YALE
UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

THE MEETING ON THE ICE-CAP.

THE
ARCTIC PROBLEM

AND NARRATIVE OF THE

Peary Relief Expedition

ACADEMY OF NATURAL SCIENCES

OF PHILADELPHIA.

ANGELO HEILPRIN
LEADER OF THE PEARY RELIEF EXPEDITION
PROFESSOR IN THE ACADEMY OF NATURAL SCIENCES ; PRESIDENT
OF THE GEOGRAPHICAL CLUB OF PHILADELPHIA.

PHILADELPHIA.
CONTEMPORARY PUBLISHING CO.
628 Chestnut Street.
1893.

COPYRIGHT 1S93,
Contemporary Publishing Co.

Engraved and Printed by
Levytype Company,
Philadelphia.

Preface.
The interest which at the present moment
centres about Polar exploration is perhaps
broad enough to permit of a few additional
pages being added to the lengthening litera
ture of the subject, even though they be want
ing in a recital of those mishaps and hard
ships which have made Arctic reading so
fascinating. In this belief the author offers
the following pages, which are in the main a
record of personal experiences in the North,
and reflections upon the best method of attain
ing the object which has so long baffled the
energies of the hardy explorer. A portion of
the work has already appeared in narrative
form in the pages of Scribner's Magazine, and
another portion is an amplification of an ad
dress delivered before the Geographical Club
of Philadelphia.
The author feels that the record of the Peary
Relief Expedition would not be complete
without a reference to the numerous helping
hands which made the expedition possible,
and permitted of the full accomplishment of
its mission; — to all these he owes a no small
debt of gratitude, and to all, without distinc
tion by name, he expresses his acknowledg
ments. A special mention should, however,

Preface.
be made of the names of a few gentlemen who
more particularly interested themselves in the
expedition, and gave their assistance in other
directions besides the one very necessary one
of raising the required funds for the under
taking. These are Gavin W. Hart, Esq., the in
defatigable Treasurer ofthe Expedition Fund,
and Messrs. Edward Longstreth, Joseph T.
Rothrock, and Edwin J. Houston, through
whose efforts, representing the good work of
Philadelphia and West Chester, the rude chil
dren of the North have been placed in a condi
tion of comparative comfort. The distribution
of gifts of charity to the Eskimo was a feature
of the expedition.
To the members of his party, for the faithful
accomplishment of their duties, and the good
will which ever prompted their work, the
leader is placed under special obligation; and
he is similarly indebted to the officers and
crew of the good ship Kite, the vessel of the
expedition.
A. H.
Philadelphia, May, 1893.

ARCTIC MUSICIANS.

Contents.
I. The Arctic Problem, .... Page £.
II. Polar Expeditions,  "28.
III. The Spitzbergen Route to
the Pole,  " $3.
IV. The Peary Relief Expedition, " 79.
V. A Lost Companion, .... " 128.
VI. The Greenland Ice-Cap and
its Glaciers  " 141.

"(?AIL on, nor fear to breast the sea !
Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee,
Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears,
Our faith triumphant o'er our fears,
Are all with thee,— are all with thee!"

I.
The Arctic Problem.
It can truly be said that to no class of work
ers does a community owe so much of what it
possesses as to that of the travelling geogra
pher or explorer, whose cumulative efforts and
resources have brought the world to know it
self as it in reality exists. This year the na
tions of the world celebrate the greatest dis
covery of modern times, — the greatest in the
sense that it most deeply touches the welfare
of the human-kind. Every year, almost, brings
with it the culmination of an effort which,
though not so great and far-reaching as the
Columbian, yet adds materially to that fund of
knowledge from which Columbus drew his
inspiration, and which served as the main
spring for the discovery of a continent. On
sea and on land, from alpine summits to the
waters af the frozen north, the march of dis
covery is progressive, and it will forever re
main progressive and unabated until the sur
face of our globe is made known to us in its
every feature and under every phase of its ex
istence. The region which to-day again most at
tracts the thoughts of geographers lies in the

6 The Arctic Problem.
far north. Like the pulse which alternately stills
and throbs with each changing phase of physi
cal depression and elevation, the Arctic pendu
lum, held and swayed by every record of dis
aster or success, vibrates between periods of
peaceful slumber and restless activity. Al
most every decade of the present century has
seen the ice-field of the north attract to it
the energies of men who have worked in the
cause of humanity and have made exploration
brilliant; every equal period, almost, has
brought with it its chapter of disaster and fail
ure. Not daunted by the opinion of those who
hold that man's legitimate field of labor lies
only there where it can return immediate profit
to one's ownself or to the community at large,
the wayfarer to the Arctic seas plods wearily
onward, slowly but steadily closing those gaps
of knowledge of which he has been appointed
the trusted guardian. Without him the world
would know less and be a corresponding suf
ferer in its lack of knowledge.
The brilliant success which has attended
Mr. Peary's recent traverse of the Greenland
ice-cap opens up anew the question of the ac
cessibility of the Pole, and the discussion of
this subject is specially apropos at this time on
the eve of the departure of two expeditions
whose destination is equally the North Pole,
and of a third, from which, while not in quest
of the Ultima Thule of most Arctic ventures,

The Arctic Problem. 7
it can reasonably be expected that a higher
latitude will be reached than has ever before
been attained. The first expedition, under
command of Fridtjof Nansen, the preparations
for which have now nearly been completed,
assumes for itself the route of the north Siber
ian waters and the help of a slow and steady
drift of the ice-pack northward from the Eur-
asiatic continent to and across the Pole, with a
return to the Spitzbergen or Greenland coast.
In other words, it is the purpose of a vessel,
specially constructed to resist the pressure of
the ice, to enter the ice-pack, not far from the
spot where the unfortunate Jeanette was
crushed in 1881, and allow itself to be drifted
by the pack, in its own course, and free from
the disturbing infiuence of a navigator, for a
period of some two or three years. The as
sumption that there is a steady currental drift
northward from the Siberian waters is based
almost entirely upon the recprds which a few
pieces of clothing and other relicts have car
ried with them of the ill-starred expedition of
1879, and the circumstance that drift-wood,
supposed to come from Alaska, is annually
thrown upon the east Greenland coast. The
Jeanette relicts, to which reference has just
been made, consisting of the trousers of one of
the, sailors, and of parts of the ship's papers,
were picked up on the ice of Julianehaab,
southwest Greenland, on June 18th, 1884,

8 The Arctic Problem.
eleven hundred days after that unfortunate dis
aster which marks one of the saddest chapters
in the history of Arctic exploration. The drift,
whatever its course may have been, consumed
three full years ; to meet the possibilities of the
same period and of a needed prolongation of
time, Nansen has provisioned himself for a
period of five years. It is impossble to foretell
the fate of this expedition ; its success or fail
ure will depend upon a combination of circum
stances and conditions which cannot even be
premised in our present knowledge of the
northern seas. The known perseverance and
indomitable pluck of the leader lend hope for
the enterprise, if not absolute assurance of
success. The Ekroll Expedition, which is expected
to leave Cape Mohn, on the east coast of
Spitzbergen, early in June, 1893, is a revival
in one sense ofthe expedition of Parry, in 1827,
when the very high latitude of 82° 45' was
attained. Its special feature is the construc
tion of a "combination" conveyance to be used
alternately in boat and sledge service — i. c, a
boat that at the needed time might be resolved
into a number of sledges. The virtual point
of departure of this expedition is Petermann's
Land, the off-lying island situated north of
Francis-Joseph Land, whence a direct trav
erse is contemplated to the Pole, with a return,
if possible, by way of Fort Conger, in Lady

The Arctic Problem. 9
Franklin Bay. Supan has constructed the
following table of distances for the expedition :
From Cape Mohn to Petermann' s Land, 700 km.
" Petermann' s Land to the Pole, . 830 "
" the Pole to Fort Conger, . . . 950 "

2480 km.
or approximately 1500 miles. Two hundred
days are allowed for the accomplishment of
this journey.
With many, probably, the Ekroll Expedi
tion, ingeniously though it may be planned,
will not fully lend itself to favor, especially in
its dominant feature, the construction of a
sectioned boat for alternate boat and sledge
service. The interdependence of the two con
structions measured as a factor of safety is an
element of insecurity, or at least uncertainty,
in the enterprise which should be carefully
weighed and considered before the initial
stages in an undertaking so hazardous as the
one here contemplated are taken. One may
perhaps, express a further doubt in the matter
of expediency ; the constant shifting of the im
pedimenta of travel is a condition which
should be avoided so far as is possible in a
journey, the execution of which is dependent
almost wholly upon a reserve strength and
that adjustment of labor and rest which per
mits of the greatest amount of bodily and
mental vigor being maintained. The main

10 The Arctic Problem.
work of any Polar expedition should be to go
ahead, and not the labor of adjustment and
rearrangement looking only toward the ac
complishment of this end.
Mr. Peary's new expedition contemplates
the further exploration of the north and
east Greenland coasts, to the extent of survey
ing the still unknown, or at best conjectural,
boundary which unites Cape Bismarck on the
east with the extreme north and with the
"farthest" of Lockwood and Brainard on the
northwest (in latitude 83° 24'). This course
involves the circumnavigation, or more pro
perly — since the effort will doubtless be executed
on the frozen surface of the sea — rounding of
the Greenland archipelago, the insular masses
lying north of Independence Bay and of what
appears to be a continuation of the Victoria
Inlet. To what degree of northern latitude
this course of exploration may take, cannot in
the nature of things be predicted; but there
are reasons for believing that the outlying in
sular masses extend to fully the 85th parallel,
and possibly much further. Carried out on the
lines of the exploration of the past year, with
the inland ice-cap as the main line of travel,
there are good grounds for hoping for an
amount of success equal to that which has made
the year 1892 memorable in Arctic service.
No doubt the eyes of the world will follow
with interest the experiences of these daring

THE FIRST ICE.— A GRAY DAY.

The Arctic Problem. 11
navigators of the north. The question will,
however, certainly be asked : To what good?
For those who identify the progress of civil
ization with a search after truth, it is hardly
necessary to answer this question. It was
fully answered a half-century ago by that stern
friend of knowledge, Sir John Barrow, when
he wrote ; "The North Pole is the only thing in
the world about which we know nothing;
and that want of all knowledge ought to oper
ate as a spur to adopt the means of wiping
away that stain of ignorance from this en
lightened age." Alexander, after he had con
quered the world, is said to have grieved be
cause he had failed to accomplish the ambi
tion of his . life, — the discovery of the sources
of the Nile — a legacy which was bequeathed
to his successors through a period of 2200
years. Whatever protest might be indulged
in to prevent further Arctic exploration, what
ever specious reasons advanced for not "further
risking the lives of more able men," it can be
accepted as a certainty that until the region of
the Pole is in fact traversed, or its inaccessi
bility absolutely demonstrated, the pendulum
of Arctic exploration will continue to swing.
The search after knowledge has no limits and it
knows no time.
It is customary to decry Arctic exploration
on the sole ground that it endangers the lives
of worthy people, while it yields little of bene-

12 Tlie Arctic Problem.
fit in return. This is the narrow view of that
vast body of opinionists who from habit prefer
to say much to thinking little, who know the
world from their own knowledge, rather than
from the knowledge obtained by others. The
successful man is in their eyes a hero, the un
fortunate one, although travelling in the same
field of honest labor or research, scarcely bet
ter than an imbecile. The exploits of a Ross,
a Kane or a Hayes are held up for emulation —
those of a Franklin, Hall, or DeLong for con
demnation. All of these persons strove for a
common purpose, and from each the world
has derived an almost equal share of profit.
Each of these heroes and others before and
after them have contributed to that special
store of knowledge which conquers assumed im
possibilities — whicli renders practicable much
that had before been considered impracticable.
It is not difficult to discern the practical re
sults or benefits arising from Arctic exploration.
The location of the Magnetic Pole alone,
rendering possible the determination of the
lines of variation in the magnetic needle, is in
itself a conquest for which navigators will
for all time be grateful, and from which the
world at large has derived inestimable bene
fits. The Arctic whale fishery is principally
an outcome of Arctic exploration, made practi
cable and profitable through that more inti
mate knowledge of the physical conditions of

The Arctic Problem. 13
the far north which has been begotten alike of
the labors of success and disaster. Every ex
pedition, almost, has accomplished something
that had been left undone by its predecessor
arid been considered in the nature of things
unattainable. The brilliant exploits of Lock-
wood and Brainard, when they penetrated to
within five hundred miles of the Pole, or to
Lat. 83° 24' ; of Nordenskjold, the discov
erer of the North-East Passage ; and of
Nansen, the transgressor of Greenland's sup
posed impassible ice-fastnesses, are a chapter
in the history of the present decade. Among
its pages, too, will be written the narrative of
that remarkable journey which has only re
cently been accomplished and which in bold
ness of execution outranks the achievements
of all previous explorers in the same field.
It may, however, be pointed out that the
exploits to which reference has just been made
are of insignificant import; that Parry as early
as 1827 had reached a point north within
forty-five miles of that attained by Lockwood
and Brainard ; that McClure, despite his bril
liant forcing of the North- West Passage, had
yet failed to render commercially navigable
the route in the search for which Sir John
Franklin and the greater part of his force gave
up their lives. Where is the profit? The
contention is just, or better true, but only in
so far as the simple statement of fact is con-

14 The Arctic Problem.
corned. Parry's farthest north bears certainly
the mark of a brilliant achievement, but yet
the position is not so far north of the point
where Greely and his party spent the better
part of three years as to disguise the real ad
vance that has been made in Arctic explora
tion. Plall, Markham, Aldrich, and Lock-
wood and Brainard have all passed beyond
Parry's "farthest", and it is a well-known fact
that almost every expedition advances upon its
predecessor. Again, with reference to the
"barrenness" of the North- West Passage :
What do we know of its possibilities — only the
record of failures ? Mainly so ; but is the ex
perience of a few Arctic ventures, most of them
badly conducted or ill-arranged, to be taken as
the guiding line on which the possibilities of
the future are to be weighed? Our mental
equipment is such that we almost invariably
judge of possibilities in the light of existing
knowledge; in geographical exploration, as in
all departments of mechanical and physical
science, however, it has repeatedly been shown
that the assumed impossibilities of one day are
ready possibilities of another, and that there
are no fixed limits in which the element of
success can be determined. The heroic achieve
ment of Paccard, who in 1786 first scaled the
then seemingly inaccessible summit of the
Mont Blanc, is to-day scarcely remembered, so
facile — one might almost say, fashionable — has

The Arctic Problem. 15
become the route along which the first breach
was effected. Humboldt's ascent of Chimbor-
azo added lustre to the researches of that re
markable investigator, but to-day, after what
has been accomplished by the brothers Schlag-
intweit, by Graham and Conway in the Hima
layas, by Donkin and Freshfield in the Cau
casus, by Meyer on Kilima 'Njaro, by Gtissfeldt
on Aconcagua, by Reiss, Wolff, and Whymper
among the Equatorial Andes, and by Russell
on St. Elias, such an undertaking would
scarcely pass beyond the records ofthe geogra
pher and the archives of geographical societies.
Neither the sands nor the swamps, or even the
dark and gloomy forests of the deep interior,
can any longer reasonably be counted upon to
thwart the purposes of the African traveler.
Stanley's remarkable traverse of that conti
nent on what might be termed schedule time,
and Emin Bey's equally remarkable sojourn of
years in a region approach to which had for a
long time baffled the energies of men of most
undoubted courage, are an evidence of direct
evolution of possibility from knowledge and
experience. Similarly, in the far north, the
dreaded dangers of Melville Bay can to-day,
with proper judgment, be avoided with much
the certainty that the dangers of the fog-banks
are avoided by the regular trans-Atlantic
liners. We are as yet too ignorant of what the north

16 The Arctic Problem.
promises to permit us to venture upon a state
ment of the possibilities which it offers to either
commerce or science, but certain it is that its
inaccessibility is becoming more and more re
mote every year. Albeit the North- West Pass
age has not yet proved of commercial signifi
cance, who can predict what its future might
not be ? Equally unpromising has seemed the
passage, only once effected, in the opposite
direction, but the explorations of Nordenskjold
are already beginning to bear fruit. The
successful issue of this journey has revived the
so-called " north Siberian trading " route, and
the day appears not far distant when it will be
freely used as the direct means of commercial
communication between the north of Europe
and north-central Asia. The successful ven
tures of Captain J. Wiggins in 1888 and 1889,
when with little delay he reached the mouth
of the Yenissei River, and of Peterson, Cor-
diner, and R. Wiggins in 1890, seem to justify
the hopes that have been held out for the new
route, and to bring promise, at least, for the
" Anglo-Siberian Trading Syndicate."
There are two phases to the exploration of
the region ofthe far north : that which touches
exploration only in the broader sense of a con
tribution to scientific knowledge, and the other
which has for its first and ultimate object the
attainment of the position of the North Pole.
It has been contended with a certain amount

The Arctic Problem. 17
of force that from a scientific or geographical
standpoint the Pole offers nothing more of in
terest than would be offered by any other un
known point of the far north, and that, con
sequently, exploration toward it should treat
the Polar question merely as an incident
rather than as an object. This is not strictly
the case, however; for from the simple fact
that the Pole has thus far proved inaccessible,
the question of "why this inaccessibility" —
the determination of the conditions which
make this approach seemingly impossible —
must forever be of special scientific moment, and
until the question is definitely answered by a
practical demonstration, or once and forever
removed from the field of possible answer, it
will continue to attract to it the minds of the
speculative as well as of those who are con
cerned only with an immediate result. Arctic
exploration, in the Weyprechtian sense of an
exploration for the attainment of scientific
knowledge pure and simple, is worthy of all
the effort that can be put to it ; but none the
less worthy is an exploration which has for its
main object the resolution of a problem which
has attracted man's attention for upwards of
three hundred years, and thus far baffled all
his ingenuity and advances. It might almost
be said with Sir Martin Frobisher, who wrote
toward the close of the sixteenth century (or
nearly three centuries in advance of the actual

18 The Arctic Problem.
discovery) regarding the North-West passage :
" It is the only thing in the world that is left
yet undone whereby a notable mind might be
made famous and fortunate."
Two questions here naturally suggest them
selves : Is the Pole in fact accessible, and if
so, how and by what route is it to be attained?
As regards the first question, the answer can
be freely hazarded that with the advances in
the art of travel that have latterly been made
— and it is needless to conceal the fact that to
the explorations of the past year we owe more
in this regard than to any preceding explora
tion — its conquest will be assured before many
years have passed. As to the route to be fol
lowed, conjecture has broad scope and an
ample field.
With two exceptions — the Austro-Hungarian
Expedition of 1872-74 and the Herald-Jeanette
Expedition of 1879 — all the more notable
efforts made within recent years to attain the
" farthest north " have been by way of the
west Greenland waters i. e., Baffin Bay, Smith
Sound, and Kennedy and Robeson Channels.
The Austro-Hungarian Expedition was im
prisoned in the ice of Francis-Joseph Land,
while the Jeanette was crushed in the ice of
the north Siberian waters. The two Polar
expeditions that are maturing their plans for
work in the present year will follow largely
in the paths of the Tegethoff and Jeanette.

The Arctic Problem. 19
The estimation of the possibilities of reaching
the Pole can only be calculated on the basis of
past failures. What improvements or changes
in the method of travelling suggest themselves
so as to convert failure into success? It now
seems to be conclusively proved that any at
tempt to sail to the Pole by way of the west
Greenland seas must be doomed to failure; the
open Polar Sea, which has so largely figured
in Arctic ventures, has vanished — at least from
the American hemisphere — and in its place is
a seemingly interminable barrier of ice, the ice
of the so-called Palseocrystic Sea. An effort
to penerate this frozen sea in the direction of
the Pole was made by Markham in 1876, with
the result of attaining the high latitude of 83°
20'. The able commander of the sledge-
journey states: "I feel it impossible for any
pen to depict with accuracy, and yet be not
accused of exaggeration, the numerous draw
backs that impeded our progress. One point,
however, in my opinion is most definitely set
tled, and that is, the utter impracticability of
reaching the North Pole over the floe in this
locality ; and in this opinion my able colleague,
Lieutenant Parr, entirely concurs. I am con
vinced that with the very lightest equipped
sledges, carrying no boats, and with all the
resources of the ship concentrated in the one
direction, and also supposing that perfect
health might be maintained, the latitude at-

20 The Arctic Problem.
tained by the party I had the honor and pleas
ure of commanding would not be exceeded by
many miles, certainly not by a degree."
While one cannot but admire the courage of
this statement, emanating as it does from one
of the most tried of Arctic explorers, it can
nevertheless scarcely be considered to have
proved its case. There is as yet nothing to prove
that the condition of impassability of the Pal
seocrystic ice is the same year for year ; the ob
servations of one season are not sufficient to
demonstrate this, as the experiences of Lock-
wood and Brainard in the spring of 1883
clearly prove. These intrepid explorers in
their second effort to reach the farthest north
found the Polar pack disrupted and moving
already in the early days of April, and at a
point not much beyond the 82d parallel. The
conditions of the previous year had been en
tirely reversed. And if the conditions of the ice
change, do not also the possibilities of travel ?
Again, the extraordinarily rapid sledge journey
of Lockwood and Brainard in 1882, when they
attained the most northerly point ever reached
by man, 83° 24', clearly points out a line of
possibility which was certainly not appreciated
by the officers of the British expedition. Who
can tell how far Lockwood and Brainard might
not have penetrated had they been furnished
with supplemental time and that form of ex
perience, including its resources, of which Mr.

r

IN THE WAIGAT.

