Ray Stannard Baker (writing as Sturgis B. Rand)

McClure’s Magazine/February, 1902

THE other day a letter came out of the white north bringing tidings of bold deeds and new worlds conquered. It was written by Lieutenant Robert E. Peary in a forlorn, snow-banked hut on the shores of a frozen sea within less than 600 miles of the North Pole. Though dated at the close of the dreaded winter-long night of the arctic regions, when most men’s spirits are at the lowest ebb of disheartenment, it bore the unmistakable note of buoyancy—a grim cheerfulness of the kind that, in men of action, rises to challenge every added responsibility and danger. The results of a year’s exploration were chronicled in three short paragraphs. Each reported a feat never before accomplished by man. To quote Mr. Peary himself, these results (of the year 1900) were:

“First. The rounding of the northern limit of the Greenland archipelago, the most northerly known land in the world, probably the most northerly land.

“Second. The highest latitude yet attained in the Western Hemisphere (83 degrees 50 north).

“Third. The determination of the origin of the so-called paleocrystic ice (floe berg).”

The writer continues: ”Considering that I am an old man, have one broken leg and only three toes, and that my starting-point was Etah, I feel that this was doing tolerably well. It seems fitting that this event, the discovery of the insularity of Greenland, characterized by Sir Clements Markham as second in importance only to the attainment of the Pole itself, should fall in the closing year of the century.”

Peary did not win these prizes without working for them. If he is old at forty-five, the years spent within the arctic circle have aged him, for he has lived and worked longer in the far north than any other white man. He was the pioneer who inspired the present wide interest in polar research, his first expedition on the then untrodden ice-cap of Greenland, made more than fifteen years ago (in 1886), having encouraged Nansen to embark on the polar work which has since yielded such important results. Baldwin received his arctic training with Peary, and all the recent expeditions have profited much by his experience and conclusions. Most polar explorers lose their enthusiasm after one campaign. Peary has led four expeditions, and has made seven voyages into arctic seas. Most explorers have been equipped and supported by their governments or by institutions, or newspapers; but Peary, unaided except by his wife, raised nearly all the large funds necessary for his first three expeditions. And he has gone forward in the face of every reverse: a broken leg could not turn him back, nor could the loss of seven toes by freezing, nor the dissensions that nearly caused the failure of one of his expeditions, nor the sinking of one of his ships with all on board, nor a narrow escape from starvation on the Greenland ice-cap—and now, though he has been in the frozen north continuously more than four years, he is determined to crown his life work with the greatest achievement remaining to the explorer. He says in concluding that notable letter of April 4th: “If I do not capture the Pole itself in this spring, campaign, I shall try it again next spring.”

