Hans Egede—The house of Eric the Red—Nansen's crossing of Greenland—Nansen and Sverdrup row to Ny Herrnhut—NordenskiÖld's journeys—Berggren's discovery—NordenskiÖld on the inland ice—Glaciers and icebergs—Diatoms and whales—Edward Whymper's expedition—Greenland in Miocene times—Graah—Scoresby—Ryder—The Germania and Hansa—The Duke of Orleans—The Eskimos of Clavering Island—Franz Josef Fiord—The drift of the Hansa—The Greely expedition—The International Polar stations—Voyage of the Proteus—Lockwood reaches 83° 24´—Greely's wagon—The Eskimo house at Lake Hazen—Greely Relief expeditions—The rescue of Greely—Peary—His journey to Independence Bay—His four years' expedition—Reaches 84° 17´—His Polar expedition of 1905—The Roosevelt—The voyage to Cape Sheridan—Plan of the northern advance—Peary reaches 87° 6´—Moxon's mariner.

Hans Egede, aged twenty-two, priest of the parish of Vaagen, in the north of Norway, reading, in 1710, about the Norse colonists of the west—and apparently knowing nothing of Thiodhilda—was led to think that some of their descendants might still be living in heathenism. Writing to the Bishop of Trondhjem, he proposed to go out to these as a missionary. The good father rather astonished him by the reply that "Greenland was undoubtedly part of America, and could not be very far from Cuba and Hispaniola, where there was found such abundance of gold," and, as those who went to Greenland might bring home "incredible riches," he approved of the suggestion.

Unfortunately, however, Egede had written his letter without the knowledge of his wife, who by no means thought with the Bishop until seven years afterwards, when she changed her mind. Trying in vain locally, Egede applied for support to Frederick IV of Denmark, who finding him an earnest, honest, interesting man, gave him his patronage, the result being that a company was formed at Bergen for the development of trade and the propagation of the gospel; and, on the 3rd of May, 1721, the Hope set sail from there for Greenland with forty-six intending colonists, including the missionary and his wife and family.

His landing-place was on an island at the mouth of Godthaab Fiord, or Baal's River. He found the Greenlanders very different from what he had supposed; and also that the Dutch were carrying on a profitable trade with them and keeping it quiet. To begin with they were nothing like Vikings in appearance; and their language, instead of being a Scandinavian dialect, was of the same character as that of the Eskimos of Labrador—and not at all easy to learn. Learn it, however, he and his family did; and among the Greenlanders they remained and laboured with truly admirable energy and devotion, battling hard for life amid much disaster until, with the help of his son Paul, who succeeded him as superintendent of the mission with the title of bishop, the settlement became permanent, and other settlements arose from it up the western coast as they are found to-day.

Though there were no Norsemen, there were many traces of them, the most interesting being the house of Eric the Red, near Igaliko. Here, close to Erik's Fiord and overlooking Einar's Fiord, on one of the prettiest sites in Greenland, was Brattelid—"the steep side of a rock"—one side of it a natural cliff, the walls of the other sides, more than four feet thick, built of blocks of red sandstone from four to six feet in length as well as in breadth and thickness, reminding the visitor of those of Stonehenge, and evoking similar wonderment as to how they were got into place. And in his first colony, now called Igdluernerit, Egede seems to have followed the Norsemen—at an interval—in their architecture, to judge by the large stones in the walls of his house, which, like Eric's, is now in ruins.

Twelve years after Egede, came the Moravians to take up their quarters at Ny Herrnhut, also at the mouth of Godthaab (that is, Good Hope) Fiord. It was here that Nansen and Sverdrup landed in October, 1888, having rowed up from Ameralik Fiord in their "half a boat," as the Eskimos called it.

"Are you Englishmen?" they were asked.

"No," said Nansen, in good Norse, "we are Norwegians."

"May I ask your name?"

"My name is Nansen and we have just come from the interior."

"Oh, allow me to congratulate you on taking your doctor's degree!"

From which it is clear that Godthaab is not so much out of the world as one would suppose.

Nansen with his three Norsemen and two Lapps had reached the east coast in the Jason, and on the 17th of July had left the ship in their boats to make their way to the shore; but they had been caught in the floes, and on them and among them they had drifted for twelve days—an experience they had not bargained for. Getting ashore at last near Cape Tordenskiold, they worked their way back northwards along the coast, spending a short time at an Eskimo encampment at Cape Bille, until on the 15th of August they hauled their two boats up near Umivik and started to cross Greenland over the inland ice.

