The struggle for the North Pole began nearly one hundred years before the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers at Plymouth Rock, being inaugurated (1527) by that king of many distinctions, Henry VIII of England.

In 1588 John Davis rounded Cape Farewell, the southern end of Greenland, and followed the coast for eight hundred miles to Sanderson Hope. He discovered the strait which bears his name, and gained for Great Britain what was then the record for the farthest north, 72° 12´, a point 1128 miles from the geographical North Pole. Scores of hardy navigators, British, French, Dutch, German, Scandinavian, and Russian, followed Davis, all seeking to hew across the Pole the much-coveted short route to China and the Indies. The rivalry was keen and costly in lives, ships, and treasure, but from the time of Henry VIII for three and one-half centuries, or until 1882 (with the exception of 1594-1606, when, through Wm. Barents, the Dutch held the record), Great Britain's flag was always waving nearest the top of the globe.

The same year that Jamestown was founded, Henry Hudson (1607), also seeking the route to the Indies, discovered Jan Mayen, circumnavigated Spitzbergen, and advanced the eye of man to 80° 23´. Most valuable of all, Hudson brought back accounts of great multitudes of whales and walruses, with the result that for the succeeding years these new waters were thronged with fleets of whaling ships from every maritime nation. The Dutch specially profited by Hudson's discovery. During the 17th and 18th centuries they sent no less than 300 ships and 15,000 men each summer to these arctic fisheries and established on Spitzbergen, within the Arctic Circle, one of the most remarkable summer towns the world has ever known, where stores and warehouses and reducing stations and cooperages and many kindred industries flourished during the fishing season. With the approach of winter all buildings were shut up and the population, numbering several thousand, all returned home.

Hudson's record remained unequaled for 165 years, or until 1773, when J. C. Phipps surpassed his farthest north by twenty-five miles. To-day the most interesting fact connected with the Phipps expedition is that Nelson, the hero of Trafalgar and of the Battle of the Nile, then a lad of fifteen, was a member of the party. Thus the boldest and strongest spirits of the most adventurous and hardy profession of those days sought employment in the contest against the frozen wilderness of the north.

The first half of the 19th century witnessed many brave ships and gallant men sent to the arctic regions. While most of these expeditions were not directed against the Pole so much as sent in an endeavor to find a route to the Indies round North America—the Northwest Passage—and around Asia—the Northeast Passage—many of them are intimately interwoven with the conquest of the Pole, and were a necessary part of its ultimate discovery. England hurled expedition after expedition, manned by the best talent and energy of her navy, against the ice which seemingly blocked every channel to her ambitions for an arctic route to the Orient.

In 1819 Parry penetrated many intricate passages and overcame one-half of the distance between Greenland and Bering Sea, winning a prize of £5000, offered by Parliament to the first navigator to pass the 110th meridian west of Greenwich. He was also the first navigator to pass directly north of the magnetic North Pole, which he located approximately, and thus the first to report the strange experience of seeing the compass needle pointing due south.

So great was Parry's success that the British government sent him out in command of two other expeditions in search of the Northwest Passage. In explorations and discoveries the results of these two later expeditions were not so rich, but the experience in ice work so obtained gave Parry conclusions which revolutionized all methods in arctic navigation.

Hitherto all attempts to approach the Pole had been in ships. In 1827 Parry suggested the plan of a dash to the Pole on foot, from a base on land. He obtained the assistance of the government, which for the fourth time sent him to the Arctic provided with well-equipped ships and able officers and men. He carried a number of reindeer with him to his base in Spitzbergen, purposing to use these animals to drag his sledges. The scheme proved impracticable, however, and he was compelled to depend on the muscles of his men to haul his two heavy sledges, which were in reality boats on steel runners. Leaving Spitzbergen on June 23 with twenty-eight men, he pushed northward. But the summer sun had broken up the ice floes, and the party repeatedly found it necessary to take the runners off their boats in order to ferry across the stretches of open water. After thirty days' incessant toil Parry had reached 82° 45´, about 150 miles north of his base and 435 geographical miles from the Pole. Here he found that, while his party rested, the drift of the ice was carrying him daily back, almost as much as they were able to make in the day's work. Retreat was therefore begun.