The Arctic Problem. 21
Peary took such good advantage? There is
reason to believe that they might have travelled
200 miles or more further, and possibly even
reached the Pole in an early and favorable
season. From Lady Franklin Bay, the head
quarters of the Greely Expedition, the distance
north to the Pole is less than six hundred
miles; at the average rate of progress made by
Lockwood and Brainard for a period of twenty-
two days, from Cape Bryant to Lockwood
Island and return, a direct traverse to the point
of the earth's axis would be made in forty
days; or allowing twenty-five per cent for de
flection from a due north and south traverse,
in fifty days. Payer, in his second sledge
journey in April 1874, accomplished the re
turn of 313 miles (latitudinal distance) in thirty
days, under the most exhaustive conditions
of hummocky and mountainous ice, drift snow,
an unnecessarily heavily laden sledge, and
with a temperature descending to — 22° F.
The late Greenland expedition traversed 1300
odometric miles in ninty-six days, or an aver-
age| including all stoppages, of thirteen and a
half miles per day. But in reality the greater
part of the return journey was made at the
astonishingly rapid rate of 20 — 25 miles, and
some of it at thirty miles a day.
It is true that the special conditions which
favor travelling on the Greenland snows are
not to be met with on the rough surface of the

22 The Arctic Problem.
frozen sea, but even with this difference, and
recognizing as permanent the conditions which
Markham emphasizes, there seems to be no
good reason why, with a properly adjusted
equipment, the Pole might not be reached.
In all the sledge expeditions thus far, with the
exception of Mr. Peary's, progression has been
very largely effected on the principle of "doub
ling up" — i. e., drawing the load in sections,
and thus retraversing the same ground two,
three or even five times over. The unnecessa
rily heavy equipment necessitated this method
of advance. Lockwood's sledge, drawn by
eight dogs, and equipped with the impedi
menta for three men for twenty-five days,
weighed 7837^- lbs. ; Payer's sledge, equipped
for seven men and three dogs for twenty-eight
days, weighed 1565 lbs. ; Parry's memorable
sledge journey north of Spitzbergen, in 1827,
was made with two equipments of 3800 lbs.
each, the provisioning being for seventy-one
days serving twenty-eight men ; the load calcu
lated for each man was 270 lbs. Mr. Peary's
equipment, on the other hand, on leaving the
Humboldt Glacier, or seventy-seven days be
fore the close of the journey, weighed only
1500 lbs., which was distributed exclusively
among the dogs pressed in for service. With.
this comparatively light load the travel was
made direct and without doubling.
The traverse to the Pole — barring a possible

The Arctic Problem. 23
direct passage through the "pack sea" by a pow
erful steamer — owing to ice-driftages and water
holes, can seemingly be made only by a com
bination of boat and sledge journey, and that
it can so be accomplished with the use of a light
equipment, admits of little or no doubt. Parry's
remarkable journey of 1827 is almost conclu
sive evidence on this point. This most cau
tious and circumspect navigator, in his mem
orable journey northward of twenty-nine days,
accomplished 292 geographical miles, largely
over soft and floating ice ; or, with the journey
repeated, as it had to be, three and not unfre
quently five times over, the actual space cov
ered was, as stated by Parry himself, approxi
mately 668 statute miles, "being nearly suffi
cient to have reached the Pole in a direct
line." It is one of the anomalies of Arctic ex
ploration that the route which Parry broke
into has never since been followed. The
thoroughness with which his expedition had
been conducted and its failure to reach the
point desired, seem to have been sufficient to
condemn the route for all time. However
wise or unwise the abandonment of the Parry
route may have originally been, it is all but
certain that with the Arctic experience that
has been acquired during the last twenty-five
years, and with such special facilities for trav
elling as have become incorporated in the "art"
during the same period, the route in question

24 The Arctic Problem.
could be advantageously followed to-day. In
deed, Parry himself, commenting upon his own
failure eighteen years after the event, gives it
as his opinion that the object is "of no very
difficult attainment, if set about in a different
manner." He believed that starting from the
north of Spitzbergen in the month of April,
" when the ice Avould present one hard and
unbroken surface" " it would not be difficult to
make good thirty miles per day without any
exposure to wet, and probably without snow
blindness." The advantages which a condensed food
supply, proper body-covering, and light con
structions carry with them — advantages un
known to the early Arctic explorers — are a
factor in the calculation which tends wholly
to the side of success.
If it be asked why Parry failed to reach a
higher point than he did, the answer is im
mediately found in his narrative : the southerly
drift ofthe ice annihilated the actual northing
made. But it is manifest that with the ice in
a condition of stability, as it probably largely
is at an earlier season, and with the equipment
so adjusted as to obviate the. necessity of
"doubling" over the line of traverse, a much
greater daily advance could be made than
Parry found possible, and one that would
three or four times cover the four-mile drift of
the ice. With a daily advantage of only eight

The Arctic Problem. 25
miles the Pole would be reached from the 82d
parallel in sixty days; while on the other
hand, the return journey with the drift would
probably not occupy much more than half that
period of time.
A further question suggests itself in con
nection with the Arctic problem : Has the
Pole ever been more nearly accessible than it
is at the present time? Without entering into
a discussion of the geological problem or to a
consideration of remote periods of time, it can
be said that we are in possession of a certain
amount of evidence which goes far toward
giving an affirmative to the question. We
.owe chiefly to the Honorable Daines Barring-
ton, that indefatigable advocate of Polar ex
peditions of the last century, the collection of
data bearing upon this point. From these
it would appear that a century or more
ago voyages to the far north were not an ex
ceptional circumstance — indeed, that the lati
tudes attained on these voyages were in some
instances beyond what it has been possible to
attain since. Thus, it is asserted that Capt.
MacCallam, in command ofthe Campbeltown,
one of the ships employed in the Greenland
Fishery, in 1751 penetrated to 83° 30' in a
perfectly open sea, with no ice visible to the
northward. In 1754 three whalers are re
ported to have passed beyond the 82d par
allel (to 82° 15', 83° and 84° 30'); the circum-

26 The Arctic Problem.
stances connected with the voyage of Mr.
Stephens, when the latitude of 84° 30' is said
to have been attained, are reported by the As
tronomer Royal of the time, Mr. Maskelyne,
and are so circumstantially stated that they
would seem to allow little room for doubt in
the manner. But little ice was seen or met
with beyond Hakluyt Headland. The same con
dition was reported in 1766 by Capt. Robinson,
who claims in that year to have reached 82°
30' ; and in the same year, along the same
course, Master Wheatley reported no ice in any
direction visible from the mast-head of his
vessel in Lat. 81° 30'.
Unfortunately, the evidence that is presented
is not of that kind which permits it to be ac
cepted without reservation, but the coincidence
as to years of easy passage — 1754, 1766, 1770
— and of a generally facile period about that
time is certainly suggestive of an amount of
truth-color. It is evidence of a kind that
cannot be brushed aside merely because it con
flicts with notions formed on more modern ex
periences, or because it emanates from the non-
erudite whaler. The popular notion of a
change in the winter climate of the eastern
United States, with a suggested explanation
that it might be due to a transference nearer
to the coast of some ofthe heated waters ofthe
Gulf Stream — a notion ridiculed in many
quarters of the scientific world — seems to have

The Arctic Problem. 27
received a nearly full vindication through the
recent investigations of Prof. Libbey. That in
1817, and again in 1818, the greater part of the
ice-mass which as a rule, year in and year out,
almost impassably bounds the northeast coast
of Greenland, suddenly disappeared, is proved
by the unimpeachable testimony ofthe younger
Scoresby ; at that time a largely unencumbered
sea seems to have extended along the coast very
nearly to, if not beyond, the 80th parallel. This
circumstance makes it probable that more truth
is contained in the statements of the old whalers
than has been commonly allowed. Indeed, it
would appear from Parry's own narrative that
at the time of his expedition a staunch steam-
vessel, such as is now used for purposes of this
kind, could have forced a passage much to the
northward of the farthest point reached by
him, or far beyond the most northern point
which has ever been reached by a vessel,
whether steamer or sailer.

II.
Polar Expeditions.
The first attempt, of which we have record,
to reach the Pole seems to have been made in
1527. In that year, at any rate, according to
the Chronicles of Hall and Grafton (as quoted
by Hakluyt), King Henry VIII, actuated by
"very weighty and substantial reasons to set
forth a discoverie even to the North Pole,"
"sent two faire ships well manned and victual
led, having in them divers cunning men to seek
strange regions, and so they set forth out of
the Thames the 20th day of May, in the 19th
yeere of his raigne, which was the year of our
Lord 1527." Little is known of this expedi
tion beyond the fact that one of the vessels,
whether the Dominus Vobiscum or not, was
lost in the waters north of Newfoundland,
and that the other returned home about the
beginning of October. A Canon of St. Paul's,
in London, reputed to be a great mathemati
cian and a wealthy man, was one of the party
on the Dominus Arobiscum.
In 1596, in an attempt to make the trans-
Polar passage from Amsterdam to China,
William Barentz, Jacob ATan Heemskerke, and
Cornelis Ryp reached Lat. 80° 11' (on June

Polar Expeditions. 29
19th), off what is with little doubt Amsterdam
Island, Spitzbergen. It is not known whether
further progress northward was absolutely
prevented by an impassable barrier of ice or
not. Failing to make the passage on the
route selected Barentz, with one ofthe vessels,
sailed eastward for the Waigatsch, hoping to
be more successful on a lower parallel. In
this hope, however, he was disappointed ; his
vessel was hemmed in by the Nova Zembla
ice, and there abandoned to its fate. The
fortunes of the expedition were then thrown
into the two open boats. Passing a winter of
nnusual hardship, the party on the 13th of
June following (1598), began that memorable
retreat homeward which may be considered to
be pioneer among similar Arctic mishaps —
a monument to the "worthy stuff" out of
which a ship's crew was made three hundred
years ago. Barentz and one of his associates,
Claes Adrianson, died a few days after the de
parture, but the remainder of the party suc
cessfully pulled through to Kola, where they
were rescued by Cornelis Ryp. Barrow well
says (1818): " There are numerous instances on
record of extraordinary voyages being per
formed in rough and tempestuous seas in open
boats, with the most scanty supply of provis
ions and water, but there is probably not one
instance, that can be compared to that in
question, where fifteen persons, in two open

30 The Arctic Problem.
boats, had to pass over a frozen ocean more
than eleven hundred miles, ' in the ice, over
the ice, and through the sea,' exposed to all
the dangers of being at one time overwhelmed
by the waves, at another of being crushed to
atoms by the whirling of large masses of ice,
and to the constant attack of ferocious bears,
enduring for upwards of forty days severe
cold, fatigue, famine, and disease." The most
noteworthy outcome of Barentz's expedition
was the discovery af Spitzbergen.
The distinguished navigator Henry Hud
son, in an attempt to make the trans-Polar
passage in 1607, reached the very high lati
tude of 80° 23'. It is not known at precisely
what point this position was attained and it is
difficult to correlate the observations made with
our present geographical knowledge of the re
gion (the Greenland-Spitzbergen Sea). Hud
son himself states that land was visible south
ward, and that it extended in the opposite
direction "farre into 82 degrees." Barrow re
marks in this connection that this statement
must be erroneous, or that Hudson stood over
so far to the westward as to again bring him
into proximity with the Greenland coast
("Chronological History of Voyages into the
Arctic Regions," p. 182). This conclusion was
reached from the supposition that Greenland
was the only land-mass inthe region under
consideration which extended to or beyond the

A QUIET DAY ON MELVILLE BAY.-THE " ICE BLINK. '

Polar Expeditions. 31
81st parallel; the since-discovered Francis-
Joseph Land, however, makes it possible that
Hudson's course was northeastward, rather
than northwestward, and that the land re
ported to have been seen was in fact the dis
jointed tract which was reached by Payer and
Weyprecht in 1873. Two considerations seem
to sustain this view: first, the more ready ac
cessibility ofthe coast of Francis-Joseph Land,
so far as an unencumbered sea is concerned, and
secondly, its own comparative proximity. One
day's sail from the northern extremity of
Spitzbergen would almost bring the mountain
masses of Francis-Joseph Land into promi
nence, "trending," as stated by Hudson, "north
in our sight." On the other hand, a voyage
of four hundred miles westward would be ne
cessitated before any part of the Greenland
coast lying north of the 80th parallel could be
brought into view ; again, this portion of the
Greenland-Spitzbergen Sea has generally been
found to be impassable by reason of the heavy
accumulation of drift ice. No landing on the
Greenland east coast has thus far been found
possible north of Cape Bismarck (77° 1'), the
position reached by Koldewey in 1870, yet
Hudson narrates that (in 80° 23') his men
were successful in making a landing, that
"they found it hot on shoore, and drunke
water to coole their thirst, which they also
commended." It is possible that the summer

32 The Arctic Problem,.
season of 1607 was an open one, justasScoresby
found it in 1817, and that the Greenland ice
had disappeared even from the region of the
sOtli parallel ; in that case Hudson may have
approached to, or even landed on, the Green
land coast, and indeed, a suspicion of this con
dition is found in a (subsequent) passage which
refers to "neerenesse to Groneland," and in his
desire to "returne by the north of Groneland
to Davis his Streights, and so for England."
If, as is claimed, land was visible far
to the northward of the 82d parallel, then,
manifestly, Hudson must have penetrated
considerably beyond 80° 23', as it is wholly
unlikely that he saw any land at a greater
distance than 80 or 100 statute miles; at any
rate, this could not have been on the Green
land side, where, as we now know, the coast
beyond the 80th parallel trends rapidly west
ward. A mountain 4,000 feet in elevation,
under the most favorable conditions, can be
seen from the sea-level from an extreme dis
tance of only eighty miles; and from a mast
head one hundred feet in height, about
twelve miles further.
Another effort in the direction ofthe Pole
was made by a certain Jonas Poole, master of
tlie ship Amitie, in 1610, but the farthest lati
tude reached (off Spitzbergen) was 79° 50'
The commission of this voyage, undertaken
under the auspices of the Muscovy Company,

Polar Expeditions. 33
recites: "Inasmuch as it hath pleased
Almightie God, through the industry of your-
selfe and others, to discover unto our nation a
land lying in eightie degrees toward the North
Pole : We are desirous, not only to discover
farther to the northward, along the said land,
to find whether the same be an island or a
mayne, and which way the same doth trend,
either to the eastward or to the westward of
the pole; as also whether the same be in
habited by any people, or whether there be
an open sea farther northward than hath been
already discovered  "
The same Jonas Poole seems to have attained
to about the 80th parallel in the following-
year, while Robert Fotherby, three years.later,
reached the northeastern extremity of Spitz
bergen, in Lat. 80° 16'. Between this period
and 1773, when Captain Constantine John
Phipps (afterwards Lord Mulgrave) was en
trusted with the command of an expedition to
determine the limits of navigation north
ward, there seems to have been no "official" or
organized effort to attain any very high lati
tude. It is true that in the instructions given
to Baffin and Bylot to guide the expedition of
1616 in search of a North-West Passage we
find the following: "For your course you
must make all possible haste to the Cape
Desolation; and from thence you, William
Baffin as pilot, keep along the coast of Green-

31 The Arctic Problem.
land and up F return Davis, until you come
toward the height of eighty degrees, if the
land will give you leave;" but this northern
diversion seems to have been in no way asso
ciated with the thought of an actual northerly
passage, since the instructions further recite
that the voyage is thence to be conducted
westward and southward, with a fall to the
60th parallel. The exact position of Baffin's
"farthest north" is not known, but it was
doubtless beyond the 78th parallel, probably
just within the Kane Basin. Phipps reached
positions due north of Spitzbergen of 80° 34',
80° 37', and 80° 48' (July 27th), at which
points the great ice-barrier trending in an
almost due east-and-west line prevented further
penetration northward.
The failure to reach a more northerly point
is significant, since it is alleged that in the
same year Captain Clarke sailed to 81° 30' and
Captain Bateson to 82° 15'. Scoresby, who
seems inclined to distrust the accounts of these
whalers, thus forcibly expresses himself in
this connection: "Now this was the year in
which Captain Phipps proceeded on discovery,
towards the North Pole, who, notwithstanding
he made apparently every exertion, and ex
posed his ships in no common degree; though
he repeatedly traced the face of the northern
ice from the longitude of 2° E., where the ice
began to trend to the southward, to 20° E.,

Polar Expeditions. 35
where he was so dangerously involved, was
never able to proceed beyond 80° 48' N., and
even that length once in the season. Is it
reasonable, therefore, to suppose that whale-
fishers, sailing in clear water, without any
particular object to induce them to proceed far
towards the north, should exceed the length
to which Captain Phipps attained in the same
year, and within a few days of the same time,
by eighty-seven miles towards the north? I
imagine, on the contrary, that both Captain
Clarke and Captain Bateson had been mistaken
in their latitude, and had not been so far as
Captain Phipps, or at least not farther."
Scoresby's objections are well taken, yet the
rapidity with which the northern ice frequently
breaks, and as rapidly closes over, as I have
myself had occasion to observe during two
seasons, makes it not exactly impossible that
with the difference in time of a few days the
whalers may have been actually successful
where Phipps was not ; again, the recklessness
— a characteristic which, at least to-day, marks
that class of people — of the whalers might
have impelled to a course which would not
have been considered expedient to an officer of
trained responsibility, such as Phipps. It is
well known that in the west Greenland waters,
in Melville Bay, the whalers, in their anxiety
to be first on the American whaling "ground,"
regularly subject their vessels to the chances of

36 The Arctic Problem.
crushing by forcing ("butting") a passage
through the ice, rather than wait for it to dis
appear in its normal course. In this way the
traverse is frequently made in the early days
of June — sometimes still earlier — when the sea
is seemingly still one impassable ice-pan,
whereas the so-called "open passage" is
usually not made before the middle or last
week of July. In our traverse of the Bay in
1891, under the guidance of an experienced,
but perhaps too cautious, ice-master, we were
detained in the ice until the 23rd of July —
becoming imprisoned on the 2d; yet in the
following year, Captain Phillips, of the whaler
"Esquimaux," who kindly offered to apprise
Mr. Peary in advance of the coming of a relief
expedition, had already as early as the 13th
of June succeeded in planting my message on
Wolstenholme Island, fully fifty miles beyond
the gates of Cape York.
It is not then unreasonable to assume that
the hardy and venturesome whaler will fre
quently penetrate where the dictates of caution
would restrain the disciplinarian, or man of
more impressed responsibility ; therefore, due
weight must be given to this consideration
in judging ofthe possible accomplishments of
the two classes of navigators. That a much
further northing than Phipps's had already
been made some time before the voyage of that
navigator is almost indisputably proved by

Polar Expeditions. 37
the Dutch charts of 1707, which place a
"Gilles' Land" on the 82d parallel, and in a
position which, in its relations to the trend of
Zichy Land (Francis-Joseph Land), make it
all but certain that land had in fact been dis
covered at that time.
In order to encourage exploration in the far
north the English Parliament in 1776, by
special enactment (16th Geo. III., chap. 6),
offered a reward of £5,000 to the owner of any
merchant vessel or to the commander of any
King's vessel who should first penetrate to
within one degree of the Pole, a fitting supple
ment to the act of 1743 (16th Geo. IL, chap.
17) which conferred an award of £20,000 for
the discovery of the North- AVest Passage.
Despite this encouragement, no further effort
— at least, none of a determined nature — to
penetrate into the far north was made until
1818, when John Ross and W. E. Parry,
respectively iu command of the Isabella and
Alexander, were commissioned by the British
Government to make further search after a
North- AVest Passage, and David Buchan and
John Franklin, in command of the Dorothea
and Trent, to attempt the Polar passage by way
of the Greenland-Spitzbergen Sea. In the
same year the act of 1776 relative to the award
of £5,000 was modified into one of proportional
awards (Act 58th Geo. III., chap. 20), which,
by a subsequent commission, was adjusted as

38 The Arctic Problem.
follows : "To the first ship, as aforesaid [belong
ing to any of his Majesty's subjects, or to his
Majesty], that shall sail to 83° of north lati
tude, £1,000; to 85°, £2,000; to 87°, £3,000;
to 88°, £4,000; and to 89°, as before allotted,
the full reward of £5,000." *
Both expeditions of 1818, so far as the main
objects to be obtained were concerned, were un
successful. Buchan's and Franklin's farthest
north, off Spitzbergen, was 80° 34' (July);
although seemingly beyond the main body of
the ice, the rapidly southward-sweeping cur
rent prevented nearer approach to the Pole.
It is a singular circumstance, as bearing
upon the accomplishments of whalers and the
official heads of expeditions, that the farthest
north that had thus far been attained, or to
which, at least, absolute credence can be given,
was the northing of the two Seoresbys, who,
while on a whaling voyage, on May 24th,
1806, reached the very high latitude (carefully
estimated, and based upon an observation of
the day before, viz.: 81° 12' 42") of 81° 30'.
This was on Long. 19° E. of Greenwich, on
the border of the great northern ice-pack,
whose front had been followed from the W S.
W. over an extent of 27 degrees of longitude
The younger Scoresby states regarding their
position : "The margin of the ice continued
to trend to the E. N. E. (true), as far as it was
^London Gazette, 'Sid March, 1S19.

Polar Expeditions. 39
visible; and, from the appearance of the
atmosphere, it was clear that the sea was not
incommoded by ice, between the E. N. E. and
S. E. points, within thirty miles, or limited by
land within 60 or even 100 miles of the place
ofthe ship." *
One of the most determined efforts to reach
the Pole, and certainly the most significant
that had been made up to that time, was the
one of Parry in 1827. It was the first in
stance where a long pedestrian traverse of the
northern pack-ice was contemplated and execu
ted as an auxiliary to the ordinary operations
of the vessel of the expedition. Equipped with
two open fiat-floored, and runner-mounted
boats, the Enterprise and Endeavor — each
measuring twenty feet in length and seven feet
in breadth — and a number of sledges, and thus
provided for operations on both ice and water,
the expedition on June 23rd left H. M. Sloop
Hecla off the coast of Spitzbergen and headed
due northward. No serious obstruction was
encountered until Lat. 81° 12' 51" was reach
ed, when the boats had to be hauled up on
the floe-ice. From that time until the com
pletion of the journey the course was one
almost continuous struggle. The rough and
hummocky ice, wholly unlike the flat plain
which had been pictured by Lutwidge and
Scoresby, and over which it had been assumed
* Account of the Arctic Region:;, p. 313.

40 The Arctic Problem.
that a coach could be driven for many leagues
in a direct line, with its numerous pools and
water-ways, and a heavy covering of soft
snow, made the work of dragging an exceed
ingly laborious one. Especially fatiguing was
the management of the boats. The heavy equip
ment necessitated a constant retraverse of the
same journey, so that each day's progress was
a repetitionary effort made two, three, four or
even five times. Indeed, Parry remarks that
in some instances the traverse had to be made
seven times over. The management of each
boat, which, with its full complement of furni
ture, clothing, provisions, etc., weighed 3,753
pounds, was intrusted to twelve men, the
weight per man, exclusive of four sledges
weighing 26 lbs. each, being thus 268 lbs.
Parry thus describes his usual mode of pro
ceeding :
"It was my intention to travel wholly at
night, and to rest by day, there being, of
course, constant daylight in these regions
during the summer season. The advantages
of this plan, which was occasionally deranged
by circumstances, consisted first, in our avoid
ing the intense and oppressive glare from the
snow during the time of the sun's greatest
altitude, so as to prevent, in some degree, the
painful inflammation in the eyes, called 'snow-
blindness,' whicli is common in all snowy
countries. We also thus enjoyed greater

IN THE ICE OF MELVILLE BAY.

Polar Expeditions. 41
warmth during the hours of rest, and had a
better chance of drying our clothes ; besides
which, no small advantage was derived from
the snow being harder at night for travelling.
The only disadvantage of this plan was, that
the fogs were somewhat more frequent and
more thick by night than by day, though even
in this respect there was less difference than
might have been supposed, the temperature
during the twenty-four hours undergoing but
little variation  "
"When we rose in the evening, we com
menced our day by prayers, after which we
took off our fur sleeping-dresses, and put on
those for travelling ; the former being made of
camblet, lined with raccoon-skin, and the latter
of strong blue box-cloth. We made a point of
always putting on the same stockings and
boots for travelling in, whether they had dried
during the day or not ; and I believe it was
only in five or six instances, at the most, that
they were not either still wet or hard-frozen.
This, indeed, was of no consequence, beyond
the discomfort of first putting them on in this
state, as they were sure to be thoroughly wet
in a quarter of an hour after commencing our
journey ; while, on the other hand, it was of
vital importance to keep dry things for sleep
ing in. Being 'rigged' for travelling, we break
fasted upon warm cocoa and biscuits, and after
stowing the things in the boats and on the

42 The Arctic Problem.
sledges, so as to secure them, as much as
possible, from wet, we setoff on our day's
journey, and usually travelled from five to five
and a half hours, then stopped an hour to
dine, and again travelled four, five, or even six
hours, according to circumstances. After this
we halted for the night, as we called it, though
it was usually early in the morning, selecting
the largest surface of ice we happened to be
near, for hauling the boats on, in order to avoid
the danger of its breaking up by coming in
contact with other masses, and also to prevent
drift as much as possible. The boats were
placed close alongside each other, with their
sterns to the wind, the snow or wet cleared out
of them, and the sails, supported by the bam
boo masts and three paddles, placed over them
as awnings, an entrance being left at the bow.
Every man then immediately put on dry
stockings and fur boots, after which we set
about the necessary repairs of boats, sledges,
or clothes ; and, after serving the provisions for
the succeeding day we went to supper. Most
of the officers and men then smoked their pipes,
which served to dry the boats and awnings
very much, and usually raised the temperature
of our lodgings 10° or 15°. . . . AVe then
concluded our day with prayers, and having
put on our fur-dresses, lay down to sleep with
a degree of comfort, which perhaps few persons
could imagine possible under such circum-

Polar Expeditions. 43
stances; our chief inconvenience being, that we
were somewhat pinched for room, and there
fore obliged to stow rather closer than was
quite agreeable. The temperature, while we
slept, was usually from 36° to 45°, according
to the state of the external atmosphere ; but on
one or two occasions, in calm and warm weather,
it rose as high as 60° to 66°, obliging us to
throw off a part of our fur-dress  Our
allowance of provisions for each man per day
was as follows :
Biscuit . . .10 ounces
Pemmican . ... 9 "
Sweetened Cocoa Powder 1 ounce, to make 1 pint.
Rum .  1 gill
Tobacco  3 ounces per week.
Our fuel consisted entirely of spirits of wine,
of which two pints formed our daily allow
ance, the cocoa being cooked in an iron boiler,
over a shallow iron lamp, with seven wicks ;
a simple apparatus, which answered our pur
pose remarkably well."
This graphic account gives little idea of
the hardships, or perhaps rather, difficulties,
that were encountered in the passage of the
pack-sea. The rapid thawing and breaking
up of the floating ice-masses, which in many
instances were barely strong enough to sup
port the weight of a single boat with its
complement of men, the yielding crust and
almost innumerable water-ways, and the strong
southwardly-trending current combined to

44 The Arctic Problem.
render progress extremely slow and irksome.
Indeed, on the last day or days the southerly
drift more than counterbalanced the actual
advance made, so that on the 26th of
July the position, as determined by a meri
dian altitude of the sun— 82° 40' 23"— was
actually three miles to the south of the posi
tion which had been determined at midnight
of the 22nd. "Again," as Parry states, "we
were but one mile to the north of our place
at noon on the 21st, though we had estimated
our distance made good at twenty-three miles.
Thus it appeared that, for the last five days,
we had been struggling against a southerly
drift exceeding four miles per day."*
Parry's farthest north, a little beyond 82°
45', was made seemingly on the morning of
July 23rd. At that time the distance from the
Hecla, bearing S. 8° W., was only 172 miles,
to accomplish which it is assumed fully 290
miles were covered, of which about one hun
dred were performed by water previous to en
tering the ice. "As we travelled by far the
greater part of our distance on the ice three,
and not unfrequently five times over, we may
safely multiply the length of the road by two
and a half; so that our whole distance, on a
very moderate calculation, amounted to five
hundred and eighty geographical, or six hun
dred and sixty-eight statute miles, being nearly
*Narrative, p. 102.

