seemed to be walking in some splendid golden realms of dreamland. As we
bounded onward the ice swam about me in circling rivers of gold.
E-tuk-i-shook and Ah-we-lah, though thin and ragged, had the dignity of
the heroes of a battle which had been fought through to success.
We all were lifted to the paradise of winners as we stepped over the
snows of a destiny for which we had risked life and willingly suffered
the tortures of an icy hell. The ice under us, the goal for centuries of
brave, heroic men, to reach which many had suffered terribly and
terribly died, seemed almost sacred. Constantly and carefully I watched
my instruments in recording this final reach. Nearer and nearer they
recorded our approach. Step by step, my heart filled with a strange
rapture of conquest.
At last we step over colored fields of sparkle, climbing walls of purple
and gold--finally, under skies of crystal blue, with flaming clouds of
glory, we touch the mark! The soul awakens to a definite triumph; there
is sunrise within us, and all the world of night-darkened trouble fades.
We are at the top of the world! The flag is flung to the frigid breezes
of the North Pole!
[Illustration: ROUTE TO THE POLE AND RETURN
A triangle of 30,000 square miles cut out of the mysterious unknown]
AT THE NORTH POLE
OBSERVATIONS AT THE POLE--METEOROLOGICAL AND ASTRONOMICAL
PHENOMENA--SINGULAR STABILITY AND UNIFORMITY OF THE THERMOMETER AND
BAROMETER--A SPOT WHERE ONE'S SHADOW IS THE SAME LENGTH EACH HOUR OF THE
TWENTY-FOUR--EIGHT POLAR ALTITUDES OF THE SUN
XX
FULL AND FINAL PROOFS OF THE ATTAINMENT
Looking about me, after the first satisfactory observation, I viewed the
vacant expanse. The first realization of actual victory, of reaching my
lifetime's goal, set my heart throbbing violently and my brain aglow. I
felt the glory which the prophet feels in his vision, with which the
poet thrills in his dream. About the frozen plains my imagination evoked
aspects of grandeur. I saw silver and crystal palaces, such as were
never built by man, with turrets flaunting "pinions glorious, golden."
The shifting mirages seemed like the ghosts of dead armies, magnified
and transfigured, huge and spectral, moving along the horizon and
bearing the wind-tossed phantoms of golden blood-stained banners.
The low beating of the wind assumed the throb of martial music.
Bewildered, I realized all that I had suffered, all the pain of
fasting, all the anguish of long weariness, and I felt that this was my
reward. I had scaled the world, and I stood at the Pole!
By a long and consecutive series of observations and mental tabulations
of various sorts on our journey northward, continuing here, I knew,
beyond peradventure of doubt, that I was at a spot which was as near as
possible, by usual methods of determination, five hundred and twenty
miles from Svartevoeg, a spot toward which men had striven for more than
three centuries--a spot known as the North Pole, and where I stood first
of white men. In my own achievement I felt, that dizzy moment, that all
the heroic souls who had braved the rigors of the Arctic region found
their own hopes' fulfilment. I had realized their dream. I had
culminated with success the efforts of all the brave men who had failed
before me. I had finally justified their sacrifices, their very death; I
had proven to humanity humanity's supreme triumph over a hostile,
death-dealing Nature. It seemed that the souls of these dead exulted
with me, and that in some sub-strata of the air, in notes more subtle
than the softest notes of music, they sang a paean in the spirit with me.
We had reached our destination. My relief was indescribable. The prize
of an international marathon was ours. Pinning the Stars and Stripes to
a tent-pole, I asserted the achievement in the name of the ninety
millions of countrymen who swear fealty to that flag. And I felt a pride
as I gazed at the white-and-crimson barred pinion, a pride which the
claim of no second victor has ever taken from me.
My mental intoxication did not interfere with the routine work which
was now necessary. Having reached the goal, it was imperative that all
scientific observations be made as carefully as possible, as quickly as
possible. To the taking of these I set myself at once, while my
companions began the routine work of unloading the sledges and building
an igloo.