Parry's accomplishments, marking a new era in polar explorations, created a tremendous sensation. Knighthood was immediately bestowed upon him by the King, while the British people heaped upon him all the honors and applause with which they have invariably crowned every explorer returning from the north with even a measure of success. In originality of plan and equipment Parry has been equaled and surpassed only by Nansen and Peary.

In those early days, few men being rich enough to pay for expeditions to the north out of their own pockets, practically every explorer was financed by the government under whose orders he acted. In 1829, however, Felix Booth, sheriff of London, gave Captain John Ross, an English naval officer, who had achieved only moderate success in a previous expedition, a small paddle-wheel steamer, the Victory, and entered him in the race for the Northwest Passage. Ross was assisted, as mate, by his nephew, James Clark Ross, who was young and energetic, and who was later to win laurels at the opposite end of the globe. This first attempt to use steam for ice navigation failed, owing to a poor engine or incompetent engineers, but in all other respects the Rosses achieved gloriously. During their five years' absence, 1829-1834, they made important discoveries around Boothia Felix, but most valuable was their definite location of the magnetic North Pole and the remarkable series of magnetic and meteorological observations which they brought back with them.

No band of men ever set out for the unknown with brighter hopes or more just anticipation of success than Sir John Franklin's expedition of 1845. The frightful tragedy which overwhelmed them, together with the mystery of their disappearance, which baffled the world for years and is not yet entirely explained, forms the most terrible narrative in arctic history. Franklin had been knighted in 1827, at the same time as Parry, for the valuable and very extensive explorations which he had conducted by snowshoes and canoe on the North American coast between the Coppermine and Great Fish rivers, during the same years that Parry had been gaining fame in the north. In the interval Franklin had served as Governor of Tasmania for seven years. His splendid reputation and ability as an organizer made him, though now fifty-nine years of age, the unanimous choice of the government for the most elaborate arctic expedition it had prepared in many years. Franklin's fame and experience, and that of Crozier and his other lieutenants, who had seen much service in the north, his able ships, the Terror and the Erebus, which had just returned from a voyage of unusual success to the Antarctic, and his magnificent equipment, aroused the enthusiasm of the British to the highest pitch and justified them in their hopes for bringing the wearying struggle for the Northwest Passage to an immediate conclusion.

For more than a year everything prospered with the party. By September, 1846, Franklin had navigated the vessels almost within sight of the coast which he had explored twenty years previously, and beyond which the route to Bering Sea was well known. The prize was nearly won when the ships became imprisoned by the ice for the winter, a few miles north of King William Land. The following June Franklin died; the ice continued impenetrable, and did not loosen its grip all that year. In July, 1848, Crozier, who had succeeded to the command, was compelled to abandon the ships, and, with the 105 survivors who were all enfeebled by the three successive winters in the Arctic, started on foot for Back River. How far they got we shall probably never know.

Meanwhile, when Franklin failed to return in 1848—he was provisioned for only three years—England became alarmed and despatched relief expeditions by sea from the Bering Sea and the Atlantic and by land north from Canada, but all efforts failed to gather news of Franklin till 1854, when Rae fell in with some Eskimo hunters near King William Land, who told him of two ships that were beset some years previous, and of the death of all the party from starvation.

In 1857 Lady Franklin, not content with this bare and indirect report of her husband's fate, sacrificed a fortune to equip a searching party to be commanded by Leopold McClintock, one of the ablest and toughest travelers over the ice the world has ever known. In 1859 McClintock verified the Eskimos' sad story by the discovery on King William Land of a record dated April, 1848, which told of Franklin's death and of the abandonment of the ships. He also found among the Eskimos silver plate and other relics of the party; elsewhere he saw one of Franklin's boats on a sledge, with two skeletons inside and clothing and chocolate; in another place he found tents and flags; and elsewhere he made the yet more ghastly discovery of a bleached human skeleton prone on its face, as though attesting the truthfulness of an Eskimo woman who, claiming to have seen forty of the survivors late in 1848, said "they fell down and died as they walked."

