On June 6, 1891, the steam-whaler “Kite,” which was to bear the expedition of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences northward, set sail from the port of New-York, her destination being Whale Sound, on the northwest coast of Greenland, where it had been determined to pass the winter, preliminary to the long traverse of the inland ice which was to solve the question of the extension of Greenland in the direction of the Pole. The members of the expedition numbered but five besides the commander, Mr. Peary, and his wife. They were Dr. F. A. Cook, Messrs. Langdon Gibson, Eivind Astrup, and John T. Verhoeff, and Mr. Peary’s faithful colored attendant in his surveying labors in Nicaragua, Matthew Henson. This was the smallest number that had ever been banded together for extended explorations in the high Arctic zone. A year and a quarter after their departure, with the aid of a relief expedition conducted by Professor Angelo Heilprin, Mr. Peary’s party, lacking one of its members, the unfortunate Mr. Verhoeff, returned to the American shore. The explorer had traversed northern Greenland from coast to coast, and had added a remarkable chapter to the history of Arctic exploration.
The main results of Mr. Peary’s journey were:
The determination of the rapid convergence of the shores of Greenland above the 78th parallel of latitude, and consequently the practical demonstration of the insularity of this great land-mass;
The discovery of the existence of ice-free land-masses to the northward of Greenland; and
The delineation of the northward extension of the great Greenland ice-cap.
In the following pages Mrs. Peary recounts her experiences of a full twelvemonth spent on the shores of McCormick Bay, midway between the Arctic Circle and the North Pole. The Eskimos with whom she came in contact belong to a little tribe of about three hundred and fifty individuals, completely isolated from the rest of the world. They are separated by hundreds of miles from their nearest neighbors, with whom they have no intercourse whatever. These people had never seen a white woman, and some of them had never beheld a civilized being. The opportunities which Mrs. Peary had of observing their manners and mode of life have enabled her to make a valuable contribution to ethnological learning.
THE PUBLISHERS.
This plain and simple narrative of a year spent by a refined woman in the realm of the dreaded Frost King has been written only after persistent and urgent pressure from friends, by one who shrank from publicity, and who reluctantly yielded to the idea that her experiences might be of interest to others besides her immediate friends.
I have been requested to write a few words of introduction; and while there may be some to whom it might occur that I was too much interested to perform this task properly, it must nevertheless be admitted that there is probably no one better fitted than myself to do it. Little, indeed, need be said.
The feeling that led Mrs. Peary through these experiences was first and foremost a desire to be by my side, coupled with the conviction that she was fitted physically as well as otherwise to share with me a portion at least of the fatigues and hardships of the work. I fully concurred in this feeling, and yet, in spite of my oft-expressed view that the dangers of life and work in the Arctic regions have been greatly exaggerated, I cannot but admire her courage. She has been where no white woman has ever been, and where many a man has hesitated to go; and she has seen phases of the life of the most northerly tribe of human beings on the globe, and in many ways has been enabled to get a closer insight into their ways and customs than had been obtained before.
I rarely, if ever, take up the thread of our Arctic experiences without reverting to two pictures: one is the first night that we spent on the Greenland shore after the departure of the “Kite,” when, in a little tent on the rocks—a tent which the furious wind threatened every moment to carry away bodily—she watched by my side as I lay a helpless cripple with a broken leg, our small party the only human beings on that shore, and the little “Kite,” from which we had landed, drifted far out among the ice by the storm, and invisible through the rain. Long afterward she told me that every unwonted sound of the wind set her heart beating with the thoughts of some hungry bear roaming along the shore and attracted by the unusual sight of the tent; yet she never gave a sign at the time of her fears, lest it should disturb me.
The other picture is that of a scene perhaps a month or two later, when—myself still a cripple, but not entirely helpless—this same woman sat for an hour beside me in the stern of a boat, calmly reloading our empty firearms while a herd of infuriated walrus about us thrust their savage heads with gleaming tusks and bloodshot eyes out of the water close to the muzzles of our rifles, so that she could have touched them with her hand, in their efforts to get their tusks over the gunwale and capsize the boat. I may perhaps be pardoned for saying that I never think of these two experiences without a thrill of pride and admiration for her pluck.
In reading the pages of this narrative it should be remembered that within sixty miles of where Kane and his little party endured such untold sufferings, within eighty miles of where Greely’s men one by one starved to death, and within less than fifty miles of where Hayes and his party and one portion of the “Polaris” party underwent their Arctic trials and tribulations, this tenderly nurtured woman lived for a year in safety and comfort: in the summer-time climbed over the lichen-covered rocks, picking flowers and singing familiar home songs, shot deer, ptarmigan, and ducks in the valleys and lakes, and even tried her hand at seal, walrus, and narwhal in the bays; and through the long, dark winter night, with her nimble fingers and ready woman’s insight, was of inestimable assistance in devising and perfecting the details of the costumes which enabled Astrup and myself to make our journey across the great ice-cap in actual comfort.
Perhaps no greater or more convincing proof than this could be desired of what great improvements have been made in Arctic methods. That neither Mrs. Peary nor myself regret her Arctic experiences, or consider them ill-advised, may be inferred from the fact that she is once more by my side in my effort to throw more light on the great Arctic mystery.
R. E. PEARY, Civil Engineer, U. S. N.
FALCON HARBOR, BOWDOIN BAY, GREENLAND, August 20, 1893.
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