We now know that he failed again in “this spring campaign” (that is, the campaign of 1901). It must have been bitterly disheartening, yet the supply expedition which visited him last summer (1901) found him invincibly determined to “try it again next spring” (1902). This winter (1901-02), Peary is camped beneath the bleak cliffs of Cape Sabine, within a mile of the spot where nearly all the members of Greeley’s expedition of 1881-83 slowly perished by starvation and cold. He is living in a ship’s house taken from the “Windward,” and banked up with snow until it resembles the igloo of an Eskimo. Indeed, he is living among the Eskimos and in the Eskimo way; it is his belief that experience has taught these natives the best methods of dressing, house-building, and traveling in the far north. An important part of his work for years has been the careful study of the life and habits of the Eskimos, so that he now speaks their language perfectly, knows as well as they the difficult art of dog-team driving, throws a harpoon with precision, and is able to subsist, if necessary, on walrus and seal meat. He has with him two men besides the natives; the first, a negro body servant, Matt Henson by name, whose personal devotion to the explorer has carried him through the most trying arctic experiences; the second, Charles Percy, a white cook and campman from Newfoundland. They are now in the full darkness and cold of the winter night, but with the return of the sun in March (1902) Peary will start northward, making his “last dash” for the Pole; his wife has a promise from him that he will not go again. He has established caches of provisions at intervals along the shores of Smith Sound (see map), Kennedy Channel, and Robeson Channel, to Cape Hecla on the shores of Lincoln Sea, less than one degree (sixty-nine miles) south of the “farthest north” made by Lockwood in 1882. At Fort Conger alone, the most northerly house in the world, he has fourteen tons of provisions. He expects to take with him a large number of dogs, a party of Eskimos, and, as a companion, Matt Henson. The Newfoundlander will be left behind to care for the camp. The trip along the coast 300 miles northward to the shore of Lincoln Sea, while difficult, will be merely preparatory. The “dash” will begin at Cape Hecla (see map), about 500 miles from the Pole itself (the distance being a little greater than that from New York to Pittsburg). But it will be over an untrodden waste of shifting ice, with many channels of open water; and while Peary has twice traveled much farther from his base of supplies in the interior of Greenland, he has never met the difficulties which will confront him here. As he advances he will send back his Eskimos from time to time, until he and Matt Henson, with one Eskimo, are alone with the sledges and the dogs, and thus they will rush to the northward; for they must reach the Pole and get back within three months, before the summer sun softens the ice and snow too much for easy sledging. As their food gives out they will feed the weaker dogs to the other members of the team, so that before their return they may have only a single dog remaining, and they may be compelled to eat this last dog and come in dragging their sledge. Next June (1902) the relief ship of the Arctic Club will sail again from New York with Mrs. Peary to meet the explorer at or near Cape Sabine, and return with him in September. Not till then will the world know whether the Pole has at last been reached.

Those who are best informed on arctic work believe Lieutenant Peary’s plans have been wisely laid; yet, even with his great experience, the difficulties and dangers to be surmounted are so stupendous that few really expect success. As one remarked: “If it were not Peary, and we did not know his indomitable courage and determination, I should say the chances of reaching the Pole were small.” But Peary has succeeded before where all prophecy was against him, and being the man he is, he may succeed again. It is always the human element that refuses to be bounded.

Peary’s birthright in itself marked him for hardy deeds. Though born in Pennsylvania (May 6, 1856), where his father resided temporarily, he comes of an old family of Maine lumbermen, an active, adventurous, out-door stock of French-Anglo-Saxon origin, which has produced so many stout New England seamen, soldiers, and pioneers. And with his name, which is plainly a modification of the French Pierre, Lieutenant Peary has inherited somewhat of the peculiar Gallic imagination and high-spiritedness, though both are held finely in check as well as reenforced by the solid common sense, constructive capacity, and determination of the Anglo-Saxon. When Lieutenant Peary was three years old, his father having died, his mother returned to Maine, settling among her friends in Portland. Here the boy grew up. With the sea on one side of him he learned how to swim and row and sail, and he absorbed, unconsciously as a boy will, the deep knowledge of the ways of the tide and the wind on a stormy shore. With the woods and the fields also near at hand, he became a sturdy walker, an explorer of his little hills, a steady shot, a close observer and collector of birds, beetles, and flowers. From all accounts he was a solid, wholesome, natural boy, not precocious and not unusual, except perhaps in his devotion to natural history and in his love of outdoor life. Also, as more than one of his early friends informed me, he was singularly thorough and persevering in everything he attempted, a characteristic to which he owes much of his later success. George T. Little, an oldtime friend, speaking of his accomplishments as a taxidermist, says:

“He always took great pains in mounting the birds he shot in a life-like posture. He told me with some pride that, although an amateur, he was unlike some professional taxidermists, ready to stuff birds of whose habits and attitudes they know nothing.”

