Passing the Duck Islands on the upward voyage, approaching Cape York in 1908, and thinking of the graves there, I little dreamed that a loved member of my own party, Professor Ross G. Marvin, who ate at my table and acted as my secretary, was fated to add his name to this long list of arctic victims, and that his grave, in uncounted fathoms of black water, was to be the most northerly grave on this earth.
We reached Cape York on the first day of August. Cape York is the bold, bluff headland which marks the southern point of the stretch of arctic coast inhabited by my Eskimos, the most northerly human beings in the world. It is the headland whose snowy cap I have seen so many times rising in the distance above the horizon line of Melville Bay as my ships have steamed north. At the base of the headland nestles the most southerly of all the Eskimo villages, and it has marked the point of meeting, year after year, between the members of this tribe and myself.
At Cape York we were on the threshold of the actual work. I had on board the ship when I arrived there all the equipment and assistance which the civilized world could yield. Beginning there, I was to take on the tools, the material, the personnel, that the arctic regions themselves were to furnish for their own conquest. Cape York, or Melville Bay, is the dividing line between the civilized world on the one side and the arctic world on the other—the arctic world with its equipment of Eskimos, dogs, walrus, seal, fur clothing, and aboriginal experience.
Behind me lay the civilized world, which was now absolutely useless, and which could give me nothing more. Ahead of me lay that trackless waste through which I must literally cut my way to the goal. Even the ship's journey from Cape York to winter quarters on the north coast of Grant Land is not "plain sailing"; in fact, it is not sailing at all during the later stages; it is jamming and butting and dodging and hammering the ice, with always the possibility that the antagonist will hit back a body blow. It is like the work of a skilled heavy-weight pugilist, or the work of an old Roman fighter with the cestus.
| BRANT-GOOSE | SABINE'S GULL |
RED-THROATED DIVER, MALE AND FEMALE | KING EIDER, DRAKE |
Beyond Melville Bay the world, or what we know as the world, is left behind. On leaving Cape York, we had exchanged the multifarious purposes of civilization for the two purposes for which there is room in those wide wastes: food for man and dog, and the covering of miles of distance.
Behind me now lay everything that was mine, everything that a man personally loves, family, friends, home, and all those human associations which linked me with my kind. Ahead of me lay—my dream, the goal of that irresistible impulse which had driven me for twenty-three years to measure myself, time after time, against the frigid No of the Great North.
Should I succeed? Should I return? Success in the attainment of 90° North would not inevitably carry with it the safe return. We had learned that on recrossing the "big lead" in 1906. In the Arctic the chances are always against the explorer. The inscrutable guardians of the secret appear to have a well-nigh inexhaustible reserve of trump cards to play against the intruder who insists upon dropping into the game. The life is a dog's life, but the work is a man's work.
As we steamed northward from Cape York, on the first day of August, 1908, I felt that I was now in truth face to face with the final struggle. Everything in my life appeared to have led up to this day. All my years of work and all my former expeditions were merely preparations for this last and supreme effort. It has been said that well-directed labor toward a given end is an excellent kind of prayer for its attainment. If that be so, then prayer has been my portion for many years. Through all the seasons of disappointment and defeat I had never ceased to believe that the great white mystery of the North must eventually succumb to the insistence of human experience and will, and, standing there with my back to the world and my face toward that mystery, I believed that I should win in spite of all the powers of darkness and of desolation.