THE FINAL SPURT BEGUN
At this time it may be appropriate to say a word regarding my reasons
for selecting Henson as my fellow traveler to the Pole itself. In this
selection I acted exactly as I have done on all my expeditions for the
last fifteen years. He has in those years always been with me at my
point farthest north. Moreover, Henson was the best man I had with me
for this kind of work, with the exception of the Eskimos, who, with
their racial inheritance of ice technic and their ability to handle
sledges and dogs, were more necessary to me, as members of my own
individual party, than any white man could have been. Of course they
could not lead, but they could follow and drive dogs better than any
white man.
Henson, with his years of arctic experience, was almost as skilful at
this work as an Eskimo. He could handle dogs and sledges. He was a part
of the traveling machine. Had I taken another member of the expedition
also, he would have been a passenger, necessitating the carrying of
extra rations and other impedimenta. It would have amounted to an
additional load on the sledges, while the taking of Henson was in the
interest of economy of weight.
The second reason was that while Henson was more useful to me than any
other member of my expedition when it came to traveling with my last
party over the polar ice, he would not have been so competent as the
white members of the expedition in getting himself and his party back to
the land. If Henson had been sent back with one of the supporting
parties from a distance far out on the ice, and if he had encountered
conditions similar to those which we had to face on the return journey
in 1906, he and his party would never have reached the land. While
faithful to me, and when _with me_ more effective in covering distance
with a sledge than any of the others, he had not, as a racial
inheritance, the daring and initiative of Bartlett, or Marvin,
MacMillan, or Borup. I owed it to him not to subject him to dangers and
responsibilities which he was temperamentally unfit to face.
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.
As the Eskimos worked away at repairing the sledges while we rested
there on the first day of April, they stopped from time to time to eat
some of the boiled dog which the surplus numbers in Bartlett's returning
team had enabled them to have. They had killed one of the poorest dogs
and boiled it, using the splinters of an extra broken sledge for fuel
under their cooker. It was a change for them from the pemmican diet. It
was fresh meat, it was hot, and they seemed thoroughly to enjoy it. But
though I remembered many times when from sheer starvation I had been
glad to eat dog meat raw, I did not feel inclined to join in the feast
of my dusky friends.
A little after midnight, on the morning of April 2, 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. Every man and dog of us was as lean and flat-bellied as a
board, and as hard.
Up to this time I had intentionally kept in the rear, to straighten out
any little hitch or to encourage a man with a broken sledge, and to see
that everything was in good marching order. Now I took my proper place
in the lead. Though I held myself in check, I felt the keenest
exhilaration, and even exultation, as I climbed over the pressure ridge
and breasted the keen air sweeping over the mighty ice, pure and
straight from the Pole itself.
These feelings were not in any way dampened when I plunged off the
pressure ridge into water mid-thigh deep, where the pressure had forced
down the edge of the floe north of us and had allowed the water to flow
in under the surface snow. My boots and trousers were tight, so that no
water could get inside, and as the water froze on the fur of my trousers
I scraped it off with the blade of the ice lance which I carried, and
was no worse for my involuntary morning plunge. I thought of my unused
bath tub on the _Roosevelt_, three hundred and thirty nautical miles to
the south, and smiled.
It was a fine marching morning, clear and sunlit, with a temperature of
minus 25°, and the wind of the past few days had subsided to a gentle
breeze. The going was the best we had had since leaving the land. The
floes were large and old, hard and level, with patches of sapphire blue
ice (the pools of the preceding summer). While the pressure ridges
surrounding them were stupendous, some of them fifty feet high, they
were not especially hard to negotiate, either through some gap or up the
gradual slope of a huge drift of snow. The brilliant sunlight, the good
going save for the pressure ridges, the consciousness that we were now
well started on the last lap of our journey, and the joy of again being
in the lead affected me like wine. The years seemed to drop from me, and
I felt as I had felt in those days fifteen years before, when I headed
my little party across the great ice-cap of Greenland, leaving twenty
and twenty-five miles behind my snowshoes day after day, and on a spurt
stretching it to thirty or forty.
* * * * *
Perhaps a man always thinks of the very beginning of his work when he
feels it is nearing its end. The appearance of the ice-fields to the
north this day, large and level, the brilliant blue of the sky, the
biting character of the wind--everything excepting the surface of the
ice, which on the great cap is absolutely dead level with a straight
line for a horizon--reminded me of those marches of the long ago.