The distinction of being the first to make the Northwest Passage, which Franklin so narrowly missed, fell to Robert McClure (1850-53) and Richard Collinson (1850-55), who commanded the two ships sent north through Bering Strait to search for Franklin. McClure accomplished the passage on foot after losing his ship in the ice in Barrow Strait, but Collinson brought his vessel safely through to England. The Northwest Passage was not again made until Roald Amundsen navigated the tiny Gjoa, a sailing sloop with gasoline engine, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, 1903-06.

Yankee whalers each year had been venturing further north in Davis Strait and Baffin Bay and Bering Sea, but America had taken no active part in polar exploration until the sympathy aroused by the tragic disappearance of Franklin induced Henry Grinnell and George Peabody to send out the Advance in charge of Elisha Kent Kane to search for Franklin north of Smith Sound. In spite of inexperience, which resulted in scurvy, fatal accidents, privations, and the loss of his ship, Kane's achievements (1853-55) were very brilliant. He discovered and entered Kane Basin, which forms the beginning of the passage to the polar ocean, explored both shores of the new sea, and outlined what has since been called the American route to the Pole.

Sixteen years later (1871) another American, Charles Francis Hall, who had gained much arctic experience by a successful search for additional traces and relics of Franklin (1862-69), sailed the Polaris through Kane Basin and Kennedy Channel, also through Hall Basin and Robeson Channel, which he discovered, into the polar ocean itself, thus completing the exploration of the outlet which Kane had begun. He took his vessel to the then unprecedented (for a ship) latitude of 82° 11´. But Hall's explorations, begun so auspiciously, were suddenly terminated by his tragic death in November from over-exertion caused by a long sledge journey.

When the ice began to move the ensuing year, his party sought to return, but the Polaris was caught in the deadly grip of an impassable ice pack. After two months of drifting, part of the crew, with some Eskimo men and women, alarmed by the groaning and crashing of the ice during a furious autumn storm, camped on an ice floe which shortly afterwards separated from the ship. For five months, December to April, they lived on this cold and desolate raft, which carried them safely 1300 miles to Labrador, where they were picked up by the Tigress. During the winter one of the Eskimo women presented the party with a baby, so that their number had increased during the arduous experience. Meanwhile the Polaris had been beached on the Greenland shore, and those remaining on the ship were eventually also rescued.

In 1875 Great Britain began an elaborate attack on the Pole vi what was now known as the American route, two ships most lavishly equipped being despatched under command of George Nares. He succeeded in navigating the Alert fourteen miles further north than the Polaris had penetrated four years previous. Before the winter set in, Aldrich on land reached 82° 48´, which was three miles nearer the Pole than Parry's mark made forty-eight years before, and the following spring Markham gained 83° 20´ on the polar ocean. Other parties explored several hundred miles of coast line. But Nares was unable to cope with the scurvy, which disabled thirty-six of his men, or with the severe frosts, which cost the life of one man and seriously injured others.

The next expedition to this region was that sent out under the auspices of the United States government and commanded by Lieutenant—now Major-General—A. W. Greely, U. S. A., to establish at Lady Franklin Bay the American circumpolar station (1881). Greely during the two years at Fort Conger carried on extensive explorations of Ellesmere Land and the Greenland coast, and by the assistance of his two lieutenants, Lockwood and Brainard, wrested from Great Britain the record which she had held for 300 years. Greely's mark was 83° 24´, which bettered the British by four miles. As the relief ship, promised for 1883, failed to reach him or to land supplies at the prearranged point south of Fort Conger, the winter of 1883-84 was passed in great misery and horror. When help finally came to the camp at Cape Sabine, seven men only were alive.

