The North Pole by Robert E. Peary (life changing books to read .txt) 📖

To recount all the incidents of this upward journey of the Roosevelt would require a volume. When we were not fighting the ice, we were dodging it, or—worse still—waiting in some niche of the shore for an opportunity to do more fighting. On Sunday, the sixth day out from Etah, the water continued fairly open, and we made good progress until one o'clock in the afternoon, when we were held up by the ice pack as we were nearing Lincoln Bay. A cable was run out, and the ship secured to a great floe, which extended some two miles to the north and several to the east. The tide, which was running north at the time, had carried the smaller ice with it, leaving the Roosevelt in a sort of lake. While we were resting there, some of the men observed a black object far out on the great ice floe to which we were attached, and Dr. Goodsell and Borup, with two Eskimos, started out to investigate. This walking across the floes is dangerous, as the ice is full of cracks, some of them quite wide, and on the day in question the cracks were for the most part concealed by a recent snowfall. In jumping across a lead, the men had a narrow escape from drowning, and when they got within shooting distance of the black object they were seeking, it proved to be only a block of stone.

Before the return of Borup and the doctor the ice had already begun to close in around the ship and, as soon as the men were safe on board, the cable was hauled in and the Roosevelt drifted south with the pack. So close was the ice that night, that we had to swing the boats inward on the davits to protect them from the great floes, which at times crowded the rail. Finally, the captain worked the ship into another small lake to the southeast of our former position by the great floe, and there we remained several hours, steaming back and forth in order to keep the pool open.

About eleven o'clock that night, for all our efforts, the ice closed in again around the Roosevelt; but I observed a small lead to the southeast, which led into another body of open water, and gave orders to ram the vessel through, if possible. By working the nose of the ship into the small opening, and then by butting the ice on alternate sides, we succeeded in widening the lead sufficiently to allow of our passing through to the pool of open water beyond.

At four o'clock the next morning we were again under way, working northward through slack ice to a point a little beyond Shelter River, where we were again stopped by ice about nine o'clock in the forenoon. The Roosevelt moved in near the shore and her head was shoved against a big floe, to avoid her being jammed or carried southward by the now swiftly running tide and the ice pack.

After supper that night, MacMillan, Borup, and Dr. Goodsell, with two Eskimos, started for the shore over the jammed ice, with the intention of getting some game; but before they reached the shore there was so much movement in the adjacent floes that I considered their journey too hazardous for inexperienced men. A recall was sounded with the ship's whistle, and they started back over the now moving floes. Their movements were impeded by their guns, but fortunately they carried boat hooks, without which they could never have made their way back.

Using the boat hooks as vaulting poles, they leaped from one floe to another, when the leads were not too wide. When the open water was impassable in that way, they crossed it on small floating pieces of ice, using their hooks to push and pull themselves along. First the doctor slipped on the edge of a floe, and went into the icy water to the waist, but he was quickly hauled up by Borup. Then Borup slipped and went in to the waist, but he was out again as quickly.

Meanwhile the ice had separated about the Roosevelt, leaving a wide lane of water between her and the men; but by running the ship against one of the larger floes, we enabled them to clamber aboard. They lost no time in exchanging their wet garments for dry ones, and in a few minutes they were all laughing and recounting their exploits to an interested—and possibly amused—group of listeners.

A man who could not laugh at a wetting or take as a matter of course a dangerous passage over moving ice, would not be a man for a serious arctic expedition. It was with a feeling of intense satisfaction that I watched these three men, MacMillan, Borup, and Dr. Goodsell, my arctic "tenderfeet," as I called them, proving the mettle of which they were made.

I had selected these three men from among a host of applicants for membership in the expedition, because of the special fitness of each one. Dr. Goodsell was a solid, sturdy, self-made physician of Pennsylvania stock. His specialism in microscopy I trusted might give valuable results in a field not hitherto investigated in the North. He was to make microscopic studies of the germ diseases of the Eskimos.

MacMillan, a trained athlete and physical instructor, I had known, and known about, for years. I chose him because of his intense interest in the work, his intense desire to be of the party, and his evident mental and physical fitness for the rigorous demands of the Arctic.

Borup, the youngest member of the party, impressed me with his enthusiasm and physical abilities. He had a record as a Yale runner, and I took him on general principles, because I liked him, satisfied that he was of the right stuff for arctic work. It was a fortunate selection, as the photographs brought back by the expedition are due in a large measure to his expert knowledge of film developing.

I have been asked how the members of my party amused themselves during the long waits, when the ship was held up by the ice. The principal amusement of the new members was in trying to acquire from the Eskimos on board a smattering of their language. As interpreter, they had Matt Henson. Sometimes, looking down from the bridge of the ship onto the main deck, I would see one of these new men surrounded by a group of Eskimos, gesticulating and laughing, and I knew that a language lesson was in progress. The women were delighted at the opportunity to teach Borup the Eskimo words for jacket, hood, boots, sky, water, food, et cetera, as they seemed to be of the opinion that he was a fine boy.

The Roosevelt lay quietly in open water all night on the 24th of August, but in the forenoon of the 25th steamed northward nearly to Cape Union. Beyond there the ice was densely packed. I climbed up into the rigging to take a look but, finding no suitable shelter, decided to turn back to Lincoln Bay, where we made the ship fast between two grounded ice floes. The day before had been calm and sunny, but the 25th was snowy and disagreeable, with a raw northerly wind. The snow was driving in horizontal sheets across the decks, the water was black as ink, the ice a spectral white, and the coast near us looked like the shores of the land of ghosts. One of our berg pieces was carried away by the flood tide, and we were obliged to shift our position to the inner side of the other one; but there were other grounded bergs outside us to take the impact of the larger floes.

On general principles, I landed a cache of supplies at this point on the following day. The possibility of losing the ship was always present; but if everything went well the cache could be made use of in the hunting season. The supplies, in their wooden boxes, were simply piled upon the shore. Wandering arctic hares, reindeer, and musk-oxen never attempt to regale themselves on tin cans or wooden boxes.

I went ashore and walked over to Shelter River, living over again the experiences there in 1906, when, during my absence at Cape Thomas Hubbard, Captain Bartlett—for he was then, as now, the master of the Roosevelt—had tried to drive the ship south from her exposed position at Cape Sheridan to a more sheltered place in Lincoln Bay, where I was to rejoin them.

At Shelter River, the Roosevelt had been caught between the moving pack and the vertical face of the ice-foot, receiving almost a fatal blow. She had been lifted bodily out of the water, the stern-post and rudder smashed into kindling wood, and a blade ripped off the propeller. Everything was landed from the vessel in the expectation that when the ice slacked off and she settled into the water, she would be leaking so badly it would be impossible to keep her afloat.

Bartlett and his men worked manfully in stopping the leaks, as far as possible; and when the pressure from the ice was partially released, the ship was floated. But she lay there nearly a month, and twice during that time even the rigging of the ship was landed, when it seemed impossible that she could survive.

Here at Shelter River I had found the Roosevelt on my return from "farthest west." A new rudder was improvised, and the crippled and almost helpless ship floated around into Lincoln Bay, whence she finally limped home to New York.

After an hour of retrospection at this place I walked back to the ship. Borup and MacMillan had also gone ashore, in the hope of obtaining game but had not found any. It was a dull, raw, overcast day and MacMillan, Borup, the doctor, and Gushue, the mate, amused themselves by target-shooting with their Winchesters.

The next day was seemingly endless, and still we lay there at Lincoln Bay, with a strong, raw, northeast wind blowing steadily and with increasing violence. The edge of the moving pack was only a few yards from the