The country is now in its glacial period, and for days they toiled across its glacial desert; each day alike in its wearisome monotony. "Flatness and whiteness were the two features of this ocean of snow," says Nansen; "in the day we could see three things only, the sun, the snowfield and ourselves. We looked like a diminutive black line feebly traced upon an infinite expanse of white. There was no break or change in our horizon, no object to rest the eye upon, and no point by which to direct the course. We had to steer by a diligent use of the compass, and keep our line as well as possible by careful watching of the sun and repeated glances back at the four men following and the long track which the caravan left in the snow. We passed from one horizon to another, but our advance brought us no change."

By the 2nd of September they had all taken to their skis on which they made great progress alone, but when it came to hauling the sledges there was a difference. Sometimes the snow proved to be very heavy going, particularly when it was wind-packed, and then it was no better than sand. One entry in Nansen's journal will suffice: "It began to snow in the middle of the day, and our work was heavier than ever. It was worse even than yesterday, and to say it was like hauling in blue clay will scarcely give an idea of it. At every step we had to use all our force to get the heavy sledges along, and in the evening Sverdrup and I, who had to go first and plough a way for ourselves, were pretty well done up."

When at last the wind became favourable they hoisted sail, and off they went over the waves and drifts of snow at a speed that almost took their breath away; and when they reached the western slopes they slid down them using the sledges as toboggans. At first they had intended making for Christianshaab, but the route had to be changed for that to Godthaab, and the sea was reached some distance to the south. Here they stitched the floor-sheet of their tent over a framework of withies, and with oars made of canvas stretched across forked willows and tied to bamboo shafts, Nansen and Sverdrup boldly trusted themselves to the waves and with much hard labour pulled into Ny Herrnhut on the 3rd of October. Such was the first crossing of Greenland, a really remarkable instance of daring endeavour.

Further north, NordenskiÖld, in 1883, had attempted to cross over the ice-cap from near Disco on the west coast, but, hindered and finally stopped by crevasses and other obstacles, could do no more than send his Lapps to try their best on their skis, and they returned after their journey eastwards of a hundred and forty miles reporting similar monotonous conditions all along their track. Thirteen years before, he had, also from Auleitsivik Fiord, started out with Berggren; and deserted by their followers, they had gone on by themselves for some thirty miles east of the northern arm of the fiord. It was on this occasion that Berggren discovered Ancylonema, that small poly-cellular alga forming the dark masses that absorb a far greater amount of heat than the white ice and thus cause the deep holes that aid in the process of melting.

"The same plant," says NordenskiÖld, "has no doubt played the same part in our country; and we have to thank it, perhaps, that the deserts of ice which formerly covered the whole of Northern Europe and America have now given place to shady woods and undulating cornfields."

NordenskiÖld looked upon Greenland and its icefield as a broad-lipped, shallow vessel with chinks in the lip, the glacier being viscous matter within it. As more is poured in, the matter runs over the edges, taking the lines of the chinks, that is, of the fiords and valleys, as that of its outflow. In other words, the ice floats out by force of the superincumbent weight of snow just as does the grain on the floor of a barn when another sackful is shot on to the top of the heap already there. When the glacier reaches the sea it makes its way along the bottom under water for a considerable distance, in some cases, as near Avigait, for more than a mile. This is where the water is too shallow for it to affect the mass, which forms a breakwater; though as a rule the shore deepens more suddenly and the projection is less. It was long supposed that the berg broke from the glacier by force of gravity, but this is not generally so. The berg is forced off from the parent glacier by the buoyant action of the sea from beneath; the ice groans and creaks; then there is a crashing, then a roar like the discharge of artillery; and with a great regurgitation of the waves the iceberg is launched into life. These huge floating islands of ice are the most conspicuous exports of Greenland; and their true magnitude is not realised until it is remembered that only about an eighth of their bulk appears above the water. Bergs as large as liners we frequently hear of—one such is shown in our illustration—but sometimes they are of much greater freeboard, though the very large ones reported as extending along the horizon are invariably groups of several crowded together.

Ancylonema has evidently plenty to do. Another instance of the important part played by the insignificant in these regions is suggested by the colour of the sea. This varies from ultramarine blue to olive-green, from the purest transparency to striking opacity; and the changes are not transitory but permanent. These patches of dark water abound with diatoms, while the bluer the water the fewer are the diatoms; and where they are most numerous, there the animals that feed on them assemble in their greatest numbers. And these animals are jellyfish, entomostracans, and, to a greater extent, pteropods, their chief representative being Clio borealis. In short, the animals that feed on the diatoms are food of the Greenland whale, and where the waters are dark the whale-fishers thrive. "I know nothing stranger than the curious tale I have unfolded," says Dr. Robert Brown, who worked out this remarkable chain, "the diatom staining the broad frozen sea, again supporting myriads of living beings which crowd there to feed on it, and these again supporting the huge whale. Thus it is no stretch of the imagination to say that the greatest animal depends for its existence on a being so minute that it takes thousands to be massed together before they are visible to the naked eye."

