Читать книгу Beyond Adventure - Roy Chapman Andrews - Страница 13

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He set about raising the money, and in 1891 ten thousand dollars had been subscribed. The expedition sailed June 6, 1891, on the sealer Kite, and included Mrs. Peary and six others, among whom was Dr. Frederick A. Cook, surgeon. Also there was a group of scientists from Philadelphia. It was Cook's first trip to the North. Mrs. Peary became the first white woman to spend a winter in the Arctic.

In Melville Bay, the Kite ran into heavy ice floes. Peary was leaning over the stern rail when a great ice cake hit the rudder. One of the spokes of the wheel caught Peary's leg and snapped both bones just above the ankle. Dr. Cook set the fractures. The others wanted Peary to return to the U.S. on the Kite but he would not consider such a course, and when the ship reached the party's winter quarters in Inglefield Gulf, he was carried ashore. It was five weeks before he could walk, but he directed the work of building the house and never complained at his hard luck. The camp was named Red Cliff House.

Before the long night set in, it was imperative to obtain the winter's supply of meat. Peary, Dr. Cook, Mrs. Peary, Mat Henson, and two Eskimos were in a small boat when they discovered a herd of walrus on an ice pan, and harpooned a big female. She gave them a regular "Nantucket sleigh ride" before they put a bullet in her head. Peary writes: "Our appetite for sport had been only whetted by this adventure and we had a new and still more exciting experience a few minutes later. We suddenly ran into a school and blazing away we killed two of the animals. The rest of them resented our intrusion, and we suddenly became the hunted instead of the hunters. There were perhaps one hundred of the enraged brutes and we had the hardest kind of work to keep them away from the boat. Our repeaters blazed continuously, and to add to the din, Ikwa beat a lively tattoo on the boat with his harpoon and emitted the most startling yells. Mrs. Peary was very cool through it all, and slipping down from her seat beside me in the stern into the bottom of the boat, where she could with her body shield my injured leg, now knitting in the splints, from the excited movements of the others, she steadily filled the magazines of our Winchesters as they were emptied and enabled us to keep up such a continuous fire that the huge brutes, though fiercely and repeatedly led to the charge by an old bull, could not stand the uninterrupted blaze and crash of our repeaters."

By the time the sun left, they had collected 11 walrus, 41 reindeer (caribou), 4 seals, 1 bear, and 300 little auks and guillemots. These birds are a great source of food to the Eskimos as well as to every Arctic explorer. George Borup, who was on Peary's successful polar expedition of 1909, says of them: "On the top of the mountain we saw a couple of the implements [nets] the Eskimos use to catch little auks. All you have to do is to sit down on the rocks, it being immaterial whether you are out of sight or not. The auks, returning from the sea where they've been feeding, fly in countless thousands—one big stream. It is impossible to convey any idea, no matter what one may say, of their incredible numbers. . . . They don't fly high and all you have to do is to make wild swings and you will surely catch something. . . . They are about as big as robins. . . . Harry Whitney tells of a huskie [Eskimo] who bagged—or netted—two hundred and eighty in three hours. The natives supplied Dr. Kane with eight thousand per week. Langdon Gibson [brother of Charles Dana Gibson] who was with the Commander in '91, got ninety odd, I think, in one shoot."