PEARY'S NORTH POLE BOOK.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 996, 10 December 1910, Page 12

PEARY'S NORTH POLE BOOK.

HE TRLLS OF THE GREAT DARK NIGHT. OF TRAVELS AND DANGERS, Commander Robert Peary's long-expected book on , "The North Pole" has been published by Hoclder and Stoughton. It is a very handsome quarto book of just over 300 pages, and has 11G illustrations fronv photographs, and most impressive many of these are. As you read you. are struck by the sincerity of the book—tho.tale is told so ■ artlessly and with such great simplicity; and yet it is the tale of the century, the tale indeed of all time, a taie no olher man has told or can tell again for the iirst time. And the setting of the story —amid tho world's wild wastes of snovr and ice—gives grandeur and dignity and great iinpressivcness to it. Even more striking than the physical facts of which the book is fu.H is the human story of the unique thing which this man Peary has done after years of striving, after endless disappointment. Only a brave, strong heart could so achieve so great a task. "The Great Dark." Let us follow Peary on a few of those long miles which led to the North' Pole. Before he came to his goal he and hia inen had to spend long days in "the Great. Dark," like men waiting for tho curtain, to go up on some great scene. "On October 12 the-sun had bidden us good-bye for the year. . . . We had gone up there in the Arctic noon, had ■worked and hunted through the Arctic twilight, and now the night was upon us—the long Arctic night, which seems like the Valley of the Shadow of Death. ... We en. tered the Great Dark with fairly contented hearts. Our ship was apparently safe; we were well housed and well fedj and if sometimes the terrible melancholy of the dark clutched- for a moment at the hearts of the men, they bravely kept, the secret from each other and from me.": "During the long Arctic night we count the days till the light shall return to .us. .;. . He who would understand the old sun-worshippers should spend a winter in the Arctic." - Peary's Winter Home. "Imagine us in our winter home on the Roosevelt,- 450 miles from the North. Pole; the ship held tight in her icy berth, 150 yards from the shore, the ship and the surrounding world covered witn enow, the wind creaking in. tho rigging, whistling and shrieking around the corners of the deck-houses, tho temperature ranging from zero to sixty, below, and the ice-pack.in the channel outside groaning and complaining with the move* inent ot the tides." . .... Peary sometimes seeins.- to have realised the loneliness of it all as he ueared the Pole. When the men were busy building, the igloos at the end o£ the day's march, he says, "I usually had a few minutes in which to look about me and to realise the picturesqueness of our situation. We, the only, living things in a trackless, colourless,' inhospitable desert of ice. Nothing but the.hostile ice and far more hostile ice-water lay between our remote .'place on the world's map ' and the utmost tips of the .lands of Mother Earth. '■ : ■ "I'knew,' of course, that there was always a ■ possibility that we might' still end our lives there, and that our conquest of . the unknown spaces and silences of the Polar void might'remain for ever unknown to. the world which we had left behind; but it was hard to realise this."- . ■ . ■ At thei\North Pole.' ■ Then came the day which was one day frbniitlie.;Pole. "I. now felt that success was ' certain; ,;and, the i)Ji'ysicar'exffa'u'stio"n'of'the forced fosbhea ■Of the !ast : 'nve'-days;l.iTent tirelessly on and on, the. Eskimos following almost automatically,' though I knew that ; they . must-feel the weariness' which my excited brain made me incapable of feeling." Oii. April 6, 1903, Peary reached the Pole.■'"Jfet; 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 realise at' the moment that my life's purpose had been achieved. . . . I . turned ■in . for. a . few hours' absolutely., necessary., sleep. . ~ . ' But weary though I was, I could not Bleep lone;. -The. first thing. I did after waiing 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 cannot bring myself to.' realise it. It seems all so simple and commonplace.' Where and What-tho Pole Is. "No one," says Peary, "has imagined that I was able to determine with my instruments the precise position of the Pole; but, after having determined its position approximately, then setting an arbitrary allowance of about ten miles for possible errors of ' the instruments and myself as observer, and then crossing and recrossing that ten mile area in. various directions, no one will havo any doubt but that at some time I passed close to the precise spot, and perhaps actually walked over it.", In the moment of success Peary did not forget the means 4 by which he won it. "Dogs, and plenty of them, were vitally necessary to tho' success of the expedition," he says. "Had an epidemic deprived us of these ■ animals, we might just as well have remained comfortably at home in the United States." And when you are at the Pole, what.is it like ? "East, west, .and north had disappeared from ns.' 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 wo stood in that spot during the six months of the Arctic win-, ter 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. "We planted' five flags at the top of tho world. The first one was a silk American flag which Mrs. Peary had given me thirteen years ago. That flag has done more travelling in. high latitudes than any other ever made. I carried it wrapped about my body on everj;. one' of my expeditions northward." Victory After Twenty Years. "For more than a score of years,!' says Peary, "that point of the earth's sunace had Been the object of my every effort. To attain it, my whole being, physical,, mental, and moral, had been dedicated. Many times my own life and the lives of those with me "had been risked. My own material and forces and those of my friends had been devoted to this object. This journey was my eighth into the Arctic wilderness. In that wilderness I had spent nearly twelve years out of the twentv-three between my. thirtieth and fifty-third year." it tho North Pole Peary wrote a postcard, which reached Mrs. Peary afterwards at Sydney. It ran:— "My Dear Jo, —I have won out at last. Have .been here a day. I start for home and you in an hour. Lovo to the kidsies.—Bert. OOdeg. north latitude, April Then "about four o'clock on the afternoon of April 7 we turned our backs upon the camp at the North Pole. . . . Th< event of human beings standing! on tho hitherto inaccessible summit of the earth was accomplished. . . . One backward glance I gave, then turned, my face toward tho south and toward the future."--. "Public Opinion."