The North Pole - Robert E. Peary (e book reader pdf .txt) 📗
- Author: Robert E. Peary
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Behind me lay the civilized world, which was now absolutely useless, and which could give me nothing more. Ahead of me lay that trackless waste through which I must literally cut my way to the goal. Even the ship's journey from Cape York to winter quarters on the north coast of Grant Land is not "plain sailing"; in fact, it is not sailing at all during the later stages; it is jamming and butting and dodging and hammering the ice, with always the possibility that the antagonist will hit back a body blow. It is like the work of a skilled heavy-weight pugilist, or the work of an old Roman fighter with the cestus.
Beyond Melville Bay the world, or what we know as the world, is left behind. On leaving Cape York, we had exchanged the multifarious purposes of civilization for the two purposes for which there is room in those wide wastes: food for man and dog, and the covering of miles of distance.
Behind me now lay everything that was mine, everything that a man personally loves, family, friends, home, and all those human associations which linked me with my kind. Ahead of me lay—my dream, the goal of that irresistible impulse which had driven me for twenty-three years to measure myself, time after time, against the frigid No of the Great North.
Should I succeed? Should I return? Success in the attainment of 90° North would not inevitably carry with it the safe return. We had learned that on recrossing the "big lead" in 1906. In the Arctic the chances are always against the explorer. The inscrutable guardians of the secret appear to have a well-nigh inexhaustible reserve of trump cards to play against the intruder who insists upon dropping into the game. The life is a dog's life, but the work is a man's work.
As we steamed northward from Cape York, on the first day of August, 1908, I felt that I was now in truth face to face with the final struggle. Everything in my life appeared to have led up to this day. All my years of work and all my former expeditions were merely preparations for this last and supreme effort. It has been said that well-directed labor toward a given end is an excellent kind of prayer for its attainment. If that be so, then prayer has been my portion for many years. Through all the seasons of disappointment and defeat I had never ceased to believe that the great white mystery of the North must eventually succumb to the insistence of human experience and will, and, standing there with my back to the world and my face toward that mystery, I believed that I should win in spite of all the powers of darkness and of desolation.
CHAPTER V WELCOME FROM THE ESKIMOSAs we approached Cape York, which is farther from the Pole in actual distance than New York is from Tampa, Florida, it was with a peculiar feeling of satisfaction that I saw the foremost of our Eskimo friends putting out to meet us in their tiny kayaks, or skin canoes. Here is the southernmost of the Eskimo villages, by which a permanent settlement is not meant, for these barbarians are nomads. One year there may be two families there; another year ten; and still another season none at all, for the Eskimos seldom live more than a year or two in one place.
As we neared the Cape, the headland was encircled and guarded by an enormous squadron of floating icebergs which made it difficult for the Roosevelt to get near shore; but long before we reached these bergs the hunters of the settlement were seen putting out to greet us. The sight of them skimming the water so easily in their frail kayaks was the most welcome spectacle I had seen since we sailed from Sydney.
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