While these important events were occurring in the vicinity of Greenland, interesting developments were also taking place in that half of the polar area north of Siberia. When in 1867 an American whaler, Thomas Long, reported new land, Wrangell Land, about 500 miles northwest of Bering Strait, many hailed the discovery as that of the edge of a supposed continent extending from Asia across the Pole to Greenland, for the natives around Bering Strait had long excited explorers by their traditions of an icebound big land beyond the horizon. Such extravagant claims were made for the new land that Commander De Long, U. S. N., determined to explore it and use it as a base for gaining the Pole. But his ship, the Jeannette, was caught in the ice (September, 1879) and carried right through the place where the new continent was supposed to be. For nearly two years De Long's party remained helpless prisoners until in June, 1881, the ship was crushed and sank, forcing the men to take refuge on the ice floes in mid ocean, 150 miles from the New Siberian Islands. They saved several boats and sledges and a small supply of provisions and water. After incredible hardships and suffering, G. W. Melville, the chief engineer, who was in charge of one of the boats, with nine men, reached, on September 26, a Russian village on the Lena. All the others perished, some being lost at sea, by the foundering of the boats, while others, including De Long, had starved to death after reaching the desolate Siberian coast.

Three years later some Eskimos found washed ashore on the southeast coast of Greenland several broken biscuit boxes and lists of stores, which are said to be in De Long's handwriting. The startling circumstance that these relics in their long drift from where the ship sank had necessarily passed across or very near to the Pole aroused great speculation as to the probable currents in the polar area. Nansen, who had already made the first crossing of Greenland's ice cap, argued that the same current which had guided the relics on their long journey would similarly conduct a ship. He therefore constructed a unique craft, the Fram, so designed that when hugged by the ice pack she would not be crushed, but would be lifted up and rest on the ice; he provisioned the vessel for five years and allowed her to be frozen in the ice near where the Jeannette had sunk, 78° 50´ N., 134° E. (September 25, 1893). When at the end of eighteen months the ship had approached 314 miles nearer to the Pole, Nansen and one companion, Johansen, with kayaks, dogs, sledges, and three months' provisions, deliberately left the ship and plunged northward toward the Pole, March 14, 1895. In twenty-three days the two men had overcome one-third of the distance to the Pole, reaching 86° 12´. To continue onward would have meant certain death, so they turned back. When their watches ran down Providence guided them, and the marvelous physique of both sustained them through fog and storm and threatened starvation until they reached Franz Josef Land, late in August. There they built a hut of stones and killed bears for meat for the winter. In May, 1896, they resumed their southward journey, when fortunately they met the Englishman Jackson, who was exploring the Archipelago.

Meanwhile the Fram, after Nansen left her, continued her tortuous drifting across the upper world. Once she approached as near as 85° 57´ to the Pole—only fifteen miles less than Nansen's farthest. At last, in August, 1896, with the help of dynamite, she was freed from the grip of the ice and hurried home, arriving in time to participate in the welcome of Nansen, who had landed a few days earlier.

Franz Josef Land, where Nansen was rescued by Jackson, has served as the base of many dashes for the Pole. It was from its northernmost point that the illustrious young member of the royal family of Italy, the Duke of the Abruzzi, launched the party captained by Cagni that won from Nansen for the Latin race the honor of the farthest north, 86° 34´, in 1901.

This land, which consists of numerous islands, had been named after the Emperor of Austria-Hungary by Weyprecht and Payer, leaders of the Austrian-Hungarian polar expedition of 1872-74, who discovered and first explored the Archipelago.

It was from Spitzbergen that Andree, with two companions, sailed in his balloon toward the Pole, in July, 1897, never to be heard from again, except for three message buoys dropped in the sea a few miles from the starting-point.

