Round About the North Pole

by W. J. Gordon

As it was then the 22nd of June, 1884, and they had had only forty days' complete rations to live upon, Schley hurried off at once. Had he been two days later he would have been too late. There was a tent wrecked by the gale, with its pole toppling over and only kept in place by the guy ropes. Ripping it up with a knife, a sight of horror was disclosed. On one side, close to the opening, with his head towards the outside, lay what was apparently a dead man. On the opposite side was a poor fellow, alive but without hands or feet, and with a spoon tied to the stump of his right arm. Two others, seated on the ground, were pouring something out of a rubber bottle into a tin can. Directly opposite, on his hands and knees, was a dark man with a long matted beard, in a dirty and tattered dressing-gown with a little red skull cap on his head, and brilliant staring eyes. As Colwell appeared, he raised himself a little, and put on a pair of eyeglasses.

"Who are you?" asked Colwell.

The man made no answer, staring at him vacantly.

"Who are you?" again.

One of the men spoke up. "That's the Major—Major Greely."

Colwell crawled in and took him by the hand, saying to him, "Greely, is this you?"

"Yes," said Greely in a faint, broken voice, hesitating with his words; "yes—seven of us left—here we are—dying—like men. Did what I came to do—beat the best record."

Near at hand were ten graves. The bodies, despite Greely's remonstrances, were taken up and removed for burial in the United States. "Little could be seen of the condition of the bodies, as they had been clothed, and all that appeared was intact. In preparing them subsequently," says Schley, "it was found that six had been cut and the flesh removed." One of these, that of a cavalryman serving under the assumed name of Henry, had a bullet in it. He had been shot, at Greely's written order, "for stealing sealskin thongs, the only remaining food."

The next to add to our knowledge of the northern coast of Greenland was Robert E. Peary, of the American Navy, who seems to have devoted his life to Arctic exploration. On his first expedition in 1886, he penetrated with Maigaard for some distance into the country in the neighbourhood of Jakobshavn as a sort of pioneering venture. In 1891, accompanied by his wife, when outward bound in the Kite in the Melville Bay pack, he had his leg broken. The ship had been butting a passage through the spongy sheets of ice which had imprisoned her, when in going astern a detached cake struck the rudder, jamming the tiller against the wheel-house where Peary was standing, and pinned his leg long enough to snap it between the knee and the ankle. In spite of this he insisted on being landed with the rest of the party at McCormick Bay, a little to the north of Whale Sound, where a house was built and the winter spent.

Making a good recovery, he set off in May to sledge across North Greenland through snow and over it, and over snow-arched crevasses, often, in cloudy weather, travelling in grey space with nothing visible beyond a foot or two around him. After fifty-seven days' journey to the north-east and along Peary Channel, the northern boundary of the mainland, he left the inland ice for a strange country dotted with snowdrifts and mostly of red sandstone, in which murmuring streams, roaring waterfalls, and the song of snow-buntings formed an agreeable change from the silence of the desert of snow. Four days' hard labouring through this brought him on the 4th of July to Independence Bay on the north-east coast, where from Navy Cliff, nearly four thousand feet high, he looked across to Academy Land on the other side of the bay and beyond it over the region leading down to the farthest north of the Duke of Orleans. "It was almost impossible," he says, "to believe that we were standing upon the northern shore of Greenland as we gazed from the summit of this bronze cliff, with the most brilliant sunshine all about us, with yellow poppies growing between the rocks around our feet, and a herd of muskoxen in the valley behind us. Down in that valley I had found an old friend, a dandelion in bloom, and had seen the bullet-like flight and heard the energetic buzz of the humble-bee."