Читать книгу Beyond Adventure - Roy Chapman Andrews - Страница 16

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A secondary object of the 1894 expedition was to find the mysterious "iron mountain" of the Smith Sound Eskimos of which Captain John Ross had heard in his Arctic expedition of 1818. Ross found that the Eskimos had knives and harpoon points with cutting edges of iron. He thought these might come from a meteorite. The natives depended entirely upon this source for their metal, and for three quarters of a century had refused to tell later British and Danish explorers where it was located. But Peary was different. He had proved himself their friend and given them knives and guns, spears, needles, and other things that literally changed their lives. By unanimous consent of the little tribe, they agreed to guide him to the place where they obtained their iron. It was, they said, on the northern shore of Melville Bay, east of Cape York, Greenland. In May of 1894, with a companion, Hugh J. Lee, and one Eskimo, Peary started on a journey which proved to be one of the most difficult and dangerous of his entire career. They were delayed day after day by terrific storms, and had to cross the mouth of Granville Bay by leaping from one cake of broken ice to another. At the end of a smaller inlet near the southern slope of a mountain, he found the meteorites—three of them—where they had hurtled out of the sky at some time in the far, dim past.

One, the Eskimos called the "Woman," for to them it resembled a woman sewing; the other was named the "Dog." But six miles away lay the great one, "Ahnighito," the "Tent." According to their superstition, an Inniut woman and her dog and tent were thrown out of Heaven by Tonarsuk, the Spirit of Evil. The two smaller ones rested upon the rocks, but the Tent was nearly buried in the earth on a terrace eighty feet above high-water mark and a hundred yards from shore. Peary recognized that the Tent was by far the largest known meteorite in the world, and that the three were of paramount value to science. To bring them to New York was a "must," but he knew it would be a difficult job.

Of the return journey, Lee writes: "We went nearly, or perhaps more than, 200 miles in four days, with nothing to eat, dragging the sledges through very deep snow, and were compelled by open water to climb glaciers from 1000 to 3000 feet high, and on one occasion we had to cut steps or footholds in the icy surface for several hundred feet, and then carry sledges, loads, and dogs up on our backs." Actually the men averaged about 65 miles per march, a near record. They returned to Anniversary Lodge on June 6th.

Later Peary made two unsuccessful attempts to revisit the meteorites, but heavy ice and storms in Melville Bay defeated him both times. It was not until 1895 that his relief steamer Kite pushed into the estuary within a mile and a half of where the celestial visitors lay in their bleak surroundings. The Woman weighed 5500 pounds, and the Dog 1000 pounds. Ahnighito, Peary thought, was as much as 100 tons but it has never been actually weighed. Estimates put it at 65 tons. By the use of jacks, the two smaller masses of iron were hoisted onto a sledge of spruce poles and dragged to the water's edge. But the Woman was nearly lost after all their work. She was placed on a huge cake of ice, forty feet by twenty and seven feet thick, and ferried to the ship. Just as the Kite's tackles were made fast to hoist her aboard, the ice cake split. But the lines held, new ones were warped about the sullen lady, although she was half submerged, and she was hoisted over the ship's side. The Tent could not be dislodged from its age-long bed. Two ten-ton screw-jacks crumpled without moving the giant. The Kite had to retreat to escape being frozen in for the winter.