The Northeast Passage was first achieved in 1878-1879 by Adolph Erik Nordenskjold. Step by step energetic explorers, principally Russian, had been mapping the arctic coasts of Europe and Siberia until practically all the headlands and islands were well defined.

Nordenskjold, whose name was already renowned for important researches in Greenland, Nova Zembla, and northern Asia, in less than two months guided the steam whaler Vega from Tromsoe, Norway, to the most easterly peninsula of Asia. But when barely more than 100 miles from Bering Strait, intervening ice blocked his hopes of passing from the Atlantic to the Pacific in a single season and held him fast for ten months.

No rÉsumÉ of polar exploration is complete without mention of Wm. Barents (1594-96) who, for the Dutch of Amsterdam, made three attempts to accomplish the Northeast Passage around Nova Zembla; Wm. Baffin, who discovered Baffin Bay and Smith Sound (1616); Wm. Scoresby, Sr., who reached by ship 81° 30´ N., 19´ E. (1806), a record till Parry eclipsed it; Wm. Scoresby, Jr., who changed all ideas of East Greenland (1822) and made valuable scientific observations, and the German North Polar expedition of 1869-70. One of the ships of the latter was crushed in the ice and sank. The crew escaped to an ice floe on which they drifted in the darkness of an arctic winter for 1300 miles along the coast of Greenland to Frederiksthaal.

The preceding brief summary gives only an inadequate conception of the immense treasures of money and lives expended by the nations to explore the northern ice world and to attain the apex of the earth. All efforts to reach the Pole had failed, notwithstanding the unlimited sacrifice of gold and energy and blood which had been poured out without stint for nearly four centuries. But the sacrifice had not been without compensation. Those who had ventured their lives in the contest had not been actuated solely by the ambition to win a race—to breast the tape first—but to contribute, in Sir John Franklin's words, "to the extension of the bounds of science." The scores of expeditions, in addition to new geographical discoveries, had brought back a wealth of information about the animals and vegetable life, the winds and currents, deep sea temperatures, soundings, the magnetism of the earth, fossils and rock specimens, tidal data, etc., which have enriched many branches of science and greatly increased the sum of human knowledge.

A brief summer excursion to Greenland in 1886 aroused Robert E. Peary, a civil engineer in the United States Navy, to an interest in the polar problem. Peary a few years previously had been graduated from Bowdoin College second in his class, a position which means unusual mental vigor in an institution which is noted for the fine scholarship and intellect of its alumni. He realized at once that the goal which had eluded so many hundreds of ambitious and dauntless men could be won only by a new method of attack.

The first arctic problem with which Peary grappled was considered at that time in importance second only to the conquest of the Pole; namely, to determine the insularity of Greenland and the extent of its projection northward. At the very beginning of his first expedition to Greenland, in 1891, he suffered an accident which sorely taxed his patience as well as his body, and which is mentioned here as it illustrates the grit and stamina of his moral and physical make-up. As his ship, the Kite, was working its way through the ice fields off the Greenland shore, a cake of ice became wedged in the rudder, causing the wheel to reverse. One of the spokes jammed Peary's leg against the casement, making it impossible to extricate himself until both bones of the leg were broken. The party urged him to return to the United States for the winter and to resume his exploration the following year. But Peary insisted on being landed as originally planned at McCormick Bay, stating that the money of his friends had been invested in the project and that he must "make good" to them. The assiduous nursing of Mrs. Peary, aided by the bracing air, so speedily restored his strength that at the ensuing Christmas festivities which he arranged for the Eskimos, he out-raced on snowshoes all the natives and his own men!

In the following May, with one companion, Astrup, he ascended to the summit of the great ice cap which covers the interior of Greenland, 5000 to 8000 feet in elevation, and pushed northward for 500 miles over a region where the foot of man had never trod before, in temperatures ranging from 10° to 50° below zero, to Independence Bay, which he discovered and named, July 4, 1892. Imagine his surprise on descending from the tableland to enter a little valley radiant with gorgeous flowers and alive with murmuring bees, where musk oxen were lazily browsing.