THE ARCTIC "MIRAGE"

Polar Expeditions. 45
sufficient to have reached the Pole in a direct
line." An analysis of Parry's journey leads to a
simple conclusion: given a better condition
of the ice for travelling, and a lighter equip
ment, obviating the necessity of retraverses,
a decided advance could have been made in
the direction of the Pole, with the possibility
of even reaching the Pole. The problem pre
sents itself: Can these conditions be met?
There can be no question, as Parry himself in
timates, that at an earlier season the ice, crisp
and solidly frozen, would have been in a much
more favorable condition for a traverse than in
the months of June and July, when it becomes
spongy and rotten, and harbors an almost end
less series of ramifying water-lanes and pools.
The constant launchings and up-haulings of
the boats are an incident of an ice-journey
which cannot conduce to satisfactory progress.
Whether or not the great quantities of soft
snow which were encountered were due to an
unusually wet season, or were the product of a
summer season as distinguished from the winter,
cannot be precisely stated. That the summer
was an unusually wet one cannot be doubted,
and Parry states (p. 129) that the quantity of
rain that fell was twenty times that which he
had observed in any preceding summer in the
Polar regions. Parry's men were not provided
with snow-shoes, and it is stated that no form

46 The Arctic Problem.
of snow-shoe could have been used with advan
tage, owing to the very hummocky condition
of the ice. Not improbably, however, with a
lighter equipment a decided advantage might
have been derived from these articles, especi
ally in an early season, before the forcing of
the pack, when the ice presents a much less
hummocky surface than at the time of its
coursing and crushing. 1
As regards the lightening of the equipment,
there can be no question that, with the ad
vantages of an experience extending over sixty
years, it can be very materially effected. The
journey of Mr. Peary is especially fruitful in
this regard, and particularly impressive is the
lesson taught by the simplicity of the personal
accoutrement 2 and the food-supply. Most of
all significant, however, is the fact that a long
Arctic journey can be safely undertaken by but
two men; and, doubtless, a small party would
be preferable in a dash for the Pole to a large
force whose principal function would be the
hauling of its own equipment.
In concluding his narrative, Parry expresses
a doubt as to the feasibility of the traverse on
the lines which he attempted to carry out, and
'Loclcwood and Brainard iu their long journey northward
were also unprovided with snow-shoes, a circumstance which
was afterwards much regretted by the leader of the party.
2 Mr. Peary's reindeer-suit, which was used on the inland ice
to the exclusion, for the greater part of the journey, of both
tent and sleeping-bag, weighed only 11)4 lbs.

Polar Expeditions. 47
of which he, following Franklin, was an
enthusiastic advocate. He thus remarks :
."That the object is of still more difficult at
tainment than was before supposed, even by
those persons who were the best qualified to
judge of it, will, I believe, appear evident from
a perusal of the foregoing pages ; nor can I,
after much cpnsideration and some experience
of the various difficulties which belong to it,
recommend any material improvement in the
plan lately adopted. Among the various
schemes suggested for this purpose, it has been
proposed to set out from Spitzbergen, and to
make a rapid journey to the northward, with
sledges, or sledge-boats, drawn wholly by dogs
or rein-deer ; but, however feasible this plan
may at first sight appear, I cannot say that
our late experience of the nature of the ice
which they would probably have to encounter,
has been at all favourable to it" (p. 143).
Parry, however, had reason to subsequently
change his opinion, for in 1845, eighteen
years after the accomplishment of his journey,
we find him writing to Sir John Barrow as
follows : "It is evident that the causes of fail
ure in our former attempt in the year 1827
were principally two ; first and chiefly, the
broken, rugged and soft state of the surface of
the ice over which we traveled ; and, secondly,
the drifting of the whole body of ice in a
southerly direction. On mature reconsidera-

48 The Arctic Problem.
tion of all the circumstances attending this en
terprise, I am induced to alter the opinion I
gave as to its practicability in my Journal, p.
144, because I believe it to be an object of no
very difficult attainment, if set about in a dif
ferent manner. My plan is, to go out with a
single ship to Spitzbergen, just as we did in
the Hecla, but not so early in the season, the
object for that year being merely to find secure
winter quarters as far north as possible 
I propose that the expedition should leave the
ship in the course of the month of April, when
the ice would present one hard and unbroken
surface, over which, as I confidently believe, it
would not be difficult to make good thirty
miles per day without any exposure to wet,
and probably without snow-blindness. At this
season, too, the ice would probably be station
ary, and thus the two great difficulties which
we formerly had to encounter would be en
tirely obviated. It might form a part of the
plan to push out supplies in advance to the dis
tance of one hundred miles, to be taken up on
the way, so as to commence the journey com
paratively light ; and as the intention would be
to complete the enterprise in the course of the
month of May, before any disruption of the ice
or any material softening of the surface had
taken place, similar supplies might be sent out
to the same distance, to meet the party on their
return."

Polar Expeditions. 49
That this latter plan of Parry is a feasible
one there is every reason to believe ; — indeed,
no other plan for reaching the Pole commends
itself to equal favor, unless it be that of trying
a staunch steamer in the middle or latter part
of August, in a favorable season, and forcing a
passage due northward (yid. post.). No expedi
tion undertaken since Parry's time has brought
in facts severely opposed to the plan outlined,
and, therefore, it is not a little remarkable1 that
the effort in this direction should have received
such scant encouragement, and been replaced
to so great an extent as it has been by the
much less promising west Greenland or Ameri
can route. The fact that a shore-line could
here be followed for so great a distance north
ward was, doubtless, the determining factor,
in at least several instances, in the selection of
this route — a route, the impracticability of
which, so far as penetration by vessel is con
cerned, has been abundantly proved by the
experiences of Kane (in 1853), Hayes (1860),
Hall (1871), and Nares (1875).2
*Vid. ant., pp. 22-24.
2Kane's brig, the Advance (120 tons), was stopped by the ice
about seventeen miles beyond the entrance to Smith Sound,
in Lat. 78° 45' ; Cape Constitution, the furthest point reached
by a sledging party (1854), is by some authorities placed in
Lat. 81° 22', by others in 80° 56'. The United States of
Hayes, a schooner of 130 tons, found it impossible to pass be
yond Littleton Island, and winter-quarters were established at
Port Poulke, in Lat. 78° 17' ; a sledging party is said to have
penetrated the following May to 81° 35' , but most geographers

50 The Arctic Prohln-,,.
Th^most interesting fact connected with
Parry's expedition, and one which has in a
measure escaped the attention of Arctic geog
raphers, is the exceedingly small quantity of
ice that was met with at the most northerly
limits reached by the expedition. Indeed, it
would appear from the narrative that a staunch
steamer, such as has been several times used in
later expeditions, might have pushed, and with
out much effort, entirely through the ice which
impeded Parry, and freely entered the open
water beyond. Parry thus describes the con
ditions which presented themselves on July
25th: "So small was the ice now around us,
that we were obliged to halt for the night at
two, a. m., on the 25th, being upon the only
piece in sight, in any direction, on which we
could venture to trust the boats while we rest
ed. Such was the ice in the latitude of 82°f"!
This intimation of a largely open Polar sea
Parry emphasizes with a concluding state
ment: "I may add, in conclusion, that before
the middle of August, when we left the ice in
our boats, a ship might have sailed to the lati
tude of 82°, almost without touching a piece
agree that the position is not to be depended upon. Hall's
vessel, the Polaris, was beset in the ice, on August 30th, in
Lat. 82° 16', the farthest north that had been reached by
vessel up to that time, but four years later, in 1ST 5, the
powerful screw-steamor Alert, of the British Expedition,
penetrated along the same route, through Robeson Channel, to
82° 27' ; a sledging party extended the exploration to S^0 20'.

ESKIMOS COME TO MEET US.-CAPE YORK.

Polar Expeditions. 51
of ice ; and it was the general opinion among
us that, by the end of the month, it would
probably have been no very difficult matter to
reach the parallel of 83° above the meridian of
the Seven Islands" (Narrative, p. 148). It
might here be properly asked: If a sailing
vessel could have penetrated without very
great difficulty to the 83d parallel, how much
further may not a steam- vessel have penetrat
ed? Did Parry in fact discover an "open Polar
sea"? This would appear to be the case from
the statement that beyond 82° 45' no ice of any
magnitude was visible ; but it should be recol
lected that a ship's horizon, even with the ad
vantage of a crow's nest, is an extremely limit
ed one. From the ice-cake on which Parry
rested at his "farthest north" the horizon
must have been limited to some five or six
miles at the utmost, and, therefore, the indica
tions of open water need not have extended
even to the 83d parallel. Indeed, Parry him
self admits that a yellow ice-blink almost con
tinuously overspread the northern horizon, a
general indication of ice not being far distant.
With all allowances, however, it may be
affirmed that in the summer of 1827 open
water, beyond the northern pack, extended quite
to, if not considerably above, the 83d parallel
of latitude. The late Dr. Petermann was the
most persistent believer in the comparative
openness of the northern Polar sea, and the

52 The Arctic Problem.
staunchest advocate of the Spitzbergen route as
the route, for vessels, to the Pole. Commenting
on the papers of this distinguished geographer,
Admiral Richards, who was one of the mem
bers of the Arctic Committee of the Admiralty
which recommended the Smith Sound route,
states that no papers read before the Royal
Geographical Society on the subject of reaching
the Pole appeared to him "so sound, so
logical, or so convincing." Carrying out the
plan of exploration in this region, he further
states : " Briefly, the proposition was that two
stout and well found steamers, such as the
Alert and Discovery, should seek an opening
through the ice north of Spitzbergen, an at
tempt which has never yet been made. It is
the only route which offers a prospect of suc
cess by ships, and it is impossible to deny that
it does hold out a very fair prospect." (Proc.
Royal Geogr. Soe, 21, p. 283).

III.
The Spitzbergen Route to the Pole.
The plan of a sledge-journey to the Pole,
while it was first seriously attempted by that
able officer, was not original with Parry. As
has already been said, the suggestion, trans
mitted through Barrow, was received from
Captain (afterwards Sir) John Franklin, but
several years before, the younger Scoresby had
already advocated this method of travel. Thus
he states, in his "Account of the Arctic Re
gions" (1820, p. 54): "But though the access
by sea be effectually intercepted, I yet imagine,
notwithstanding the objections which have
been urged against the scheme, that it would
by no means be impossible to reach the Pole by
travelling across the ice from Spitzbergen 
As the journey would not exceed 1,200 miles
(600 miles each way), it might be performed
on sledges drawn by dogs or rein-deer, or
even on foot. Foot travellers would require
to draw the apparatus and the provisions
necessary for the undertaking, on sledges by
hand; and in this way, with good despatch,
the journey would occupy at least two months;
but with the assistance of dogs, it might
probably be accomplished in a little less time.

54 The Arctic Problem.
With favorable winds, great advantage might
be derived from sails set upon the sledges;
which sails, when the travellers were at rest,
would serve for the erection of tents. Small
vacancies in the ice would not prevent the
journey, as the sledges could be adapted so as
to answer the purpose of boats ; nor would the
usual unevenness of the ice, or the depth or
softness of the snow, be an insurmountable
difficulty, as journeys of near equal length,
and under similar inconveniences, have been
accomplished." Scoresby's plan was, in part,
a remarkable anticipation of the method so
successfully followed by various Arctic ex
plorers from McClintock to Peary, while in its
special feature, the convertible sledge-boat, it
foreshadows the main feature of the Ekroll
project. The relative advantages of the Spitzbergen
and American routes to the Pole are set forth
in a series of "discussion papers" published
in the Proceedings and Journal of the Royal
Geographical Society of London for the years
1865, 1866, 1868, and 1872. The participants
in the discussions were Captain Sherard Os-
born, Sir George Back, Admiral Collinson, Cap
tain Maury, Clements R. Markham, Sir Leo
pold McClintock, Admiral Richards, J. Craw
ford, and Koldewey, who favored the Smith
Sound route; A. Petermann, General Sabine,
Sir Edward Belcher, Admiral Ommanev, Ad-

The Spitzbergen Route to the Pole. 55
miral Fitzroy, W. E. Plickson, Sir Roderick
Murchison, Captain Inglefield, Staff-Command
er Davis, and Mr. Lamont, who favored the
Spitzbergen route; and Captain Allen Young,
who favored both routes. The most striking
fact made clear in connection with the discus
sions before that honorable body was the tena
city with which opinions once expressed were
adhered to ; so that although the controversy
extended over a period of seven years — the
lack of unanimity among Arctic experts de
feating the application addressed to the Lords
of the Admiralty in behalf of a Government
Polar Expedition — there appears to have been
no recession from "first positions." What is
perhaps equally striking, and certainly much
less explicable, is the fact, as announced by
the President of the Royal Geographical So
ciety, Sir Henry Rawlinson, that the "Coun
cil of the Society had appointed a committee
of the most experienced and practical members
of their body, to report their opinions upon the
subject; and they were unanimously in favour
of Smith Sound" (Session of April 22, 1872).
How this unanimity in favor of the Smith
Sound route was obtained among the "most
experienced and practical members" of the
Society, in face of the contrary opinion of such
men as General Sabine, Sir Edward Belcher,
Admiral Ommaney, Admiral Fitzroy, Captain
Inglefield, and Staff-Commander Davis, most

56 The Arctic Problem.
of them tried Arctic or Antarctic explorers, it
is difficult to conceive. The later experiences
of Hall, Nares, and Greely, added to the experi
ences of all previous explorers in the same
region, only more clearly demonstrate how ill-
judged must have been the facts which were
marshalled up in favor of the views of the
"special" committee.*
The more remarkable does the opposition to
the Spitzbergen route appear in view of the
fact that prior to 1865 not a single attempt
had been made by steam- vessel to penetrate
the northern pack at a high latitude, and
between 1865 and 1872 Nordenskj old's effort
in the Sofia — undertaken more especially for
the purpose of determining the relative advan-
* Since writing the above, I have found in a paper by Mr.
Markham, on the Arctic Expedition of 1875-76 (Proc. Eoyal
Geogr. Soe, 21, p. 540), that in the report of the Committee
above referred to, "all mention of reaching the North Pole
as an object, was purposely excluded." The unanimity on
the part of the Committee thereby becomes much more intel
ligible, although it looks somewhat as though the change of
base was intended to deceive the Government, the previous
discussions clearly indicating the desirability of making for
the Pole. Significant in this connection is the instruction
given by the Arctic Committee of the Admiralty (Admirals
Bichards, McClintock, and Osborn) that "the scope and
primary object of the Expedition should be to attain the
highest northern latitude, and, if possible, to reach the North
Pole." The members constituting the special Committee of
the Eoyal Geographical Society were Sir George Back, Ad
miral Collinson, Admiral Ommaney, Admiral Richards, Sir
Leopold McClintock, Captain Sherard Osborn, Dr. Eae, Mr.
Eindlay^ and Clements li. Markham.

The Spitzbergen Route to the Pole. 57
tage of an autumn navigation over that of the
summer or spring season — when the latitude
of 81° 42' (Long. 17£° E. of Greenwich) was
attained, was the only one that could in any
way be considered in the nature of a real at
tempt. Nordenskjbld reached his highest point
in the latter half of September,* and was stop
ped by a sea densely packed with broken ice.
He concludes from his experiences that : " The
idea itself of an open Polar Sea is evidently a
mere hypothesis, destitute of all foundation in
the experience which has already by very con
siderable sacrifices been gained ; and the only
way to approach the Pole, which can be at
tempted with any probability of success, is
that proposed by the most celebrated Arctic
authorities of England, viz : that of — after
having passed the winter at the Seven Islands,
or at Smith Sound — continuing the journey
towards the North on sledges in the spring." It
is a little difficult to harmonize the first part of
this conclusion with Nordenskjbld's own belief,
as expressed by himself, that if the "year had
not been unusually unfavorable with regard to
the condition of the ice, we might in all proba
bility have proceeded a considerable distance
farther, perhaps beyond 83° N. Lat." If this is
* "Probably the highest northern latitude a ship has ever yet
attained." Nordenskjold, Swedish North Polar Expedition
of 1868. Journ. Eoyal Geogr. Soe, London, XXXIX, p.
142, 1869.

58 The Arctic Problem.
assumed to be easily possible — in other words, if
a favorable season would permit of an advance
farther northward of some 90-100 miles — on
what foundation rests the assurance that an
other hundred, two-hundred, or even five-hun
dred miles might not have been covered in the
same way? Buchan (with Franklin) and Parry,
the only explorers, recognized as such, who
broke through or penetrated beyond the outer
ice-barrier, found at their terminals open water
— Parry at a point only seventy statute miles
beyond Nordenskj old's "farthest" — and this
form of testimony must be accorded weight be
yond anything that is derived mainly from
supposition.* To this testimony must be added
* The statement (vid. ant.) that no serious effort to penetrate the
pack-sea north of Spitzbergen had been made by steam- vessel
up to 1872 can be extended to our own day. Petermann, com
menting on the lack of effort made in this direction, and on
the successful penetration of Captain (Sir George) Naresto
Lat. 82° 27 ' , affirms his belief that a properly equipped expe
dition would have no more difficulty in steaming through the
Spitzbergen Sea ice than Boss had of sailing through the
Antarctic ice thirty years before. With the effort of 1S75-76
to penetrate the northern ice by way of Smith Sound and
Eobeson Channel applied to the Parry route, it is thought
certain that the Pole would have been attained {Peter.
mann's Mittheilungen, 1877, p. 24). Nordenskjold's positive
statement regarding the non-existence of an open Polar Sea
is in marked contrast to the cautious opinion expressed by
Weyprecht, the virtual Commander of the Austro-Hungarian
Expedition of 1872-74, to Petermann, under date of November
1, 1874 -. Erstens sind die Schl-iisse auf ofenes Polarmeerin
huchstcn Norden eben so falsch wie dicjenigen der absolutcn
Undurchdringlichlvit des ror dem ncucn Lande vorlirgen-

The Spitzbergen Ponte to the Pole. 59
the corroborative data supplied by the early
whalers, which, while they may not be consid
ered to be of an absolutely satisfactory charac
ter, have certain elements of plausibility about
them. Indeed, it would seem on trustworthy
evidence, as adduced by the late Dr. Petermann,
that a whaler, the Truelove, of Hull, as late
as 1837, penetrated without much hindrance
to 82° 30' (Long. 12°-15° E.), and so exper
ienced a whaler and Arctic navigator as Capt
ain David Gray, of Peterhead, affirmed his be
lief that in 1874, having penetrated to 79° 45',
beyond which little or no ice was to be found,
he "could have gone up to the Pole, or at any
den Eises (Mittheilungen, 1874, p. 452). The failure of the
Swedish Expedition of 1872-73 (the main object of which was
a Polar sledge-journey) to reach a high northern latitude has
little bearing upon the question at issue, and still less, the
efforts of Koldewey, the Commander of the Second German
Expedition of 1869-70, to penetrate the east Greenland ice-
barrier between the parallels of 75° and 76°. The main pur
pose of the Austro-Hungarian Expedition of 1872-74, un."!er
Weyprecht and Payer, was the forcing ofthe North-East Pas
sage ; the remarkable drift of the Tegethoff, through which
Francis-Joseph Land was accidentally discovered, deals with
an ice-formation very different from that of the north Spitz
bergen sea. Lieutenant Payer thus expresses himself in rela
tion to the Polar problem : ' ' Our own track to the north of
Novaya Zemlya carries no weight in considering this ques
tion, for we were indebted for our progress to a. floe of ice,
and not to our own exertions." The Dutch Expedition of
1878 was in the nature of a reconnaissance — a preliminary to
more extended operations in the future ; Captain de Bruyne,
in the schooner William Barents (79 tons), reached the front
edge ofthe ice north of Spitzbergen in Lat. 80° IS'.

60 The Arctic Problem.
rate far beyond where anyone had ever been
before." *
The obstacle that has, perhaps, stood most
in the way of the assumption of the Spitz
bergen route to the Pole, by English and
American explorers at any rate, is the so-
called "canon" of Arctic exploration: "Stick
to the land-floe" or "follow a line of coast".
Among the more urgent and persistent up
holders of this doctrine have been the late
Admiral Sherard Osborn and Mr. Clements R.
Markham. The maxim is in some respects,
doubtless, a good one, but it is questionable
if the experience which has thus far been ac
quired from Arctic ventures is sufficient to
warrant its being pinned to the mast for all
time. Indeed, our experience with the open
pack is still much too limited to permit us to
postulate a measure of the possibilities which it
* Letter to Mr. Leigh Smith (Proc. Eoyal Geogr. Soe, 19, p.
179). From a passage contained in Witsen's "Tartarye,''
published in 1707, Petermann infers that Francis-Joseph
Land may have been discovered and reached three hundred
years before the arrival there ofthe Tegethoff. It recites that
a certain Captain Cornelis Eoule had "been in 84,,2'° or 85°
N. Lat. in the longitude of Novaya Zemlya, and has sailed
about forty miles between broken land, seeing large open
water behind it  He found lots of birds there, and
very tame." Petermann, commenting on this statement,
states that the longitude of Nova Zembla passes right through
Austria Sound and Francis-Joseph Land ; that the latter is a
"broken land, " behind which Lieutenant Payer saw "large
open water," and "found lots of birds." The coincidental
description is certainly striking.

The Spitzbergen Route to the Pole. 61
presents; and at the present time, with our
intimate knowledge of past exploration, the
Nansen expedition is planned wholly on
the basis of open pack service. The failure,
by the heavy vessels of the British Expedition,
to penetrate the ice north of Robeson Channel,
and the determination that the northern ex
tremity of Greenland, or of its outlying islands,
probably terminates not far from the 84th
parallel of latitude, practically dispose, for the
present, at least, of the Smith Sound route as
an available route to the Pole. Sir George
Nares himself states his belief that "great
difficulty will be found in advancing much
nearer to the Pole by the Smith Sound route
than has already been attained, either in a
ship, or by boat, or sledges, unless, indeed, the
coast of Greenland — contrary to my expecta
tions — trends to the northward beyond Lat.
83° 20' N."* But if this route is impracticable,
manifestly the only resource is to the open
pack — unless, indeed, a coast-line be found to
extend northward for a considerable distance
beyond the farthest point to which Francis-
Joseph Land is known to extend — and it be
comes merely a question as to which pack
offers the greatest advantages for a direct tra
verse. And no special regret need be ex
pressed for this one alternative, for, despite all
efforts that have been made to magnify the
* Proc. Eoyal Geogr. Soe, 21, p. 281.

