So it was not until he was thirty years old that Robert E. Peary was able to realize the dream of his boyhood and explore the bleak and frozen plains even beyond “Greenland’s icy mountains.” Five years later he started out to go farther north than any white man had even been. His first attempt to reach the Pole was in 1891, when he took with him his young wife. This was the first time a white woman ever had made the journey into the unknown regions of the “Great White North.” With the Pearys in this dangerous undertaking went Dr. Frederick A. Cook, a surgeon, and Matthew Henson, the Pearys’ colored helper. On board the Kite—the special ship for this journey—the leader’s leg was broken by the sudden slipping of the rudder. This accident kept them from advancing farther north that fall. Through the constant care of his wife, the faithful Matthew, and Dr. Cook, Lieutenant Peary was restored to health and strength by the following spring.
Peary knew how to make the best of everything. The half year he was laid up by this accident was that of the Arctic night. For six months in the year—spring and summer—the sun in the Arctic regions can be seen moving in a complete circle up in the sky. In other parts of the world, what is called the sunset is just the turning away of one side of the earth from the sun; and sunrise is the whirling round of that side into the sunlight again. What is called night is the time when the sun is shining on the other side of the earth. But the sun moves north in spring and summer; so that during those seasons in the Arctic region it never sets, and there is daylight all the time. In the fall and winter the sun moves south, and then in the Arctic region it never rises. So there is night for six months.
While nursing his broken leg during this Arctic night, Lieutenant Peary was by no means idle. He sent the Kite thousands of miles back to the United States. He made friends with the Eskimos, his little fat, red-faced northern neighbors who lived in igloos, as they called their small dome-shaped houses built of blocks of ice. He learned all he could of their language and their ways. He found out how to hunt the reindeer, the musk-ox, and other big game of the north, and studied and trained the Eskimo dogs, which would draw his sledges the thousands of miles he must yet go to reach the Pole. At last, when his leg was entirely well, it was early spring, when the sun could be seen rising, shining a little while in the middle of the day, and setting just above the frozen plains and icebergs to the south of them.
In May, when the sun was circling a little higher in the sky for several hours every day, Peary and a small party harnessed sixteen dogs to four sledges and started off on a camping trip towards the Farthest North. With one companion who was used to the life in cold northern countries, he climbed a mountain of ice nearly a mile high. These two heroes kept on alone, across bleak regions broken up by ice-cracks, called crevasses, hundreds of feet deep, over slippery hummocks or ice-mounds, through deep snowdrifts and fogs, in constant danger of precipices and pitfalls. On the Fourth of July, they reached a body of water which they named for the day, Independence Bay. Here they climbed an icy height which they called Navy Cliff. From here they beheld a splendid expanse of clear country stretching still farther away toward the north.
It was now the Arctic midsummer. They were surprised to find flowers blooming in sheltered nooks and to hear the hum of bees and flies. There were birds also—snow-bunting and sandpiper—flitting and flying about. On the little patches of bright green that showed through the snows of ages, musk-oxen—which look like both sheep and buffalo—were grazing. Peary shot five of these to supply meat for men and dogs on the return journey of five hundred miles or more.
The way back was beset with even greater dangers than before. While they were on their way north they had known that the shifting and breaking up of fields of ice might cut them off forever from their friends and supplies. So every few hundred miles they had “cached,” or buried, tools and provisions, and marked the places so that they could find them again when a little food might save them from starving. In spite of such precautions, many exploring parties found only hardship, starvation, and death in the cruel ice. But Peary and his party succeeded in making their return to the Inland Ice fields, the region of young Peary’s boyish dreams, through violent wind-storms, drifting snows, and freezing fogs. Even the hardy little Arctic dogs were half famished and worn out. Finding the Kite, with other explorers, waiting for them there, the Peary party sailed down to the United States, meeting mountain-like icebergs, and shooting walruses and polar bears by the way.
Lieutenant Peary at once went to work preparing for a second attempt at the discovery of the North Pole. Mrs. Peary again accompanied her husband into the Arctic regions, and the twelfth of September, 1893, the first white baby ever seen in that far northern country was born. This was the Pearys’ little blue-eyed daughter, “bundled deep in soft, warm Arctic furs, and wrapped in the Stars and Stripes.” During the first half year of her life, Marie Snowbaby Peary—as they named her—never saw the sunlight.