Bartlett, with a pioneer party, left the Roosevelt, and a week later
Peary started on his way. At this time 7 members of the expedition,
19 Eskimos, 140 dogs, and 28 sledges, divided into various parties,
were engaged in the great effort to reach the Pole. It was arranged
that all of these parties should meet Peary at Cape Columbia on the
last day of February; and on that day Bartlett and Borop started from
the cape with advance parties. The duties of these advance parties
were as onerous as they were important. For it was to Bartlett that
Peary looked for a trail by which the main party could travel.
On the second day's march, after Peary had left Cape Columbia and the
land behind him, he met with his first open "lead," and a slight
delay occurred. But on the following day this "lead" was covered
with young ice, and Peary determined to cross it. "If the reader,"
he wrote, "will imagine crossing a river on a succession of gigantic
shingles, one, two, or three deep, and all afloat and moving, he will
perhaps form an idea of the uncertain surface over which we crossed
this 'lead.' Such a passage is distinctly trying, as any moment may
lose a sledge and its team, or plunge a member of the party into the
icy water." And later on, when Borop was crossing an open crack, his
dogs fell into the water, and the loss both of the dogs and the
sledge with its invaluable load of provisions was only prevented by
Borop's exceptional quickness and strength.
The explorers had advanced nearly 50 miles from Cape Columbia, when
they were held up by a big "lead," which refused most obstinately to
cover itself with ice strong enough to bear the sledges. For a week
this open water delayed the expedition, and Peary had good reason to
wonder if his most careful preparation and organization were once
more to miss the success that they deserved. On 11th March, however,
the parties managed to cross the "lead," and on the march that
followed they crossed the 84th parallel.
When the explorers started on this journey, Peary did not announce
how far each one of his companions was to accompany him on the march,
and presently Dr. Goodsell and MacMillan, with Eskimos, sledges, and
dogs, turned back. Then the main expedition consisted of 16 men, 12
sledges, and 100 dogs. On 19th March, Peary revealed the programme
he intended to follow to Bartlett, Marvin, Borop, and Henson. First
of all Borop was to turn back; five marches farther on Marvin was to
go; and after another five marches Bartlett was to leave the Polar
party, which would then consist of 6 men, 40 dogs, and 5 sledges.
Unlike most programmes, this one of Peary's was faithfully carried
out. Borop returned when 85° 23' was reached, and during the next
days the explorers advanced so rapidly that they succeeded in passing
both Nansen's and the Duke of the Abruzzi's record for farthest
north. In turn, first Bartlett and then Marvin started upon the
homeward track, and Peary was left with 4 Eskimos--Egingwah, Seegloo,
Ootah, and Ooqueah--Henson, 5 sledges, and 40 dogs.
Of these Eskimos, Ooqueah was the only one who had not been in any
previous expedition; but all the same he was the most romantic of the
party, because he was intent upon winning the rewards that would
enable him to marry the girl of his choice. Glimmering before his
eyes Ooqueah saw a whale-boat, a rifle, and other prizes which Peary
had promised to those who went with him to the farthest point. Not
for a moment was there any doubt about Ooqueah's keenness, for he was
spurred on by two of the greatest incentives that any young man can
have--a desire to be wealthy, and a desire to marry.
Left alone with Henson and the Eskimos, Peary still had 133 nautical
miles* to travel before he reached his goal. This distance he
intended to cover in five marches, and, provided that the gales would
leave him in peace and not open the "leads" of water, he had every
hope of carrying out his intention.
* A nautical mile is approximately 2,026 yards.
Up to this stage in the march Peary had been whipper-in, but in the
last stages he led the van. And during the concluding stages it must
be admitted that fortune smiled upon the travellers. True, that in
this almost breathless rush for the Pole "leads" were not entirely
absent, but such as were encountered did not seriously delay the
marches. As, however, Peary got nearer and nearer to the Pole, the
fear that the prize might at the last moment be snatched away from
him by an impassable "lead" was constantly with him.
On 5th April the party reached 89° 25' N., and were within 35 miles
of the Pole. So near, indeed, were they, that Peary writes: "By some
strange shift of feeling the fear of the "leads" had fallen from me
completely. I now felt that success was certain...."