Cold as Greenland is, there was a time when matters were different. In token of this we have the Miocene fossils collected by Edward Whymper during his expedition from near Jakobshavn in 1867, which were described and illustrated by Oswald Heer in the Philosophical Transactions for 1869. A look at these is a welcome relief after such a surfeit of ice. Here, as well preserved as in the leaf beds of Alum Bay, are the leaves and fruits of an unmistakable temperate flora. Magnolias, maples, poplars, limes, walnuts, water-lilies; myrica, smilax, aralia; sedges and grasses, conifers and ferns: these at the least were all growing in Greenland in its Miocene age. And even a thousand years ago the climate must have been milder than now, to judge by the farming reports of the colonists who seem to have been quite at home along the coast, which, with its innumerable islands and fiords, is as intricate as that of Norway.

Searching for the ancient eastern settlement of the Norsemen, W. A. Graah, in 1829, wintered at Julianehaab, which in all likelihood is the site, although he knew it not. Possessed with the idea that it must be on the south-eastern coast, he devoted his attention to that region only, finding Eskimos who had never seen a white man and starting a trading intercourse which led to most of them migrating to the less inclement west. His work linked up with that of Scoresby, who in 1822 charted the main features of the sea-front from 69° to 75°. Ryder, seventy years afterwards, filled in the details of much of Scoresby's work, and found Eskimos further north, as Clavering had done in 1823, when in the Griper during Sabine's observations at Pendulum Island.

It was to Pendulum Island, in 74° 32´, that Karl Koldewey, after his preliminary run to 81° 5´ in 1868, took the Germania to winter during the German expedition of 1869. The two vessels, the Germania, a small two-masted screw steamer of one hundred and forty-three tons, built specially for Arctic service, and the Hansa, only half her size, which had been strengthened for the voyage, reached Jan Mayen on the 9th of July, and, hidden from each other by fog, sailed northwards for five days. On the fifth evening the wind rose, the fog cleared, and a hundred yards in front of them lay the ice like a rugged line of cliffs.

For a few days they sailed along it endeavouring to find an opening to the north. Then, on the 20th, the Germania ran up a signal to approach and communicate, which was misunderstood, and, instead of repeating it and making sure, the Hansa put up her helm, fell off, crowded on all sail, and disappeared in the fog. Koldewey, persisting in his efforts to get through the pack, found an opening on the 1st of August. Nine days afterwards he was again blocked, and finally, on the 27th, he reached Pendulum Island, where he made the Germania snug for the winter, which proved to be remarkably mild.

The first sledge party travelling up one of the fiords met with abundant vegetation and herds of reindeer and musk oxen, and were visited by bears who had not learnt to be wary of man; and when the bears came back with the sun in February they were as troublesome as those of Ice Haven to the Dutchmen. Several sledge parties went out in the spring, and, notwithstanding inadequate equipment, did excellent work. In April, 1870, Koldewey reached 77° 1´, almost up to Lambert Land, otherwise the Land of Edam. Here, looking out over the ice-belt, they agreed that it was "a bulwark built for eternity," and hoisting sails on their sledges they ran back to the ship. But in 1905 the Duke of Orleans arrived on the coast to reach 78° 16´ and discover that their Cape Bismarck was on an island and their Dove Bay a strait.

In the neighbourhood of their winter quarters the glaciers and mountains were well explored, and an attempt was made to measure an arc of the meridian, which proved to be rather rough work among such surroundings. The snowstorms were particularly pitiless and heavy, and the travelling decidedly bad. The thaw began about the middle of May, and there was more sledging through pools than usual, so that they did not want variety in their occupations. On the 14th of July boating became practicable, and a voyage was made to the Eskimo village found by Clavering in 1823, on the island named after him, but the village proved to be deserted and the huts in ruins—an unwelcome discovery, for, as M'Clintock says in reference to it: "It is not less strange than sad to find that a peaceable and once numerous tribe, inhabiting a coast-line of at least seven degrees of latitude, has died out, or has almost died out, whilst at the same time we find, by the diminution of the glaciers and increase of animal life, that the terrible severity of the climate has undergone considerable modification. We feel this saddening interest with greater force when we reflect that the distance of Clavering's village from the coast of Scotland is under one thousand miles. They were our nearest neighbours of the New World."

