The North Pole

The lure of the North! It is a strange and a powerful thing. More than once I have come back from the great frozen spaces, battered and worn and baffled, sometimes maimed, telling myself that I had made my last journey thither, eager for the society of my kind, the comforts of civilization and the peace and serenity of home. But somehow, it was never many months before the old restless feeling came over me. Civilization began to lose its zest for me. I began to long for the great white desolation, the battles with the ice and the gales, the long, long arctic night, the long, long arctic day, the handful of odd but faithful Eskimos who had been my friends for years, the silence and the vastness of the great, white lonely North. And back I went accordingly, time after time, until, at last, my dream of years came true.

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,

From Etah to Cape Sheridan! Imagine about three hundred and fifty miles of almost solid ice—ice of all shapes and sizes, mountainous ice, flat ice, ragged and tortured ice, ice that, for every foot of height revealed above the surface of the water, hides seven feet below—a theater of action which for diabolic and Titanic struggle makes Dante's frozen circle of the Inferno seem like a skating pond.

Then imagine a little black ship, solid, sturdy, compact, strong and resistant as any vessel built by mortal hands can be, yet utterly insignificant in comparison with the white, cold adversary she must fight. And on this little ship are sixty-nine human beings, men, women, and children, whites and Eskimos, who have gone out into the crazy, ice-tortured channel between Baffin Bay and the Polar Sea—gone out to help prove the reality of a dream which has bewitched some of the most daring minds of the world for centuries, a will-o'-the-wisp in the pursuit of which men have frozen, and starved, and died. The music that ever sounded in our ears had for melody the howling of two hundred and forty-six wild dogs, for a bass accompaniment the deep, low grumbling of the ice, surging around us with the impulse of the tides, and for punctuation the shock and jar of our crashing assaults upon the floes.

I wondered.

I think that none of the members of the expedition will ever forget the following day, the 30th of August. The Roosevelt was kicked about by the floes as if she had been a football. The game began about four o'clock in the morning. I was in my cabin trying to get a little sleep—with my clothes on, for I had not dared to remove them for a week. My rest was cut short by a shock so violent that, before I realized that anything had happened, I found myself on deck—a deck that inclined to starboard some twelve or fifteen degrees. I ran, or rather climbed the deck, to the port side and saw what had happened. A big floe, rushing past with the current, had picked up the grounded berg to which we were attached by the hawsers, as if that thousand-ton berg had been a toy, and dashed it against the Roosevelt and clear along her port side, smashing a big hole in the bulwarks at Marvin's room. The berg brought up against another one just aft of us, and the Roosevelt slipped from between the two like a greased pig.

As soon as the pressure was relaxed and the ship regained an even keel, we discovered that the cable which had been attached to the floe-berg at the stern had become entangled with the propeller. It was a time for lightning thought and action; but by attaching a heavier cable to the parted one and taking a hitch round the steam capstan, we finally disentangled it.

On the night of November 12, the ice of the channel pack, which for more than two months had seemed unmindful of our intrusive presence, arose in wrath and tried to hurl us upon the equally inhospitable shore.

All that evening the wind had been gradually increasing in violence, and about half-past eleven the ship began to complain, creaking, groaning and muttering to herself. I lay in my bunk and listened to the wind in the humming rigging, while the moonlight, shining through the porthole, filled the cabin with dim shadows. Toward midnight, mingled with the noises of the ship, another and more ominous sound became audible—the grinding of the ice in the channel outside.

I threw on my clothes and went on deck. The tide was running flood, and the ice was moving resistlessly past the point of the cape. The nearer ice, between us and the outer pack, was humming and groaning with the steadily increasing pressure. By the light of the moon we could see the pack as it began to break and pile up just beyond the edge of the ice-foot outside us. A few minutes later the whole mass broke with a rabid roar into a tumbling chaos of ice blocks, some upheaving, some going under, and a big rafter, thirty feet high, formed at the edge of the ice-foot within twenty feet of the ship. The invading mass grew larger and larger and steadily advanced toward us. The grounded piece off our starboard beam was forced in and driven against the big ice block under our starboard quarter. The ship shook a little, but the ice block did not move.