Hero Tales from History — Peary, A Hero of the Great White North

“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.

[Illustration: PEARY IN ARCTIC DRESS WITH HIS ESKIMO DOGS _©1909, Doubleday, Page & Co. _] 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.

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.

“BERT.

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