Читать книгу Beyond Adventure - Roy Chapman Andrews - Страница 17

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The next year, 1896, Peary went north with a larger ship, the Hope, of 307 tons net register, and with more powerful appliances. What happened can best be told in his own words: "The first thing to be done was to tear the heavenly visitor from its frozen bed of centuries and, as it rose slowly, inch by inch under the resistless heft of the hydraulic jacks, gradually displaying its ponderous sides, it grew upon us as Niagara grows upon the observer, and there was not one of us unimpressed by the enormousness of this lump of metal. The expressions of the Eskimos about the saviksoah (the great iron) were low but earnest and it, and the other great irons (the jacks) which could tear it from its bed, awed them to the utmost . . . It was interesting and irritating, to watch the stubbornness of the monster as it sulked and hung back to the last inch . . . Urged by the resistless lift of the jacks, the huge brown mass would slowly and stubbornly rise on its side, and be forced to a position of unstable equilibrium . . . When it struck the ground, the harder rocks would elicit streams of sparks from its brown surface before they crumbled, the softer ones would dissolve into dust and smoke, and the giant would bury itself half its depth in the earth, with the slow resistless motion of a hydraulic punch cutting cold iron, then lunge suddenly forward a few feet, throwing up a dam of earth and stones before it like the terminal moraine of a glacier . . . Never have I had the terrific majesty of the force of gravity and the meaning of the terms 'momentum' and 'inertia' so powerfully brought home to me, as in handling this mountain of iron . . .

"When lowered slowly upon heavy timber-blocking by the jacks, it settled resistlessly into the wood until it seemed as if it would never stop . . . it would bite into the steel rails like a punch and the rail itself would sink into the timber beneath if near the middle, or crush through it if near the end."

The sixty-ton jack gave out and the weight damaged the thirty-ton jacks that had done most of the work. Progress became so slow that before he could get the meteorite close to the shore, the pack ice of Melville Bay, driving in upon the beach, forced him to pull the ship out with haste to avoid having her crushed like an eggshell against the rocks.

Peary was bitterly disappointed, but his determination to bring the great mass of iron to New York and the American Museum of Natural History was only strengthened. The word "failure" simply did not exist in his vocabulary. The next year, 1897, he again went north in the Hope, with stronger planks, heavier rails, and more powerful jacks. Foot by foot the monster was dragged from land across a bridge to the ship, and lowered onto a bed of great oak timbers in the hold. Hurriedly the explorers braced it, for bad weather was in the offing. Out across Davis Strait they steamed, into the teeth of a furious storm. The superstitious sailors of the Hope thought their last hour had come, for they were sure the iron had supernatural powers and the Devil himself would prevent it from ever leaving its northern home. Of this experience Peary writes: ". . . during the night of Sept. 8th, the Hope rolled and pitched dizzily upon the furious seas till the grey light of dawn began to filter through the tumult. Time after time the lee dead-eyes were under water, and as the Hope leaned and wavered and hesitated with her rail out of sight, and the boiling tumult to leeward seething up to the side of the companionway, it seemed as if she would never right . . .

"Crouched behind the weather rail, with eyes just pupil-width above it, I watched the turmoil. The wind, resistless and sonorous as Niagara, roared across the seething waters, almost as tangible as they . . . More than one anxious heart on board was certain at every wave shock that the demoniac iron had broken loose and was smashing a way for itself through the ship's side, and more than one gave up hope of ever seeing the morning light again."

But the bracing held. Next morning they steamed under the lee of Cape of God's Mercy, named by Davis centuries ago. Every man on board offered thanks to the One who gives life and takes it away.

Bringing the great meteorite to New York was a high spot in Peary's career. The difficulties had seemed almost insurmountable, and had he not been an engineer of unusual ability and a man who refused to fail, it never could have been accomplished.

Today, all three of the Cape York meteorites are on exhibition in the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History, in New York City. Thousands of visitors pass by Ahnighito every year, but few of them know that, for centuries, it was sacred to the Eskimos; few know of the heartbreaking toil, and the near tragedy, that marked its journey from the bleak shores of Greenland to its present home.