A little north of the seventy-third parallel Koldewey discovered on his way home the magnificent Franz Josef Fiord. Here the grandest scenery in Greenland is to be found along its deep branches winding among the mountains, one of which, Mount Petermann, is over eleven thousand feet high. As the Germania entered this remarkable inlet, which extends inland for some five degrees of longitude, a fleet of icebergs were sailing out of it with the current; the farther she advanced the warmer seemed the temperature of the air and surface water, and the wilder and more impressive became the grouping of the mighty cliffs and peaks with their lofty waterfalls and raging torrents and deep glacier-filled ravines. It was the great geographical discovery of the expedition.

Meanwhile Hegemann, trying to pass to the north more to the westward, got the Hansa beset on the 9th of September some twenty-four miles from Foster Bay. As the ice-pressure threatened to become too great for the vessel to resist, an elaborate house was planned and built on the floe. Briquettes were used for the walls, the joints were filled up with dry snow on which water was poured, and in ten minutes it hardened into a compact mass. The house was twenty feet long, fourteen feet wide, and four feet eight inches high at the sides, with a rising roof consisting of sails and mats covered with deep snow. Into this house, which took a week to build, provisions for two months were carried, besides wood and fuel. The boats were put out, a flagstaff was set up, and quite a little settlement was started on the ice; and no sooner was it completed than a violent snowstorm, lasting for five days, buried both the ship and the house. The ice increased around, and, the pressure of the accumulation lifting the Hansa seventeen feet above her original level, everything of value was removed from her on to the ice and into the house. On the 22nd of October she sank, having drifted below the seventy-first parallel; and all through the winter the floe, which was about two miles across, leisurely made its way to the south.

Off Knighton Bay Christmas was kept with all possible honour. The briquette house was decorated with coloured-paper festoons, and, by the light of the sole remaining wax candle, the genial Germans made themselves merry around a stubby Christmas tree devised out of an old birch broom. Three weeks afterwards the floe cracked beneath the dwelling. There was barely time to take refuge, but all hands were saved in the boats. For two days they remained in them, poorly sheltered from the storm and unable to clear out the snow. Then a smaller house was built of the ruins of the old one, but it was only large enough for half the party; and as the spring advanced the floe decreased, breaking away at the edges as did that on which the Polaris people drifted to Labrador.

At the end of March it entered Nukarbik Bay and there it stayed four weeks, caught in an eddy, slowly moving round and round just far enough from the shore to render an attempt at escape impossible; twice a day they went in with the tide and out with the tide, the ice too bad for the boats and never promising enough for a dash to the land. Having become thoroughly acquainted with this portion of the coast with its bold range of hills, its deep bays, its inlets, headlands, and islands, a storm came on which cleared them out of the eddy and drove them further south. Three weeks after that the floe had become so diminished by the lashing of the surge that it was hardly a hundred yards across, and large fragments were slipping off every hour.

They had been on it for two hundred days and drifted eleven hundred miles when, on the 7th of May, water-lanes opening shorewards, they took to the boats and ventured among the masses of ice, making for the south. At first they had their difficulties in being compelled to haul up on the floes to pass the night or wait for a favourable wind, which meant severe work in unloading and reloading. Once during their painful progress of more than a month they were kept on a floe for six days by gales and snow-showers. Finally, after a long desperate effort, they reached Illuilek Island, and thence proceeded close inshore among rocks and ice to Frederiksdal, a couple of hours' walk from the southernmost point of the Greenland mainland, Cape Farewell being part of an island twenty-eight miles further to the south-east. On the 21st of June, eight days afterwards, they were at Julianehaab, whence they sailed to be landed at Copenhagen on the 1st of September, just ten days before the Germania steamed into Bremen. Thus the expedition, by its two divisions, ice-borne and ship-borne, had skirted nearly all that was then known of the east coast from end to end.

On the north coast, Beaumont's discoveries were extended by Lieutenant James B. Lockwood for ninety-five miles, the trend of the shore taking him up to 83° 24´, three minutes and thirty-four seconds nearer the North Pole than Markham reached out on the sea. This was on the 13th of May, 1882, during the ill-fated A. W. Greely expedition. Like most American expeditions up to then this began well and ended badly, worse, in fact, than any; and unlike them, and all others, it consisted entirely of soldiers—as if a detachment of Royal Engineers had been sent north on ordnance survey work. It was, however, more miscellaneous, for among its twenty-three members were representatives of three cavalry regiments, six infantry regiments, and an artilleryman.

