There was a magnificent funeral in Westminster Abbey, where the great missionary and explorer was buried beside the sacred ashes of kings, queens, princes, and statesmen. Thus he received the highest honors England can bestow upon her most illustrious dead. On the black marble slab which marks David Livingstone’s final resting place are the last words he is known to have written. They are about the cruel slave trade:
“All I can say in my solitude is, may Heaven’s rich blessing come down on every one—American, English, Turk—who will help to heal this open sore of the world.”
PEARY, A HERO OF THE GREAT WHITE NORTH
FOR hundreds of years after Columbus, explorers sought the Northwest Passage through the frozen seas of North America. It was not until 1853 that such a channel was actually traced. Even then it was so filled with ice that no sailor, however brave and skilful, could make his way through. Long ago the search for the Northwest Passage gave place to the great desire and purpose to reach the North Pole.
Of course, there is no pole standing out of the northern half of the world. The axis, or axle, of the earth is only an unseen line which scientists have thought of as if it ran straight through the center of the earth. The place in the middle of the top of the globe where this line, if there were one, would come out, is named the North Pole, and the same place at the opposite end is called the South Pole.
It is easy to see how many boys could have a great longing to run away to sea and seek their fortunes in foreign lands; but it is hard to understand why any young man should wish to undertake the awful hardships of bitter cold and blizzards, with the risk of falling down ice-cracks hundreds of feet deep, and of starving or freezing to death, in trying to get to the Pole, especially when there is nothing but snow and ice to see there if he ever could find the place.
Yet, in his youth, Robert E. Peary had a strange desire to visit the Inland Ice region of Greenland. Robert was a Pennsylvania lad whose father had died when he was three. He grew up to care for his widowed mother. He went to an eastern college and was graduated second in a class of fifty-one. Then he passed the rigid tests for Engineer in the United States Navy. Like young Robert E. Lee, Robert E. Peary was first assigned to engineering duty on the eastern coast, in Florida. Then he was sent as one of a number of experts in science to survey a route through Nicaragua, as many people believed that a ship canal should run through Nicaragua rather than across the narrow isthmus where the Panama Canal was dug afterward.