On the 28th of February the various parties took their departure from
Cape Hecla, and following in the rear, Peary hurried on with all
possible speed, hopeful of reaching the Pole at last.
For some days the ice was in motion everywhere; but it gradually became
quieter, and as there was very little wind the travelling was
particularly good. Full of impatience as he tramped along, and grudging
every moment given to rest, Peary dreaded lest he should meet with some
obstacle, such as open water or impassable ice, that would put an end to
the journey northwards.
Delayed by gales and open water, and driven out of his course seventy
miles to the eastward, Peary was cut off from communication with his
supporting parties; and finding that he could no longer depend upon
them, he determined to make a dash for the Pole with the party, eight in
all, and the supplies which he had with him.
Abandoning everything not absolutely essential and bending every energy
to set a record pace, they travelled thirty miles in a ten hours' march.
Storms of wind and snow added considerably to the difficulties of the
journey, the strain of which told severely on both men and dogs.
The 20th of April brought the weary travellers into a region of open
leads, [Footnote: Open leads: open ways in an ice-field.] bearing north
and south. Resting here for a few hours, Peary and his companions
resumed their march at midnight, pushing on with feverish haste to
lessen the distance between them and the goal that was luring them on.
Travelling as fast as they could till noon of the 21st, they then came
to a final halt.
Disappointed at once more having to stop before the object of all his
striving had been reached, Peary would have liked to make the last dash
with only one or two of his men; but he dared not do this in view of the
condition of the ice, and reluctantly he had to confess that once again
the prize had eluded his grasp. Making observations, he found that they
were in 87 deg, 6' north latitude, the most northerly point that had yet
been reached by man.
Warned by the haggard faces of his comrades and the skeleton figures of
the few remaining dogs, Peary saw that no time must be lost in turning
back. After hoisting a flag from the summit of the highest pinnacle, and
leaving a bottle containing a record of the journey, the exhausted men
turned their backs on the Pole, and began the weary march homeward.
Trying as the outward march had been, the dangers of the return journey
were even greater. Besides, there was no longer the excitement of
possible victory to encourage the men in the face of hardships. Killing
their dogs for food, and breaking up the sledges to provide fires for
cooking, the tired and dispirited explorers pushed on till they found
themselves stranded on an island of ice. Was this, then, to be the end
of the enterprise, and were they to meet death in that cold and pitiless
sea? Such a fate seemed inevitable. But just as they were preparing for
the worst, two of the Eskimo scouts came hurrying back to the camp with
the report that, a few miles farther on, the water was covered with a
film of young ice, and that there was a possibility of their being able
to cross on snow-shoes.
It was a desperate chance, but they were prepared to take it; and
carefully fixing on their snow-shoes, they made the venture, the
lightest and most experienced Eskimo taking the lead, with the few
remaining dogs attached to the long sledge following, "and the rest of
the party abreast, in widely extended skirmish line, some distance
behind the sledge." They crossed in silence, the ice swaying beneath
them as they skimmed along. What the result would be none could tell;
but they all felt the greatness of their peril.
Peary himself confesses that this was the first and only time in all his
Arctic experience that he felt doubtful as to what would happen. "When
near the middle of the lead," he says, "the toe of one of my snow-shoes,
as I slid forward, broke through twice in succession; then I thought to
myself, 'This is the finish.' A little later there was a cry from some
one in the line, but I dared not take my eyes from the steady gliding of
my snow-shoes. When we stepped upon the firm ice on the southern side of
the lead, sighs of relief from the two men nearest me were distinctly
audible. The cry I had heard had been from one of my men, whose toe,
like mine, had broken through the ice." The crossing had been made just
in time, for, as the travellers looked round for a moment before turning
their faces southward, they saw that the sheet of ice on which they had
crossed was in two pieces. "The lead was widening again."
All were safely across; but they were not yet out of danger. Unable to
find a route which they might traverse with any degree of safety, Peary
and his men ascended a high mass of ice to have a better view of their
surroundings, and to look for a way of escape. What they beheld from
their elevated position might well have struck terror into the boldest
heart. Before them extended "such a mass of shattered ice" as Peary had
never seen before and hoped never to see again, "a confused mass of
fragments, some only the size of paving-stones, others as large as the
dome of the Capitol at Washington, but all rounded by the terrific
grinding they had received."