62 The Arctic Problem.
success of recent expeditions, and to minimize
the results obtained by earlier explorers,
impartial critics must admit that of all at
tempts made to reach the highest latitude, the
one of Parry, in 1827, taking the essential cir
cumstances into account, was by far the most
successful and remarkable; and this expedition
was conducted on the open pack. That in
those early days of Arctic exploration, with the
rude appliances of food and equipment which
were then available, he should have been aide
to penetrate to within forty miles of the far
thest north that has since been made possible
— made possible with an experience extend
ing over fifty years, and an expenditure of
money, the vastness of which, as a vehicle
of Arctic exploration, could never have been
even remotely contemplated by Parry — is a
fact which appeals strongly in favor of the
open pack. This appeal comes the more forci
bly since, as has already been stated, no sin
cere attempt on the lines laid down by Parry
has been attempted since his time, and conse
quently no contradiction to the belief in the
easy feasibility of this route given.
The question of success, in fact, seems to re
solve itself entirely into the possibilities of
sledging, and Parry has expressed himself de
cidedly on this point. He believed that in a
sufficiently early season, before the breaking
up of the ice, he could accomplish thirty miles

CAPE YORK ESKIMOS.-GREENLANDERS.
(Arctic Highlanders)

The Spitzbergen Route to the Pole. 63
per day. Assuming that only one-half of this
amount were made good, which would ap
proximately represent the rate of travel of
Lockwood and Brainard in a twenty-two days
sledging trip from Cape Bryant to Lockwood
Island and return, the journey, from the south
ern border of the ice-pack to the Pole itself,
could be accomplished in about forty days, or
less. Parry's failure to reach a further north
ing than 82° 45' was due, as has already been
explained, to the southern drift which more
than antagonized the exceedingly slow pro
gress in the contrary direction which the heavy
equipment permitted. There is reason to
believe that had Parry had the advantages
of the possibilities of compacting and of lighten
ing in construction which years of experience
have brought forth, the Pole itself might have
been attained. This is the view of so exper
ienced an Arctic explorer as Sir Leopold Mc
Clintock, who, in discussing the methods
and merits of "Arctic Sledge-travelling," states
his conviction that "the failure of Parry's at
tempt to reach the North Pole in 1827 was
largely due to the great weight of his boats,
and the consequent difficulty of dragging them
over the ice. This error wre have attempted to
correct by supplying boats* of considerably less
than half the weight of Parry's."
*To the British Polar Expedition of 1875-76. Proc. Eoyal
Geogr. Soe, 19, p. 475.

64 The Arctic Problem.
One of the numerous fallacies connected
with Arctic exploration is the supposition,
held by some, that sledge-journeys cannot be
prosecuted for any very great distance over the
pack, or indeed anywhere. It is true, as stated
by Admiral Richards (Proc. Royal Geogr. Soe,
21, p. 283), that the "longest distance ever
accomplished by any one sledge-party, or by
any combination of sledges, in one direction did
not exceed 360 geographical miles in a straight
line," but this fact, in itself, barely warrants
the statement that "sledge-travelling with a
view to reaching the Pole was at an end for
ever." This position is justly combatted by
Dr. Rae, who holds that it is based upon the
experience of hut a single party, and, that it
is "still quite possible that sledge-journeys
might be made to the North under more favor
able circumstances." We have as yet barely
any experience bearing upon the extreme possi
bilities of sledge-journeyings, and what there is
points much more nearly to the positive rather
than to the negative side ofthe question. In
deed, there would seem to be no limitations to
the work of a properly equipped and conducted
sledge-party, whether on the open pack or else
where, and Sir Leopold McClintock probably
justly states that "there is now no known
position, however remote, that a well-equipped
[sledging] crew could not effect their escape
from, by their own unaided effort."

The Spitzbergen Route to the Pole. 65
Payer, the commander of the land journeys
of the Austro-Hungarian Expedition, affirms
his belief that the only chance of traversing
the Polar realm is by means of sledges (com
munication addressed to Petermann, under
date of November 5th, 1874). Just as firmly
as he was wedded to the proposition of pene
trating the Spitzbergen Sea by means of pow
erful steam- vessels, so was Petermann opposed
to the principle of long sledge-journeys, in the
ultimate success of which he had no faith. A
strong support was claimed to be given to his
views by the failure of the Swedish Expedi
tion of 1872-73, when Nordenskjold and Palan-
der made an ineffectual attempt to traverse the
ice north of Mossel Bay, Spitzbergen. In
this experiment, conducted over an exceeding
ly heavy and hummocky ice, progress was on
.some days measured by less than half a mile.
A weight of 280 pounds was distributed to
each man of the expedition, or very nearly
that which was allotted to the members of
Parry's party.* The ill-success attending this
expedition must be given due weight. It is
probable, however, that men more accustomed
to sledge-journeys than were the members of
the Swedish Expedition, or endowed with a
firmer determination, would have accomplish
ed more. The heavy equipment seems again
to have been the principal bar to progress, for
?Palander, in Petermann's Mittheilungen, 1873, p. 348.

66 The Arctic Problem.
Nordenskjold admits, that with the assistance
of forty reindeer, in place of tlie single animal
which was at the service of the party, even
with the exceptionally unfavorable condition
of the ice, they would have been able to pene
trate very far (sehr iveit) beyond the Parry Is
lands.* Brought to its simplest expression the ex
ploration byway ofthe Spitzbergen Sea means:
1. A direct traverse of the sea and pack by
staunch steam-vessels, or
2. The accomplishment of a large, and prob
ably the greater, part of the journey by
means of sledges and portable boats.
The probability seems to lie with the side of
the alternative, and in every event its contin
gencies must be provided for. It cannot, how
ever, be too strongly insisted upon that prelim
inary reconnaissances to the main effort, regu
lated to meet the exigencies of such effort,
should favorable conditions present themselves,
are an essential to success. There is no reason
why an expedition fitted out to make a direct
passage northward should, in the event of
specially unfavorable conditions presenting
themselves, squander its energies in an attempt
to accomplish a forlorn hope, and return with
a miserable record of failure. It would be far
better to have it return than expose it to the
chances of disaster, and better to outlive the
*Petermann, 1873, p. 445.

The Spitzbergen Route to the Pole. 67
loss of glory than suffer the penalty of misdi
rected pride. The ready accessibility of the
Spitzbergen Sea places it within easy reach of
expeditions of only moderate cost, and there
ought to be little difficulty in organizing yearly
voyages to the north with the hope of once
stumbling upon a specially favorable season.
As to just which portion ofthe Spitzbergen
Sea is most available — whether on the line fol
lowed by Parry or eastward by the shores of
Francis-Joseph Land (the route favored by
Greely, Markham and Melville) can in our pres
ent knowledge scarcely be predicated. The
western shores pf Francis- Joseph Land, should
they be found to extend much to the northward
ofthe limitations which have been generally as
signed to them, would doubtless possess all the
advantages which are involved in the Arctic
canon of keeping by the land ; and the fact
that the land has been traced (optically) quite
to the 83d parallel is a circumstance which
must be given weight in the consideration of
the possibilities of disaster and the necessities
of a forced retreat. If winter-quarters are to
be established on either Spitzbergen or Francis-
Joseph Land, preliminary to an early spring
sledge-journey, then manifestly Francis- Joseph
Land has the advantage of distance, since its
northern apex is nearer to the Pole by at least
one hundred and thirty miles than is the north-
em extremity of Spitzbergen. The western or

68 The Arctic Problem.
"lee" exposure of the ice-foot of Francis-Joseph
Land, moreover, offers the proper requirements
for an even surface, and not improbably, also,
in this higher latitude, nearer to a centre of
currental motion, the pack itself would be
found to be more nearly stationary than at a
position further south.
The chances for a successful issue to a sledge-
journey northward from Francis- Joseph Land
are seemingly the best which any region offers ;
and whether the Pole is itself attainable by
this route or not, it is all but certain that a
much higher latitude would be gained (and
gained with comparatively little effort) than
has ever before been possible. With winter-
quarters established between the 82d and the
83d parallels of latitude, or whatever the far
thest point might be to which the impedimenta
of an expedition could be carried by steamer,
a northern start could be begun with the
month of March — perhaps still earlier — and a
return effected in time, possibly, for a final de
parture from the region still the same year. At
least five months would thus be available for
the purposes of sledging, and it is probably not
too much to expect that from five to ten miles,
on an average, could be covered every day of
this period. With the lowest amount here
stated, of five miles, the seventy-five days out
ward journey would conduct to the very gates
of the Pole, or to within sight of the immedi-

The Spitzbergen Route to the Pole. 69
ate Polar tract if any high land existed within
the boundaries. Should it be desired to spend
two winters in the region, then, manifestly, the
length of time of exploration could be consid
erably extended. The most serious contin
gency to be guarded against on an expedition
of this nature would be that of driftage arising
from the breaking and dissolution of the pack be
fore the return of the exploring party, an event
that would almost certainly take place full two
months before the completion of the enterprise.
This condition would be in measure met by the
relief of portable boats, but there is no reason
why the supporting vessel of the expedition
should not cruise through the broken pack-
sea along its open front and chance the
meeting with the returning parties. Such con
templated assistance would probably not be
absolutely necessary, nor would it be assured of
being carried out, but the attempt to realize it
would cost little beyond effort. The advan
tages of the Francis-Joseph Land route to
steam-penetration are less apparent, since
seemingly the 82d or 83d parallel can be
reached without much effort, and, moreover, it
may be questioned whether the ice accumula
tion about the newly discovered land is not in
fact heavier than farther westward in the more
open oceanic tracts.
THE EAST GEEENLAND SEA.
What facilities for obtaining a high northing

70 The Arctic Problem.
are afforded by the east Greenland Sea, — or more
properly, the sea that is included between the
eastern shores of Greenland (above the 78th
parallel of latitude) and the outlying border
pack — is not known ; nor, in fact, is it positive
ly known that such a sea exists at all as a
permanency, although from the data obtained
by numerous whalers there can be no question
of its existence at times. Petermann was an
urgent advocate of the possibilities of this route,
but he had manifestly much underrated the dif
ficulties and dangers attending the passage of
the outlying pack-ice. The recent failures of
the Danish Commander Ryder to penetrate
this ice add testimony to the unfortunate ex
periences of the Second German Expedition
under Koldewey in 1869-70. Yet it is by no
means certain that in a specially propitious
season good fortune would not attend an expe
dition in this direction. Captain David Gray
had apparently no difficulty in forcing the ice
in 1874, and, as is well known, an open sea
in 1817 and 1818 washed the east Greenland
coast as far north, seemingly, as the 79th paral
lel. The recent explorations of Mr. Peary, by
demonstrating that a position on the northeast
coast, near to the 82d parallel, can be obtained
through an overland journey from the west,
opens up a new possibility, and even good
promise for this route. Starting from this
point (which could probably be reached from

" BELLES" OF CAPE YORK.
(Arctic Highlanders.)

The Spitzbergen Route to the Pole. 71
winter-quarters established on Inglefield Gulf
as early as the month of May, or even the mid
dle of April) as a base, the Parry method
might be essayed thence over the open frozen
sea. This route would probably have an ad
vantage over that pursued by Parry by being
placed (presumably) beyond the zone or belt
of greatest driftage; on the other hand, the
preliminary traverse of some four hundred
miles of land, with a full equipment, is a dis
advantage which cannot as yet be fully meas
ured in the scale of possibilities. That this
traverse is not a decided obstacle to a protracted
excursion beyond, is indicated by the prepara
tions which are at the present time being made
by Mr. Peary for the examination of the east
ern and northern coast-lines of Greenland
through an expedition starting from the west. We
know as yet nothing of the condition of the sea-
ice north or northeast of Greenland ; seen from
Independence Bay, in Lat. 81° 37', it appeared
to Mr. Peary to be largely destitute of hum
mocks, but the distance of vision was such as
to make the determination somewhat doubtful.
At the time of his visit, the early days of July,
no water was visible, but this fact is no evi
dence of permanent gelation. Melville Bay is
at the same period of the year very largely
solid, although two or three weeks later little
ice is to be seen.
If Greenland be used as a base of operations

72 The Arctic Problem.
to reach the Pole, then the Smith Sound route
commends itself to better favor than the over
land traverse. It is almost beyond question
that a staunch vessel could during one or two
months of every year penetrate to at least the
81st parallel, and find a safe anchorage in one
of the numerous deep bights or fjords which
open into the western waters. An advance post
for a sledging party could probably be estab
lished the same season considerably beyond the
"farthest" of Lockwood and Brainard, or within
some four hundred miles of the Pole, whence
the main journey over the frozen sea — unless,
indeed, the island-masses lying north of Green
land extend much beyond their assumed limits,
and permit of a coastal traverse — wTould be con
tinued in early spring. The southwestwardly
trending swing of the Polar ice, and the ab
sence of sufficiently extensive channels or ave
nues of discharge in this region, make it highly
probable, however, that the open pack would be
in a much more broken and unfavorable con
dition for travelling over than in the region
about Francis-Joseph Land, where to the west
ward a broad avenue of release is afforded by
the Greenland-Spitzbergen Sea. In its several
relations the Francis-Joseph Land route holds
out the greatest promise to a boat-and-sledge
journey. Captain Albert II. Markham has in his work,
"A Polar Reconnaissance" (1881), strongly

The Spitzbergen Route to the Pole. 73
advocated the real advantages of the Francis-
Joseph Land route, and the opinion of no Arc
tic explorer is worthy of higher consideration
than that of the intrepid commander of the
"farthest north" sledging party of 1875-76.
His conclusion is stated as follows : " From a
careful study of all that has been achieved in
the far North, I am more than ever convinced
that a greater amount of success will be gained
by the exploration of the region in the vicinity
of Franz Josef Land than in any other part of
the Arctic regions" (p. 319). In the Preface to
this work, Mr. Clements R. Markham, for many
years the unbending advocate of the Smith
Sound route, gives in his adhesion to the views
of Captain Markham. " Here, therefore, is the
route for future polar discovery. Here an ad
vanced base may be established within the un
known region, whence scientific results ofthe
utmost interest will be secured: and here the
nearest approach to the North Pole can be
made." Note. Since the foregoing was sent to press
announcement has been received that an at
tempt to reach the Pole by way of Francis-
Joseph Land will be made this summer by Mr.
Frederick G. Jackson, a Fellow of the Royal
Geographical Society of London. The plan of
journey, as outlined by Mr. Jackson in the
London Times, is as follows :
"Franz Josef Land, according to Sir Allen

74 The Arctic Problem.
Young and other authorities, would be easily
accessible any ordinary year, and it is the only
point where one could establish a base whence
to extend a secure line of march northward,
with a possibility of safe retreat, if necessary, to
one's headquarters. I propose, therefore, to
avail myself of this fortunate fact, and sail this
summer, if possible, for the southern coast of
Franz Josef Land. I shall hope to arrive there
in time to make a rapid reconnoitre northward
(and perhaps reach a point further north than
the Austrian limit) before moving into winter
quarters, In the following year I have every
expectation of being able to push forward with
a considerable quantity of stores and establish a
second depot, probably in or about the 84th or
85th degree. Having there established a base
in this high latitude, I shall have ample time, I
believe, to make a third march northward
(should there be land beyond this limit). If
there be land, this third march should enable
me to establish a third depot, within 200 miles
of the Pole, and here I should wdnter. I
should then have the whole of the next sum
mer in which to seize the opportunity to make
a push to the ultimate object of the expedition.
If there be not land northward of the second
depot (84 degrees) I should hope to firmly
establish myself there for the winter, and pre
pare to make the necessary forward advance
in the next spring. But for all that is known

The Spitzbergen Route to the Pole. 75
to the contrary, Franz Josef Land may extend
even to the Pole. Should this be the case,
one summer with fair weather may prove suf
ficient. I propose to attempt this with a small
party of not more than ten men. We should
have light equipment, sledges, dogs, etc. By
establishing a chain of depots, I may point out
that we should escape the burden of carrying
with us a large quantity of stores and provisions
at the very time when we should wish to
move most rapidly."
The results of this venture will certainly be
awaited with much interest. If carried out
with a strict observance of the necessities and
possibilities which the modern Arctic study has
developed, and under the force of that patient
energy which so triumphantly bore the British
pennant across the ice-fields in 1875, it cannot
easily fail to plant an important stepping stone
in the path of Polar exploration. To it may
we confidently look for much new light upon
the Arctic question, if not for the absolute reso
lution of the problem itself.

AN ARCTIC MONUMENT.-ICE-BERG OFF DISKO ISLAND.
(175 feet in height)

4fW4€4€®ILllTlT1

3>

J2 1.

NaiingmaTnik Uisammmasassunik univkat.
Ortnpare 4.

1 88i>

Imait: Kauren

H lifisalo Nun^m

ugain- I nan noji;aigaliiat.aut, I vig. unuldla p*oi jt&igalujr-
llr [ put ¦>Kox-imiit« ac nvdlutil., .. iava (U.ini^i-aW pi-

151.
ngitsotarata ame ukiume issigtorssuarme kisisa
tingmiaralogit otorsautigivdJuartaravtigit Kujanar-
dluinartarput. (Ukp ilagssaralue miterniarneK Kipingmg-
dlo niorKQtPKarneii pivdlugo asdlagai kuj.uata oa-
Iagata ilaaguterKuugikaidlarmagit pmgikaLdlarput ,
sule aalajaogersarnetiaQgikatdlarmat Kipit nioruuii-
gewuDeiiarungnaeiuraarnersut niorKutigemuneKaiDa-
rumaroersutdlunit; amalume misigssuissut tatnana
pivdlugo natunaerutimingnik sula oagsiutaKanging-
mata; kujatatale nalagala tularutigitigjla niiter-
niarnerup puissingniarnenuut audlanutdlo piniar-
DGrnut akorDUlaussas&usia nuluoaerutigineKaruroar-
tOK, tauvalo ImaKa V. Hamroeken-ip agdlagai
naisigssuissut suliaiout pardlaugasasoralugit ; ima-
ua naluoaerutigissat katerssorrjeitarpata Atuagag-
dliutiout ilangunenarumarpiu.)
Nupaitarliagmiut niuvertorusiuvfigissartagkaka
tamarmik sapingisanguamingmk umiagdlit umiatsiag-
dlitdlo katerasuivdluarniartartut emanarsarniartutdlo
¦* Vi ug3s» ¦" '-^ssarr -artumut " :~:--'<*- Aa-

15?.
dlernen saperdlufnalerpait, KeKertarssuarmiutdle \-
ron . Jakuvdlo, Isavdlo tikitdluinaugajagtaniorpait.
Kangerroileraniale aipaoe Jutdle kitdligalugo
nautsorssoravkit, Sebastian orssuersimavoK Ggtutit
(ft) 5,500 sivnitsiardlugit; kilalugkat orssuinik ila-
Kardlutik . Antutdle puissinait orssuinik orssuersi
mavoK ugtutit (tl) 5000 sivnitsiardlugit. llaisa
Kristiap, Peter II. Amos 1 ugtutit (ft) 4000 si v -
nitsiarn6rdhigit; ilaile ikingneruvdlulik . Ukiordle
mana KanyiugloK Amos 1 amerdlanerssauvoK QgtG-
tit (ft) 4000 ndjidlnigajagkaraigit.
KaKutigorsauaK manisi^angat aussamilunit aut-
dlaimgiOKartarpoK, autdlaisigdliL taiaarmik HaKuti-
gorssuaa pursserKauigdlunit pissasartarmata . 0-
kuale kisimik talioarojiognik piniutenarput: Actios I,
Peter J (Pitarah). Amos II. Boas 11. Taukua
siugdlit laissaka oauhgkaiugtorasuput pimardluartor-
ssuvdluiigdlu. TttarlaWfingnile Kangermiut ilaisa pissait ig-
pingnaidluinartarput ilarpagt>sue puiugauvdlutik ti->
tarta|,np"'Q-''"" ; — "'* ¦*" ¦¦ -arn- --

Reduced fac-simile of Greenland (Eskimo) paper, containing an account
of Nansen's journey.— Published at Godthaab.

THE PEARY RELIEF EXPEDITION.

A GREENLAND OFFICIALS WIFE.
(Mrs. Snfia Baumann.)

IV.
The Peary Relief Expedition.
On June 6, 1891, the good ship Kite, a bark-
entine whaler of the old type, and measuring
barely forty yards in length, lay alongside one
of the busy Brooklyn wharves, eagerly scanned
by hundreds of eyes for the little that distin
guished her from the neighboring craft. Neat
ness or cleanliness was not a characteristic of
the vessel, for she still bore traces of seal-strife
and struggles among the ice of Newfoundland's
coast. To certain peculiarities of structure was ad
ded a suggestion of the odor of oil and blub
ber, and if these were not in themselves suffi
cient to indicate the rank ofthe vessel, it could
readily have been told from the iron bow-cap, '
and that singular aerial castle known as the
crow's nest. However insignificant and hum
ble the Kite may have appeared beneath the
tall hulls and masts that surrounded her, she
bore a trim side to the waters of an open sea,
and in her adopted port of St. John's she is a
craft with a history and a name.
Prior to the date above mentioned, the most
distinguished name associated with the vessel
was that of her then master, Captain Richard

80 The Peary Relief Expedition.
Pike, a sea-dog devoid of those characteristics
which entitle one to the designation of "bluff,"
but who, despite this deficiency, had already,
on two occasions, done service among the ice
fields of the far north. To his hands, as ice-
master, the Government in 1881 entrusted the
fate of the Proteus — the ship which conveyed
the Greely party to their point of location, near
the eighty-second parallel, which was destined
to serve as a home of desolation for a period of
three years.
In 1883, on the organization of the second
Greely Relief Expedition, under Lieutenant
Garlington, Pike was again pressed into Arctic
service as the ice-master of the relief-ship Pro
teus, the crushing of which among the ice-floes
of Smith Sound, off Cape Sabine, has become a
matter of history. The ten years that have
elapsed since the day of the disaster have not
yet sufficed to wipe offthe cloud from the gen
ial tar's brow, over which the shadows of fifty-
three years have now gathered. A quiet re
solve never again to enter the Arctic seas was
brushed aside when, in 1891, the Kite was
chartered to convey the expedition of the Phila
delphia Academy of Natural Sciences to the
Greenland waters, and a demand made for the
services of an experienced ice-master and pilot.
The Kite left her anchorage among the
Brooklyn hulks on the afternoon of June 6th,
carrying as her passenger list the members of

The Peary Relief Expedition. 81
the Peary party — Civil-Engineer Robert E.
Peary, U. S. N., Josephine Diebitsch-Peary, Dr.
F. A. Cook, Langdon Gibson, Eiwind Astrup,
John T. Verhoeff, and Matthew Henson — and
an auxiliary body of "summer" investigators,
to which the writer had the advantage to be
attached. After varying incidents of one form
or another, the good little craft put in at God-
havn, the capital of the Northern Inspectorate
of Greenland, on June 27th, and on July 2d,
almost exactly opposite the Devil's Thumb,
buried her nose in the pack-ice of Melville
Bay, from which she was destined not to
emerge until three weeks later.
It was during the traverse of this ice, on
July 11th, that Lieutenant Peary met with
that mishap — the breaking of the lower right
leg, which came near to shattering the enter
prise upon which the commander had for years
.set his mind. In a constitution less vigorous,
and a mind less heroic, such an accident would
have annihilated all aspirations for success,
even in the most favored undertaking ; but to
Mr. Peary and his gallant wife, it was but an
incident, the passage of which was to be deter
mined only by future events. On July 24th,
the Kite reached McCormick Bay, on the
southern shores of which, and in the shadows
of the bright-red cliffs which make up much
of what belongs to Cape Cleveland, the Peary
winter-quarters were established. Many pleas-

82 The Peary Relief Expedition.
ant memories attach to the little retreat be
neath the boards and tar-papers of the Redcliffe
House, where probably was passed the most
comfortable and homelike winter in the far
north which it has been the lot of Arctic ex
plorers to experience. On July 30th, the Kite,
with the auxiliary party aboard, steamed out
of McCormick Bay, leaving the North Green
land Expedition to shift for itself during the
many months which were to follow before
contact with civilization could again be made
possible. It was during these months, extend
ing from August to May, that those careful
studies of possibilities were made which have
rendered practicable the most remarkable ice-
journey that has ever been undertaken, and
brought to the geographer the solution of one
of the few significant problems which remained
open to him. Greenland has been demon
strated to be an island, whose general north
ern contours lie south of the eighty-third par
allel. Probably no scientific expedition originating
on this side of the Atlantic has attracted more
general attention than the one which Mr. Peary
has but recently brought to a successful termi
nation. Its special feature, the traverse in a
due geographical course of nearly four hun
dred miles of the inland ice, was the pivot
about which much of this interest centred.
The bold manner in which the expedition had