This was to be the garrison of the International Circumpolar Station at Lady Franklin Bay. The idea of a ring of stations round the Pole for the study of the natural phenomena for which the Arctic regions afford so wide and important a field was not new, but it was first reduced to definiteness and its adoption secured by Karl Weyprecht of the Austro-Hungarian expedition of 1872. At a meeting of German scientific men at Gratz, in September, 1875, he procured assent to his general principle that the best results in Arctic inquiry were to be obtained by subordinating geographical discovery to physical investigation. It had long been evident that the most valuable results had been obtained by the ships and fixed observatories, and that the toilsome work of the sledges in their successive approaches by a few more miles towards a mathematical point, though most interesting to read about, had really been of very little practical use owing to the necessarily light equipment. Instead, therefore, of a number of isolated attempts at irregular intervals, Weyprecht suggested that the better way would be to attack the subject systematically by a group of expeditions at permanent stations working together long enough at the same time for their observations to be dealt with as part of a general scheme; and the suggestion was approved although he did not live long enough to see the stations occupied.

Three International Polar Conferences were held, in 1879 and the two following years, at Hamburg, Berne, and St. Petersburg, at the last of which it was arranged that the stations should be fourteen in number, two in the south and twelve in the north, these twelve being—(1) The Austrian at Jan Mayen; (2) the Danish at Godthaab; (3) the Finnish at Sodankyla in Uleaborg; (4) the German at Kingua in Cumberland Sound; (5) the British at Fort Rae on the northern arm of the Great Slave Lake; (6) the Dutch at Dickson Harbour at the mouth of the Yenesei; (7) the Norwegian at Bosekop at the head of Alten Fiord; (8) the Russian at Little Karmakul Bay in Novaya Zemlya; (9) the second Russian on Sagastyr Island in the Lena Delta; (10) the Swedish at Mossel Bay in Spitsbergen; (11) the American at Point Barrow under Lieutenant P. H. Ray, who met with marked success and brought his men all home in safety; and (12) the second American at Lady Franklin Bay, the winter quarters of H.M.S. Discovery, which Greely renamed Fort Conger.

In direct opposition to the guiding idea of the scheme, Greely's work was complicated by having tacked on to it Howgate's proposal of another dash for the Pole, his instructions requiring him to send out "sledging parties in the interests of exploration and discovery." Further, his expedition was fitted out in a way that almost invited disaster. Let one instance suffice. "In speaking of this instrument," he explains, "it is necessary to say that a dip-circle was especially made for the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, but it was by error shipped to the United States Coast Survey. On calling for it, when the duplicate instrument ordered could not be had in time, the late Mr. Carlisle Patterson, then Superintendent, promptly promised that it should be sent on to me at New York. On the day of my sailing, a dip-circle, carefully boxed, was received; but on opening it at St. John, an old, rusty, unreliable instrument was found in the place of the new circle. This resulted in unsatisfactory and incomplete observations at Conger, for the old circle having upright standards instead of transverse ones, as in the new, but one end of the needle could be read. It must always be a matter of regret that this unwarrantable and unauthorised substitution by some person was made, which materially impaired, if not effectually destroyed, the value of our two-years' dip-observations." This sort of thing reduced International Polar Research to a farce, and the same spirit appeared in other departments, more seriously than all in the relief proceedings, which were conducted in a way that could only lead to starvation.

In August, 1881, the Proteus, with the expedition on board, made her way up Smith Sound and Kennedy Channel without serious hindrance until she entered the south-eastern part of Lady Franklin Bay, where the close, heavy pack brought her to a stop within eight miles of her destination. She had come seven hundred miles from Upernivik in less than a week, and, faced by ice twenty to fifty feet thick, she had to wait another seven days before she got into Discovery Harbour. Here the party landed and a house was built, and dissension arose which ended in one of the company returning in the ship and another endeavouring to do so and being too late, so that he had to remain as a sort of tolerated volunteer. Two others were sent away as being physically unfit; but, making up for these, were two Eskimos engaged at Upernivik.

Preliminary sledging began at once, and in the spring the two great efforts were made. The doctor's, towards the Pole, left on the 19th of March and got adrift on a floe from which the party escaped with the loss of their tent, provisions, and some of their instruments. According to Greely's report: "The farthest latitude attained by this party is given by Dr. Pavy as 82° 56´, it being estimated, as no observations for time, magnetic declination, or latitude were made at any period during his absence."