He was graduated from Bowdoin College at the age of twenty-one, the winner of several scholarships, and second in a class of fifty-one, besides being especially proficient in mathematics and engineering. He was also a prize essayist. He took part in all sorts of college sports, his friends recalling especially his ability as a runner and jumper. The members of his arctic parties say that he was always far and away the best and most enduring walker of every expedition. His mother, a woman of notable strength of character, exerted a great influence on the development of her only son. She went to college with him, and made him a home where his friends were always welcome. For years, indeed, when most boys are out in the world, she was his closest companion and confidant.

Following the close of his college career, Peary astonished his friends by secluding himself among the mountains of Maine, where, in the little town of Fryeburg, he hung out his shingle as a land surveyor. From all accounts, there was really no surveying to be done, but Peary tramped the hills, studied the birds and the trees, surveyed and carefully platted a large part of the Franconian Mountains, and kept his own councils. And always he was adding, though unconsciously, to his equipment as an arctic explorer.

In 1879, at the age of twenty-three, he secured a place in the Coast and Geodetic Survey at Washington, where his work consisted largely in the making of maps. One day, after two years of this employment, he mysteriously rented a room in a neighboring street, and spent several weeks preparing for an examination which was soon to be held by the Navy Department for the admission of civil engineers. Out of forty men who took the difficult examination, Peary was the youngest of the four who passed: he was appointed a member of the Navy Department with the rank of lieutenant.

In the first year of his service (1881) it fell to his fortune to report on plans for a new pier at Key West, Florida, which the contractors had given up as impossible of construction at the estimated cost. The young engineer reported not only that its construction was feasible, but that it could be built for at least $25,000 less than the estimate. The Secretary of the Navy directed Peary to build the pier himself, though such a commission to an engineer so little tried was unusual. In the course of the work Peary fell ill with yellow fever, but day after day he had himself rolled out in a wheel-chair to the shore, where he could direct the builders. And though failure had been confidently predicted, the pier was built, and at a saving of nearly $30,000. This brilliant success at the very beginning of his career sent the young engineer to Nicaragua as sub-chief of the Inter-Oceanic Canal Survey, where he acquired experience of the utmost value to him in his future arctic work: he learned to manage men, half-civilized men at that; he gained experience in equipping expeditions, in making camp under adverse conditions, in traversing wild and unexplored country; in short, he learned pioneering, the ability of taking care of himself in the most hostile environments.

Up to the time of his return from Nicaragua, in 1885, the idea of arctic exploration had never occurred to him. But the soil was now ripe and the seed was ready.

“One evening,” he writes, “in one of my favorite haunts, an old book-store in Washington, I came upon a fugitive paper on the Inland Ice of Greenland. A chord, which as a boy had vibrated intensely in me at the reading of Kane’s wonderful book, was touched again. I read all I could upon the subject, noted the conflicting experiences of Nordenskjold, Jensen, and the rest, and felt that I must see for myself what the truth was of this great mysterious interior.”

At that time no one had ever attempted to explore the vast unknown interior of Greenland; no one knew whether Greenland was an island or a part of a great polar continent. Peary outlined a plan for an expedition in a paper read before the National Academy of Sciences, but it is characteristic of him that he should go forward on his own responsibility and execute his own plans. Having obtained a leave of absence from the Navy Department, he left for Greenland in May (1886). Though the expedition was intended only as a preliminary reconnaissance, Peary succeeded in penetrating more than 100 miles, for the first time reaching the real interior plateau of unchanging arctic snow. Indeed, no white man had ever before attained so great an elevation on the Greenland ice, and none had penetrated so far into the interior. This reconnaissance, though brief, for Peary was absent from Washington barely six months, added much to the world’s knowledge, besides enabling Peary to outline practical plans for future explorations, with suggested routes for crossing Greenland.