The Peary Relief Expedition. 83
been conceived, involving an almost total de
parture from the methods that had been fol
lowed by all previous expeditions to the far
north, and the circumstance that the party of
exploration had been reduced to less than a
handful of men, lent additional interest to the
enterprise. To the scientist the interest was
more than a purely sentimental one. The suc
cessful issue of the expedition meant the solu
tion of some of the most perplexing problems
which were yet open to the investigator. The
conditions which determined the limitation of
man's habitation on the globe, the nature and
extent of the great Greenland ice-cap, and its
relation to the ice accumulation of the Glacial
Period, and the distribution of plants and
animal forms beyond the boundaries of the ice
cap itself, were the topics of special scientific
interest which linked themselves with the main
geographical inquiry — the determination of
Greenland's northernmost boundaries.
The only weak point of the Peary Expedi
tion was the failure to make adequate provision
for a return to civilization after the accomplish
ment of the inland journey. It was the in
tention of the leader to make his way leisurely
down the coast in open whale-boats — two of
which had been specially constructed for the
purpose — and dare the ice and storms of Mel
ville Bay as he had dared the winds and snows
ofthe inland ice, from the sea-level to 8,000

84 The Peary Relief Expedition.
feet elevation. Once across the Bay, the
journey could be readily continued to Uperni-
vik or Godhavn. The passage in open boats
of Melville Bay has been accomplished, either
in whole or in part, on several occasions — by
Kane, in 1855 ; by Bessels and Buddington,
in their retreat from the Polaris, in 1873 ; by
Pike and Garlington, in their retreat from the
Proteus, in 1883 — but always with great diffi
culty, and under the guidance of an ample
force of able-bodied men. In the present in
stance, the party, including the courageous
wife of the commander, numbered but seven
members, too limited in strength, probably, to
undertake the risks which the journey entailed.
Under the circumstances it seemed eminently
proper that assistance be rendered to the re
turning party, and it was with a just apprecia
tion of this position that the Philadelphia
Academy of Natural Sciences undertook the
organization of a Relief Expedition.
Under my command, as leader of the Ex
pedition, were associated Henry G. Bryant, the
successful explorer of the Grand Falls of Lab
rador, second in command ; Dr. Jackson M.
Mills, surgeon ; William E. Meehan, botanist ;
Charles E. Hite, zoological preparator ; Samuel
J. Entrikin ; Frank W. Stokes, artist ; and
Albert White Yorse, most of whom had already
been tried in mountain or camp work of a more
or less arduous nature. The Kite was again

The Peary Relief Expedition. 85
chartered as the vessel of the expedition, and
with her, the tried captain of the Proteus,
Richard Pike. The possibilities of the Relief
Expedition were such that no anticipatory
plan of action, except as it was indicated in its
broadest details, could be determined upon as
a finality. The contingencies that might pre
sent themselves were too numerous to permit
of simple resolution, and therefore full scope
was given the expedition to meet the exigen
cies of the moment. It was, however, con
sidered a necessity to pass Melville Bay at the
earliest possible time consistent with an assur-
able amount of safety to the vessel, as once
beyond the ice and waters of that much-
dreaded section of the Arctic world the passage
to McCormick Bay could be made without
hindrance of any kind. The experience that
has been brought down from the various Arctic
expeditions, and more particularly from the
different whalers which , every year traverse
much of the northern icy seas, has infused an
element of certainty into Arctic navigation
which could hardly have been realized by the
heroes of a period twenty-five or thirty years
ago. The capture, by the Melville Bay pack,
of McClintock's Fox in the latter part of Au
gust, 1857, could scarcely be paralleled to-day,
except as the outcome of ignorance or disre
gard of every-day knowledge. In an average
season Melville Bay can be traversed about as

86 The Peary Relief Expedition.
readily as almost any large body of water lying
southward, while its earliest seasonal passage
can be predicated with a precision almost akin
to mathematical calculation. The hard pack-
ice which has accumulated as the result of the
winter's frost, and has to an extent been held
together through the large bergs which are
here and there scattered through it, usually
shows the first signs of weakness between July
10th and 20th. Large cakes or pans of ice
have by that time succumbed to the powerful
oceanic currents that are directed against them,
and detaching themsekves from the parent mass,
float off to find new havens of their own. The
weakening process continues until most of the
ice has been either removed or melted away,
and before the close of the fourth week of
July little beyond shore-ice (shore-pan) re
mains to indicate the barrier which but a few
days before rendered a passage all but imprac
ticable. The trend of the ice is northwestward
through the Bay, then westward to the Amer
ican side, and finally south to the open sea. It
was the purpose of the Relief Expedition to
reach the southern boundary of the Melville
Bay pack on or about the 20th of the month,
and there watch the movements ofthe ice until
the opportunity for action arrived. An earlier
traverse might possibly have been made through
persistent "butting" of the ice, but the dangers
incident to this form of navigation were such

The Peary Relief Expedition. 87
as to render slowness a prudent measure of
safety. At 2.30 of the afternoon of July 5th the hiss
of the siren announced to the loiterers on the
wharves of Newfoundland's capital that the
Kite was about to depart on her second voyage
to the Arctic seas. A few moments later the
vessel swung from her wharf, and amid a
chorus of hurrahs and the shrill accom
paniments of steam-whistles, started on her
mission of good-will northward. The bold
sandstone cliffs guarding the entrance to St.
John's Harbor, aglow with the warm sunshine
of a "typical" day, were soon dropped in the
rear, albeit the rate of travel was somewhat
less than seven knots an hour. Few of the St.
John's sealers are rated for more than nine or
ten knots ; of the entire fleet the Kite is about
the least swift, but what she lacks in this regard
is more than compensated for by a staunchness
of construction and a commodiousness of de
sign which render her specially adapted for
the purpose for which she was selected.
The first few days of the voyage were wholly
uneventful, and almost without incident. In
the afternoon of the 10th, after heavy fogs had
largely obscured our course, suspicious cakes of
ice indicated a near approach to the Greenland
coast. At midnight of the 11th, when a rift
in the fog first revealed the presence of Green
land's serrated mountains, the guard-rails of

88 The Peary Relief Expedition.
the vessel were almost overtopped by the ice;
fortunately the pans were not sufficiently
packed to cause serious alarm for our posi
tion, despite the disagreeable feature which
the presence of an ever-falling fog added.
The point of the Greenland coast opposite
to our position was approximately the great
Frederikshaab glacier, one of the most gigantic
of the almost endless number of ice-sheets
which radiate off from the inland ice to or
toward the sea. In the passage of this portion
of the coast the summer previous no sea-ice be
yond freely floating bergs was encountered, but
in the present year the ice extended fully sev
enty miles farther northward, and, as subse
quent events showed, it was the heaviest accu
mulation that had been known for several
decades. The southern ports of Greenland had
for weeks been inaccessible, while the vessels of
the cryolite fleet, for two months or more, had
found scant quarters amid the jam that was
impending. Wreckage appeared in scattered
masses, and intelligence of disaster turned up
everywhere. The Kite finally extricated her
self shortly before noon of the 12th, when
about opposite Lichtenfels, the northernmost
point which the lower or Cape Farewell ice is
known to attain.
Fog and rain followed the expedition for
another thirty-six hours, but on the morning of
the 14th day broke with a splendor and lumi-

The Peary Relief Expedition. 89
nosity unknown to regions outside of the Arc
tic Circle. The Greenland coast loomed up
brilliant for a length of a hundred miles or
more, its rugged mountain peaks, here and
there flecked by the snows of lingering winter,
or forever shrouded in the white mantle of a
perpetual ice-cap, forming a continuous pano
rama not unlike what is presented to the ob
server from the lower mountain summits of
Switzerland. It is true that the loftiest peaks
are here but four or five thousand feet in eleva
tion, but the absence of foreground and the
low descent of the snow-line combine to pro
duce an exaggerated optical effect which is
most delusory, a deception that is only further
strengthened by the Horner and aiguilles which
everywhere recall the Alps. It is Switzerland in
miniature, with a smooth, glassy sea to receive
the reflections which in old Helvetia bathe in
the waters of her deep blue lakes. Seventy
miles to the northward a slight heaving ofthe
horizon indicated the position of the basaltic
cliffs of Disko Island, under the lee of which
are nestled the few huts and houses which to
gether constitute the capital of the Northern
Inspectorate of Greenland, Godhavn or Lieve-
ly. The average mind which conceives of a
journey to the far north as being one of only
hardships and terror, finds it difficult to realize
that this is the "land beyond the Arctic Cir
cle;" the warm sunshine, the placid sea,

90 The Peary Relief Expedition.
and the absence, except in scattered flecks, of
those impending bergs which have fastened
themselves as time-honored necessities upon
the eye of the imagination, fail to do justice to
the modern conception of the Arctic world.
The temperature at 8 a. m. was 45° F., but at
noon it had risen to 50° F., and in the sun the
station of the mercury among the seventies
did away with all thoughts concerning wraps
and heavy underwear.
At 5.30 in the afternoon we arrived off God-
havn, and shortly afterward passed through
the formality of taking on a pilot — an Eskimo
of unmistakably European lineage. Swarthy
Frederick, the interpreter to the British Polar
Expedition of 1875-76, and the associate of
Peary in 1886, was among the first to greet us,
bringing with him a number of his tribe, young
and old — but all males, as no females are per
mitted to board the incoming vessels — prepared
to partake of a lasting hospitality of the ship's
steward, and to effect such barter as would
yield to them the advantage of a few krones
or of a shirt or pair of pantaloons. The latter
article was prized beyond measure, but its ac
ceptance was dependent wholly upon a proved
freedom from holes and patches. Danish sov
ereignty has long since infused a civilized
aspect into the costume of the southern Eski
mos, and hence the demand for articles which
would be scorned bv most of their brethren of

EARLY MORNING IN THE NORTH WATER.
(Petowik Glacier)

The Peary Relief Expedition. 91
the north ; European trousers and a blue cot
ton outer shirt or anorak now take the place, as
a summer attire, of the seal garments which
were a necessity in the antecedent periods of
barbaric existence. Among those who had
come out with the first boat-load of visitors to
the Kite was an old Eskimo who had in 1870
conducted Nordenskjold to the famous "me-
teoritic" region of the Blaaberg, on Disko Is
land, whence were obtained the large blocks of
native iron, commonly known as the iron of
Ovifak or Uifak, concerning the origin of
which, whether meteoric or . telluric, so much
has been written and argued by geologists and
mineralogists. I was at the identical locality
with the same Eskimo in the summer of 1891,
and fortune threw in our path a stone of some
two hundred and seventy pounds weight, for
which a reward of £5 was given. Suspecting
that there might be a return expedition this
year, the Eskimos had shrewdly made a further
examination of the desolate spot, with the re
sult of finding a number of additional blocks
of the desired material; these had been care
fully placed to one side awaiting my return,
and were now placed at my disposal, together
with much other geological material that it
was thought I might be interested in.
Our purpose in putting in at Godhavn was
primarily the presentation of official credentials
from the Danish Government, and the obtain-

92 The Peary Relief Expedition.
ing of certain effects which were considered
desirable for the expedition. Godhavn, or, as
it is commonly known to geographers, Disko,
as the capital of the Northern Inspectorate of
Greenland, is the official seat of one of the two
highest dignitaries of the land, the Inspector.
Of a population counting less than one hun
dred and thirty souls, some fifteen are Danes,
and the remainder almost entirely half-breed
Eskimos; not more than seven full-blooded
natives are recognized among the inhabitants,
of which number is the Frederick already
referred to. A first impression of this singular
settlement is not calculated to inspire enthusi
asm for a prolonged residence in the "land of
desolation." A few wooden structures, com
prising a church, the government building or
general store, and the residences of the Danish
officials, together with a somewhat larger num
ber of green-grown and chimneyed turf huts
of the Eskimos, crown a dreary expanse of
granite and syenite, over whose surfaces the ice
of former ages ploughed its way to the sea.
Everywhere the effects of past glaciation are
plainly written. No trees of any kind shadow
the sunlight from a perpetual summer sun ; no
song of bird, save the occasional chirp of the
snow-bunting and wheatear, responds to the
wakening calls of morning. The melancholy
bark of a dozen or more of shapely curs — not,
however, the awe-inspiring and night-destroy-

The Peary Relief Expedition. 93
ing howl of books of travel, but the more sub
dued tones of reality — alone indicates possession
of the town. Cheerfulness, save in the bright
sunshine which here illumines all nature,
seems to have forever deserted the locality.
But this first impression almost immediately
disappears through closer acquaintance. Once
the foot has been set upon the mirrored rocks,
the charms of this garden spot one by one un
fold themselves. The little patches of green
are aglow with bright flowers, rich in the colors
which a bounteous nature has provided ; the
botanical eye readily distinguished among
these the mountain-pink, the dwarf rhododen
dron, several species of heath, the crow-foot,
chickweed, and poppy, with their varying
tints of green, red, white, and yellow. Gay
butterflies flit through the warm sunshine,
casting their shadows over "forests" of diminu
tive birch and willow. Here and there a stray
bee hums its search for sweets among the pollen
grains, while from afar, woven through the
music of gurgling rills and brooks, come the
melodious strains of thousands of mosquitoes,
who ever cheerfully lend their aid to give voice
to the landscape. Above this peaceful scene
tower the dark-red cliffs of basalt, which from
a height of two thousand feet look down upon
a sea of Mediterranean loveliness, blue as the
waters of Villafranca, and calm as the surface
of an interior lake. Over its bosom float hun-

94 The Peary Relief Expedition.
dreds of ice-bergs, the output of the great
Jakobshavn Glacier, fifty miles to the eastward,
scattered like flocks of white sheep in a pasture.
Such was the summer picture of the region
about Disko as it was found by the writer in
two successive seasons. There was little of
that Greenland about it which we habitually
associate with the region, nothing of those ter
rors which to the average mind reflect the qual
ity of the Arctic world.
Dreary though a long residence may prove
to be at a spot like Godhavn, there is yet seem
ingly enough comfort in it to make it attract
ive to the Danish officials who reside there.
The neat little cottages, well supplied with
those appliances and adjuncts — such as a li
brary, piano, and billiard-room — which conduce
to a home-like comfort, are not in absolute
harmony with their surroundings, but they
bear testimony to an intelligence and refine
ment governing the household which come
with a rude shock to those who had expected
to meet with at best only half-barbarians in
this remote quarter of the globe. It was an al
most inexpressible pleasure for me to see the
geraniums, fuchsias, and roses whieh the good
people were here raising behind double win
dows or under glass covers, and fondling with
a care only equalled by the interest with which
they pursued the general subject of Greenland
zoology, or followed the recent explorations of

The Peary Relief Expedition. 95
men like Ryder, Stanley, Holub, and Peters.
Herr Inspector Andersson, whose hospitality I
had already enjoyed the summer previous, was
absent at the time of our visit, having but a
few days before gone to Upernivik to adjust
some matters in connection with the govern
ment there. Mrs. Andersson and her daugh
ter, however, gave us a kindly welcome, which
was reinforced through the good offices of the
Governor and his assistant. A determination
to aid our expedition to the fullest extent pos
sible was made manifest from the moment that
our arrival was officially announced.
We secured some fur clothing for our equip
ment, and what we thought to be of greater
importance to ourselves, the services of an
Eskimo interpreter and servant, Daniel Johan
nes Matthias Isaiah Broberg, a nephew ofthe
wealthiest native of Godhavn, and brother of
Nicholas Broberg, who in 1883 acted in a like
capacity for the second Greely Relief Expedi
tion. Daniel, like most of the Eskimos of God
havn, was inordinately fond of his tobacco, and
it was rarely that he was to be found without
his pipe; speaking, eating, or sleeping, his pipe
appeared to be his most faithful and constant
companion. The stipulations of our contract
with him were, that he was to receive £3 10s.
per month ; that he was not to receive any
orders from the ship's men ; not to be obliged
to draw, by himself, a sledge over the inland

96 The Peary Relief Expedition.
ice ; to be remunerated for the breakage of an
arm or leg, or for other bodily mutilation ; to
be returned to Godhavn. These stipulations,
which were exacted from a fear of ill-treatment
engendered through experiences associated
with former expeditions, and which have made
it all but impossible to secure the services of
any of the Eskimos of the Inspectorate, were
supplemented with a special recommendation
for a pair of pantaloons.
At 1.30 p. si. ofthe 16th we fired our part
ing salute, and dipping our colors to the ship
Constancia, which was then lying in port,
slowly withdrew from the shadow of the tall
cliffs which give to the harbor its most impres
sive aspect. Our destination was Upernivik,
the most northerly ofthe Danish settlements,
and the most northern settlement of civil
ization on the surface of the globe. We re
mained here but a few hours, our sole pur
pose being the exchange of civilities with the
Danish officials resident there. Herr Inspect
or Andersson and Governor and Mrs. Beyer
extended to us an open-hearted welcome, and
with it the full hospitality which their house
offered. A more exquisite day than that which
marked our departure from Upernivik could
scarcely be conceived. The white lumps of
ice which almost choked the harbor, and the
glare from whose surfaces fairly dazzled the

The Peary Relief Expedition. 97
eye, were a marked contrast to the delicious
warmth which was supplied by an Arctic 52°.
Desolate fogs, however, broke in upon the
evening and night, and it was not until two
o'clock of the following afternoon (the 19th)
that we were enabled to make a landing on
the outer Duck Island. The Devil's Thumb,
that most notable landmark, 2,347 feet in ele
vation, on the western coast of Greenland,
should have been made before midnight ; but
the ice-bound fogs obliged a halt throughout
the greater part of the evening and night hours.
The twentieth of the month, the day that had
been fixed upon for our arrival at Melville
Bay, actually found us there, and we stood
confronting the northern ice.
No real difficulty was encountered in the
passage of this much dreaded region of the
Arctic waters. An accumulation of shore-ice
prevented us from following the coast in the
track of the daring whalers, but about twenty-
five miles seaward comparatively little heavy
ice, beyond broken and rotten pans, was en
countered, and were it not for a continuous
lowering fog, little hindrance to a free naviga
tion would have been presented. My note-book
thus narrates our progress :
"We find solid shore ice stretching far out to
sea, through which it is impossible to find a
passage. Attempt a more westerly course,
some twenty-five miles from shore, and enter

98 The Peary Relief Expedition.
open water. At 8 o'clock (a. m.) we are mak
ing good headway; thermometer 33°. The
water is now as smooth as a mirror, with only
the smallest ripples to break its surface. Ice
bergs glisten at almost all points of the com
pass, but they are not numerous. An ominous
"ice-blink" shows up in the west, and under it
the mate announces much ice. It seems after
all that we are not destined to make an abso
lutely clear passage of the Melville Bay. At
10.30 we strike outliers of the ice — rotten
cakes, which we cut through without mercy.
The ice, however, thickens, and by eleven we
get into uncomfortable quarters with a solid
unbroken pan, from whose presence we igno-
miniously retreat. We try still further to the
westward, rounding the pan, and are again in
the open sea, or rather in a lead one or miles
in width between the two pans. The ice,
while unbroken, is not thick — one and a half to
two feet — and has rotted above and below.
Large bergs are moored in its midst, holding it,
doubtless. Shortly before noon we are momen
tarily halted by the ice ; start again, pushing
around the cakes, and taking a generally north
west course. Too hazy for noon observations;
we haul up again at about 4 p. si., and tie on to
an ice pinnacle. We are nosed to a very large
unbroken pan, which is rotten at its borders, but
thick, eight to ten feet or more, further away.
Mr. Dunphy, our eagle-eyed second mate, shouts

Tlie Peary Relief Expedition. 99
"bear," and immediately there is a general rush
for the guns. The object responding to the an
nouncement from the crow's nest is a blackish
looking mass about three quarters of a mile in
our lead. Bear tracks show up on the porte,
but the object of our attention gradually passes
through a varied transmutation from bear to
walrus, from walrus to seal and finally to an
interrogation point. After tea Bryant, Mills,
Entrikin and one of the ship's men put off on
the ice after seal, but come back unsuccessful.
We take fresh start about 8 o'clock, but do not
continue long, owing to fog and ice; the ther
mometer has stood pretty well at 33°.
"The fog lifts at midnight and shows clear
water all around. Our engines are again put
into operation and the ship gets to her course
at 3 a. si., continuing at full speed for about
four hours, when the fog once more shuts down
upon us. Scores of seals lie about us on the
distant floes, but unfortunately the condition of
our surroundings renders them inaccessible.
We grope along slowly, hoping by chance to
avoid the more formidable ice-pans which have
been cast loose from their moorings and are
now freely navigating in the course of the pre
vailing winds and currents. Every break in
the fog is taken advantage of for a fresh spurt,
but seemingly each effort only adds another
line to the zig-zag which we have been con
structing. High flat-topped bergs, the largest

100 The Peary Relief Expedition.
possibly 200-250 feet in height, loom up in the
distance, and their grouping suggests that they
occupy the well-known McClintock ground of
stranded bergs."
At 8 a. m. of July 22d we were off Cape York,
and had completed the passage of the Bay ; the
high land was first sighted shortly after mid
night, but beyond a momentary appearance, it
remained shrouded in the heavy fog until the
early hours of morning. Gray cliffs of granite,
moss-grown and grass-grown on their favored
slopes, with here and there a glacier peacefully
slumbering in their deeper hollows, mark the
exit from the ice-bound Melville Bay to the
open North Water. For sixty hours after leav
ing the Duck Islands the condition of the
weather had been such that no observations
for position could be taken ; our course had
been one solely of compass and dead-reckoning.
Considering the sluggishness of the compass in
these regions, and the almost endless number
of detours which a course in the fog among the
ice-pans necessitates, one could not but be im
pressed by the general directness ofthe traverse,
and the exactitude with which it was termin
ated. Barely fifty hours were required for the
passage from the Devil's Thumb to Cape York,
and had there been no fog, even with the large
quantity of ice that was present, the time would
probably have been reduced by from fifteen to
twenty hours.

ESKIMO CHILDREN OF SOUTH GREENLAND.