[Illustration: CLIMBING THE LADDER OF LATITUDES]
Our course when arriving at the Pole, as near as it was possible to
determine, was on the ninety-seventh meridian. The day was April 21,
1908. It was local noon. The sun was 11 deg. 55'' above the magnetic
northern horizon. My shadow, a dark purple-blue streak with ill-defined
edges, measured twenty-six feet in length. The tent pole, marked as a
measuring stick, was pushed into the snow, leaving six feet above the
surface. This gave a shadow twenty-eight feet long.
Several sextant observations gave a latitude a few seconds below 90 deg.,
which, because of unknown refraction and uncertain accuracy of time, was
placed at 90 deg.. (Other observations on the next day gave similar results,
although we shifted camp four miles toward magnetic south.) A broken
hand-axe was tied to the end of a life-line; this was lowered through a
fresh break in the ice, and the angle which it made with the surface
indicated a drift toward Greenland. The temperature, gauged by a spirit
thermometer, was 37.7 deg., F. The mercury thermometer indicated -36 deg.. The
atmospheric pressure by the aneroid barometer was at 29.83. It was
falling, and indicated a coming change in the weather. The wind was very
light, and had veered from northeast to south, according to the compass
card.
The sky was almost clear, of a dark purple blue, with a pearly ice-blink
or silver reflection extending east, and a smoky water-sky west, in
darkened, ill-defined streaks, indicating continuous ice or land toward
Bering Sea, and an active pack, with some open water, toward
Spitzbergen. To the north and south were wine-colored gold-shot clouds,
flung in long banners, with ragged-pointed ends along the horizon. The
ice about was nearly the same as it had been continuously since leaving
the eighty-eighth parallel. It was slightly more active, and showed, by
news cracks and oversliding, young ice signs of recent disturbance.
The field upon which we camped was about three miles long and two miles
wide. Measured at a new crevasse, the ice was sixteen feet thick. The
tallest hummock measured twenty-eight feet above water. The snow lay in
fine feathery crystals, with no surface crust. About three inches below
the soft snow was a sub-surface crust strong enough to carry the bodily
weight. Below this were other successive crusts, and a porous snow in
coarse crystals, with a total depth of about fifteen inches.
Our igloo was built near one edge in the lee of an old hummock about
fifteen feet high. Here a recent bank of drift snow offered just the
right kind of material from which to cut building blocks. While a
shelter was thus being walled, I moved about constantly to read my
instruments and to study carefully the local environment.
In a geographic sense we had now arrived at a point where all meridians
meet. The longitude, therefore, was zero. Time was a negative problem.
There being no longitude, there can be no time. The hour lines of
Greenwich, of New York, of Peking, and of all the world here run
together. Figuratively, if this position is the pin-point of the earth's
axis, it is possible to have all meridians under one foot, and therefore
it should be possible to step from midnight to midday, from the time of
San Francisco to that of Paris, from one side of the globe to the other,
as time is measured.
[Illustration: WHERE ALL MERIDIANS MEET AND EVERY DIRECTION IS SOUTH
The Pivotal Point on which the earth turns.
*Magnetic Pole]
Here there is but one day and but one night in each year, but the night
of six months is relieved by about one hundred days of continuous
twilight. Geographically, there was here but one direction. It was south
on every line of the dial of longitude--north, east and west had
vanished. We had reached a point where true direction became a paradox
and a puzzle. It was south before us, south behind us, and south on
every side. But the compass, pointing to the magnetic Pole along the
ninety-seventh meridian, was as useful as ever. (To avoid statements
easily misunderstood, all our directions about the Pole will be given as
taken from the compass, and without reference to the geographer's
anomaly of its being south in every direction.)
=My first noon observations= gave the following result, which is
copied from the original paper, as it was written at the Pole and
reproduced photographically on another page. April 21, 1908: Long.,
97-W.; Bar., 29-83; Temp., -37.7; Clouds Alt., St., 1; Wind, 1;
Mag., S.; Iceblink E.; Water Sky W.
Noon Alt. 0 23--33--25
--- +2
+--------------
2 | 23--35--25
+--------------
11--47--42 5
+15--56
---------------
50 12-- 3--38
61/2 --9
----------- ---------------
25 11--54--38
300 90
+---------- ---------------
60 | 325 78-- 5--22
+---------- 11--54--23
5--25 ---------------
11--48--58 89--59--45
----------
11--54--23
Shadows 28 ft. (of 6 ft. pole).