Peary was not, however, destined to follow out immediately his plans for further exploration. Indeed, he was to suffer the bitter regret of seeing his work forestalled, his plans carried out by another—for two years later Greenland was crossed for the first time by Nansen. Interest in the Nicaragua Canal having now revived,. Peary devoted nearly two years as engineer in charge of the surveys, after which he was sent (in 1888) to superintend the building of the new dry dock at the League Island Navy Yard in Philadelphia. In this year he married Miss Josephine Diebitsch, who was to exercise an important influence upon his future work. In all this time his projects for further arctic exploration employed every brief interval of leisure in his exacting navy work; he was studying the questions of equipment and transportation, which really determine the success of every expedition.

At last he was ready for a serious and extended expedition. Perhaps no man who ever sailed the polar seas was more thoroughly prepared in every respect. The first and most important of an arctic explorer’s equipment is his own physical strength and health. In the very prime of life, Peary was as perfect physically as it is ever given to a man to be. Always a prodigious worker, no excesses had impaired his strength. The first time I saw him he reminded me strongly of the young Sioux braves of the Northwest. Standing more than six feet tall, he had the Indian swiftness, softness, and lightness of step; slender, he had the Indian bigness of chest that suggested “wind,” and the leanness of flank of the Indian runner. Without giving an impression of special strength, he was all muscle and sinew, unencumbered by an ounce of superfluous weight. Peary had the typical gray eyes of the sure-shooting Western plainsman; a high, fine forehead, and a determined chin. He impressed me, as I find he impresses most people, as a man of few words, and these singularly well chosen. He knew just what he wanted, and went about getting it briskly. Peary has that rare possession of favored men of action, an apparently boundless reserve force. Dr. Frederick Cook, the surgeon of two of his expeditions, told me that Peary’s endurance always seemed endless. The accounts of his expeditions contain many instances in which, after all the other men were completely exhausted and disheartened, the strength and nervous energy of their leader seemed to lift up and carry forward the whole burden of the work, to inspire and enliven the weary men and make impossibility possible. And that spirit of indomitability, the capacity for effort beyond the strength and courage of other men, are the unmistakable qualities of the great leader; such a spirit is only piqued by danger. “I think,” said a member of one of his parties to me, “he loved to meet emergencies.”

 A leader of this sort commands the devotion of his followers, even though he be silent and perhaps cold. For he is completely trusted. Many who know Peary have marveled at his influence over men. It is nothing more nor less than the simple qualities of earnestness, and the determination of the man who, having a clearly defined plan, is calmly prepared to overturn heaven or earth to carry it through. And he is as successful with the busy millionaire to whom he goes for money as he is with the half-savage Eskimos, the same Eskimos whom early explorers reported dangerously treacherous, now Peary’s friends and faithful followers. If Peary ever erred in his leadership, it has been on the side of the splendid self-sufficiency which needs no advice and asks no sympathy. Having his purpose clearly in mind, his men, perhaps, come to be to him too much like instruments, to be used with cold precision to the accomplishment of certain purposes clearly perceived by the master mind.

And this was the man who prepared in 1891 to discover the northern limits of Greenland, and perhaps to reach the Pole. Briefly outlining his plans, he presented them before a number of societies and institutions, and succeeded in obtaining several contributions, to which he added all his own savings, and with some additional assistance from his immediate friends, he was able to charter a vessel; and having obtained an eighteen months’ leave of absence from the Secretary of the Navy, he set sail in June, 1891, accompanied by Mrs. Peary and a small party. At the very outset he was stricken down by an accident that would have sent most men back to their homes. An ice floe, striking the ship’s rudder, drove the pilot wheel against his leg, snapping the bones. Dr. Cook promptly set the fracture, and Peary was strapped to a board; and though the pain caused by the jarring of the ship as it pounded through the ice was excruciating, the explorer insisted on going forward without delay. Establishing his headquarters in McCormick Bay, he directed the construction of a comfortable house and prepared for the expedition across Greenland. With the return of the sun in the spring of 1892, Peary, whose leg was now healed, set off with a single companion, Astrup, for the long journey across the great ice of Greenland, an expedition which the explorer still calls the “White March.” All winter long he had been preparing, and his sledges were of the strongest and lightest, his equipments the smallest compatible with safety, and his dogs, twenty in all, of the best. It was a most remarkable journey. To appreciate it even faintly, one must understand something of what the interior of Greenland is like. Peary himself has given a vivid description:

