PEARY DISCOVERS THE NORTH POLE

His Own Account.

COMMANDER ROBERT E. PEARY, the first human being of authentic record to reach the North Pole, attained that goal of his life-long ambition April 6, 1909, as told in his "The North Pole: Its Discovery," from which this account is taken, by permission of Frederick A. Stokes Company. Temporarily the glory of his achievement was threatened by the claim of Dr. Frederick A. Cook to have reached the Pole on April 21, 1908. The civilized world was still huzzaing Cook on September 6, 1909, when the first news came from Peary that he had succeeded in reaching the Pole. Cook has been discredited.

This was Peary's eighth "dash" into the arctic wilderness. It was made in the steamer "Roosevelt," which sailed from a Maine port in August, 1908, with a company of 66 men and 140 dogs. Thirty hours were spent at the Pole. In 1911, by special act, Peary received the thanks of Congress and was made a rear-admiral.

WE were now one hundred and thirty-three nautical miles from the Pole. Pacing back and forth in the lee of the pressure ridge near which our igloos were built, I made out my program. Every nerve must be strained to make five marches of at least twenty-five miles each, crowding these marches in such a way as to bring us to the end of the fifth march by noon, to permit an immediate latitude observation.

As to the dogs, most of them were powerful males, as hard as iron, in good condition ; but without an ounce of superfluous fat; and, by reason of the care which I had taken of them up to this point, they were all in good spirits, like the men. The sledges, which were being repaired that day, were also in good condition. My food and fuel supplies were ample for forty days, and by the gradual utilization of the dogs themselves for reserve food, might be made to last for fifty days if it came to a pinch.

A little after midnight, on the morning of April 2 1909], after a few hours of sound, warm and refreshing sleep, and a hearty breakfast, I started to lift the trail to the north, leaving the others to pack, hitch up, and follow. As I climbed the pressure ridge back of our igloo, I took up another hole in my belt, the third since I left the land thirty-two days before.

As we had traveled on, the moon had circled round and round the heavens opposite the sun, a disk of silver opposite a disk of gold. Looking at its pallid and spectral face, from which the brighter light of the sun had stolen the color, it seemed hard to realize that its presence there had power to stir the great ice-fields around us with restlessness power even now, when we were so near our goal, to interrupt our pathway with an impassable lead.

When we awoke early in the morning of April 3, after a few hours' sleep, we found the weather still clear and calm.

Some gigantic rafters were seen during this march, but they were not in our path. All day long we had heard the ice grinding and groaning on all sides of us, but no motion was visible to our eyes. Either the ice was slacking back into equilibrium, sagging northward after its release from the wind pressure, or else it was feeling the influence of the spring tides of the full moon. On, on we pushed, and I am not ashamed to confess that my pulse beat high, for the breath of success seemed already in my nostrils.

I had not dared to hope for such progress as we were making. Still the biting cold would have been impossible to face by any one not fortified by an inflexible purpose. The bitter wind burned our faces so that they cracked, and long after we got into camp each day they pained us so that we could hardly go to sleep. The Eskimos complained much, and at every camp fixed their fur clothing about their faces, waists, knees, and wrists. They also complained of their noses, which I had never known them to do before. The air was as keen and bitter as frozen steel.

At the next camp I had another of the dogs killed. It was now exactly six weeks since we left the "Roosevelt," and I felt as if the goal were in sight.

At our camp on the fifth of April I gave the party a little more sleep than at the previous ones, as we were all pretty well played out and in need of rest. I took a latitude sight, and this indicated our position to be 89 25', or thirty-five miles from the Pole; but I determined to make the next camp for a noon observation, if the sun should be visible.

The last march northward ended at ten o'clock on the forenoon of April 6. I had now made the five marches planned from the point at which Bartlett turned back, and my reckoning showed that we were in the immediate neighborhood of the goal of all our striving. After the usual arrangements for going into camp, at approximate local noon, of the Columbia meridian, I made the first observation at our polar camp. It indicated our position as 89 57'.

We were now at the end of the last long march of the upward journey. Yet with the Pole actually in sight I was too weary to take the last few steps. The accumulated weariness of all those days and nights of forced marches and insufficient sleep, constant peril and anxiety, seemed to roll across me all at once. I was actually too exhausted to realize at the moment that my life's purpose had been achieved. As soon as our igloos had been completed and we had eaten our dinner and double-rationed the dogs, I turned in for a few hours of absolutely necessary sleep. But, weary though I was, I could not sleep long. It was, therefore, only a few hours later when I woke. The first thing I did after awaking was to write these words in my diary :

"The Pole at last. The prize of three centuries. My dream and goal for twenty years. Mine at last! I can not bring myself to realize it. It seems all so simple and commonplace."

Everything was in readiness for an observation at 6 p. m., Columbia meridian time, in case the sky should be clear, but at that hour it was, unfortunately, still overcast. But as there were indications that it would clear before long, two of the Eskimos and myself made ready a light sledge carrying only the instruments, a tin of pemmican, and one or two skins; and drawn by a double team of dogs, we pushed on for an estimated distance of ten miles. While we traveled, the sky cleared, and at the end of the journey I was able to get a satisfactory series of observations at Columbia meridian midnight. These observations indicated that our position was then beyond the Pole.

Nearly everything in the circumstances which then surrounded us seemed too strange to be thoroughly realized ; but one of the strangest of those circumstances seemed to me to be the fact that, in a march of only a few hours, I had passed from the western to the eastern hemisphere and had verified my position at the summit of the world. It was hard to realize that, in the first miles of this brief march, we had been traveling due north, while, on the last few miles of the same march, we had been traveling south, although we had all the time been traveling precisely in the same direction. It would be difficult to imagine a better illustration of the fact that most things are relative. Again, please consider the uncommon circumstance that, in order to return to our camp, it now became necessary to turn and go north again for a few miles and then to go directly south, all the time traveling in the same direction.

As we passed back along that trail which none had ever seen before or would ever see again, certain reflections intruded themselves which, I think, may fairly be called unique. East, west, and north had disappeared for us. Only one direction remained, and that was south. Every breeze which could possibly blow upon us, no matter from what point of the horizon, must be a south wind. Where we were, one day and one night constituted a year, a hundred such days and nights constituted a century. Had we stood in that spot during the six months of the Arctic winter night, we should have seen every star of the northern hemisphere circling the sky at the same distance from the horizon, with Polaris (the North Star) practically in the zenith.