The Peary Relief Expedition. 101
At the Eskimo settlement a few miles to
the eastward of Cape York — the settlement
commonly known as that of Cape York — we
obtained the first information regarding the
Peary party. A shaggily-bearded Eskimo,
one of the tallest and most stalwart of the tribe
of so-called Arctic Highlanders, measuring
little (if anything) less than six feet in height,
had passed some part of the winter about the
"Peary igdloo" on McCormick Bay, and conse
quently could state something from personal
knowledge. Our extremely limited acquaint
ance with the Eskimo tongue, combined with
the difficulty with which our interpreter grasped
the sense of the northern dialect, made pro
gress in a mutual comprehension slow and
wearisome ; but enough was made clear that at
last accounts, extending back to a period of
some four or five months, the members of the
party — all of whom were indicated by name —
were doing well. A rude drawing, represent
ing with fair precision the geographical con
tours ofthe region, showed that they were at that
time still on McCormick Bay, and provided
with both boats and sledges. Coupled with
this information we were made to understand,
as, indeed, we had already known previous
to our departure — that one of the vessels of
the Melville Bay whaling fleet had been
crushed in the ice.
The arrival of the Kite at this first outpost

102 The Peary Relief Expedition.
of the northern Eskimos was the signal for
much quiet happiness on the part of the na
tives. Scarcely had the vessel made fast to a
cake of ice before she was boarded by the happy
people — men, women, and children — who,
true to the instincts of an honest nature, re
quired no invitation to bid them welcome.
They stayed until they had satisfied every
curiosity, or until the steam whistle announced
the prospective departure ofthe "Oomeakshua"
— the "big woman's boat," as the natives style
every large vessel. Among the visitors I re
cognized a number of familiar faces, but the
majority of my associates of last year seemed
to be absent. A limping old man who had
been known to Hayes was dead, and other
members of the tribe had departed.
A special purpose in calling at the settle
ment of Cape York, or Ignamine, was the dis
tribution among the natives of gifts of charity
which had been generously contributed by citi
zens of Philadelphia and West Chester. Boards
cut to the length of sledges, strips for kayak
frames, hardware, and utensils of various
kinds, cooking implements, etc., were a part of
the bountiful cargo that was to give joy and
wealth to a rugged people — a people to whom a
barrel stave or a needle was an almost price
less treasure. Words fail to describe the scene
of animation which marked the bestowal of
the awards. There were no rude attemps to ob-

1 he Peary Relief Expedition. 1 03
tain possession of any special article, no bois
terous demonstrations of superiority; each
man or woman received his or her gifts with a
dignity and calm composure which were truly
remarkable, in view of the wealth which the
presents conveyed. Their expression of ex
treme delight was told in a few syllables "Na,
na, na, nay."
The Eskimos of the Melville Bay region and
of the further north, the Itaner or Etahnes of
Bessels, to whom Ross, with singular inappro-
priateness, applied the name of Arctic High
landers — the Eskimo rarely leaving the low
lands of the sea-border — are, contrary to com
mon supposition, undergoing no diminution in
numbers. Indeed, if the estimates given by
earlier explorers are at all to be relied upon,
they must be increasing in numbers. Hayes,
in 1860, placed the total population between
Cape York and Etah, the most northern of the
native settlements, at about 100 souls, but Bes
sels, twelve years later, with the advantage of
an extended period of observation, assumed
that 150 would more nearly approximate the
truth. The exceedingly accurate work of Dr.
Cook, the ethnologist of the Peary Expedition,
whose census comprises not only the number,
hut the names, relationships, and points of
location of most of the members of this ex
ceedingly interesting people, increases the
number to 233, all of whom are at this time

104 The Peary Relief Expedition.
located between Cape York and the northern
shores of Robertson Bay, or between the paral
lels of 75° 56' and 77° 55' (77° 45'?) northlati-
tude. The fact that these Eskimos are of a
migratory habit, changing their location as
the conditions or the necessities ofthe chase de
mand — appearing now at one point, and dis
appearing at another — may have given rise to
the notion of impending extinction, and has,
doubtless, been in a measure the cause of the
discrepancy in the estimates furnished by dif
ferent travelers. When the Kite put in at the
Cape York settlement in the summer of 1891
there were not less than sixty natives settled
there, of which number forty-five were at one
time on our vessel ; at the time of the visit of
the present expedition barely more than one
half of this population remained, a northerly
migration, principally to the settlement on
Barden Bay (Netlik or Netchiolumi, not Ittiblu,
which is some fifteen miles further to the east),
having robbed the locality to the advantage of
another. At the locality just named we found
a population of 41 as against the twelve of the
year before. On the other hand, none but
"departed" traces were found at Port Foulke
and on Sonntag Bay of the so-called Etah and
and Sorfalik Eskimos, whose pleasant associa
tion with the expeditions of Kane, Hayes and
Hall forms so bright a chapter in the history
of Arctic exploration.

The Peary Relief Expedition. 105
After a delay of a few hours, necessitated in
part by the fog, the Kite pushed into the North
Water, where no floes or pack-ice were encount
ered. The clouds hung low over the Crimson
Cliffs, but beneath them scattered patches of
snow, tinted at intervals with the red of the
Protococcus nivalis, clung lazily to the moun
tain slopes. Passing Conical Rock at mid
night, the expedition steamed to Wolstenholme
Island, on the western spur of which it had
been prearranged that records should be left by
Mr. Peary, in the event of a forced early re
treat, but no cairn was discovered. My own
advice of the prospective Relief Expedition,
which had been deposited on the same island
nearly six weeks earlier (June 13th), by Cap
tain Phillips, of the whaler Esquimaux, was
picked up by my men and found to be un
disturbed. The party of exploration had mani
festly not yet passed to the south. Shortly
after 5 a. m. (of the 23d), the Kite shaped her
course to Whale Sound, and early in the even
ing of the same day, after discharging a second
cargo of charities to the Eskimos of Barden
Bay, made the passage between Northumber
land and Herbert Islands. Throughout the
greater part of the day there prevailed a balmy
and spring-like temperature which was in
striking harmony with the warm, sunlit effects
which the landscape everywhere presented.
We were less than nine hundred miles from the

106 The Peary Relief Expedition.
Pole, yet the thermometer could not be coaxed
down even to the freezing-point; in the sun the
mercury rose rapidly to near the 60° line.
Thousands of ice fragments, thrown out by one
of the arms of the great Tyndall Glacier,
covered the silvered surface of the sea; while
off in the distance swung out in majestic line
the flotilla of bergs to which the giant glaciers
of Inglefield Gulf have given birth. Murchi
son Sound was reached at ten o'clock, and only
ten miles now intervened between our ship and
the spot where, a year before, the "West Green
land" party saw fashioned the wooden shelter
which was to give lodgement to the brave
seven who composed the Peary party. Ex
pectancy is now at full height, and from every
point of vantage on the vessel comes the de
sire to possess the eyes that see the first and
farthest. The bow, the rigging, the bridge,
and crow's nest are all in active competition,
but the award of victory is to be withheld for
some time as yet. McCormick Bay opens up
broadly to the east, its moving ice-field joining
with the endless fleet of bergs which are slowly
coursing to the open sea. Five miles more are
covered, and the Kite plunges into the soft
pack, but no sign of human life or habitation
is as yet apparent. Through the clear night
air is sent the boom of the ship's cannon, but
only reverberations from the barren crags an
swer. Save the occasional crackling of a feeble

The Peary Relief Expedition. 107
iceberg, and the noise of the ship's machinery,
all is as quiet as the grave. A second discharge
follows, accompanied by the shrill tones of the
steam-whistle, but still no answer. The red
cliffs of Cape Cleveland are now near to us, and
the range of vision, except for an intercepting
berg, covers the site which we know to be that
of the Peary igdloo. Presently from far aloft
comes the welcome : "They are answering us
with a gun." No sound was audible, but the
keen eye of Second Mate Dunphy had detected
smoke. Three long shrieks from our siren, as
a token of welcome, and the pennant swings to
the breeze. When the ship's thunder once
more broke the ominous silence a small speck
appeared upon the water's surface. "They are
coming to meet us in a boat," came the cry from
aloft, and the field-glass confirmed the obser
vation from the crow's nest. In the nearing
boat were Verhoeff, Cook, and Gibson, who had
come with Eskimo friends to greet the strange
apparitions from the south. A half hour before
the midnight hour they boarded our vessel, and
we obtained from them the happy tidings that
everything was well. Lieutenant Peary, who
had entirely recovered from the accident of
last summer, was at the time of the arrival of
the Kite, with young Astrup, traversing the
vast wilderness of the inland ice, while the he
roic wife of the commander, with Matthew
Henson, was encamped at the head of the bay,

108 The Peary Relief Expedition.
some fifteen miles distant, awaiting the return
of the explorers.
The members of the Peary party who had
come out to meet us showed no signs of a
struggle with a hard winter. Their bronzed
faces spoke more for a perpetual tropical sun
light than for a sunless Arctic night, the mem
ories of which had long since vanished as a
factor in their present existence. No serious
illness of any kind had invaded the house
hold during a twelve months absence from
civilization. The expedition quarters presented
a very different appearance from what they
did a year before when the Kite steamed out
from McCormick Bay. The diminutive two-
roomed house, which then stood solitary and
uninviting in its own field of scattered moun
tain-pink and poppy, roofless to the elements
and unprotected from the blasts which were
hurled against the sides of board and tar-paper,
was now the focus of a busy world that had
congregated about. A colony of Eskimos,
whose members had been gathered in from
various settlements along the coast, had estab
lished themselves on the same free soil of na
ture, eager to reap the benefits which a contact
with civilization might bring, and ever ready
to give a helping hand to those whom they
now recognized as superiors. The twenty or
more natives were lodged in five tupics, or
skin summer tents, about which were gathered

The Peary Relief Expedition. 109
a variety of paraphernalia necessary to the
Eskimo household and an amount of odor
which only weeks — more likely months — of
abrasion and ablution could efface. If clean
liness was not a virture with these people,
their honesty, cheerfulness, and good-will
made amends for the lack of a quality which a
defective vision has assigned to be the first at
tribute of Godliness. The majority of the men
and women were of low stature, the tallest of
the latter, fat Itushakshui, the mother of an
exceedingly winsome young bride of thirteen,
Tongwingwa, measuring only 4 feet 8 inches.
M'gipsu, the shortest of the mothers, measured
only 4 feet 4 inches. The men are, with few
exceptions, taller than the women, but even
among them a stature exceeding five feet is a
rarity rather than the reverse, although such
exceptional cases are less rare among the people
of the. region about Cape York than further
northward. The moment that the Kite appeared in
McCormick Bay the natives recognized that a
"circus had come to town." A few of them
had seen the vessel, or one similar to it, before,
but to the majority the Oomeakhshua was an
unimaginable novelty. At all hoursof "night"
and day, when a transfer could readily be made
from the shore, men, women, and children
would gather to her sides, eager to obtain
mementos of our journey in the shape of bis-

110 The Peary Relief Expedition.
cuits, soup, or thimbles. The deck and cabins
underwent a daily inspection, as did also the
forecastle and every other available spot of in
terest which the ship offered. These visits to
us ultimately became a source of some annoy
ance, since they interfered largely with the
work — the making of skin boots and clothing,
fashioning of sledges and kayaks, etc. — which
had been laid out for them by the Peary party.
So long as the vessel was in sight and approach
able, it formed the uppermost thought in their
minds, more especially of the women. Stitch
ing seal-boots, or kamiks, or chewing hides to
render them pliable, was of little moment so
long as good-hearted Captain Pike gave them
welcome with him, and dealt out rations of
bread and biscuit. On two occasions we were
favored with a song and dance, the instrument
al accompaniment being given on a stretched
drum-like hide, the frame of which was beat
to a three-time with a splinter of ivory. The
most popular melody — the one which is sup
posed to have curative powers when sung by
the "angekoks" or wise men of the settlement
— consisted of a succession of yah, yah, yahs,
and scarcely anything more, which fell in
rhythmic cadence from a high crescendo to a
tremulous under-note, suggestive of almost any
range of possibilities.
Almost immediately after our arrival a mes
sage was sent up by special Eskimo express to

THE ARCTIC NIGHT.— SMITH SOUND.

The Peary Relief Expedition. Ill
Mrs. Peary, informing her of our coming, and
in a few short hours a welcome greeting was
returned to the relief party. I visited her camp
on the following day (25th). The bay was still
largely closed with ice, and the upper part was
accessible only by way of the long shore line,
on which a lingering ice-foot had set its heavy
masses of frozen sea. Just outside the tent, in
the midst of a mosquito-tract which, for the
quality and quantity of its musical^ tenants,
could readily vie with the more favored spots
of the tropics, I met the brave woman who was
the first of her race to dare the terrors of the
north Arctic winter. She had come to meet
me and pressed a cordial invitation to follow
to her cosey shelter. The little white tent,
whose only furniture consisted of two sleep
ing-bags of reindeer-fur, stood on a patch of
meadow-land facing the bay and across it the
bold granite bluffs which to the outer world
marked the last traces of the departed explor
ers, and over whose nearly vertical walls it
was hoped that fortune would favor an early
return. A range of steep heights, over whose de
clivities a number of glaciers protruded their
arms caterpillar-like in the direction of the sea,
formed the desolate background. Eastward
the eye gazed upon the interminable ice-cap,
with its long sweep of gentle swells and un
dulations — a land lost between the sky and
the earth ; westward it fell upon the broad ex-

112 The Peary Relief Expedition.
panse of the bay whose half-congealed surface
passed hazily to the distant sea beyond. This
was the picture of the spot where Mrs. Peary,
almost alone among the few wild flowers by
which she was surrounded, had passed full
nine days with but a single companion to help
relieve the dreary and anxious hours of wait
ing. The experiences of a year had told lightly
on her, and there was nothing to indicate re
gret for a venture which no woman had here
tofore braved and which only noble devotion
had dictated.
Recognizing, with the late day of his depar
ture from McCormick Bay (May 1st), that Mr.
Peary could not readily return from his haz
ardous journey before the first week of August,
and that no purpose would be subserved by
the relief party remaining at their present
quarters until that time, I ordered out the
Kite on the following morning to proceed to
Smith Sound, hoping that a fortunate combi
nation of circumstances might permit us to
make a traverse of the front of the great Hum
boldt Glacier. In this hope, however, we were
destined to be disappointed. No more delight
ful weather could have been conceived than
that which marked the day of our departure
northward. A flood of light poured over the
landscape, illumining it with a radiance which
only the snows and ice of the far north or of
Alpine summits can reflect. Scarcely a breath

The Peary Relief Expedition. 113
of air disturbed the hundreds of bergs and
"berglets" which floated lazily by, impelled by
the gentle current of the deep blue sea, and
barely a ripple, save where the little auk had
congregated in hundreds to disport awhile in
the warm sunshine, broke the surface of the
mirror into whose inner depths we cast our
images. Fifty miles northward the headland
of Cape Alexander stood out with a boldness
that was almost startling in its effects, while
beyond it a few minor heights marked the
passage into that forbidding tract of sea and
ice from which so many brave hearts have
never returned. Before we had reached Lit
tleton Island the ominous ice-blink only too
plainly told us that ice was ahead ; Smith
Sound was closed from Greenland to the Amer
ican side. At midnight we were brought up
by the "pack"; Cape Sabine, memorable in
the annals of Arctic discovery as the scene
of disaster and of heroic rescue, was to our
left, and Rensselaer Harbor, equally memo
rable as the winter quarters of the Advance of
Kane, a few miles to the eastward. The ice
was somewhat heavier than the "pack" of
Melville Bay, in which we were imprisoned the
summer previous, but it yet bore the same
quiet and tranquil air, wholly unsuggestive
of power-possession. The hummocky sheets,
measuring from six to ten feet in thickness, and
showing but a single lead in their midst, had

114 The Peary Relief Expedition.
manifestly not yet begun to break for the sea
son, and therefore all efforts to reach the glacier
at this time must be fruitless. Although nine
years had elapsed since the crushing of the
Proteus, the experiences of that desolate July
23d were still too vivid in the mind of our cap
tain to permit of any risks being taken on this
occasion. With his back turned to the snow-
clad slopes of Cape Sabine, and gazing upon
the uncovered and to him less reminiscent
heights of the Greenland coast, he announced
that we had reached the journey's end. The
Humboldt Glacier was invisible, although
farther off to the northward, the prominences of
Grinne-11 Land, Capes Hawkes and Louis Na
poleon, and possibly also that of Cape Imperial,
carried the eye quite to the border line of, or
even beyond, the eightieth parelel.
The front ice of the Smith Sound pack is the
home of the walrus. Hundreds of these ani
mals were disporting themselves in the silent
hours of a sunlit midnight; here a few gath
ered on tablets of floating ice, others leisurely
paddling about with an abandon truly majes
tic. Their frolics immediately called to mind
the gambols of pups and kittens. No animal,
probably, save the Bengal tiger, offers the same
amount of sport to the huntsman as does this
king of the. northern waters. Every attack
resulting in a wounded animal can be safely
relied upon for a counter-attack, which is

The Peary Relief Expedition. 115
prosecuted with an audacity no less remark
able than the energy with which it is sustained.
A wounded walrus will not infrequently call
for assistance to a number of its associates, and
woe be then to the huntsman if, in the general
struggle; one of the infuriated animals should
place its tusks on the inner side of the little
craft that has gone out to do battle.
The largest specimen secured by us measured,
from the tip of the nose to the extended hind
flippers, somewhat more than thirteen feet (to
the extremity of the spinal column, eleven feet
four inches); its weight was estimated to be
between fifteen hundred and two thousand
pounds, but not impossibly it was considerably
more. In our return southward to McCormick Bay,
which began shortly before five o'clock of the
morning of July 27th, explorations were ex
tended into Port Foulke and Sonntag Bay,
where were located the "tribes" of the Etah
and Sorfalik Eskimos, the most northerly of the
inhabitants of the globe. Only empty huts,
five or six at each locality, a few grave-
heaps, and distributed rubbish of one kind or
another, now indicated a former possession of
the land; adverse conditions of the chase had
driven away the inhabitants, who had departed
south to add their little mite to the colonists of
the Whale Sound region. The last of the Etahs
had joined the cantonment about the Peary

116 The Peary Relief Expedition.
igdloo. That the region of Port Foulke had
only recently been abandoned was proved by
the generally good state of preservation of the
stone huts, not less than by the newly arranged
fox-traps that were outlying. A return of the
departed could probably be expected in a more
propitious year. In Sonntag Bay an effort
was made to ascertain the possibilities of some
of the large glaciers as a means of communica
tion with the upper ice or ice-cap. The fact
that in many of these northern ice-streams
crevasses were largely or almost entirely want
ing, or were so completely closed as to show
but mere rifts on the surface, seemed to indi
cate that a direct highway of travel, accessible
alike to sledge and man, could be found on the
moving ice. A first attempt on a northeast
glacier, with a sledge loaded to about two
hundred pounds, proved abortive; the high
terminal wall and abrupt lateral slopes, while
they offer no serious hindrance to man in the
capacity of pedestrian, blocked the approach of
the toboggan, as would, indeed, have also
done the numerous crevasses which cut across
the ice in its lower border. A second attempt,
made on the glacier* discharging into the east
ern extremity of the bay, proved more success-
*It is with special pleasure that I associate with this unde
scribed glacier the name of George W. Childs, Esq., of
Philadelphia, to whose kindly interest in the expedition un
der my command the expedition owes much for its organiza
tion and success.

The Peary Relief Expedition. 117
ful. Ascending over the feebly depressed
lateral moraine of the left side, no difficulty
was encountered in transferring our impedi
menta to the surface of the glacier, which was
practically solid, and almost without rift for
miles from its termination. The even crust of
the ice, which at the early hour of twelve had
barely begun to yield to the softening in
fluences of a midnight sun, offered little obsta
cle to the traction of our sledge, and before
five hours had passed, we had planted our
stakes in the neve basin, 2,050 feet above the
sea. A portion of the immediate ice-cap was
below us, some of it eighty or a hundred feet
higher up; the feasibility of the passage had
been demonstrated.
Later experiences on some of the more
southerly and still more gigantic glaciers only
further demonstrated the accessibility of the
ice-cap along a route of travel where the
gradient was scarcely ten degrees, and in
many parts considerably less. Indeed, the
slope of many of the northern glaciers for
miles does not exceed three to five degrees.
The only difficulty that we encountered in
the traction of our sledge, a steel runnered to
boggan, over the Sonntag Bay glacier was on
the upper course of that ice-sheet. The hard
and slippery crust which there rises into a series
of rapidly flowing swells or mounds, in some
places disposed in almost amphitheatric regu-

118 The Peary Relief Expedition.
larity, was a hard test to the almost unshod
condition of our walking gear. We had un
fortunately provided ourselves with only in
different creepers or climbing irons, whose
penetration in the ice was not sufficient, with
the dragging weight behind, to secure lodge
ment or resistance to the feet. It required the
full force of the six men of our party to mount
these ice-hillocks, the accomplishment of which
would otherwise have been a comparatively
easy matter. On the down-journey, again, the
tendency of the toboggan to run by itself ne
cessitated a continuous "brake" to be applied to
it in the form of guiding lines, which were
held on either side by the members of the party.
In the upper course of the glacier, where the
slope mounts more abruptly to the forming
basin, a number of crevasses were met with,
but with the exception of a few which had to
be circumvented, they were nearly all easily
crossed, the toboggan in some cases being
pushed over to form a bridge, over which the
least gymnastically-inclined of the party found
a ready passage. We found it, however, a
wise precaution to use the Alpine rope, and
indeed, had the satisfaction of seeing this pre
caution emphasized by a plunge which Mr.
Bryant took into one of the crevasses. Fortun
ately a deep descent was prevented by the
narrowness of tho fissure and by an accumula
tion of ice-debris which clogged and disfigured

TERMINAL WALL OF VERHOEFF GLACIER.

The Peary Relief Expedition. 119
the interior, almost closing it to the top.
We arrived at our old quarters in McCor
mick Bay in the evening of the 29th. The
balmy weather that had thus far accompanied
us still gave the sensation of spring, but an
impending change was perceptible. The last
two or three evenings had grown measurably
cooler, and the drooping sun indicated a draw
ing approach to cold weather and wintry nights.
Anticipating a probable return of Mr. Peary
toward the close of the first week in August,
the Kite, with Mrs. Peary and Matthew Henson
added to my party, steamed on the 4th to the
head of the bay and there dropped anchor. Mrs.
Peary accompanied me in the afternoon to the
foot of one of the glaciers which here de
bouches in the valley, terminating about a
quarter of a mile from the water. It was my
intention to measure the velocity of this ice-
stream, and toward that purpose a number of
sight stakes were planted on the off-border;
unfortunately, circumstances were such as not
to permit a return to the same locality, and,
therefore, no record was obtained. Like
seemingly all the glaciers, at least those of
a second order, of north Greenland, this was
one of recession ; the open space between it
and the bay was everywhere marked by evi
dences of former glaciation, with here and
there traces of terminal moraines still stand
ing. Naturally, it could not be ascertained

120 The Peary Relief Expedition.
whether actual recession was still in progress,
or whether a reversed condition had possibly
set in ; only the observations of a succession
of two or more years could determine this
point.* Vast quantities of water were being
everywhere thrown off from the icc, some of
it falling in great lateral fountains which
cut ragged gashes into tbe solid wall of ice.
The heat of a single summer, being continued
almost equally through night and day, graves
deeply into these northern ice-sheets, and the
effects of lateral ablation are especially well
marked. Many of the glaciers are bordered
by lateral ravines, portions of the glacial
trough which have been left exposed by the
disappearance from them of the excavating ice.
The surface waste is surprisingly great in some
instances. One of the arms of the great Tyn-
dall Glacier which on our journey northward
was found to encompass the north side of Bell
(Fitzclarence) Rock, in Booth Sound, had all
but disappeared in the interval of five weeks
preceding our return.
On the day following our arrival at the head
of the bay, a reconnaissance of the inland ice,
*The examination of the much larger glacier, since named by
Mr. Peary the Sun Glacier, which discharges, with a frontage
of a mile, on the opposite side of the bay, gave an advance of
the lateral margin of nearly seven inches in eight hours ; on
the other hand I could detect no movement, for a period of
twenty-four hours, in the large glacier which descends from
the Cleveland plateau toward Murchison Sound.

