The attempt to reach that point began in the reign of Henry VIII of England, when Master John Davis sailed up the Greenland coast to a big cliff which he named after his becker, Sanderson’s Hope. The cliff is sheer from the sea three thousand four hundred feet high, with one sharp streak of ice from base to summit. It towers above Upernivik, the most northerly village in the world, and is one thousand one hundred twenty-eight miles from the Pole.
In 1594 Barentz carried the Dutch flag a little farther north but soon Hudson gave the lead back to Great Britain, and after that, for two hundred seventy-six years the British flag unchallenged went on from victory to victory in the conquest of the North. At last in 1882 Lieutenant Greely of the United States Army beat us by four miles at a cost of nearly his whole expedition, which was destroyed by famine. Soon Doctor Nansen broke the American record for Norway, to be beaten in turn by an Italian prince, the Duke d’Abruzzi. But meanwhile Peary, an American naval officer, had commenced his wonderful course of twenty-three years’ special training; and in 1906 he broke the Italian record. His way was afoot with dog-trains across the ice of the Polar sea, and he would have reached the North Pole, but for wide lanes of open sea, completely barring the way. At two hundred twenty-seven miles from the Pole he was forced to retreat, and camp very near to death before he won back to his base camp.
Peary’s ship was American to the last detail of needles and thread, but the vessel was his own invention, built for ramming ice-pack. The ship’s officers and crew were all Newfoundlanders, trained from boyhood in the seal fishery of the Labrador ice-pack. They were, alas! British, but that could not be helped. To make amends the exploring officers were Americans, but they were specially trained by Peary to live and travel as Eskimos, using the native dress, the dog-trains and the snow houses.
Other explorers had done the same, but Peary went further, for he hired the most northerly of the Eskimo tribes, and from year to year educated the pick of the boys, who grew up to regard him as a father, to obey his orders exactly, and to adopt his improvements on their native methods. So he had hunting parties to store up vast supplies of meat, and skins of musk-ox, ice-bear, reindeer, fox, seal and walrus, each for some special need in the way of clothing. He had women to make the clothes. He had two hundred fifty huskie dogs, sleds of his own device, and Eskimo working parties under his white officers. In twenty-three years he found out how to boil tea in ten minutes, and that one detail saved ninety minutes a day for actual marching—a margin in case of accident. Add to all that Peary’s own enormous strength of mind and body, in perfect training, just at the prime of life. He was so hardened by disaster that he had become almost a maniac, with one idea, one motive in life, one hope—that of reaching the Pole. Long hours before anything went wrong an instinct would awaken him out of the soundest sleep to look out for trouble and avert calamity.
A glance at the map will show how Greenland, and the islands north of Canada, reach to within four hundred miles of the Pole. Between is a channel leading from Baffin’s Bay into the Arctic Ocean. The Roosevelt, Peary’s ship, forced a passage through that channel, then turned to the left, creeping and dodging between the ice-field and the coast of Grant Land. Captain Bartlett was in the crow’s-nest, piloting, and Peary, close below him, clung to the standing rigging while the ship butted and charged and hammered through the floes. Bartlett would coax and wheedle, or shout at the ship to encourage her, “Rip ’em, Teddy! Bite ’em in two! Go it! That’s fine, my beauty! Now again! Once more!”
Who knows? In the hands of a great seaman like Bartlett a ship seems to be a living creature, and no matter what slued the Roosevelt she had a furious habit of her own, coming to rest with her nose to the north for all the world like a compass. Her way was finally blocked just seventy-five miles short of the most northerly headland, Cape Columbia, and the stores had to be carried there for the advanced base. The winter was spent in preparation, and on March first began the dash for the Pole.
No party with dog-trains could possibly carry provisions for a return journey of eight hundred miles. If there had been islands on the route it would have been the right thing to use them as advanced bases for a final rush to the Pole. But there were no islands, and it would be too risky to leave stores upon the shifting ice-pack. There was, therefore, but one scheme possible. Doctor Goodsell marched from the coast to Camp A, unloaded his stores and returned. Using the stores at Camp A, Mr. Borup was able to march to Camp B, where he unloaded and turned back. With the stores at Camp B, Professor Marvin marched to Camp C and turned back. With the stores at Camp C, Captain Bartlett marched to Camp D and turned back. With the stores at Camp D, Peary had his sleds fully loaded, with a selection, besides, of the fittest men and dogs for the last lap of the journey, and above all not too many mouths to feed.
It was a clever scheme, and in theory the officers, turned back with their Eskimo parties, were needed to pilot them to the coast. All the natives got back safely, but Professor Marvin was drowned. If Peary had not sent all his officers back, would he have been playing the game in leaving his Eskimo parties without navigating officers to guide them in the event of a storm? There is no doubt that his conduct was that of a wise and honorable man. But the feeling remains—was it sportsman-like to send Captain Bartlett back—the one man who had done most for his success, denied any share in the great final triumph? Bartlett made no complaint, and in his cheery acceptance of the facts cut a better figure than even Commander Peary.
With his negro servant and four Eskimos, the leader set forth on the last one hundred thirty-three miles across the ice. It was not plain level ice like that of a pond, but heaved into sharp hills caused by the pressure, with broken cliffs and labyrinthine reefs. The whole pack was drifting southward before the wind, here breaking into mile-wide lanes of black and foggy sea, there newly frozen and utterly unsafe. Although the sun did not set, the frost was sharp, at times twenty and thirty degrees below zero, while for the most part a cloudy sky made it impossible to take observations. Here great good fortune awaited Peary, for as he neared the Pole, the sky cleared, giving him brilliant sunlight. By observing the sun at frequent intervals he was able to reckon with his instruments until at last he found himself within five miles of ninety degrees north—the Pole. A ten-mile tramp proved he had passed the apex of the earth, and five miles back he made the final tests. Somewhere within a mile of where he stood was the exact point, the north end of the axis on which the earth revolves. As nearly as he could reckon, the very point was marked for that moment upon the drifting ice-field by a berg-like hill of ice, and on this summit he hoisted the flag, a gift from his wife which he had carried for fifteen years, a tattered silken remnant of Old Glory.
“Perhaps,” he writes, “it ought not to have been so, but when I knew for a certainty that I had reached the goal, there was not a thing in the world I wanted but sleep. But after I had a few hours of it, there succeeded a condition of mental exaltation which made further rest impossible. For more than a score of years that point on the earth’s surface had been the object of my every effort. To obtain it my whole being, physical, mental and moral, had been dedicated. The determination to reach the Pole had become so much a part of my being that, strange as it may seem, I long ago ceased to think of myself save as an instrument for the attainment of that end.... But now I had at last succeeded in planting the flag of my country at the goal of the world’s desire. It is not easy to write about such a thing, but I knew that we were going back to civilization with the last of the great adventure stories—a story the world had been waiting to hear for nearly four hundred years, a story which was to be told at last under the folds of the Stars and Stripes, the flag that during a lonely and isolated life had come to be for me the symbol of home and everything I loved—and might never see again.”