Before the sun began to show above the southern horizon again, Papa Peary started off on another twelve-hundred mile ice journey. This time he took with him eight men, twelve sledges, and ninety-two Eskimo dogs. But some of the dogs were strangers to the rest, and those from different places fought one another. As it is hard enough to separate only two fighting dogs, it was impossible to stop the wholesale dog-fight that went on constantly and kept the party from going forward. The cold became even more intense; the temperature went down to sixty degrees below zero. Conditions were so much worse than on the previous trip that Peary decided to cache all the provisions and other things they did not need to preserve life, and returned to the place where he had left his wife and baby. The feet of the men, even of the Eskimos of the party, were badly frozen, and when they returned to their base of supplies, out of the ninety-two dogs, there were only twenty-six left.
But the heroic explorer would not give up. He and his little family stayed north of the Arctic Circle while he made discoveries and proved the truth of the statements of those who had been there before him. Little Snowbaby also made her observations. She saw Eskimo children living in their small round hives of ice, and heard them teasing their mothers for whale blubber and other kinds of grease, just as the children at home plead for candy or ice-cream. An Eskimo child likes a tallow candle much better than a stick of candy, and will chew the cotton candle-wick until there is no more grease left in it.
Lieutenant Peary made eight trips to the Arctic regions. Sometimes he would advance farther north than any explorer before him; then, when he was almost within reach of the Pole, everything would fail and he would have to retreat and go back thousands of miles to the United States and begin to raise a fortune for the next attempt. At one time his ship, on the way to the north, would be caught in the ice and crushed like an egg-shell. On another occasion the boat would be frozen up in miles and miles of ice, so that he and his men would have to wait for spring to come and thaw it out of the clutches of the terrible white giant, Jack Frost.
It needed the patience of Job to endure and overcome the trials which came thick and fast upon him. One summer the wealthy friend died who had promised him all the money he needed to reach the Pole; but a newspaper owner in London, England, offered his yacht, the Windward, for the next polar trip. This time the great Arctic explorer froze both his feet and had to have eight toes cut off. The cold was awful—from fifty-one to sixty-three degrees below zero. After many weeks of acute suffering, he was removed to a less severe climate.
In 1902, for the seventh time, Peary came within a few degrees of the Pole, and finding that he could not go farther, was forced to return to the United States. In the first gloom of this defeat he wrote:
“The game is off. My dream of sixteen years is ended. I have made the best fight I knew. I believe it has been a good one. But I cannot do the impossible.”
But this hopeless state of mind did not last long. Peary spent six more years in preparing for one last desperate attempt. On the sixth of July, 1908, he left New York City for his eighth voyage to the Arctic, on his latest ship, the Roosevelt—determined to reach the Pole or die in the attempt. This time, when he came within a few degrees of his goal, he decided to leave all behind but the faithful Matthew and one Eskimo, while he made the last dash. When he came within a few miles of the spot he had sought for nearly twenty years, he was prostrated by overwork and excitement. After a short rest he went on and stood, on the sixth of April, 1909, in the place called the North Pole. There was nothing to see—not a living thing but themselves and their dogs. But he was now on the top of the world. There was no North, no East, no West—only South. The only North he could see was up in the cold, gray sky. Directly overhead was the North Star, toward which the Pole points.
Peary stayed in that desolate neighborhood thirty hours, taking observations and “planting” five United States flags to show to future comers that America had been first to discover and take possession of the North Pole. One flag he mounted on a pole which he set in the top of a hummock of ice, as if the North Pole were a flag pole standing up out of the surface of the earth. This was called “nailing the American flag to the North Pole.” Then he wrote this postal card to mail to his wife:
“90 North Latitude, April 7th, 1909.
“My Dear Jo:—I have won out at last. Have been here a day. I start for home and you in an hour. Love to the kidsies.