Once again death was looking them in the face, for it seemed an utter
impossibility to find a path through that frozen wilderness. But as long
as they could keep a footing they determined to struggle on; and
stumbling forward at every step, bruised and sore, they at last struck a
better road. They made their way to Britannia Island, [Footnote:
Britannia Island: one of the most northern islands of the Arctic Ocean.]
and thence to Cape May and Cape Bryant.
The brave party suffered much from want of food. For days on end they
were on the verge of starvation. A hare that was shot gave them the
first full meal for nearly forty days. With snow falling around them,
and without tent or covering of any kind, they lay down on the ground to
sleep.
Waking in the morning as tired and hungry as ever, they found the tracks
of musk-oxen [Footnote: Musk-oxen: the musk-ox has long shaggy hair and
somewhat resembles a buffalo.] in the snow, and their hopes rose as they
endeavoured to follow the trail. Sweeping the valley with their
field-glass, they could see no sign of a living thing; but later on they
espied several black dots at a distance, and knew that they had located
the herd. Pushing on towards them, Peary and a companion lay down behind
a big boulder to rest and gather strength, for they dared not risk a
shot before they were sure of their aim. Resolving at last on an attack,
the two men grasped their rifles, and, rushing out from behind their
place of shelter, made straight for the animals, now less than two
hundred yards away. An old bull that was standing guard gave the signal
to charge, and in a minute the "black avalanche of thundering beasts"
was bearing down on their enemies.
Fortunately for Peary his shot went true, and the great bull fell dead.
The maddened rush was stopped; and before the oxen could make their
retreat over the ridges six of their number lay dead upon the frozen
ground; and for the next few days the party revelled in the delights of
a continuous feast.
Reaching the Roosevelt [Footnote: Roosevelt: Peary's ship.] at the end
of July, the expedition returned to America a few months later. After
twenty years of heroic striving, Peary had again missed the prize; but
the victory was postponed only for a little while.
--J. KENNEDY McLEAN.
[Footnote: How does the heroism shown in this account of Peary's
struggle compare with military courage? What qualities of the true
explorer does Peary show? What picture do you get of the country in
which the travelers journeyed? What do you know of Peary's later
expedition? Do you think the descriptions would be so purely objective
if they were written by the explorer himself? Would the account seem
more real or more interesting if it had been told in the first person?]
HENRY WARD BEECHER'S ACCOUNT OF
HIS SPEECH IN MANCHESTER
I went to my hotel, and when the day came on which I was to make my
first speech, I struck out the notes of my speech in the morning; and
then came up a kind of horror--"I don't know whether I can do anything
with an English audience--I have never had any experience with an
English audience. My American ways, which are all well enough with
Americans, may utterly fail here, and a failure in the cause of my
country now and here is horrible beyond conception to me!" I think I
never went through such a struggle of darkness and suffering in all my
life as I did that afternoon. It was about the going down of the sun
that God brought me to that state in which I said, "Thy will be done. I
am willing to be annihilated; I am willing to fail if the Lord wants me
to." I gave it all up into the hands of God, and rose up in a state of
peace and serenity simply unspeakable, and when the coach came to take
me down to Manchester Hall I felt no disturbance nor dreamed of anything
but success.
We reached the hall. The crowd was already beginning to be tumultuous,
and I recollect thinking to myself as I stood there looking at them, "I
will control you! I came here for victory, and I will have it, by the
help of God!" Well, I was introduced, and I must confess that the things
that I had done and suffered in my own country, according to what the
chairman who introduced me said, amazed me. The speaker was very English
on the subject, and I learned that I belonged to an heroic band, and all
that sort of thing, with Abolitionism [Footnote: Abolitionism: The
policy of those who worked for the abolition of slavery before the Civil
War.] mixed in, and so on. By the way, I think it was there that I was
introduced as the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher Stowe. But as soon as I began
to speak the great audience began to show its teeth, and I had not gone
on fifteen minutes before an unparalleled scene of confusion and
interruption occurred. No American that has not seen an English mob can
form any conception of one. I have seen all sorts of camp meetings and
experienced all kinds of public speaking on the stump; I have seen the
most disturbed meetings in New York City, and they were all of them as
twilight to midnight compared with an English hostile audience. For in
England the meeting does not belong to the parties that call it, but to
whoever chooses to go; and if they can take it out of your hands, it is
considered fair play. This meeting had a very large multitude of men in
it who came there for the purpose of destroying the meeting and carrying
it the other way when it came to a vote.