The Peary Relief Expedition. 121
with a view to locating signal posts to the re
turning explorers, was made by the members of
the expedition. A tedious half-hour's march
over boggy and bouldery talus brought us to
the base of the cliffs, at an elevation of three
hundred and fifty to four hundred feet, where
the true ascent was to begin. The line of
march is up a precipitous water-channel, every
where encompassed by boulders, on which, de
spite its steepness, progress is rapid. The
virtual crest is reached about six hundred and
fifty feet higher, and then the gradual uprise
of the stream-valley begins. Endless rocks,
rounded and angular — the accumulation of
former ground and lateral moraines — spread
out as a vast wilderness, rising to the ice-cap
in superimposed benches or terraces. At an
elevation slightly exceeding eighteen hundred
feet we reached the first tongue of the ice.
Rounding a few outlying "nunataks" — uncov
ered hills of rock and boulders — we bear east
of northeast, heading as nearly as possible in
the direction from which, so far as the lay of
the land would permit us to determine, the re
turn would most likely be made. The ice-cap
swells up higher and higher in gentle rolls
ahead of us, and with every advance to a colder
zone it would seem that the walking, or rather
wading, becomes more and more difficult. One
by one we plunge through the yielding mass,
gasping for breath, and frequently only with

122 The Peary Ililief IApxdition.
difficulty extricating ourselves. The hard
crust of winter had completely disappeared,
and not even the comparatively coo] sun of
midnight was sufficient to bring about a degree
of compactness adequate to sustain the weight
of the human body. At times almost every
step buried the members of the party up to the
knee or waist, and occasionally even a plunge
to the armpits was indulged in by the less for
tunate, to whom perhaps a superfluity of avoir
dupois was now for the first time brought home
as a lesson of regret. We have attained an
elevation of 2,200 feet; at 4 p. si. the baro
meter registers 2,800 feet. The landscape of
McCormick Bay has faded entirely out of sight;
ahead of us is the grand and melancholy snow
waste of the interior of Greenland. No grander
representation of nature's quiet mood could be
had than this picture of the endless sea of ice
¦ — a picture of lonely desolation not matched
in any other part of the earth's surface. A
series of gentle rises carries the eye far into the
interior, until in the dim distance, possibly
three-quarters of a mile or a full mile above
sea-level, it no longer distinguishes between
the chalky sky and the gray-white mantle
which locks in with it. No lofty mountain-
peak rises out of the general surface, and but
few deep valleys or gorges bight into it ; but
roll follows roll in gentle sequence, and in such
a way as to annihilate all conceptions of space

The Peary Relief Expedition. 123
and distance. This is the aspect of the great
"ice-blink." It is not the picture of a wild and
tempestuous nature, forbidding in all its de
tails, but of a peaceful and long-continued
slumber. At 5.45 p. m., when we took a first luncheon,
the thermometer registered 42° F. ; the atmos
phere was quiet and clear as a bell, although
below us, westward to the islands guarding
the entrance to Murchison Sound, and east
ward to a blue corner of Inglefield Gulf, the
landscape was deeply veiled in mist. Shortly
after nine o'clock we had reached an elevation
of 3,300 feet, and there, at a distance of about
eight miles from the border of the ice-cap, we
planted our first staff-^-a lash of two poles,
rising about twelve feet and surmounted by
cross-pieces and a red handkerchief. One of
the cross-pieces read as follows : "To head of
McCormick Bay — Kite in port — August 5,
1892." A position for a second staff was selected on
an ice-dome about two and a half miles from
the present one, probably a few hundred feet
higher, and commanding a seemingly uninter
rupted view to all points of the compass. Soli
citous over the condition ofthe feet of some of
my associates, I ordered a division ofthe party,
with a view of sparing unnecessary fatigue and
the discomfort which further precipitation into
soft snow entailed. Mr. Bryant, in command

124 The Peary Relief Expedition.
of an advanced section, was entrusted with the
placing of the second staff, while the remaining
members of the party were to effect a slow re
treat, and await on dry ground the return of
the entire expedition. Scarcely had the separa
tion been arranged before a shout burst upon
the approaching midnight hour which made
everybody's heart throb to its fullest. Far off
to the northeastward, over precisely the spot
that had been selected for the placing of the
second staff, Entrikin's clear vision had de
tected a black speck that was foreign to the
Greenland ice. There was no need to conjec
ture what it meant : "It is a man ; it is mov
ing," broke out almost simultaneously from
several lips, and it was immediately realized
that the explorers of whom we were in quest
were returning victoriously homeward. An
instant later a second speck joined the first,
and then a long black object, easily resolved by
my field-glass into a sledge with dogs in har
ness, completed the strange vision of life upon
the Greenland ice. Cheers and hurrahs fol
lowed in rapid succession — the first that had
ever been given in a solitude whose silence,
before that memorable summer, had never been
broken by the voice of man.
The distance was as yet too great for the
sound to be conveyed to the approaching wan
derers, but the relief party had already been
detected, and their friends hastened to extend

The Peary Relief Expedition. 125
to them a hearty welcome. Like a veritable
giant, clad in a suit of deer and dog-skin, and
gracefully poised on Canadian snow-shoes, the
conqueror from the far north plunged down the
mountain-slope. Behind him followed his
faithful companion, young Astrup, barely
more than a lad, yet a tower of strength and
endurance ; he was true to the traditions of his
race and of his earlier conquests in the use of
the Norwegian snow-skate or "ski." With him
were the five surviving Eskimo dogs, seem
ingly as healthy and powerful as on the day of
their departure.
In less than an hour after Lieutenant Peary
was first sighted, and still before the passage
of the midnight hour of that memorable Au
gust 5th, culminated that incident on the in
land ice which was the event of a lifetime.
Words cannot describe the sensations of the
moment which bore the joy of the first saluta
tion. Mr. Peary extended a warm welcome to
each member of my party, and received in re
turn hearty congratulations upon the successful
termination of his journey. Neither of the
travellers looked the worse for their three
months' toil in the interior, and both, with
characteristic modesty, disclaimed having over
come more than ordinary hardships. Fatigue
seemed to be entirely out of the question, and
both Mr. Peary and Mr. Astrup bore the ap
pearance of being as fresh and vigorous as

126 The Peary Relief Expedition.
though they had but just entered upon their
great journey.
After a brief recital of personal experiences,
and the interchange of American and Green
land news, the members of the combined ex
pedition turned seaward, and thus terminated
a most dramatic incident. A more direct
meeting than this one on the bleak wilderness
of Greenland's ice-cap could not have been had,
even with all the possibilities of prearrange-
ment. At 4.30 of the morning of August 6th Mr.
Peary met his devoted and courageous wife ;
and on the following day, in the wake of a
storm which grounded the good rescue ship
and for a time threatened more serious compli
cations, the Kite triumphantly steamed down
to the Peary winter-quarters at the Redcliffe
House. The results of the Peary Expedition justify
all the anticipations that had been pinned to it.
Apart from its worth in determining the in
sularity of Greenland — thereby setting at rest
a question which had disturbed the minds of
geographers and statesmen for a period of three
centuries, or since the days of Lord Burleigh —
it has forever removed that tract from a consid
eration of complicity in the main workings of
the Great Ice Age. The inland ice-cap, which
by many has been looked upon as the linger
ing ice of the Glacial Period, stretching far in-

THE VERHOEFF GLACIER.

The Peary Relief Expedition. 127
to the realm of the Pole itself, has been found
to terminate throughout its entire extent at
approximately the eighty-second parallel ; be
yond this line follows a region of past glacia-
tion — uncovered to-day, and supporting an
abundance of plant and animal life not differ
ent from that of the more favored regions
southward. Over this tract has manifestly
been effected that migration of organic forms
from the west and to the west which has
assimilated the faunas and floras of eastern
Greenland with those of other regions ; indeed,
man's own migrations are probably bound up
with this northern tract. Significant, too, is
the discovery of giant glaciers passing north
ward from the inland ice-cap, and discharging
their icebergs into the frozen sea beyond. The
largest of these, named the Academy Glacier,
and measuring from fifteen to twenty miles in
width, empties on the northeast coast into In
dependence Bay, under the eighty-second par
allel.

V.
A Lost Companion.
Shortly after the return from the interior of
the exploring party, and pending preparations
for the final departure southward, happened
that one incident to the expedition which in
any way marred the brilliancy of its exploits.
It was at this time that Mr. Verhoeff, the met
eorologist and mineralogist of the North Green
land party, undertook that last search after
rock-specimens from which he never again re
turned to meet his associates. He was last
seen on the morning of August 11th, when he
stated his intention of visiting the Eskimo set
tlement of Kukan, across the northern wall of
McCormick Bay, and a mineral locality well
known to him. Failing to appear at an early
day, fears were entertained for his safety, and a
systematic and scattered search was immedi
ately instituted by our combined parties, as
sisted by nin,e specially selected Eskimos and
several members of the ship's crew. The
search was extended almost unremittingly
throughout seven days and nights, over mount
ain, ice, and glacier, and with a thoroughness
that left no large area of accessible country un
covered.

A Lost Companion. 129
For the first four days the members of my
party, assisted in part by Dr. Cook, by Mate
Murphy, Engineer McKinley and sailor "Jim"
of the ship's crew, and four of Mr. Peary's
Eskimos (Equaw, Anauka, Kooko, and Ton-
gwe), explored the shores of McCormick and
Robertson Bays, while Mr. Peary and his party
made the traverse of the divide which separates
these two bodies of water from one another.
By this division we hoped to cover at the same
time both the lowland and upland regions,
and thereby lessen the chances of possible fail
ure. Our endeavors were, however, fruitless.
Neither cliff nor valley gave out any vestiges
of the missing man — no trace that human feet
had recently trod the frozen soil. Failing in
our examination of the open land-surface, we
next directed our attention to the huge ice-
sheets which like so many rivers break the
continuity of the shore-line, and sail out their
ever-crumbling masses into the sea beyond.
The possibility that Mr. Verhoeff had at
tempted a tour of McCormick Bay to gain the
Redcliffe House, to accomplish which a tra
verse of the large glacier emptying at the north
east angle of the bay would have been neces
sitated, laid our course in the direction of this
ice stream. It was early in the evening of the
19th of August, when the elevation of the sun
still marked about twenty degrees above the
horizon, that we again entered the shadows of

130 The Peary Relief Expedition.
the same granite cliffs over which, only a few
days before, we had so joyfully passed after our
meeting with Mr. Peary. The scene had
changed. The deep canon, along which the
eye could follow the long lazy line of glacier
for a distance of 12-15 miles to its mother ice
cap, looked bleak and forbidding ; there was
no longer that charm of the unknown about it
which attracts when all nature smiles with
success. A dark cloud had settled over the
landscape, and for a time closed out its joys.
We approached the front wall of the glacier
with caution and in almost silence, fearing
lest any percussion might too hastily precipi
tate some of the tottering masses which were
"calving" their way to sea as bergs. Like the
snowy avalanches of the Alps, which are at
times called to life by the clapping of the
hands, so must these ice-masses of the north be
left to their own peaceful slumbers. Once
overturned, there can be no forecasting of the
commotion that might follow. A turn or two
may end the scene, or it can be that it has
hardly begun before the water is churned into
foam. We secured a safe landing in a small
bight on the eastern flank of the glacier, and
there hauled up our boat.
Cutting our steps into the dome-shaped
lateral margin of the glacier we soon gained
the surface, upon which walking was fairly
easy and comfortable. An effort to reach the

A Lost Companion. , 131
opposite side was frustrated by the numerous
long and deep crevasses which cut into the me
dian portion of the ice ; we were obliged to
wander around and about some of these, but
generally could manage to keep on a united
body, or where the fissures were of but insigni
ficant width. For some distance the surface
kept disagreeably hummocky, but after passing
a feeding glacier, it spread out in an almost
horizontal glistening sheet, admirably adapted
for sledging purposes, and of necessity, to pedes-
trianism. The crevasses became less and less
numerous, and ultimately ceased altogether,
so that a traverse could be made in any direc
tion. A narrow, remarkably straight and
evenly-defined medial moraine, more in the
nature of a dirt-band with angular blocks
scattered over it — the like of which is to be
found only in the old-fashioned books of geo
logy, the illustrations in which are ordinarily
considered to be archaic rather than truthful
— occupied the central axis, stretching-off up
wards to the limits of vision.
Had our mission been different from what
it really was we might have said that this
glacial travelling was truly delightful. With
all the beauty of the ice-fields of Switzerland,
and that charm of pedestrianism which an un
expected and varying change of scene carries
with it, we had here the advantage of the
many hours, the consciousness that a journey

132 The Peary Relief Expedition.
was not limited to any arbitrary separation of
day from night. It was all day, albeit the sun
shone for only a paltry few hours. For some
time angry-looking clouds had been gathering
about the blackened granite crests; the side
canons poured out their fleecy hosts, and be
fore long the wild spirit of the mountains
swept demon-like across the valley ofthe gla
cier. The few lazily-falling flakes which for a
half-hour or so had portended evil, were before
long replaced by blinding sheets of snow, and
for a short time, save in its elements, nature
ceased to exist. The landscape was completely
blotted out from view. We were not prepared
for this change, and the cold wind stung merci
lessly wherever it caught an exposed surface.
We muffled ourselves as best we could in our
not over-generous garments, but yet it was not
all solid comfort. Fortunately, the storm was
of only short duration, and in its wake the
landscape rose resplendent in its new garb.
At about 3 A. si. we started on the return;
we had penetrated up-stream about five or six
miles, and had ascended probably 6-700 feet
in that distance. We had seen nothing, and
no sound, save the echoes from the beetling
cliffs of granite and trap which here rose in
impending masses 2,500 or 3, 000 feet above us,
responded to the oft-repeated shouts to which
we gave utterance.
On the day following our return to the Kite

CROSSING THE VERHOEFF GLACIER.

A Lost Companion. 133
a second search was made over the same gla
cier, starting from the opposite side, but with
no better result. Equally unsuccessful were
the members of my party who had searched in
other directions, and before noon Mr. Peary,
whohad returned from his own arduous search,
only communicated further intelligence of
failure. Some of his men were, however, still
searching over the mountain heights towards
Robertson Bay, and a ray of hope remained
that they might have met with better success.
With a view of combining our forces in a final
effort, and of affording relief to the mountain
party, the Kite was for the second time di
rected into Robertson Bay, the shores of which
were closely scanned, but without result.
Aged Kauna, the lord of the one-family settle
ment of Igludahominy — the last of the Etahs
— whose lonely wigwam guards entrance to
a patch of green which nature had specially
nursed in her bosom, had neither seen nor
heard of the missing man; on the opposite
shore, the igdloos of Kukan were found to be
all deserted and untouched. At 2 A. M. of the
2 2d we reached the head of the bay, and were
there joined by Mr. Peary and his Eskimos; no
word had yet been received from the mountain
party, Astrup, Gibson, Cook and their native
contingent, but it was known that their des
cent would be in the direction of the glaciers
which break through- the pinnacled walls cf

134 The Peary Rdirf Expedition.
granite which bound the eastern extremity of
the bay.
The strain of almost continuous travel during
the last few days, combined with little sleep,
forced a temporary rest upon us, and it was not
until the hours of morning had been well ad
vanced that we attempted to face the ice-sheet
which promised only a forlorn hope. Over an
extent of two full miles the deeply hollowed-
out or concave ice-front presents an unbroken
wall of 70-100 feet elevation, from which ice
bergs constantly press forward. A mile or more
in advance of it the polished surfaces of three
protruding rock masses or islets clearly betray
a former greatness and subsequent shrinkage,
but such as it is, the glacier would not be
shamed by the largest of the Alps or of Scan
dinavia. With the arrangement that the ex
amination of this huge ice-sheet shoud be made
simultaneously from opposite sides, we divided
forces, my party taking up the start from the
western border. Our landing place was a true
garden spot. The luxuriant growth of grass,
12-16 inches in height, with its garniture of
poppies, chickweed, potentillas and gentians,
was the most refreshing exposition of Greenland
vegetation that we had yet met with ; butter
flies flitted about in the bright sunshine, whose
genial warmth recalled memories of a distant
south. The back of the glacier was easily reached

A Lost Companion. 135
by mounting over the low rounded flank which
partially overrides the lateral moraine. Near
to the margin the sea of ice was smooth and
gently undulating, but towards the center it
becomes rapidly rugged and fissured. The
whole is piled up in a wild confused mass,
peaks and pinnacles rising up innumerable. I
ordered on the creepers and Alpine rope, and
leading, was followed in the order of Meehan,
Hite, Bryant, Mills, Arorse, Entrikin, and
Daniel ; Mr. Stokes had been disabled in the
beginning of the journey by stumbling over one
of the numerous holes which encumber the
grass slope of the mountain-side, and had to be
left in the rear. It was manifest that no cross
ing could be attempted in the lower course of
the glacier; the disrupted surface bore a most
wicked aspect, and we dared not trust to the
snow-bridges which crossed the border cre
vasses. Into many of these, down to a depth
of fifty or a hundred feet, we peered, with the
thought of possibly seeing traces of our unfor
tunate companion, but the eye brought back
with it only visions of the beautiful blue
ice- walls, and of the long icy pendants which
clung close to their surfaces. Striking diagon
ally up-stream we soon broke into a less torn
portion of the ice-sheet, where travelling was
comparatively easy, and where but a few cre
vasses disturbed the line of march. Shortly
after 4 p. m., when we had just about reached

136 The Peary Relief Expedition.
the middle ofthe ice-stream, we met Mr. Peary
and two of his Eskimos, Kumenapik and Mek-
tosha, crossing from the opposite side. They
brought to us the intelligence that the first traces
of the missing man had finally been found;
partially obliterated foot-prints, a few rock
fragments placed on a boulder, and bits of pa
per from a meat-tin label, were discovered on the
lateral ice which for some distance accompanies
the glacier on its eastern flank. The discov
ery was made by the mountain party, who had
so far as possible followed in the course which
it was assumed must necessarily have been
taken in an effort to cross the ridge. It was
evident that Verhoeff had descended the cliffs
and attempted to cross the glacier possibly
with a view of reaching Igludahominy. The
Eskimos declared the foot-prints old, and pro
bably a full week had elapsed since they were
planted on the soft snow.
At Mr. Peary's request my party proceeded
up the glacier to a prominent nunatak which,
about two miles further, splits the glacier into
two unequal arms, one of which had already
been searched by Gibson and Astrup. The
glacier here expands to a width of about four
miles, and presents a charm of scenery which,
of its kind, I had never before seen equalled.
The ice-cap is the bounding vision of the dim
distance, but on either side the beetling cliffs
of granite narrow the horizon to a sharp real-

A Lost Companion. 137
ity. We encountered little difficulty in making
a median traverse of the glacier; the surface of
the ice was crystalline-granular through hard
freezing and alternate melting, and there were
no crevasses of any account. A wilderness of
small hummocks supplied their place. Occas
ional water-courses had graven winding chan
nels in the ice, but they were of insignificant
depth, and offered no obstacle to their passage.
Shortly before seven o'clock we reached the
base of the central nunatak, a giant granite
mass, stained red with its rusty coat of lichen,
and rising probably not less than 800 or 1,000
feet out of the ice. Its foot is buried in a gar
den of grass, moss and wild flowers — a veritable
oasis in an ice-wilderness.
We had now reached a point on the glacier
beyond which it would have been superfluous
to make further search. Regretfully, there
fore, we turned in the direction of the sea, with
but little hope left to lighten our footsteps.
We followed for some distance a medial de
pression in the ice (formed through the junc
tion with, and deflection by, a secondary gla
cial arm — a negative medial moraine), and
then deflected the course to the side of the gla
cier opposite to that from which we started.
Good areas of travel alternate with bad ones,
but it is easily noticeable that the crevasses rap
idly increase both in number and size. Long
detours are necessitated, and step-cutting be-

138 The Peary Relief Expedition.
comes more frequent than pleasant. For some
distance before the edge of the ice is reached
the surface is frightfully torn into yawning
chasms and jagged pinnacles, both alike for
bidding and impassable. The snow bridges are
no longer to be trusted, and over the wider
chasms they are entirely absent. At 10.30 p. si.
we met the remaining members of the Peary
party, and with them rowed out to the Kite,
which we reached shortly before the midnight
hour. The aspect of the almost effaced foot-prints
convinced me that the Eskimos were correct in
their belief that they must have been made
many days before their discovery. It was in
vain that any effort was made to follow them
up — there was no outlet. The search was con
tinued through all the opening valleys and
gorges of the region, and back again to the
final glacier, but only with negative result.
Painfully we were forced to the conclusion
that the unfortunate man had met his fate in
attempting the passage of that wicked portion
of the ice-sheet opposite which the scanty, but
positive, traces of his presence had been de
tected.* Under this conviction, and recogniz-
* It is but proper to state here that a sister aud uncle of Sir.
Verhoeff believe the missing man to be still alive, and that
he designedly separated himself from the expedition through
a fondness for the life that he had been leading, and for the
purpose of making a ''record." No one wishes more heartily
that this mav be the fact than the writer of this narrative.

A Lost Companion. 139
ing the futility of further search, the expedi
tion returned to McCormick Bay, on the north
western promontory of which (known as Cape
Robertson), on Cairn Point, a cache of provis
ions was left by Lieutenant Peary.
The final departure from McCormick Bay
took place on the day following the return
from the search (the 24th). At 2.20 p. m. a
parting salute was blown, and the Oomeakshua,
whose presence had given so much joy to the
rude children of the north, turned her nose
homeward. Taking advantage of the fine
weather, we called at the Eskimo settlement
on the southern shore of Saunders Island, but
found it deserted; the inhabitants were prob
ably at their more favored retreat on North
Star Bay, access to which was impossible at
the time of our visit. Much ice, as a result of
continuous south and southwest winds, had
driven into the North Water and choked the
shore passage of Melville Bay, but groping out
in the direction of the "middle sea," we found
our exit, and, early in the morning of the 30th,
reached the first outpost of civilization, God
havn. Without special incident, beyond the
official courtesies which the expedition received
at the capitals of the two Inspectorates of
Greenland, Godhavn and Godthaab, and
which must forever remain among our pleasur
able reminiscences, the voyage was continued
to the port of destination of the Kite, St. John's,

140 The Peary Relief Expedition.
and thence to Philadelphia. The debarkation
at the latter port was made between ten and
eleven o'clock on the morning of September
23d. The mission of the Relief Expedition
had been accomplished.

VI
The Greenland Ice-Cap and its
Glaciers.
The distinctive feature of all Greenland is
its white mantle. Seen from almost any
point off the coast, except where fogs and mist
have unnaturally limited the horizon, the ob
ject that most distantly appeals to the eye is
some portion of the interminable ice-cap,
which rises above all other features of the
country, and gives to it its general surface.
Travellers have measured on this surface ele
vations of 8,000 and 9,000 feet, and not un
likely still greater elevations will yet be re
corded. Rising in a measure dome-like to
the interior, the "height of land" attains its full
elevation only after miles of country have been
traversed, and possibly the highest point lies
not very far from the axial centre of the
land. This is, however, doubtful, and there
seem to be no very good grounds for believing
it to be the case. Nordenskjold reached an
elevation of 5,000 feet at an estimated distance
of 73 miles from the ice-margin ; Peary (east
of Disko) of 7,525 feet, at lOOmiles; Nansen of
8,970 feet, at 112 miles ; and Peary, in the far

142 The Greenland Ice-Cap and its Glaciers.
north, of 8-9,000 feet, at seemingly not more
than 80-100 miles. Nansen assumes the cur
vature of the ice-cap to be the correspondent
of an arc of a circle, and he attributes the
outline to an evenly-timed or distributed
movement which has been brought about
by the weight (mass) of the ice-cap itself.
While it may not be easy to disprove (just as
it is impossible to prove) this proposition,
it does not appear to me that there is any real
evidence to support it. The inland contour
is too flat to permit of any hopeful consider
ation of the cause of the curvature such as
it is. Seaward the fall ofthe ice-cap to its lower level
is in places rapid. Beyond the Arctic Circle this
lower-level — the line of perpetual snow — is
held in a general way between 1,700 and 2,200
feet, and seemingly a latitudinal distance of
ten or fifteen degrees does not materially dis
turb this position. We found the lower margin
ofthe summer snows on Disko Island (Lat. 69°)
at 1,800 feet, on the south side of McCormick
Bay (77° 30') at 2,200 feet, on the northeast
angle of the same bay at 1,800 feet, and on the
cliffs about Sonntag Bay (Lat. 78° 30') at 2,000
feet. The exposed high ground beyond the
82d parallel sustains the evenness of physio
graphic conditions. At the northeast angle of
McCormick Bay, where we made our search
for the Peary party, we attained an elevation

The Greenland Ice-Cap and its Glaciers. 143
of 3,300 feet not further than eight miles from
the ice-border, and 4,000 feet is reached within
the next four or five miles. The ascent is here,
therefore, approximately 180 feet to the mile,
most of which is determined by the structural
relief of the land.
The most pertinent inquiry regarding the
ice-covering of Greenland is that relating to
vertical development. It is commonly as
sumed that the thickness of the snow-cap can
not be less in places than 5-6,000 feet, anditis
even thought that it might considerably exceed
this figure. The reasons assigned for this
hypothetical development are generally stated
to be : 1, that the snow-surface has, in fact,
an elevation of 8-10,000 feet, without any land-
mass (or true relief) rising through it ; 2, snow
falling through long ages must have accumu
lated to enormous depths ; and 3, no valleys
or deep depressions are anywhere to be met
with in the interior (consequently they are filled
in, and to an unknown depth). Naturally, this
assumed thickness is purely conjectural, since
there are no means for ascertaining its true
measure; but the circumstance that no mount
ain ridges or natural orographic lines, indica
tive of a high relief of the interior, rise above
the plateau-surface, would seem to lend color
to this hypothesis. Assuming that such a vast
deposit of snow does in fact exist, it becomes
interesting to inquire into the conditions gov-

144 The Greenland Ice-Cap and. its Glaciers.
erning its accumulation and first formation.
We know nothing of the petrographic relief
of the interior, but reasoning from analogy or
from our knowledge of other large land-masses,
there is reason to assume that Greenland con
forms to the normal type-structure of having
its greater eminences seaward, and the lower
elevations central.* If this is true, then ne
cessarily must the interior snows have a much
greater development than the border snows,
since the relief which supports them can oc
cupy but a fraction of the full height of the
8,000-10,000 feet to which the surface of the
plateau rises. But by what process of accumu
lation can the interior snows acquire a develop
ment so much greater than that of the margin
al snows? One would naturally look to the
sea-bord as the region of excessive or greatest
precipitation, and, indeed, it is difficult to con-
* It can, however, be assumed that the whole interior is, like
Mexico, one vast rock plateau of very nearly uniform eleva
tion. While it is true that such a plateau of igneous rock
may exist over a very large area north of the 69th parallel of
latitude, it is equally true that over still larger areas it does
not exist, and that its absence in no essential way modifies the
relief of the land. Nansen, on the other hand, assumes that
in all probability the configuration of the country is similar
to that of Norway, or the Scandinavian peninsula — a mount
ainous country, with its greater elevations central. The com-
parsion, however, can scarcely be said to apply. The Scan
dinavian peninsula, like Italy, is a narrow backboned strip,
very different from the broad expanse of Greenland, which
has many of its most elevated summits situated not far from
the coast-border.