Taking advantage of our brief stay, the boys set up the ice-axe and
drying sticks, and hung upon them their perspiration-wetted and frosted
furs to dry. Hanging out wet clothes and an American flag at the North
Pole seemed an amusing incongruity.
The puzzled standpoint of my Eskimos was amusing. They tried hard to
appreciate the advantages of finding this suppositious "_tigi shu_" (big
nail), but actually here, they could not, even from a sense of deference
to me and my judgment, entirely hide their feeling of disappointment.
On the advance I had told them that an actual "big nail" would not be
found--only the point where it ought to be. But I think they really
hoped that if it had actually disappeared they should find that it had
come back into place after all!
In building our igloo the boys frequently looked about expectantly.
Often they ceased cutting snow-blocks and rose to a hummock to search
the horizon for something which, to their idea, must mark this important
spot, for which we had struggled against hope and all the dictates of
personal comforts. At each breathing spell their eager eyes picked some
sky sign which to them meant land or water, or the play of some god of
land or sea. The naive and sincere interest which the Eskimos on
occasions feel in the mystery of the spirit-world gives them an
imaginative appreciation of nature often in excess of that of the more
material and skeptical Caucasian.
Arriving at the mysterious place where, they felt, something should
happen, their imagination now forced an expression of disappointment. In
a high-keyed condition, all their superstitions recurred to them with
startling reality.
In one place the rising vapor proved to be the breath of the great
submarine god--the "_Ko-Koyah_." In another place, a motionless little
cloud marked the land in which dwelt the "_Turnah-huch-suak_," the great
Land God, and the air spirits were represented by the different winds,
with sex relations.
Ah-we-lah and E-tuk-i-shook, with the astuteness of the aborigine, who
reads Nature as a book, were sharp enough to note that the high air
currents did not correspond to surface currents; for, although the wind
was blowing homeward, and changed its force and direction, a few high
clouds moved persistently in a different direction.
This, to them, indicated a warfare among the air spirits. The ice and
snow were also animated. To them the whole world presented a rivalry of
conflicting spirits which offered never-ending topics of conversation.
As the foot pressed the snow, its softness, its rebound, or its metallic
ring indicated sentiments of friendliness or hostility. The ice, by its
color, movement or noise, spoke the humor of its animation, or that of
the supposed life of the restless sea beneath it. In interpreting these
spirit signs, the two expressed considerable difference of opinion.
Ah-we-lah saw dramatic situations and became almost hysterical with
excitement; E-tuk-i-shook saw only a monotone of the normal play of
life. Such was the trend of interest and conversation as the building of
the igloos was completed.
Contrary to our usual custom, the dogs had been allowed to rest in their
traces attached to the sleds. Their usual malicious inquisitiveness
exhausted, they were too tired to examine the sleds to steal food. But
now, as the house was completed, holes were chipped with a knife in
ice-shoulders, through which part of a trace was passed, and each team
was thus securely fastened to a ring cut in ice-blocks. Then each dog
was given a double ration of pemmican. Their pleasure was expressed by
an extra twist of the friendly tails and an extra note of gladness from
long-contracted stomachs. Finishing their meal, they curled up and
warmed the snow, from which they took an occasional bite to furnish
liquid for their gastric economy. Almost two days of rest followed, and
this was the canine celebration of the Polar attainment.
We withdrew to the inside of the dome of snow-blocks, pulled in a block
to close the doors, spread out our bags as beds on the platform of
leveled snow, pulled off boots and trousers, and slipped half-length
into the bristling reindeer furs. We then discussed, with chummy
congratulations, the success of our long drive to the world's end.
While thus engaged, the little Juel stove piped the cheer of the
pleasure of ice-water, soon to quench our chronic thirst. In the
meantime, Ah-we-lah and E-tuk-i-shook pressed farther and farther into
their bags, pulled over the hoods, and closed their eyes to an
overpowering fatigue. But my lids did not easily close. I watched the
fire. More ice went into the kettle. With the satisfaction of an
ambition fulfilled, I peeped out occasionally through the pole-punched
port, and noted the horizon glittering with gold and purple.