And his confidence was justified. On April 6, 1909, Peary, with his
coloured assistant, Matthew Henson, and the four Eskimos, reached the
Pole, and there the leader of this successful party wrote the
following note;--
"90° N. Lat., North Pole,
6_th April_ 1909.
"I have to-day hoisted the national ensign of the United States of
America at this place, which my observations indicate to be the North
Pole axis of the earth, and have formally taken possession of the
entire region and adjacent, for and in the name of the President of
the United States of America. I leave this record and United States
flag in possession.
"ROBERT E. PEARY,
"United States Navy."
The explorers spent thirty hours at the Pole, and then started upon
the long journey back to the coast of Grant Land. By 23rd April,
favoured by beautiful weather, the party had reached Cape Columbia;
so favoured, indeed, had they been that Ootah remarked on their
arrival that "the devil is asleep or having trouble with his wife, or
we should never have come back so easily."
On that same day Peary wrote in his diary: "I have got the North Pole
out of my system after twenty-three years of effort, hard work,
disappointments, hardships, privations, more or less suffering, and
some risks."
The joy of success, tremendous as it was, could not but be dimmed by
the news that awaited Peary on his return to the ship. For Marvin
had lost his life, on the return journey, in trying to cross some
young and treacherous ice, and the loss of this gallant and able man
illustrates all too sadly the "some risks" of which Peary
wrote--risks which all explorers in greater or less measure have to
run.
As a conclusion to this chapter of adventure and determined effort,
the words of that prince of explorers, Fridtjof Nansen, seem
peculiarly appropriate. "From first to last," he wrote, "the history
of Polar exploration is a single mighty manifestation of the power of
the Unknown over the mind of man."
IV
THE MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON
THE MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON
(_Map_, p. 112.)
Twenty-four centuries ago a line of Æschylus--"Egypt nurtured by the
snow"--embodied a geographical theory which descended from Heaven
knows what early folk-wandering. Aristotle with his _'aryuroun
oros_, the Mountain of Silver from which the Nile flowed, continued
the tradition in literature. Meantime Sabæan Arabs, trading along
the east coast of Africa, and making expeditions to the interior,
came back with stories of great inland seas and snow mountains near
them. What they saw may have been only Kilimanjaro and Kenia, but
the popular acceptance of their reports points to the earlier tale
linking the snows with the Nile valley. Greek and Roman travellers
spread the rumour, and presently it found its way, probably through
Marinus of Tyre, into the pages of the geographer Ptolemy.
Ptolemy had no doubt about these snows. He called them the Mountains
of the Moon, and definitely fixed them as the source of the river of
Egypt. For centuries after him the question slumbered, and men were
too busied with creeds and conquests to think much of that fount of
the Nile which Alexander the Great saw in his dreams. When the
exploration of Equatoria began in last century the story revived, and
the discovery of Kenia and Kilimanjaro seemed to have settled the
matter. It was true that these mountains were a long way from the
Nile watershed, but then Ptolemy had never enjoyed much of a
reputation for accuracy.
Still doubt remained in some minds, and explorers kept their eyes
open for snow mountains which should actually feed the Nile, since,
after all, so ancient a tradition had probably some ground of fact.
Speke in 1861 thought he had discovered them in the chain of
volcanoes between Lake Kivu and Lake Albert Edward, but these
mountains held no snow. He received a hint, however, which might
have led to success, for he heard from the Arabs of Unyamwezi of a
strange mountain west of Lake Victoria, seldom visible, covered with
white stuff, and so high and steep that no man could ascend it. In
1864 Sir Samuel Baker was within sight of Ruwenzori, and actually saw
dim shapes looming through the haze, to which he gave the name of
"Blue Mountains."
In 1875 Stanley encamped for several days upon the eastern slopes,
but he did not realize the greatness of the heights above him. He
thought they were something like Elgon, and he christened them Mount
Edwin Arnold (a name happily not continued); but he had no thought of
snow or glacier, and he disbelieved the native stories of white stuff
on the top. In 1876 Gordon's emissary, Gessi, recorded a strange
apparition, "like snow mountains in the sky," which his men saw, but
he seems to have considered it a hallucination. Stranger still, Emin
Pasha lived for ten years on Lake Albert and never once saw the
range--a fact which may be partly explained by his bad eyesight.