“The interior of Greenland is simply an elevated, unbroken plateau of snow, lifted from 5,000 to 8,000 and even 10,000 feet above the level of the sea; a huge, white glistening shield some 1,200 miles in length and 500 miles in width, resting on the supporting mountains. It is an arctic Sahara, in comparison with which the African Sahara is insignificant. For on this frozen Sahara of inner Greenland occurs no form of life, animal or vegetable; no fragment of rock, no grain of sand, is visible. The traveler across its frozen wastes, traveling as I have week after week, sees outside of himself and his own party but three things in the world, namely, the infinite expanse of the frozen plain, the infinite dome of the cold blue sky, and the cold white sun — nothing but these. The traveler, too, across this frozen desert knows that at no time during his journey are the highest rocks of the mountain summits below him nearer than from 1,000 to 5,000 feet down through the mighty blankets of snow.”

At these great altitudes, which, without the intense cold and the unceasing blinding glare, would be trying enough to most travelers, Peary set his course exactly as a mariner at sea would, even hoisting a sail on his sledge. They tramped northward, often through storm and fog, often half blind with the sun glare, sleeping on the ice usually without a tent, and eating half-cooked rations. And in forty days they covered over 600 miles, reaching on the 4th of July the rocky northern end of Greenland, which no man ever had seen before. On a high hill, which Peary named Navy Cliff, a cairn with the stars and stripes floating above was erected, and the wintry sea which flowed at its feet was named Independence Bay in honor of the day. The land visible across the Bay, now first discovered, Peary called Melville and Heilprin lands.

Having reached the end of their journey and proved the insularity of Greenland, Peary and Astrup returned, reaching McCormick Bay in August, whence the party sailed to New York. It had been a brilliantly successful expedition; it won for Peary the prized medals of several learned societies, and “Petermann’s Mitteilungen,” the most famous geographical publication in the world, honored the explorer by suggesting the name “Pearyland” for North Greenland.

But Peary was not content. Believing that the ice-cap offered an “imperial highway” to the Pole, he was impatient to make another journey. Everything was against him. He had no money, no ship, few wealthy friends, and some of the institutions which had assisted him before were unable to do so again; moreover, he had used up his leave of absence, and the Navy Department was loath to release him longer. But Peary had made up his mind to go, and nothing now could turn him. The campaign for funds and equipment which followed was of a sort to arouse admiration. It was November (1892); in order to start the following spring he must raise the money and complete his organization and equipment all within six months’ time. Yet he went at it with characteristic energy. By exerting all possible influence he succeeded in securing a three years’ leave of absence. Then he began lecturing; Major J. B. Pond, his manager, being authority for the statement that no other American lecturer ever equaled his record. He spoke 168 times in ninety-six days—nearly two lectures every week-day— and earned $13,000. A stenographer accompanied him constantly, and he dictated matter for his book and arranged the multitudinous details of his expedition during his travels. He was able, also, to obtain some money from societies; the “New York’ Sun”’ contributed $2,000 for letters; Mrs. Peary wrote a successful book, and the proceeds from that, with minor sums gathered here and there, enabled him to charter his vessel, “The Falcon,” and provide most of the equipment. At the last moment the money gave out, and Peary, to his distress, was compelled to exhibit his ship at several large cities, the quarters paid for admission completing his funds. As a feat of physical energy, this six months’ work must assuredly be called extraordinary. In June, 1893, the expedition sailed, under the happiest auspices, though it was destined to a long series of misfortunes, which caused the explorer the bitterest disappointments of his life. “The Falcon,” upon its return after landing Peary’s party, was lost with all on board, though the explorer knew nothing of this fact until a year later. Against his own best judgment, Peary had taken with him a large party of men, and dissensions having arisen, nearly all the members of the party returned by the first relief ship, leaving Peary with only two men, his faithful negro, Matt Henson, and Hugh J. Lee. Only one bright event lightened the darkness, the birth in the far north of a daughter to Mrs. Peary, little Anighito, the “Snow Baby.” His party thus depleted, Peary found himself terribly handicapped. His means had now been exhausted, so that it devolved on Mrs. Peary, who also returned by the relief ship, to raise the money necessary to send a ship for him in the following year. But Peary never once swerved from his iron purpose. He was determined to go poleward over the great ice, come what might; and go he did, though the expedition was fraught with such terrible hardships that its safe return is nothing short of a miracle. Though short of provisions and fuel, and far from being in the best trim physically, the three men, Peary, Lee, and Henson, set out in April (1895) to cross the ice-cap.