The (Areenland Ice-Cap and its Glaciers. 145
ceive how, in a region like Greenland, the in
terior can be more favored in this respect than
the exterior. The depleting of the clouds by
the cold coast-wall, and the nearness to it ofthe
open evaporating basin, the sea, must almost
of necessity cause a maximum discharge over
the littoral tracts. The vast thickness of the
inland snows and ice must be due to a cause
other than that of simple or natural precipita
tion. Nordenskjold assumed that the strong
and rapid condensation of moisture by the
peripheral tracts of Greenland could not but
deprive the in-blowing winds of their vapor,
and thereby create a region in the interior
largely devoid of precipitation — a dry oasis.
This was practically a restatement of the hy
pothesis enunciated by Alexander von Hum
boldt that, were the Alps only moderately
higher than they now are they would pass in
to a region beyond the clouds, and conse
quently into a snowless plane. The rapid
diminution of snow-fall on the Alps as we as
cend from about 8,000 feet to 10,000 feet,
which has been so significantly demonstrated
by Dollfuss-Ausset and the Schlagintweits, cer
tainly seems to sustain this position ; yet it
cannot be denied that the enormous thickness
of snow and ice that is found at the greater
elevations of some of the Alpine peaks — for
example, 300 feet, on the Jungfrau at an
elevation of 10,200 feet, of 200 feet on the

14<i The Greenland Ice-Cap and its Glaciers.
Piz Bernina at 13,000 feet — is a condition
which is not absolutely in harmony with
that rapid diminution of precipitation which
has been assumed. On the other hand, the
fact that in many years a number of the
more prominent Alpine peaks were deprived
of their snowy covering, shows that at certain
periods this covering is not very thick.* The
condition of the interior of Grinnell Land,
much of which — even the "hills" of respecta
ble elevation, of from 1,500 to 3,000 feet — was
found to be devoid of a snow-covering by the
officers of the Greely Expedition, tends in a
measure to confirm Nordenskjold's hypothesis.
On the other hand, it is well known that
Nordenskjold's own researches in the interior of
Greenland, as well as the more recent observa
tions of Nansen and Peary, failed to demon
strate the condition that had been assumed,
* It should be noted with reference to the observations made by
Dollfuss-Ausset on the The'odule Pass, that probably many
of the more elevated mountain-regions receive their heaviest
snow-deposit during the summer months (instead of the
winter), when the elouds, also more highly charged durint*
this season of the year, ascend to the highest level before they
are deprived of their vapor. The vastly diminished snow
fall that has been observed during the winter months in the
high northern regions and the low position'of the cloud-line
seem likewise to point to the conclusion that the snows of the
loftier Greenland mountains, whose crests and summits rise
to 8,000 or 10,000 feet, must be principally the result of sum
mer, rather than of winter, accumulation. The mountain-
peak snows must, however, be distinguished from the snows
of tbe interior.

The Greenland Ice-Cap and its Glaciers. 147
but on the contrary give a flat contradiction
to it. The interior of the land harbors no
oasis, but is one continuous ice (snow) sheet.
To explain the anomaly that despite the
"drying" of the in-passing clouds by the mar
ginal mountains the snow accumulation in the
far interior should be much heavier than it is
on the coastal fringe, it can be assumed that
the interior receives the discharges from the
clouds from both the water areas, the eastern
and the western, and that what is lost in ac
tual quantity from one side alone is more than
made good by a remaining quantity received
from the other side. There would then be an
equality at least, if not a large excess. This
may be. true to an extent, and there is every
reason to believe that there is a certain amount
of overlapping of the cloud-banks coming in
from the opposite sides. But granting the
overlapping of the deposits from the two sides,
it is still exceedingly questionable if it would
explain the enormous excess of material as it
appears to-day in the interior.
An easier solution seems to be given by as
suming that the inland snows are largely a
wind-drift accumulation — the winds driving
in to the interior (and there in a measure
focussing) necessarily promoting excess of ac
cumulation. This is, in fact, the simple ex
planation of well-known and to an extent par
allel phenomena which are presented in re-

148 The Greenland lee-Cap and its Glaciers.
gions of formative sands and loose earth — the
"sand-mountains" of many desert tracts, much
of the loess of China, the high hills of coral
islands, etc. It is well known that the en
tire height of the Bermuda Islands, 260 feet,
is of wind-drift construction, and still greater
elevations of the same kind have been recorded
as occurring on other coral islands. It is true
that these hills are in the nature of giant dunes
rather than extended plateaus, but this is due
mainly to the limited area over which wind-
action has free play; were the areas of deposi
tion much larger, they would almost positively
conduce to plateau formation.
So far as this explanation, applied to the
interior Greenland snows, is concerned, it may
be contended that the prevalent winds ofthe
region are largely from the contrary direction
— i. e., they blow from the ice-cap seaward,
and ought consequently to produce diminution,
rather than accumulation, in the interior. Mr.
Peary found the out-blowing winds almost
constant throughout his journey — indeed, they
were in great measure his directors in a "com
pass" course. But the journey was accom
plished in the summer months, and it could
hardly be expected that the course ofthe winds
would be otherwise in that season of the year.
The warm sea-area is at that time the suction
area, and to it would be directed the indraught
of cold air from the ice-covered interior.

Hie Greenland, Icc- Cap audits Glaciers. 149
During probably full eight months of the year the
reversed conditions would obtain, or rather, the
direction of the winds would be reversed. The
preponderance of ocean- over land-winds
would give a large balance in favor of the
in-blow, with the result of causing the snows
to drive inward, whether from the one side or
the other, and there spread themselves in the
form of a vast plateau-surface. This is, as I
conceive it, the most likely explanation of
Greenland's heavy ice-cap, a parallel to which
is presented by the sand and ash plateau of
the Mexican Republic.
What thickness of the interior ice and snows
is really needed for the formation of the large
glaciers which almost everywhere push out
into the direction of the sea, is a question that
cannot, perhaps, be answered at the present
moment. It is all but certain, however, that
the enormous thickness which has generally
been insisted upon is not a necessary condi
tion for the existence of the large ice-sheets.
Indeed, apart from latitudinal extent, it is
doubtful if the thickness of the ice in any of
the Greenland glaciers exceeds, or even equals,
that of the largest ice-sheets of Switzerland.
The Humboldt Glacier, which discharges be
yond the 79th parallel into the Kane Basin
(Smith Sound), and with a frontage stated to
be from 50 to 70 miles, is generally assumed
to be the largest of all known glaciers, yet the

150 The Greenland Ice-Cap and its Glaciers.
height of its sea-wall has been determined to
be not much over 300 feet, or but little in ex
cess of that ofthe Muir Glacier, and scarcely
a fourth of the thickness of the ice which has
been assumed for some of the Alpine glaciers.*
None of the glaciers which I had personally
the opportunity to examine had any really very
great thickness of ice — i. e., a thickness much
exceeding 200 — 300 feet. Usually the sea
wall did not measure more than one-half this
thickness. It is true that our examination
did not extend more than a few miles up
* I strongly suspect that the dimensions of this glacier have
been largely over-stated, as the dimensions of almost every
thing Arctic — capes, bays, islands, ice-bergs, dangers — are
over-stated by the earlier explorers. The dimensions are so
greatly in excess of those of any other Greenland glacier
that a re-measurement should be made before they are ac
cepted as a finality. The charts of the northwest coast are so
erroneous in their details that little dependence can be placed
on them ; bays and sounds are given with double the ex
tent that really belongs to them — e. g., Whale and Slurchi-
son Sounds, Wolstenholme Sound, etc., — and so their enter
ing glaciers are made to appear very much larger than they
really are. Many ot the so-called Hers de Glace which ap
pear on nearly all charts, leading one to assume the existence
of vast interior or summit glaciers, are in reality only the ice.
cap or feeding-basins, the correspondent of the firn or ne've,
Again, where many maps indicate a solid land-frontage,
without a glacial break, the actual face of the countiy shows
it be almost riddled by glacial valleys. Thus, between Cape
York and the Petowik Glacier no less than eight glaciers,
and of goodly size, break through the granite cliffs, and tha
same configuration of glacier following rapidly upon glacier
presents itself almost everywhere beyond the Petowik
(ilacier.

THE LAST BERG.— TWILIGHT.

The Greenland Ice-Cap audits Glaciers. 151
stream, and it is possible, and even very prob
able, that a considerably greater thickness of
ice would be found (in some of the glaciers, at
least) in positions nearer to their feeding basins.
The difficulty of approach to the Melville Bay
glaciers, which are probably the largest after
the Humboldt Glacier, prevented any careful
observations being made on these, but seem
ingly even their terminal walls were of
no extraordinary height. Yet it is true that
the ice-bergs which course about Melville Bay
are many of them fully 200 — 250 feet above
water, and, doubtless, they descend in cases
at least 600 — 800, or even a thousand, feet
beneath the water-line. In what manner the
height of an ice-berg is related to the thick
ness of glacial ice, is a question that still re
mains to be determined. The height of a
berg may very readily be a length in section
of a glacier, especially in the case of dis
charges from the solid-bodied or non-cre-
vassed ice-streams.
The insignificant development of the ice
cap, in its relation to the large glacial streams
which radiate off from it, is so striking a pecu
liarity in some parts of Greenland as to have
suggested the suspicion that many of the ex
isting glaciers are relicts of the Great Ice Age.
Bessels, the accomplished scientist of the Pol
aris Expedition, actually assumed this ex
planation for the by no means insignificant

152 The Greenland Ice-Cap and its Glaciers.
glaciers of Herbert and Northumberland Is
lands, lying somewhat above the 77th par
allel of latitude, which descend from an ice
cap of from 1,800 to 2,500 feet elevation; it
did not seem possible that the comparatively
feeble accumulation of snow which is found at
this altitude could originate ice-streams of the
dimensions which are there found. I am
convinced that there is no real basis for this in
terpretation. The snow-covering of these is
lands belongs to themselves, and feeble
though it be, it is quite competent to explain
the associated phenomena. Many of the
"hanging" glaciers of Herbert Island, which
descend over slopes of some 30 — 35 degrees,
are so attenuated in their upper parts as to be
almost extinguished before reaching the sum
mer ice-cap ; yet basally they rapidly increase
in dimensions, so that before they finally disap
pear ' they measure not less than 40 — 50 feet
in thickness. The slowly accumulting snows
descend over the first-formed layers, whether
by sliding or otherwise, and help to build up
the base while they thin out the top. These
hanging glaciers have all the structural fea
tures of the normal glacier type. I am con
vinced that some of the minor glaciers have,
indeed, been formed without the assistance of
any ice-cap or of the accumulated snows of a
neve basin. Such glacial streams might, per
haps, be advantageously termed ravine or

The Greenland Ice-Cap and its Glaciers 153
couloir glaciers ; they seem not to be numerous.
Geologists frequently distinguish between
the glaciers of Greenland and those of other
countries, and insist that the phenomena of
the Great Ice Age must be studied in the light
of the evidence afforded by the ice-sheets of
Greenland (and of other Arctic regions) rather
than by that of the glaciers of south-central
Europe, of the Caucasus, or of the Himalayas,
I have not been able to determine precisely
in what the distinction lies. The glaciers
(and their workings) of Greenland seem to me to
be the exact counterpart of those of the Alps; the
differences which they present are individual
and not specific, just as they are in all regions
of glaciation. They are large or small, are
steeply-inclined or nearly horizontal, rapidly-
moving or almost stationary, just as special
conditions of formation and moulding present
themselves. They may, again, be largely fis
sured or solid, provided with moraines or des
titute of them, and clean or dirty. Many of
them discharge into the sea, others stop before
reaching the water-line. All are now, or have
been in a recent period, undergoing contrac
tion (recession).

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INDEX OF REFERENCES.

Name.

Page.

Aldrieh,.

•14

Andersson, . .

95
Astrup,. .
.81,
107, 125,
133
Back, . ...
. . .54,
56
Baffin, . 
. . .35
;,34
Barentz,
28
Barrington, ....
. 25
Barrow,
11, 30, 47
, 53
Bateson, ...
.34
, 35
Belcher, .
54
Bessels,
.84,
103
Beyer, 
96
Brainard (See Lockwood and Brainard.)
Broberg, .... . .
95,
135
. 59
Bryant, . .
... 84, 99,
118, 123,
135
Buchan,
. 37, 38
, 58
Buddington, . . .
Bylot (See Baffin.)
. 84
Clarke, . .
34,
35
Collinson,
,54;
56
Cook, .
. 81, 103,
107, 129,
133
Cordiner,
. 16
Crawford,
. 54
Dollfuss-Ausset, .
145
" Dominus Vobiscum,".
. 28
Dunphy,
. 98,
107
Ekroll, .
. 8, 9
Entrikin,
. 84
:, 99, 124,
135
Findlay, .
. 56
Fitzroy,
.55
Fotherby, .
. 33
Franklin,
13, 37, 38, 53,
58
Frederick, .
. 90,
92
156 Index of References.
Frobisher, .  . . 17
Garlington, . . 80, 84
Gibson, ¦. . 81, 107, 133
Gray,. . 59, 70
Greely, 14, 67, 80, 146
Hall, . 14, 49, 50, 104
Hayes, 49, 103, 104
Henson, . 81, 107, 119
Hite, . . 84, 135
Hudson,. . 30, 31, 32
Humboldt, 145
Inglefield, . . 55
Jackson.. 73-75
"Jeannette," 7, 18
Kane, 49, 84, 104
Koldewey, . 31, 54, 59, 70
Lamont, . . .55
Lockwood and Brainard, . 10, 13, 20, 21, 22, 46, 63, 72
Mac Callam, . . .25
Markham, A. H., . 14, 19, 22, 67, 72, 73
Markham, C. B., 54, 56, 60, 73
Maury, 54
McClintock, 54, 56, 63, 64, 85
McClure, 13
MeKinley, 129
Meehan, 84, 135
Melville, . . 67
Mills, . 84, 199
Murchison, . 55
Murphy, 129
Nansen, 7, 141, 142
Nares, 49, 58, 61
Nordenskjold, 13, 16, 56, 57, 58, 65, 66, 91, 141, 145, 146
Ommaney, . 54, 56
Osborn, . 54, 56, 60
Palander, . 65
Parr,. 19

Index of References. 157
Parry, 8, 13, 14, 22, 23, 24, 27, 37, 39-51, 58, 62, 63, 65, 67
Payer, . . ... . 21, 22, 31, 59, 60, 65
Peary, R. E., 10, 21, 22, 46, 70, 71, 81-84, 107, 112, .
125, 129, 133, 136, 139, 148

Peary, J. D.,

. 81, 107, 111, 119, 126

Petermann,

51, 54, 58, 59, 60, 65, 70

Peterson,

16

Phipps,

33, 34, 35, 36

Pike,

. . 80, 84, 85, 110

Poole,

. 32, 33

"Proteus,"

. 80, 84, 114

Rae, .

56, 64

Rawlinson,

55

Richards,

. 52, 54, 56, 64

Robinson,

26

Ross, J.,

37, 103

Ross, J. C,

. 58

Roule, .

. . 60

Ryder,.

70

Ryp,

. 28, 29

Sabine,

. 54

Schlagintweit,

145

Scoresby,

. 34, 35, 38, 53

Smith,.

60

Stephens,

. 26

Stokes,

. 84, 135

"Tegethoff,".

. 18, 59

Verhoeff,. .

81, 107, 128, 129, 138, 139

Vorse,.

. 84, 135

Weyprecht,

17, 31, 58, 59

Wiggins, J.,

. 16

Wiggins, R.,. .

16

Young,.

. 55, 74

CORRECTION.
Pages 7, 18. For Jeanette read Jeannette.

CAPTAIN RICHARD PIKE.

Captain Richard Pike— A Retrospect.
While these pages are going through the
press intelligence is received of the death, on
the 5th of May, of Captain Richard Pike.
Through this death the guild of the northern
"ice-masters" is deprived of one of its most
noted and conspicuous members. From early
manhood through to his last day Captain
Pike was a man of the sea. Although not
strictly fond of the "ocean blue," he was rest
less on land, and seemed always impatient to
be active in his calling. The vessels under
his command sailed the waters from New
foundland to La Plata, and from the Mediter
ranean to the frozen north. He was thus a
man of all climates, but his home, as a sealer
and whaler, was preeminently the abode of
snow and ice. His familiarity with the north
ern waters was such as to always insure re
spect and consideration for his opinions and
judgment, a confidence that was not shaken
through the misfortunes which broke into his
career, and which a long period of active
service is almost certain to compass. The
recollection of one of these seems never to
have completely left the mind of the good
and genial tar, no more than the reality ever

160 Captain Richard Pike — A Retrospect.
left the body in which it had sown the seeds
of dissociation. The crushing of the Proteus,
the vessel of the Second Greely Relief Expe
dition, by the ice-floes of Smith Sound in
July, 1883, had graven a deep reminiscent
furrow — one too deep even for the mellowing
influences of time to efface ; nor did exonera
tion by two Naval Boards of Inquiry succeed
in restoring to him that spirit which was
shattered in the thought that the fate of an
Arctic expedition hung in the balance of his
misfortunates. But Captain Pike remained
true and good to his men, and to the rugged
Newfoundlanders he was endearingly known
as "good old Captain Pike."
The following pages briefly recite the events
of a few days surrounding the catastrophe to
the Proteus — the approach to Cape Sabine,
the crushing of the vessel in the ice, and the
preparations for the retreat. They are part of
the official "log" of the vessel which, was con
fided to the author by Captain Pike, with the
request that it might some day be given to the
public as a supplement to an Arctic journal.
No more fitting place appears than the narra
tive of the expedition of the Kite, the ship
which he, so successfully conducted to her
point of destination on two successive voyages.
Thursday, July 19th: — A. M. begins mod
erate, breeze from S. E., with rain and thick
fog — 5 A. M., fog clearing up, no water to be

Captain Richard Pike — A Retrospect. 161
seen to the northward — hauled ship back to
S. E., towards some lakes of water, thinking
to get around the ice in that direction — ship
steaming full speed — 7, clear, saw the land —
noon, fine, no water to be seen along the coast.
Latitude by meridian altitude 75° 30' N. — 3
P. M., stopped the ship by the edge of ice off
some islands in Melville Bay in Lat. 75° 42'
N., Long. 61° 50' W. — 7 P. M. saw no chance
to get to Cape York in shore, turned ship and
went full speed to the southward to try to get
around to the westward — Midnight calm and
clear sky, a little young ice making in the
lakes of water; ship making good way through
loose ice to the westward.
Friday, July 20th: — A. M. begins calm and
clear — ship steaming full speed around large
sheets of ice in a westerly direction — 2 A. M.
shot a Polar bear after chasing him some time
— 3 A. M., ice close, but ship making good way
to the westward, two men belonging to the ex
pedition busy skinning the bear — 8 A. M., ice
in very heavy sheets to the westward, turned
ship to the southward towards some loose ice.
— Noon, got in a southern water which
trimmed around to N. W.,' going full speed,
Lat. obs. 75° 17' N.— 2 P. M. turned after a
Polar bear, shot him after a long chase, hoisted
him on board and went full speed on her
course — 7 P. M., Cape York S. E. about 15
miles, light breeze from S. S. E., with light

162 Captain Richard Pike — A Retrospect.
misty .rain — 8.30 P. M. shot a dog hood-seal
on the ice, hoisted it on board and skinned it
— Midnight calm and clear, but very thick to
the southward; going full speed along the
coast, very little ice close in, great deal to the
westward. Saturday, July 21st: — A. M. begins calm
and fine — 1.30 A. M. passed Conical Rock off
Cape Dudley Digges about a mile off, passing
through loose ice towards Carey Islands, as we
were going to visit the eastern one of the group
— 7 A. M. off Cape Athol, thick, black fog to
the northward, close down to the water, but
clear along the coast to the eastward. — 8 A.
M. thick fog all around, ice in very large sheets
but not heavy — 10 A. M. fog cleared off, no
chance of getting north on the course steering,
as it was all one sheet between the ship and
the island, turned ship to S. W. in some veins
of water to get around to the westward, strong
wind from W. S. W. — Noon, lakes of water
trimming north, followed around the sheets S.
E., Carey Islands bore N. E. — 3 P. M. hove to,
off the island in open water — bergs very thick,
landed on the island to examine stores landed
there by the English Expedition in 1875 — 6
P. M. boat returned, reported the boat left
there in good condition, but a great deal of the
stores spoiled — 6.30 P. M. turned ship north
wards, going full speed for Pandora Harbor —
11 P. M. passed Hackluyt Island — Midnight,

Captain Richard Pike — A Retrospect. 163
light breeze from S. W., and fine but hazy on
the land.
Sunday, July 22nd: — A. M. begins calm and
fine, going full speed to the northward in open
water — 5 A. M. close by Cape Alexander,
stopped the engines a short time for some little
repairs — when finished, started again for Pan
dora Harbor — 7 A. M. steamed in the Harbor,
Expedition party went on shore to see for the
record left by the S. S. Neptune in 1882, but
failed to find any — 8 A. M. boat returned,
steamed on for Littleton Island, stopped there
a little while, but did not land, started full
speed to the northward — Noon, met ice to the
north, steamed to the edge — not a break to be
seen to the northward ; steamed to the edge,
still all solid north — turned ship towards Cape
Sabine — 3.30 P. M. Lieut. Garlington went to
the Cape to look after a depot of provisions
left last year by the S. S. Neptune — 7 P. M.
came on board and reported open water to the
northward, had some conversation with him
as to going out in the ship — 7.30 hove up
anchor and proceeded full speed toward the
Cape, saw a little water across toward Cape
Albert and by hard steaming and butting
sheets to the north gained that point.* — Mid
night, water closing up still .... north tow
ard Cape Albert — calm and fine.
Monday, July 23rd begins calm and fine —
*The last three words are erased in the log.

164 Captain Richard Pike — A Retrospect.
2 A. M. butting for open water off Cape Al
bert, but could not succeed ; turned ship in an
easterly direction to try to get around ; got
within about 100 yards of the water when the
ship got nipped and could not move off Cape
Albert — 5 A. M. ship loose, steamed north
about 5 miles when we were stopped; no
water to be seen north ; put back to the open
water south towards Cape Sabine — 7 A. M.
lay up in a small lake of water — 8, started
south again, at times very difficult to get the
ship through as the ice was very close and
heavy — 3 P. M. close by the main water in the
Sound when two heavy sheets caught the ship,
rafting all around her, carrying starboard, main
rail, bulwark,, stanchions and everything be
fore it ; ordered boats and provisions to be put
on the ice which was still rafting — 4.30 ice
stove in the starboard side abreast of boiler —
6.30 P. M. filled to the decks with water— 7.30
ice opened and the ship sank ; Cape Sabine S.
S. E. about 10 miles ; held a consultation with
Lieutenant Garlington and Colwell regarding
getting provisions, etc., landed. — Midnight
started one boat, being successful in landing
one load a little to the west of Cape Sabine.
Tuesday, July 24th. — A. M. begins light
breeze from the westward and fine — ice drift
ing out around Cape Sabine very fast; all
hands employed with five boats landing pro
visions off the ice — 8.30 A. M. all hands lef

Captain Richard Pike — A Retrospect. 165
the floe and landed close to Payer Harbor
where most of the provisions and clothing
were landed — 2 P. M. boiled some tea and had
dinner; the rest of the afternoon employed
fixing up stores and collecting them together ;
wind south with thick fog — a little ice passing
down the sound ; midnight, strong breeze with
thick fog.