Quivers of self-satisfying joy ran up my spine and relieved the frosty
mental bleach of the long-delayed Polar anticipation.
In due time we drank, with grateful satisfaction, large quantities of
ice-water, which was more delicious than any wine. A pemmican soup,
flavored with musk ox tenderloins, steaming with heat--a luxury seldom
enjoyed in our camps--next went down with warming, satisfying gulps.
This was followed by a few strips of frozen fresh meat, then by a block
of pemmican. Later, a few squares of musk ox suet gave the taste of
sweets to round up our meal. Last of all, three cups of tea spread the
chronic stomach-folds, after which we reveled in the sense of fulness
of the best meal of many weeks.
With full stomachs and the satisfaction of a worthy task well performed,
we rested.
We had reached the zenith of man's Ultima Thule, which had been sought
for more than three centuries. In comfortable berths of snow we tried to
sleep, turning with the earth on its northern axis.
But sleep for me was impossible. At six o'clock, or six hours after our
arrival at local noon, I arose, went out of the igloo, and took a double
set of observations. Returning, I did some figuring, lay down on my bag,
and at ten o'clock, or four hours later, leaving Ah-we-lah to guard the
camp and dogs, E-tuk-i-shook joined me to make a tent camp about four
miles to the magnetic south. My object was to have a slightly different
position for subsequent observations.
Placing our tent, bags and camp equipment on a sled, we pushed it over
the ice field, crossed a narrow lead sheeted with young ice, and moved
on to another field which seemed to have much greater dimensions. We
erected the tent not quite two hours later, in time for a midnight
observation. These sextant readings of the sun's altitude were continued
for the next twenty-four hours.
In the idle times between observations, I went over to a new break
between the field on which we were camped and that on which Ah-we-lah
guarded the dogs. Here the newly-formed sheets of ice slid over each
other as the great, ponderous fields stirred to and fro. A peculiar
noise, like that of a crying child, arose. It came seemingly from
everywhere, intermittently, in successive crying spells. Lying down,
and putting my fur-cushioned ear to the edge of the old ice, I heard a
distant thundering noise, the reverberations of the moving, grinding
pack, which, by its wind-driven sweep, was drifting over the unseen seas
of mystery. In an effort to locate the cry, I searched diligently along
the lead. I came to a spot where two tiny pieces of ice served as a
mouthpiece. About every fifteen seconds there were two or three sharp,
successive cries. With the ice-axe I detached one. The cries stopped;
but other cries were heard further along the line.
The time for observations was at hand, and I returned to take up the
sextant. Returning later to the lead, to watch the seas breathe, the cry
seemed stilled. The thin ice-sheets were cemented together, and in an
open space nearby I had an opportunity to study the making and breaking
of the polar ice.
That tiny film of ice which voiced the baby cries spreads the world's
most irresistible power. In its making we have the nucleus for the
origin of the polar pack, that great moving crust of the earth which
crunches ships, grinds rocks, and sweeps mountains into the sea.
Beginning as a mere microscopic crystal, successive crystals, by their
affinity for each other, unite to make a disc. These discs, by the same
law of cohesion, assemble and unite. Now the thin sheet, the first sea
ice, is complete, and either rests to make the great field of ice, or
spreads from floe to floe and from field to field, thus spreading,
bridging and mending the great moving masses which cover the mid-polar
basin.
Another law of nature was solved by a similar insignificant incident. In
spreading our things out to air and dry (for things will dry in wind
and sun, even at a very low temperature), two pieces of canvas were
thrown on a hummock. It was a white canvas sled-cover and a black strip
of canvas, in which the boat fittings were wrapped. When these strips of
canvas were lifted it was found that under the part of the black canvas,
resting on a slope at right angles to the sun, the snow had melted and
recongealed. Under the white canvas the snow had not changed. The
temperature was -41 deg.; we had felt no heat, but this black canvas had
absorbed enough heat from a feeble sun to melt the snow beneath it. This
little lesson in physics began to interest me, and on the return many
similar experiments were made. As the long, tedious marches were made, I
asked myself the questions: Why is snow white? Why is the sky blue? And
why does black burn snow when white does not?