“When we started on this journey,” writes Peary, “we knew that we were relying solely upon our own exertions and the Almighty. Whatever fortune, ill or good, awaited us in or beyond the heart of the ‘great ice’; whatever accident or mishap befell, there would, there could be no rescuing. And even if we returned in safety, if the trust which I reposed in my Eskimo friends was ill-founded I might find my house and stores appropriated and ourselves left destitute.”

From the very beginning, misfortunes followed one another thick and fast. A cache of all but indispensable pemmican, 1,400 pounds in all, could not be found, and though its lack threatened starvation, still they went forward—three men, forty-two dogs, and five sledges. Lee fell ill, leaving all the work to the other men, besides delaying the march. Often, indeed, they dragged Lee on the sledges. The dogs fought, tangled the harness, and one went mad; they had to abandon one sledge after another, they ate raw frozen meat warmed a little in their tea. Presently the men were denying themselves, to make the walrus meat last for the dogs; then the dogs one after another were consumed. And still their faces were set toward the north. Five hundred miles from their home camp, with eleven all but useless dogs and a sick companion, their very life now depended on finding the musk-oxen which Peary had seen on the open shore three years previously, and on their ability when found to kill the quarry. Peary’s story of that awful hunting trip is one of the most thrilling in all the annals of bold deeds. Thirty miles from the open country of Independence Bay, Lee, now unable to travel farther, was left in camp with a share of the remaining provisions. Peary and Henson, with one light sledge and the strongest dogs, rushed forward. The rocks of the open ground played havoc with the sledge, so that the men were often forced to help the dogs; their feet covering was cut and worn; their food disappeared rapidly, and still no game. Suddenly Peary, who was in advance, beckoned Henson to bring the gun. Fastening the dogs to a stake, the negro crept up, quivering with excitement. Peary pointed silently to an arctic hare, but being overcome with hunger, he directed Henson to shoot. Henson was himself so weak that, though he lay down and took a dead rest, he missed; a second bullet killed the game. Henson ran back to get the lamp for cooking, but the hunger of the men could not be curbed; seizing the animal, they devoured it raw.

Then they hunted again to the very verge of desperation, and when at last they suddenly saw a fine herd of musk-oxen they were too unnerved at first to fire. Then they rushed forward and began shooting half, blindly. Peary says he could not see his sights, but felt his aim. They killed their prey.

The finding of the musk-oxen had saved them, but more terrible experiences were yet to come. Peary was set on going northward toward the Pole. He had reached a latitude of eighty-one degrees forty-seven minutes, ten miles farther north than he had gone before. Not many miles farther on, and he would have reached the farthest north. Had he secured the alcohol and pemmican of that last cache, he could have continued his journey safely and easily. He stood upon the brink of the rocks and looked down and out over the sea of ice before him. It was smooth and inviting; the dogs could have made fast time; perhaps the Pole itself might have been reached. For ten years he had struggled to reach the farthest north, and now, when he had almost achieved it, he was obliged to beat a retreat. Sadly he turned back, and began the grim, terrible march to the southward. They threw away their bedding, instruments, guns, ammunition, extra clothing, a prayer-book, the tent itself—in fact, everything that might impede them in their struggle for life. They even tore from their nautical almanac the three leaves containing the calculations then required, and discarded the remainder. They had started with forty-two dogs and five sledges; now they had but one sledge and two dogs. For five days they subsisted on a few biscuits and a little tea. They killed one dog and ate him, giving the remaining dog a share. At length the last morsel of food of any kind was consumed, and the home camp was still twenty miles away.