The most marked difference was the shadows, which on the ice-cap are
absent entirely, but on the polar ice, where the great pressure ridges
stand out in bold relief, are deep and dark. Then, too, there are on the
polar ice those little patches of sapphire blue already mentioned, made
from the water pools of the preceding summer. On the Greenland ice-cap
years ago I had been spurred on by the necessity of reaching the
musk-oxen of Independence Bay before my supplies gave out. Now I was
spurred on by the necessity of making my goal, if possible, before the
round face of the coming full moon should stir the tides with unrest and
open a network of leads across our path.
After some hours the sledges caught up with me. The dogs were so active
that morning, after their day's rest, that I was frequently obliged to
sit on a sledge for a few minutes or else run to keep up with them,
which I did not care to do just yet. Our course was nearly, as the crow
flies, due north, across floe after floe, pressure ridge after pressure
ridge, headed straight for some hummock or pinnacle of ice which I had
lined in with my compass.
In this way we traveled for ten hours without stopping, covering, I felt
sure, thirty miles, though, to be conservative, I called it twenty-five.
My Eskimos said that we had come as far as from the _Roosevelt_ to
Porter Bay, which by our winter route scales thirty-five miles on the
chart. Anyway, we were well over the 88th parallel, in a region where no
human being had ever been before. And whatever distance we made, we
were likely to retain it now that the wind had ceased to blow from the
north. It was even possible that with the release of the wind pressure
the ice might rebound more or less and return us some of the hard-earned
miles which it had stolen from us during the previous three days.
Near the end of the march I came upon a lead which was just opening. It
was ten yards wide directly in front of me, but a few hundred yards to
the east was an apparently practicable crossing where the single crack
was divided into several. I signaled to the sledges to hurry; then,
running to the place, I had time to pick a road across the moving ice
cakes and return to help the teams across before the lead widened so as
to be impassable. This passage was effected by my jumping from one cake
to another, picking the way, and making sure that the cake would not
tilt under the weight of the dogs and the sledge, returning to the
former cake where the dogs were, encouraging the dogs ahead while the
driver steered the sledge across from cake to cake, and threw his weight
from one side to the other so that it could not overturn. We got the
sledges across several cracks so wide that while the dogs had no trouble
in jumping, the men had to be pretty active in order to follow the long
sledges. Fortunately the sledges were of the new Peary type, twelve feet
long. Had they been of the old Eskimo type, seven feet long, we might
have had to use ropes and pull them across hand over hand on an ice
cake.
It is always hard to make the dogs leap a widening crack, though some of
the best dog drivers can do it instantly, using the whip and the voice.
A poor dog driver would be likely to get everything into the water in
the attempt. It is sometimes necessary to go ahead of the dogs, holding
the hand low and shaking it as though it contained some dainty morsel of
food, thus inspiring them with courage for the leap.
Perhaps a mile beyond this, the breaking of the ice at the edge of a
narrow lead as I landed from a jump sent me into the water nearly to my
hips; but as the water did not come above the waistband of my trousers,
which were water-tight, it was soon scraped and beaten off before it had
time to freeze.
This lead was not wide enough to bother the sledges.
As we stopped to make our camp near a huge pressure ridge, the sun,
which was gradually getting higher, seemed almost to have some warmth.
While we were building our igloos, we could see, by the water clouds
lying to the east and southeast of us some miles distant, that a wide
lead was opening in that direction. The approaching full moon was
evidently getting in its work.
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.
The moon had been our friend during the long winter, giving us light to
hunt by for a week or two each month. Now it seemed no longer a friend,
but a dangerous presence to be regarded with fear. Its power, which had
before been beneficent, was now malevolent and incalculably potent for
evil.
When we awoke early in the morning of April 3, after a few hours' sleep,
we found the weather still clear and calm. There were some broad heavy
pressure ridges in the beginning of this march, and we had to use
pickaxes quite freely. This delayed us a little, but as soon as we
struck the level old floes we tried to make up for lost time. As the
daylight was now continuous we could travel as long as we pleased and
sleep as little as we must. We hustled along for ten hours again, as we
had before, making only twenty miles, because of the early delay with
the pickaxes and another brief delay at a narrow lead. We were now
half-way to the 89th parallel, and I had been obliged to take up another
hole in my belt.
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.