Little by little, in the long drive of monotony, satisfactory answers
came to these questions. Thus, in seeking abstract knowledge, the law of
radiation was thoroughly examined. In doing this, there came to me
slowly the solution of various problems of animal life, and eventually
there was uncovered what to me proved a startling revelation in the
incidents that led up to animal coloring in the Arctic. For here I found
that the creatures' fur and feathers were colored in accord with their
needs of absorbing external heat or of conserving internal heat. The
facts here indicated will be presented later, when we deal with the
snow-fitted creatures at close range.
One of the impressions which I carried with me of this night march was
that the sun seemed low--lower, indeed, than that of midday, which, in
reality, was not true, for the observations placed it nine minutes
higher. This was an indication of the force of habit. In the northward
march we had noted a considerable relative difference in the height of
the night sun and that of the day. Although this difference had vanished
now, the mind at times refused to grasp the remarkable change.[16]
At the Pole I was impressed by a peculiar uniformity in the temperature
of the atmosphere throughout the twenty-four hours, and also by a
strange monotone in color and light of sea and sky. I had begun to
observe this as I approached the boreal center. The strange equability
of light and color, of humidity and of air temperatures extended an area
one hundred miles about the Pole. This was noted both on my coming and
going over this district.
Approaching the Pole, and as the night sun gradually lifted, an
increasing equalization of the temperature of night and day followed.
Three hundred miles from the Pole the thermometer at night had been from
10 deg. to 20 deg. lower than during the day. There the shivering chill of
midnight made a strong contrast to the burning, heatless glitter of
midday. At the Pole the thermometer did not rise or fall appreciably for
certain fixed hours of the day or night, but remained almost uniform
during the entire twenty-four hours.
This, to a less notable extent, was true also of the barometer. Farther
south there had been a difference in the day and night range of the
barometer. Here, although the night winds continued more actively than
those of the day, the barometer was less variable than at any time on my
journey.
At the Pole the tendency of change in force and direction of air
currents, observed farther south, for morning and evening periods, was
no longer noted. But when strong winds brushed the pack, a good deal of
the Polar equalization gave place to a radical difference, giving a
period for high and low temperatures; which period, however, did not
correspond to the usual hours of day or night. The winds, therefore,
seemed to carry to us the sub-Polar inequality of atmospheric variation
in temperature and pressure. Many of the facts bearing upon this problem
were not learned until later. Subsequently, I learned, also, that strong
winds often disturb the Polar atmospheric sameness; but all is given
here because of the striking impression which it made upon me at this
time.
In the region about the Pole I observed that, although there were
remarkable and beauteous color blendings in the sky, the intense
contrasts and the spectacular display of cloud effects, seen in more
southern regions, were absent.
A color suffusion is common throughout the entire Arctic zone. Light,
pouring from the low-lying sun, is reflected from the ice in an
indescribable blaze. From millions of ice slopes, with millions and
millions of tiny reflecting surfaces, each one a mirror, some large,
some smaller than specks of diamond dust, this light is sent back in
different directions in burning waves to the sky. A liquid light seems
forced back from the sky into every tiny crevice of this bejeweled
wonderland. One color invariably predominates at a time. Sometimes the
ice and air and sky are suffused with a hue of rose, again of orange,
again of a light alloyed yellow, again blue; and, as we get farther
north, more dominantly purple. Farther south, in our journey northward,
we had viewed color effects in reality incomparably more beautiful than
those in the regions about the Pole. The sun, farther south, in rising
and setting, and with limitless changes of polarized and refracted
light, passing through strata of atmosphere of varying depths of
different density, produces kaleidoscopic changes of burning color.
[Illustration: FIRST CAMP AT THE POLE, APRIL 21, 1908]
[Illustration: AT THE POLE--"WE WERE THE ONLY PULSATING CREATURES IN A
DEAD WORLD OF ICE"]
At the Pole there were sunbursts, but because of the slight change in
the sun's dip to the horizon, the prevailing light was invariably in
shades running to purple. At first my imagination evoked a more glowing
wonder than in reality existed; as the hours wore on, and as the wants
of my body asserted themselves, I began to see the vacant spaces with a
disillusionizing eye.
The set of observations given here, taken every six hours, from noon on
April 21 to midnight on April 22, 1908, fixed our position with
reasonable certainty.