And they were constantly haunted by the terrible fear that the Eskimos might have played false, looted the camp, and left them to certain starvation. Two days of this starvation, and at last they arrived, three gaunt men, with a single emaciated dog creeping along a mile behind. To their unspeakable joy, the stores were intact.

For days they lay and rested, scarcely able to move, sickened by the food they ate, bleeding at the nose, their legs swollen to twice their natural size. The dog gave himself up to eating and sleeping and to hiding food away. For weeks he buried everything that resembled food during his waking hours, as if, remembering his terrible experiences, he had determined to cache a store of provisions that would last him for the rest of his days. There they remained, weak, miserable, all but hopeless, until the arrival of the relief party organized by the energy of Mrs. Peary, who had succeeded in interesting a number of wealthy men in her husband’s work. Indeed, without the courageous assistance and constant encouragement of his wife, the explorer never could have accomplished what he has.

The disappointments and perils of this ill-fated expedition convinced the explorer, so he thought, that his arctic work was finished, but he had not reckoned on his own enthusiasm. Hardly had he recovered from the fatigue of the last ice-cap expedition, when his brain was busy again with new plans. In 1896 and 1897 he made two voyages into the arctic region, bringing back the famous Cape York meteorites, the largest in the world. In 1898 his only book, “Northward Over the Great Ice,” appeared, and he delivered a lecture before the Royal Geographical Society of Great Britain which was received with flattering honors.

With these encouragements he was prompted to make one more supreme attempt to reach the Pole, and to carry out his original, but now thoroughly crystallized methods of exploration: the small party with the leader in the van; the highly compact equipment, most of it devised by the explorer himself; the use of Eskimos and the Eskimo ways of clothing and living; the extensive employment of dogs; and the establishment in advance of the “dash” northward of caches of provisions at regular intervals.

“I am after the Pole,” he wrote in 1898 for McCLURE’S MAGAZINE, “because it is the Pole; because it has a value as a test of intelligence, persistence, endurance, determined will, and perhaps courage, qualities characteristic of the highest type of manhood; because I am confident that it can be reached, and because I regard it as a great prize which it is peculiarly fit and appropriate that an American should win.”

And this time Peary’s way was made easy for him. In 1897 influential friends secured a four years’ leave of absence from the Navy Department; the Peary Arctic Club was formed, with Morris K. Jesup of the American Museum of Natural History as the president and Herbert L. Bridgman as secretary. Money was secured, and in the summer of 1899 Peary sailed away to the north for the seventh time and there he is to-day. The first winter out, while on the long march to Fort Conger, Peary frosted both feet, and the surgeon decided that seven toes must be amputated. Having no instruments at hand, however, Peary lay prostrated and suffering acutely for six weeks; and then, strapped to a sledge, with the thermometer from sixty to seventy degrees below zero, he started on the journey of 250 miles over the frozen sea channel to his ship, the “Windward,” which was still fast in the ice. At times his agony was almost beyond endurance, so that it was found necessary to turn the sledge on its side, loosen the lashings, and permit the explorer to rest. Upon reaching the “Windward” an operation was safely performed, and Peary recovered rapidly. He would not listen for a moment to the suggestion that he return. And astonishing as it may seem, he was soon able to walk and even jump as well as ever.

Thus we leave Peary with his face still set to the northward and his courage undimmed.