On the 3rd of April, Lockwood with twelve men left for the coast of Greenland. Up to Newman Bay four men had been sent back as unfit for field-work. On the 16th, when the party started from here for the north-east, Lockwood and Christiansen, the Eskimo, were in advance hauling about eight hundred pounds with a team of eight dogs, a three-men sledge following, and then two two-men sledges; at Cape Bryant the men-sledges were sent back, and Lockwood, Brainard, and the Eskimo went on with the dog-sledge. Cape Britannia was reached on the 5th of May, and on the 13th they camped at Lockwood Island, and there, for the first time, Americans reached a farthest north.

"I decided to make this cape my farthest," reported Lockwood, "and to devote the little time we could stay to determining accurately my position, if the weather would allow, which seemed doubtful. We built a large, conspicuous cairn, about six feet high and the same width at the base, on the lower of two benches. After repitching the tent Sergeant Brainard and I returned to the cairn, and collected in that vicinity specimens of the rocks and vegetation of the country, the sergeant making almost all the collection. We ascended without difficulty to a small fringe of rocks, which seemed from below to form the top. The ascent, at first very gradual, became steeper as we went up, but we had no difficulty, as for some distance below the summit the surface is covered with small stones, as uniform in size, position, etc., as those of a macadamised road. Reached the top at 3.45 p.m. and unfurled the American flag (Mrs. Greely's) to the breeze in latitude 83° 24´ N. (according to last observation). The summit is a small plateau, narrow, but extending back to the south to broken, snow-covered heights. It commanded a very extended view in every direction. The barometer, being out of order, was not brought along, so I did not get the altitude. The horizon on the land side was concealed by numberless snow-covered mountains, one profile overlapping another, and all so merged together, on account of their universal covering of snow, that it was impossible to detect the topography of the region. To the north lay an unbroken expanse of ice, interrupted only by the horizon."

On Midsummer Day Greely started with a four-wheel wagon to explore Grinnell Land. The wagon, in the men's vernacular, was a man-killer, and was abandoned after they had dragged it a hundred miles. On this journey much exploring work was done in the unknown country, the most interesting find being that of the Eskimo house at Lake Hazen. In this, according to Greely's description, there were two fireplaces, one in the east and the other in the south, both of which had been built outward so as to take up no part of the space of the room, which was over seventeen feet long and nine feet wide. The sides of the entire dwelling were low walls of sodded earth, lined inside with flat thin slates, the tops of which were about two feet above the level of the interior floor, and the bench was covered with flat slabs of slate. Near by was a smaller house of the same character, and around were a large number of relics, including walrus-ivory toggles for dog-traces, sledge-bars and runners, an arrow head, skinning knife, and articles of worked bone. Next year further explorations of the back country were undertaken, so that some six thousand miles of the interior were viewed, disclosing many fertile valleys with their herds of musk ox.

Meanwhile the Neptune, with supplies for Fort Conger, had in August, 1882, been vainly endeavouring to get north, and, a few miles from Cape Hawks, had turned back with the pack piling the ice as high as her rail. Six attempts she made before she gave up and retreated, after making several deposits of stores at Cape Sabine and elsewhere. In July, 1883, the Proteus, making a similar attempt to reach Greely, was crushed in the ice off Cape Albert, her side opening with a crash while the men were working in the hold, the ice forcing its way into the coal-bunkers and then pouring in so that as soon as the pressure slackened she went down, escape to the south being effected in the boats.

Next year, matters having become serious, a naval expedition consisting of the Thetis, the Bear, and Nares's old ship the Alert, presented by the British Government, was placed in the capable hands of Commander Winfield Schley, who had with him George Melville of Jeannette fame as engineer of the Thetis, and matters were conducted in quite a different way under much more favourable circumstances. Schley intended to find Greely, at all costs, and he did so. First he found a cairn at Brevoort Island, in which were the papers deposited by Greely relating how he had had to come south owing to shortness of supplies, and how his party were then—21st of October, 1883—encamped on the west side of a small neck of land distant about equally from Cape Sabine and Cocked Hat Island.

As it was then the 22nd of June, 1884, and they had had only forty days' complete rations to live upon, Schley hurried off at once. Had he been two days later he would have been too late. There was a tent wrecked by the gale, with its pole toppling over and only kept in place by the guy ropes. Ripping it up with a knife, a sight of horror was disclosed. On one side, close to the opening, with his head towards the outside, lay what was apparently a dead man. On the opposite side was a poor fellow, alive but without hands or feet, and with a spoon tied to the stump of his right arm. Two others, seated on the ground, were pouring something out of a rubber bottle into a tin can. Directly opposite, on his hands and knees, was a dark man with a long matted beard, in a dirty and tattered dressing-gown with a little red skull cap on his head, and brilliant staring eyes. As Colwell appeared, he raised himself a little, and put on a pair of eyeglasses.