Ruwenzori keeps its secret well. The mists from the Semliki valley
shroud its base, and only on the clearest days, and for a very little
time, can the traveller get such a prospect as Mr. Grogan got on his
famous walk from the Cape to Cairo--"a purple mass, peak piled upon
peak, black-streaked with forest, scored with ravine, and ever
mounting till her castellated crags shoot their gleaming tops far
into the violet heavens."
The true discoverer was Stanley, who, in 1888, suddenly had a vision
of the range from the south-west shore of Lake Albert. Every one
remembers the famous passage:--
"While looking to the south-east and meditating upon the events of
the last month, my eyes were directed by a boy to a mountain said to
be covered with salt, and I saw a peculiar-shaped cloud of a most
beautiful silver colour, which assumed the proportions and appearance
of a vast mountain covered with snow. Following its form downward, I
became struck with the deep blue-black colour of its base, and
wondered if it portended another tornado; then as the sight descended
to the gap between the eastern and western plateaus I became for the
first time conscious that what I gazed upon was not the image or
semblance of a vast mountain, but the solid substance of a real one,
with its summit covered with snow.... It now dawned upon me that
this must be Ruwenzori, which was said to be covered with a white
metal or substance believed to be rock, as reported by Kavali's two
slaves."
Stanley had neither the time nor the equipment for mountain
expeditions, though to the end of his life Ruwenzori remained for him
a centre of romance. It was his "dear wish," as he told the Royal
Geographical Society shortly before his death, that some lover of
Alpine climbing would take the range in hand and explore it from top
to bottom. In 1889 one of his companions, Lieutenant Stairs, made an
attempt from the north-west, and reached a height of nearly 11,000
feet. Two years later Dr. Stuhlmann, a member of Emin's expedition,
made a bold journey up the Butagu valley on the west, discovered the
wonderful mountain vegetation, and nearly reached the snow level. In
1895 came Mr. Scott Elliot, who was primarily a botanist, but who, in
spite of bad malaria, managed to struggle as far as 13,000 feet.
Then followed troubles in Uganda, and it was not till 1900 that the
work of exploration was resumed. To make the story clear, it is
necessary to explain that the range runs practically north and south,
and that about half-way it is cut into by two deep valleys--the
Mobuku running to the east and the Butagu running to the Semliki on
the west. Fort Portal at the northern end is the nearest station;
and as from it the eastern side is the more accessible, it was
natural that the Mobuku valley should be chosen as the best means of
access. In 1900 Mr. Moore reached its head, and ascended the
mountain called Kiyanja to the height of 14,900 feet. He had no
sight of the range as a whole, but he believed this to be the highest
peak, and put the summit at about 16,000 feet. In the same year Sir
Harry Johnston followed this route. He ascended to the height of
14,828 feet on Kiyanja, and saw from the Mobuku valley a mountain to
the north, which he named Duwoni. He came to the conclusion that the
highest altitude of the range was not under 20,000 feet, and in this
view he was followed by other travellers, like Mr. Wylde, Mr. Grogan,
and Major Gibbons, none of whom, however, actually made ascents of
any peak.
The first serious mountaineering expedition was made in 1905 by Mr.
Douglas Freshfield and Mr. A. L. Mumm, who suffered from such
appalling weather that they had to give up the attempt. Being
experienced mountaineers, however, they reached some valuable
conclusions. From the plains they had a clear view of the tops, and
ascertained that the mountain called Kiyanja at the head of the
Mobuku valley was certainly lower than a twin-peaked snow mountain
beyond it to the west. They also placed the extreme height of the
range at no more than 18,000 feet. Meanwhile Lieutenant Behrens, of
the Anglo-German Boundary Commission, had made an elaborate
triangulation, and gave to the twin tops of the highest peak
altitudes of 16,625 feet and 16,549 feet--measurements, let it be
noted, which were only a few hundred feet out. One other expedition,
which occupied the close of the same year and the beginning of 1906,
deserves mention. Mr. A. F. R. Wollaston, of a British Museum party,
found an old ice-axe in a hut (probably left by Mr. Freshfield), and,
with a few yards of rotten rope, set off with a companion to climb
Kiyanja. He reached a height of 16,379 feet, and also climbed a peak
to the north, which he believed wrongly to be Duwoni, and which now
very properly bears his name. The whole performance was a brilliant
adventure, and Mr. Wollaston has published the story of his travels
in a delightful book.*
* _From Ruwenzori to the Congo_ (John Murray).
