Secrets of Polar Travel

by Robert E. Peary

The Eskimo in the igloo shapes a block, pushes it through the opening endwise, reaches out, turns it over, and lowers it into its place, afterward chipping it off with his knife until it fits perfectly tight. At one side of the igloo, at the bottom, an aperture, large enough to permit a man to crawl through, is cut. At the farther end of the igloo the slope is leveled off for a bed platform, and a space in front of it is dug out for standing room and cooking-utensils. All the superfluous snow is then thrown out the door, and the cooking-outfit and sleeping-gear are brought inside. When the party turns in for the night, the entrance is closed by a large cake of snow.

It is doubtful if the North Pole would ever have been discovered with our present means and facilities but for the help of the faithful Eskimos, and it is an absolute certainty that it would still be undiscovered but for the Eskimo dog to furnish traction power for our sledges, thus enabling us to carry supplies where nothing else could carry them. All kinds of methods and devices such as balloons, motor-cars, ponies, trained polar bears, reindeer, etc., have been suggested in connection with the attainment of the pole, but all are unsuitable.

These Whale Sound Eskimos could be of great value in antarctic work, but there are probably not more than four men living who have experience to use them.

The whole animus of the polar regions is against machinery, and those regions are the last places in the world in which to try out or develop an untried device. Even devices which work satisfactorily in temperate regions are more than likely to fall down when called upon to perform under the handicap of polar conditions.

Sooner or later—and usually sooner—any machine will fall down in polar work, and when it does so it is simply a mass of old junk which neither men nor dogs can eat, and which cannot even be burned to cook a pot of tea.

The use of ponies, for which the British have shown a great predilection in antarctic work, is not as efficient or simple as the use of dogs.

Assume that a pony is equivalent in tractive force and weight to a team of ten Eskimo dogs, which is approximately correct. Then as between two expeditions having an equal amount of tractive force and equal weight of motors, one in the form of ponies and the other in the shape of dogs, the former will have ten motors and the other one hundred, and the motors of the former will each weigh ten times as much as the motors of the latter. Every motor that one expedition loses means a loss of ten per cent of its tractive force, while every motor that the other loses means only one per cent loss.

In crossing thin sea ice the concentrated weight of a pony will cause him to break through with almost certainty of loss, while on the same ice the dispersed weight of ten dogs will enable them to cross in complete safety. On the Antarctic Barrier and the great interior snow-cap, in crossing the snow covering of the deadly masked crevasses, a pony will break through and be lost when a team of ten dogs will cross and never know the crevasse existed.

Dogs require no assistance during the march and no care or shelter at the camps, and when it comes to the matter of food, then everything is in favor of the dogs. With dogs as motors, the food for the men and fuel for the motors are the same—pemmican. With ponies it is a different and a bulkier article. When a pony dies, or is no longer needed as a result of the reduced loads, he can be eaten by the men of the party, but is not available as fuel for the other ponies. When a dog is no longer needed, he can be eaten by the party or used for fuel for the other motors, and in this way not an ounce of material is wasted.

With two kinds of food, pemmican and dog meat, at his command, both equally available for dog or man, the leader of an expedition, watching his party with the same care that an engineer watches a running motor, can adjust his food-supply to meet varying conditions and without wastage. He can put his party on reduced rations and keep up the number of his dogs to increase the speed and take all work except that of walking from his men, or he can feed the dogs to each other, and so conserve the amount of pemmican available for the men alone in the latter part of the journey. In this way every ounce of food in the party, whether in tins or “on the hoof,” is utilized, and can be used at the time and in the way that will be most effective. I could dilate at very considerable length on details of this method, but it seems as if its simplicity, efficiency, and flexibility must be self-evident to every reader. A leader who has once tried this method will never handicap himself with any other. With apologies for my assurance in the matter, I may say it is absolutely the only method.