Читать книгу Beyond Adventure - Roy Chapman Andrews - Страница 14

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For the trip across the ice cap, Peary chose only Astrup, a young Danish ski expert, as a companion, for he believed that a small party could be more effective than a larger one. Gibson and Cook accompanied them for the first 130 miles to help with the loads, and then returned. The explorers set out May 3rd, with three sleds, and fourteen dogs, and laid their course northeastward, traveling at night to avoid the glare of the sun. Long marches over hard snow stretches, halts for blizzards and detours for crevasses and ponds on the ice surface, formed the order of their days. At times the men suffered from heat in their fur clothes. Land was sighted on June 26th, and five days later a wide trenchlike opening with cliffs on either side could be clearly seen. The descent from the ice cap was abrupt, and streams of thaw-water had to be forded every few miles. They had tough going over a great moraine dotted with patches of snow. The jagged rocks cut their foot gear so badly that both men had to use mittens, caps, and parts of clothing to keep their feet covered. Here Peary killed his first musk ox: "Two were lying down, less than a hundred yards away. One was entirely quiet but the other turned his head in my direction as I coughed in my excitement. My crippled leg had thrown me out of all the deer [reindeer] hunts about Red Cliff, and lack of practice and the nature of the game before me gave me the severest kind of buck fever. As I raised my Winchester it was with the utmost difficulty that I could keep the sight on that great shaggy head. I pulled the trigger and heard the bullet reach the mark somewhere. Much to my surprise, as I appeared on the scene he rose leisurely and advanced toward me, as if to see what might be the trouble. A second shot point blank staggered and discouraged him, and he turned away giving me the desired shot back of the fore shoulder. As he fell, the other rose leisurely, exposing as he did so, the same fatal shot . . .

"Familiar with descriptions and pictures of the musk ox, I had yet obtained no true conceptions of the appearance of these strange denizens of the fartherest north . . . they were just shedding their heavy winter coats of wool and this, as it worked out through the long coarse black hair of the summer coat, fell to the ground on either side, giving the animal the appearance of size greatly in excess of the reality. This, with their slow sedate movements, made an impression which I shall never forget."

Twenty-six miles from the moraine they climbed a long incline to a plateau which fell away in a sheer wall 3800 feet high. Below them lay a great bay of the sea. Peary writes: "Before us stretched new lands and waters, to which, with the explorer's prerogative, I gave names. . . . It was almost impossible for us to believe that we were standing on 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 musk oxen in the valley behind us."

Peary named the fiord Independence Bay in honor of the day, July 4th. At the summit of what he called Navy Cliff, he erected a cairn of stones and in it placed an outline of his crossing, "Which should be in the coming years the silent record of our visit here." In 1912, more than twenty years after Peary's discovery, the Danish North Greenland Expedition under the famous explorer Knud Rasmussen recovered the record, which read:

Have this day, with one companion, Eivind Astrup, and eight dogs, reached this point via the Inland Ice from McCormick Bay, Whale Sound. We have travelled over 500 miles, and both we and the dogs are in good condition. I have named this Fiord "Independence" in honor of that day, July 4th, dear to all Americans, on which we looked down into it.

Have killed five musk oxen in the valley above and seen several others. I start back for Whale Sound tomorrow.

R. E. Peary, U.S. Navy

Of this discovery Dr. Hobbs says: "There were also two American papers. To this precious record Peter Freuchen added (in Danish) 'Taken from the cairn on Navy Cliff the 22nd of July 1912, and handed over to Knud Rasmussen, the Leader of the Expedition.' Freuchen also reported that the tracks in the gravel of Peary and his companion, as they had leaned against the cairn, were well preserved after a score of years."

The return journey, when they had regained the interior ice cap, was a dreary succession of blizzards, fog, and high winds. Several of the dogs gave out and had to be fed to the living animals. On August 3rd, after three months on the ice cap, the familiar land near Red Cliff base came into view. They had covered 1200 miles on the round trip. "This first great sledge journey of Peary's in north Greenland had almost completely realized his expectations through discovering the sea on the east coast and making probable, though it did not prove, the insularity of the great land mass," says Dr. Hobbs.