Such was the position when, in April, 1906, the Duke of the Abruzzi
and his party left Italy to solve once and for all the riddle of the
mountains. The Duke was perhaps the greatest of living mountaineers.
As a rock-climber his fame has filled the Alps, and no name is more
honoured at Courmayeur or the Montanvert. He had led Polar
expeditions, and had made the first ascent of the Alaskan Mount St.
Elias. His experience, therefore, had made him not only a climber
but an organizer of mountain travel. It was to this latter
accomplishment that he owed his success, for Ruwenzori was not so
much a climber's as a traveller's problem. The actual mountaineering
is not hard, but to travel the long miles from Entebbe to the range,
to cut a path through the dense jungles of the valleys, and to carry
supplies and scientific apparatus to the high glacier camps, required
an organizing talent of the first order.
The Duke left no contingency unforeseen. He took with him four
celebrated Courmayeur guides, and a staff of distinguished
scientists, as well as Cav. Vittorio Sella, the greatest of living
mountain photographers. So large was the expedition that two hundred
and fifty native porters were required to carry stores from Entebbe
to Fort Portal. It was not a bold personal adventure, like Mr.
Wollaston's, but a carefully planned, scientific assault upon the
mystery of Ruwenzori. The Duke did not only seek to ascend the
highest peak, but to climb every summit, and map accurately every
mountain, valley, and glacier. The story of the work has been
officially written,* not indeed by the leader himself, who had no
time to spare, but by his friend and former companion, Sir Filippo de
Filippi. It is an admirable account, clear and yet picturesque, and
it is illustrated by photographs and panoramas which have not often
been equalled in mountaineering narratives.
* _Ruwenzori; An Account of the Expedition of H.R.H. the Duke of the
Abruzzi_ (London: Constable).
The charm of the book is its strangeness. It tells of a kind of
mountaineering to which the world can show no parallel. When Lhasa
had been visited, Ruwenzori remained, with the gorges of the
Brahmaputra, one of the few great geographical mysteries unveiled.
Happily the unveiling has not killed the romance, for the truth is
stranger than any forecast. If the Mountains of the Moon are lower
than we had believed, they are far more wonderful. Here you have a
range almost on the Equator, rising not from an upland, like
Kilimanjaro, but from the "Albertine Depression," which is 600 or 700
feet below the average level of Uganda; a range of which the highest
peaks are 1,000 feet higher than Mont Blanc, which is draped most
days of the year in mist, and accessible from the plains only by
deep-cut glens choked with strange trees and flowers. The altitude
would in any case give every stage of climate from torrid to arctic,
but the position on the Line adds something exotic even to familiar
mountain sights, draping a glacier moraine with a tangle of monstrous
growths, and swelling the homely Alpine flora into portents. The
freakish spirit in Nature has been let loose, and she has set
snowfields and rock _arêtes_ in the heart of a giant hothouse.
[Illustration: The Peaks and Valleys of Ruwenzori. The Route to
Ruwenzori.]
The Duke of the Abruzzi was faced at the start with a deplorable
absence of information. Even the season when the weather was most
favourable was disputed. Mr. Freshfield, following Sir Harry
Johnston's advice, tried November, and found a perpetual shower-bath.
Warned by this experience, the Duke selected June and July for the
attempt, and was fortunate enough to get sufficient clear days to
complete his task, though he was repeatedly driven into camp by
violent rain. Another matter in doubt was the best means of approach
to the highest snows. The obvious route was the Mobuku valley, but
by this time it was pretty clear that Kiyanja, the peak at its head,
was not the highest, and it was possible that there might be no way
out of the valley to the higher western summits. Still, it had been
the old way of travellers, and since the alternative was the Butagu
valley right on the other side of the range, the Duke chose to follow
the steps of his predecessors.
Just before Butiti he got his first sight of the snow, and made out
that a double peak, which was certainly not Johnston's Duwoni, was
clearly the loftiest. Duwoni came into view again in the lower
Mobuku valley, and the sight, combined with the known locality of
Kiyanja, enabled the expedition to take its bearings. Duwoni was
seen through the opening of a large tributary valley, the Bujuku,
which entered the Mobuku on the north side between the Portal Peaks.