"Who are you?" asked Colwell.

The man made no answer, staring at him vacantly.

"Who are you?" again.

One of the men spoke up. "That's the Major—Major Greely."

Colwell crawled in and took him by the hand, saying to him, "Greely, is this you?"

"Yes," said Greely in a faint, broken voice, hesitating with his words; "yes—seven of us left—here we are—dying—like men. Did what I came to do—beat the best record."

Near at hand were ten graves. The bodies, despite Greely's remonstrances, were taken up and removed for burial in the United States. "Little could be seen of the condition of the bodies, as they had been clothed, and all that appeared was intact. In preparing them subsequently," says Schley, "it was found that six had been cut and the flesh removed." One of these, that of a cavalryman serving under the assumed name of Henry, had a bullet in it. He had been shot, at Greely's written order, "for stealing sealskin thongs, the only remaining food."

The next to add to our knowledge of the northern coast of Greenland was Robert E. Peary, of the American Navy, who seems to have devoted his life to Arctic exploration. On his first expedition in 1886, he penetrated with Maigaard for some distance into the country in the neighbourhood of Jakobshavn as a sort of pioneering venture. In 1891, accompanied by his wife, when outward bound in the Kite in the Melville Bay pack, he had his leg broken. The ship had been butting a passage through the spongy sheets of ice which had imprisoned her, when in going astern a detached cake struck the rudder, jamming the tiller against the wheel-house where Peary was standing, and pinned his leg long enough to snap it between the knee and the ankle. In spite of this he insisted on being landed with the rest of the party at McCormick Bay, a little to the north of Whale Sound, where a house was built and the winter spent.

Making a good recovery, he set off in May to sledge across North Greenland through snow and over it, and over snow-arched crevasses, often, in cloudy weather, travelling in grey space with nothing visible beyond a foot or two around him. After fifty-seven days' journey to the north-east and along Peary Channel, the northern boundary of the mainland, he left the inland ice for a strange country dotted with snowdrifts and mostly of red sandstone, in which murmuring streams, roaring waterfalls, and the song of snow-buntings formed an agreeable change from the silence of the desert of snow. Four days' hard labouring through this brought him on the 4th of July to Independence Bay on the north-east coast, where from Navy Cliff, nearly four thousand feet high, he looked across to Academy Land on the other side of the bay and beyond it over the region leading down to the farthest north of the Duke of Orleans. "It was almost impossible," he says, "to believe that we were standing upon the northern shore of Greenland as we gazed from the summit of this bronze cliff, with the most brilliant sunshine all about us, with yellow poppies growing between the rocks around our feet, and a herd of muskoxen in the valley behind us. Down in that valley I had found an old friend, a dandelion in bloom, and had seen the bullet-like flight and heard the energetic buzz of the humble-bee."

Next year he and his wife were out again to take up their quarters at a house they built at Bowdoin Bay, where, in September, their daughter was born. In March, 1894, he started for another journey across Greenland, with twelve sledges and over ninety dogs, but severe weather drove him back after travelling some two hundred miles. Staying over that winter instead of returning in the Falcon, he set out in the spring, and under almost desperate circumstances managed to reach and return from Independence Bay.

Following this came his expedition of 1898, in which he spent four winters in the Arctic regions and almost met with Petersen's fate by a venturesome winter sledge journey, which resulted in the freezing of his feet and the loss of eight of his toes. Travelling in Grinnell Land he proved beyond doubt that it was continuous with Ellesmere Land, as had been admitted by those who named it. Following Lockwood's track, he continued it up to 83° 54´, along Hazen Land, practically completing the coast-line to Cape Henry Parish, its furthest east, thus rounding the north of the Greenland archipelago, and even there finding traces of Eskimos and a fauna similar to that of other Arctic lands hundreds of miles further south. And striking northwards over the sea from Cape Hecla, with seven men and six dog-sledges, into the breaking, drifting pack, he made a dash for the Pole which ended at 84° 17´.

His next northern venture, though not more remarkable, is destined, perhaps, to be remembered longer. On it he sighted the new land away out in the sea north-west of Grinnell Land, nearer to the Pole than any other land discovered up to then, and where it was expected to be. And out over the ice he went to eclipse his 1902 record by nearly two hundred miles, in the best planned of all his journeys.