I took the measure of the audience and said to myself, "About one fourth
of this audience are opposed to me, and about one fourth will be rather
in sympathy; and my business now is, not to appeal to that portion that
is opposed to me nor to those that are already on my side, but to bring
over the middle section." How to do this was a problem. The question
was, who could hold out longest. There were five or six storm-centres,
boiling and whirling at the same time: here some one pounding on a group
with his umbrella and shouting, "Sit down there;" over yonder a row
between two or three combatants; somewhere else a group all yelling
together at the top of their voices. It was like talking to a storm at
sea. But there were the newspaper reporters just in front, and I said to
them, "Now, gentlemen, be kind enough to take down what I say. It will
be in sections, but I will have it connected by and by." I threw my
notes away, and entered on a discussion of the value of freedom as
opposed to slavery in the manufacturing interest, arguing that freedom
everywhere increases a man's necessities, and what he needs he buys, and
that it was, therefore, to the interest of the manufacturing community
to stand by the side of labor through the country. I never was more
self-possessed and never in more perfect good temper, and I never was
more determined that my hearers should feel the curb before I got
through with them. The uproar would come in on this side and on that,
and they would put insulting questions and make all sorts of calls to
me, and I would wait until the noise had subsided, and then get in about
five minutes of talk. The reporters would get that down, and then up
would come another noise. Occasionally I would see things that amused me
and would laugh outright, and the crowd would stop to see what I was
laughing at. Then I would sail in again with a sentence or two. A good
many times the crowd threw up questions which I caught at and answered
back. I may as well put in here one thing that amused me hugely. There
were baize doors that opened both ways into side alleys, and there was a
huge, burly Englishman standing right in front of one of those doors and
roaring like a bull of Bashan; [Footnote: Bull of Bashan: _Psalm_
XXII, 12-13] one of the policemen swung his elbow around and hit him in
the belly and knocked him through the doorway, so that the last part of
the bawl was outside in the alleyway; it struck me so ludicrously to
think how the fellow must have looked when he found himself "hollering"
outside that I could not refrain from laughing outright. The audience
immediately stopped its uproars, wondering what I was laughing at, and
that gave me another chance, and I caught it. So we kept on for about an
hour and a half before they got so far calmed down that I could go on
peaceably with my speech. They liked the pluck. Englishmen like a man
that can stand on his feet and give and take; and so for the last hour I
had pretty clear sailing. The next morning every great paper in England
had the whole speech. I think it was the design of the men there to
break me down on that first speech, by fair means or foul, feeling that
if they could do that it would be trumpeted all over the land. I said to
them then and there, "Gentlemen, you may break me down now, but I have
registered a vow that I will never return home until I have been heard
in every county and principal town in the Kingdom of Great Britain. I am
not going to be broken down nor put down. I am going to be heard, and my
country shall be vindicated." Nobody knows better than I did what it is
to feel that every interest that touches the heart of a Christian man
and a patriotic man and a lover of liberty is being assailed wantonly,
to stand between one nation and your own, and to feel that you are in a
situation in which your country rises or falls with you. And God was
behind it all; I felt it and knew it; and when I got through and the
vote was called off, you would have thought it was a tropical
thunderstorm that swept through that hall as the ayes were thundered,
while the noes were an insignificant and contemptible minority. It had
all gone on our side, and such enthusiasm I never saw. I think it was
there that when I started to go down into the rooms below to get an
exit, a big burly Englishman in the gallery wanted to shake hands with
me, and I could not reach him, and he called out, "Shake my umbrella!"
and he reached it over; I shook it, and as I did so he shouted, "By
Jock! Nobody shall touch that umbrella again!"
--HENRY WARD BEECHER.
[Footnote: Henry Ward Beecher was born in 1813 and died in 1887. He was
a noted lecturer, reformer, author, and clergyman. He was also among the
most prominent of anti-slavery orators, and delivered many addresses in
England on subjects relating to the Civil War.
Why do you suppose Mr. Beecher was introduced as Henry Ward Beecher
Stowe? Name some characteristics of Mr. Beecher as revealed in this
selection. What qualities would you attribute to an English audience,
judging from this account? Do you know anything about the custom of
"heckling" in England? How much was the success of the speech due to Mr.
Beecher's sense of humor? Do you imagine that Mr. Beecher was successful
in his addresses to the English people? Why?]