Now it had been clear from the lowlands that the highest snows were
to the south of Duwoni, and must consequently lie between that peak
and the Mobuku valley. The conclusion was that the Bujuku must lead
to the foot of the highest summits, while the Mobuku could not. The
discovery was the key of the whole geography of the range. But the
Duke did not at once act upon it. He wisely decided to explore
Kiyanja first; so, thinning out his caravan and leaving his heavier
stores at the last native village, he with his party pushed up the
Mobuku torrent.
The Mobuku valley falls in stages from the glacier, and at the foot
of each stage is a cliff face and a waterfall. The soil everywhere
oozes moisture, and where an outcrop of rock or a mat of dead boughs
does not give firmer going, it is knee-deep in black mud. The first
stage is forest land--great conifers with masses of ferns and
tree-ferns below, and above a tangle of creepers and flaming orchids.
At the second terrace you come to the fringe of Alpine life. Here is
the heath forest, of which let the narrative tell:--
"Trunks and boughs are entirely smothered in a thick layer of mosses
which hang like waving beards from every spray, cushion and englobe
every knot, curl and swell around each twig, deform every outline and
obliterate every feature, till the trees are a mere mass of grotesque
contortions, monstrous tumefactions of the discoloured leprous
growth. No leaf is to be seen save on the very topmost twigs, yet
the forest is dark owing to the dense network of trunks and branches.
The soil disappears altogether under innumerable dead trunks, heaped
one upon another in intricate piles, covered with mosses, viscous and
slippery when exposed to the air; black, naked, and yet neither
mildewed nor rotten where they have lain for years and years in deep
holes. No forest can be grimmer and stranger than this. The
vegetation seems primeval, of some period when forms were uncertain
and provisory."
But the third terrace is stranger still. There one is out of the
forest and in an Alpine meadow between sheer cliffs, with far at the
head the gorge of Bujongolo and the tongue of the glacier above it.
But what an Alpine meadow!--
"The ground was carpeted with a deep layer of lycopodium and springy
moss, and thickly dotted with big clumps of the papery flowers, pink,
yellow, and silver white, of the helichrysum or everlasting, above
which rose the tall columnar stalks of the lobelia, like funeral
torches, beside huge branching groups of the monster senecio. The
impression produced was beyond words to describe; the spectacle was
too weird, too improbable, too unlike all familiar images, and upon
the whole brooded the same grave deathly silence."
It is a commonplace to say that in savage Africa man is surrounded by
a fauna still primeval; but in these mountains the flora, too, is of
an earlier world--that strange world which is embalmed in our coal
seams. Under the veil of mist, among cliffs which lose themselves in
the clouds, the traveller walks in an unearthly landscape, with the
gaunt candelabra of the senecios, the flambeaus of the lobelias, and
the uncanny blooms of the helichryse like decorations at some ghostly
feast. The word "helichryse" calls up ridiculous Theocritean
associations, as if the sunburnt little "creeping-gold" of Sicily
were any kin to these African marvels! Our elders were wise when
they named the range the Mountains of the Moon, for such things might
well belong to some lunar gorge of Mr. Wells's imagination. Beyond
Kiyanja the Duke found a little lake where a fire had raged and the
senecios were charred and withered. It was a veritable Valley of Dry
Bones.
[Illustration: Ruwenzori from the Hill near Kaibo. (_By permission
of Messrs. Arch. Constable & Co., Ltd._)]
Bujongolo offered the expedition a stone-heap overhung by a cliff,
and there the permanent camp was fixed. Among mildews and lichens
and pallid mist and an everlasting drip of rain five weeks were
passed with this unpromising spot as their base. The first business
was to ascend Kiyanja. This gave little trouble, for the ridge was
soon gained, and an easy _arête_ to the south led to the chief point.
The height proved to be 15,988 feet, and the view from the summit
settled the geography of the range and confirmed the Duke's theories.
For it was now clear that the ridge at the head of the Mobuku was no
part of the watershed of the chain, and that the Duwoni of Johnston
was to the north, not of the Mobuku, but of the Bujuku. The highest
summits stood over to the west, rising from the col at the head of
the Bujuku valley. The Duke saw that they might also be reached by
making a detour to the south of Kiyanja, and ascending a glen which
is one of the high affluents of the Butagu, the great valley on the
west side of the system.