Читать книгу Beyond Adventure - Roy Chapman Andrews - Страница 12

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He seems to have had no difficulty in obtaining leave from the Navy Department, and his mother loaned him five hundred dollars to finance the expedition. The whaler Eagle, Captain Jackman, Master, dropped the amateur Arctic explorer off at Disco Island, June 6, 1886. Eventually he got a skin boat to take him to the mainland where he engaged Christian Maigaard, the assistant manager of a little settlement of Eskimos, for the ice journey.

Pulling two sledges up the face of the glacier to the top was hard work, but after two days they reached the landward edge of the ice cap at an elevation of 1956 feet. East from this camp stretched an ice plain, cut by deep cracks and crevasses, usually marked by snow bridges. One bridge broke through, and Peary just managed to hang by his arms and scramble out. He was pretty well shaken as he looked down at the ragged blue walls, festooned with giant icicles and frostwork of fantastic patterns, lost in the blue-black night of the unknown depths. Day after day the men pushed on until, at 7525 feet elevation, a southeasterly gale developed and for two days and nights they lay under a rubber blanket with the wind and snow driving in an incessant, sullen roar across the drift above them. On July 19th, the gale ceased and Peary got a good observation of the sun. This camp was almost one hundred miles from the margin of the ice cap. From there they turned back because of lack of food.

The results of Peary's initial attempt at Arctic exploration were unspectacular, but he had penetrated inland farther than any other explorer and had reached a greater elevation. Most important of all, however, was what he had learned of the characteristics of the ice cap and of Arctic travel and equipment. Moreover, his feet were now set on the path that eventually led him to the North Pole.

Back in Washington, a perverse fate still tried to push him southward into the tropics. A new organization, the Maritime Canal Company of Nicaragua, decided upon a final survey of the route. Menocal was again in charge, with Peary second in command.

Matthew Henson, his Negro body servant, accompanied Peary on this expedition. The faithful man never left him, and finally stood at his side when he raised the American flag at the North Pole. "Mat" is still alive, well into his eighties. He worships Peary, almost as a god.

The canal survey was completed in 1888 when Peary was thirty-two years old. At this time he married in Washington Josephine Diebitsch, daughter of a professor in the Smithsonian Institution. It could not have been a happier union. All their lives the couple were devoted and their home life was ideal. But it was a hard role for a young wife. She knew that her husband was dedicated to exploration and that it would mean hardship and long separation, but she always gave Peary fullest support in his ambitions.

A little more than a month after the wedding, news came that Nansen had made the first crossing of Greenland. This was a great disappointment to Peary, but he projected a new plan. He would explore the ice cap in a general northeasterly direction and would find out whether or not Greenland was an island and if it led to the Pole.