In July, 1905, he had left New York in the Roosevelt, a steamship of over six hundred tons and more than a thousand horse-power, rigged complete as a three-masted coasting schooner, able to hold her own almost anywhere in the event of her engines becoming useless. One hundred and eighty-two feet in length, thirty-five and a half in beam, and sixteen and a quarter in depth; sharp in the bow and rounded amidships; treble in framing and double in planking, with sides thirty inches thick, twelve feet of deadwood in her bow, and six feet of false keels and kelsons, she was specially built for the expedition as the strongest and most powerful vessel ever sent on Arctic service, and was launched on the 23rd of May, 1905, Mrs. Peary naming her by smashing a block of ice against her ironclad stem.

A month out from New York, the Roosevelt left Etah laden deep with coal from the Eric that had awaited her there, and having on board over fifty Eskimos, of both sexes and all sizes, and some two hundred Eskimo dogs. Leaving a reserve of provisions at Bache Peninsula, she worked up through open water and occasional ice to Richardson Bay, where the pack looked so threatening that Peary literally rammed his way across to the eastern side, and so continued northwards. When off Cape Lupton the ship received such rough treatment that the rudder was twisted and the head-bands and tiller-rods broken, as she ground along the face of the ice-foot "with a motion and noise like that of a railway-car which has left the rails"; but this was the only time she was in serious danger during her most fortunate run. Resting for six days in Newman Bay to repair damages and make ready for a final effort, she was headed westward to Grinnell Land through the floes, and after a continuous battle of thirty-five hours, reached the ice-foot at Cape Sheridan, a little north of the old winter quarters of the Alert, and found her wintering place, like her, just as the Polar pack closed in against the shore. The endeavour had been to lay up in Porter Bay, twenty-seven miles further north, but the state of the ice made this impossible.

Provisions were plentiful, as no less than two hundred and fifty musk oxen had been shot by the 1st of November, and there were numbers of hares and several herds of the white reindeer first mentioned by Hudson in his second voyage three hundred years ago. During the very mild winter eighty of the dogs died, and when sledging began only twenty teams of six each were available. The plan of the northern advance over the ice was to divide it into sections of about fifty miles each, with snow houses at each station, the nearest station being supplied from the base and supplying the next, and so on, thus keeping up an unbroken line of communication gradually extending nearer to the Pole, the sledges working backwards and forwards, outwards laden and inwards empty, between station and station along the line.

The land was left at Point Moss, north-west of Cape Joseph Henry. At 84° 38´ a lead in the pack stopped the way for six days until the young ice was thick enough to bear, and forty miles further north the vanguard drifted east some seventy miles during a storm for another six days. On the 20th of April a region of much open water was reached, and from midnight to noon next day the last effort was made by Peary, Henson, and a small party of Eskimos, the farthest north, 87° 6´, being attained and immediately left in a rapid retreat for safety.

Thus Peary went nearer to the Pole than Cagni by thirty-two minutes or thirty-seven statute miles, both being stopped by water with apparently similar conditions ahead of them. What the conditions may be along the intervening two hundred miles from Peary's farthest nobody knows; but although a good many things may happen between London and York, which is about the same distance, there is good reason for supposing that, even if there be land somewhere, the road is over a sea more or less packed with ice which is never without its channels.

One thing is clear: the attainment of the Pole is a matter of money. Given the funds, the men and the dogs, and the ships, boats, sledges, and other things will be forthcoming, and the journey accomplished, not by a rush, but on some systematic station-to-station plan; though it is not impossible that it may be done by chance in some exceptional year, for the climate of the north is variable and has a wider range of temperature than that of Britain in its good years and its bad years.

Let us hope there may be land at the exact spot, for then the position can be checked at leisure, and there will be no doubt of its having been reached. Joseph Moxon, Hydrographer to the King, in 1652 met at Amsterdam a sailor of a Greenland ship which "went not out to fish that summer, but only to take in the lading of the whole fleet to bring it to an early market"—in other words, to act as a carrier—which ship, before the whaling fleet had caught enough to lade her, had by order of the Company sailed to the North Pole and back again, and even two degrees beyond it; no land seen, no ice, and the weather as it was in summer-time at Amsterdam.

A sailor's yarn told in a tavern? Only this and nothing more, perhaps; though a good many things were kept dark in the whaling trade as in other trades. But if there had been an island at the Pole we might eventually have been able to verify that ancient mariner's tale.