This sledding journey, which he duplicated by another equally remarkable crossing of the ice cap three years later, defined the northern extension of Greenland and conclusively proved that it is an island instead of a continent extending to the Pole. In boldness of conception and brilliancy of results these two crossings of Greenland are unsurpassed in arctic history. The magnitude of Peary's feat is better appreciated when it is recalled that Nansen's historic crossing of the island was below the Arctic Circle, 1000 miles south of Peary's latitude, where Greenland is some 250 miles wide.

Peary now turned his attention to the Pole, which lay 396 geographical miles farther north than any man had penetrated on the western hemisphere. To get there by the American route he must break a virgin trail every mile north from Greely's 83° 24´. No one had pioneered so great a distance northward. Markham and others had attained enduring fame by advancing the flag considerably less than 100 miles, Parry had pioneered 150 miles, and Nansen 128 from his ship.

His experiences in Greenland had convinced Peary, if possible more firmly than before, that the only way of surmounting this last and most formidable barrier was to adopt the manner of life, the food, the snowhouses, and the clothing of the Eskimos, who by centuries of experience had learned the most effective method of combating the rigors of arctic weather; to utilize the game of the northland, the arctic reindeer, musk ox, etc., which his explorations had proved comparatively abundant, thus with fresh meat keeping his men fit and good-tempered through the depressing winter night; and lastly to train the Eskimo to become his sledging crew.

In his first north polar expedition, which lasted for four years, 1898-1902, Peary failed to get nearer than 343 miles to the Pole. Each successive year dense packs of ice blocked the passage to the polar ocean, compelling him to make his base approximately 700 miles from the Pole, or 200 miles south of the headquarters of Nares, too great a distance from the Pole to be overcome in one short season. During this trying period, by sledging feats which in distance and physical obstacles overcome exceeded the extraordinary records made in Greenland, he explored and mapped hundreds of miles of coast line of Greenland and of the islands west and north of Greenland.

On the next attempt, Peary insured reaching the polar ocean by designing and constructing the Roosevelt, whose resistless frame crushed its way to the desired haven on the shores of the polar sea. From here he made that wonderful march of 1906 to 87° 6´, a new world's record. Winds of unusual fury, by opening big leads, robbed him of the Pole and nearly of his life.

The story of the last Peary expedition, which resulted in the discovery of the Pole and of the deep ocean surrounding it, is told in the present volume by Commander Peary. The 396 miles from Greely's farthest had been vanquished as follows: 1900, 30 miles; 1902, 23 miles; 1906, 169 miles; 1909, 174 miles.

No better proof of the minute care with which every campaign was prearranged can be given than the fact that, though Peary has taken hundreds of men north with him on his various expeditions, he has brought them all back, and in good health, with the exception of two, who lost their lives in accidents for which the leader was in no wise responsible. What a contrast this record is to the long list of fatalities from disease, frost, shipwreck, and starvation which in the popular mind has made the word arctic synonymous with tragedy and death.

Thus Robert E. Peary has crowned a life devoted to the exploration of the icy north and to the advancement of science by the hard-won discovery of the North Pole. The prize of four centuries of striving yielded at last to the most persistent and scientific attack ever waged against it. Peary's success was made possible by long experience, which gave him a thorough knowledge of the difficulties to be overcome, and by an unusual combination of mental and physical power—a resourcefulness which enabled him to find a way to surmount all obstacles, a tenacity and courage which knew no defeat, and a physical endowment such as nature gives to few men.

It has been well said that the glory of Peary's achievement belongs to the world and is shared by all mankind. But we, his fellow-countrymen, who have known how he has struggled these many years against discouragement and scoffing and how he has persevered under financial burdens that would have crushed less stalwart shoulders, specially rejoice that he has "made good at last," and that an American has become the peer of Hudson, Magellan, and Columbus.