Читать книгу Beyond Adventure - Roy Chapman Andrews - Страница 8

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When Peary returned from the Arctic, he went immediately to his summer home at Eagle Island, Maine, to wait until his daily records and scientific data had been passed upon by a well-known geographical society. Thus Cook had a clear field in which to spread his propaganda, which he did with consummate skill.

Dr. Hobbs records that only once during this time did Peary appear in public. That was in October, in New York, at the great naval parade on the Hudson River celebrating the tercentenary of the voyage of Fulton's Clermont. He had promised that the Roosevelt could be included, and he would not break his word. Peary stood on the quarter-deck of the Roosevelt while insulting epithets and challenges came from well-organized Cook supporters on passing excursion boats. No one on the Roosevelt was allowed to make a reply. George Borup, one of the polar party, told me that never in his life had he endured such an ordeal and that for Peary it must have been absolute hell.

Within informed circles, Peary had enemies who were only too ready to support Cook and thus bring discredit to the man they disliked. The flame of unreasoning popular hysteria was fanned by certain well-known Arctic explorers, competitors of Peary, who were jealous of his success where some of them had failed. The great Nansen only grudgingly gave praise, and the Scandinavians Sverdrup, Rasmussen, and Amundsen actively supported Cook. Most important enemies of Peary in the United States were General A. W. Greely and Admiral W. S. Schley. In 1883, Greely, then a lieutenant with no Arctic experience, had commanded the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition which ended in awful tragedy. When a relief ship did not appear as scheduled, Greely and his party left their well-stocked base camp at Fort Conger in panic, thinking they would be cut off in the Arctic, and dashed southward to Cape Sabine on the Ellesmere Island coast, with inadequate supplies. There, many of the party died of starvation, and charges of cannibalism were hinted. Only seven out of twenty-four men remained alive to be rescued by Admiral Schley, then a commander in the Navy. One of the most dramatic evenings I ever spent was when I, as president of the Explorers Club, with two others, read the heartbreaking letters to his wife found on the body of the doctor of the expedition. With the doctor's letters were his wife's last letters to him, received in Labrador on the way north. They are intimate revelations of two lonely souls: one a young girl facing long months of separation from her husband; the other a man slowly dying of starvation. In his account of the North Pole expedition written for Hampton's magazine, Peary said of Greely's Starvation Camp at Cape Sabine: "I first saw the place in August, 1896, in a blinding snowstorm. . . . I shall never forget the impression of that day—the pity and sickening sense of horror. The saddest part of the whole story for me, was the knowledge that the catastrophe was unnecessary, that it might have been avoided. I, and my men, have been cold, and have been near to starvation in the Arctic when cold and hunger were inevitable; but the horrors of Cape Sabine were not inevitable. They are a blot upon the record of American Arctic exploration."