, I decided to save my party the valuable time and labor incident to constructing winter quarters by utilizing this deck-house. Captain Sam Bartlett and his men lifted it from the deck, lowered it over the side, ran it over the heavy harbor ice on timber shoes, and with tackles and falls hauled it up the rocks to the place that I had selected for it.

Here, after the ship had left, we banked it in completely as high as the bottom of the portholes with loose dry gravel, which is abundant at Payer Harbor, and when the snow came, covered it completely, roof and all, with an armor of two-foot-thick snow-blocks, carefully laid and cemented together by throwing water on the joints. A double snow igloo, Eskimo style, at the entrance kept out completely the furious winds which howled incessantly past Cape Sabine and Payer Harbor, and we lived here through the winter of 1901–02 in perfect comfort, with a minimum expenditure of fuel.

The third and perhaps most interesting experience was at Fort Conger, the headquarters of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition. Returning here in June, 1900, from my long sledge-journey round the northern end of Greenland, in which I proved the insularity of that island continent, I waited at Fort Conger through the summer on the possibility that an auxiliary ship might come north and be able to reach me.

When late in the season it became evident that no ship would arrive, I took up the matter of the winter quarters for my small party, consisting, beside myself, of Henson, the doctor, and several Eskimos. The utilization of the building known as Fort Conger was entirely out of the question. This great barn of a structure, sixty feet long by thirty feet wide, was grotesque in its utter unfitness and unsuitableness for polar winter quarters. With its great size, its light construction, and its high-posted rooms, nine or ten feet from floor to ceiling, it embodied about everything that should not be found in winter quarters.

One possibility would have been to construct in the center of one of the great rooms of this building a small room with material taken from other parts of the house, utilizing the big house simply as a wind-break, and constructing the small apartment in the proper way, with double walls, low ceiling, and tight joints.

After some consideration, however, I gave up this idea, and decided upon three small structures outside of the big house and made partly of material from it. For myself, partly to economize the lumber, partly as a practical experiment, and partly to furnish occupation and amusement for myself, as I still was somewhat incapacitated from taking part in the hunting-trips over the rocks and frozen ground as the result of the accident to my feet the year before, I decided to make for myself a winter den, as perhaps it might be called, from an eight by twelve A tent, which I found among the things at Conger, as a nucleus.

First I made an eight-by-twelve-foot floor of boards resting directly upon a bed of gravel. The idea of air spaces round a polar dwelling as an insulation against the cold is, like many other ideas connected with the polar regions, a pure fallacy. At each corner of this floor I drove a post, sawing it off four feet above the ground, connected the tops of these posts with horizontal joists, boarded up to this joist with odds and ends of old boards, and banked in to the top of this boarding with the surrounding gravel, working in against the boards, as the gravel bank gradually rose, a two-or-three-inch thickness of grass, which grows somewhat abundantly in the neighborhood of Conger.

On top of these joists I erected the tent, putting in a few intermediate rafters on each side of the ridge-pole to prevent the side of the tent from sagging; fitted a small door-frame and door into one end of the tent; and on the sides two window-frames and windows taken from the big house; then covered the tent completely, roof and gable ends, with the straw-filled mattresses taken from the men’s quarters of the big house. A chimney made from a few lengths of vitrified sewer-pipe found in the material at Conger, a stove constructed from a ten-gallon sheet-iron oil tin, one of the cots from the big house, a table, and a chair completed the outfit.

Later, when the snow came, a wall of snow-blocks eighteen inches in thickness was carefully laid, inclosing the entire tent, each course as it was laid being sprinkled with water brought up from the bay, the joints cemented in the same manner, and after all was done, bucketful after bucketful of water dashed over the structure until it was essentially a single block of ice. A low, narrow, covered snow-tunnel entrance, with storm-door at the outer end, gave access to the tent.