It is easy to see how many boys could have a great longing to run away to sea and seek their fortunes in foreign lands; but it is hard to understand why any young man should wish to undertake the awful hardships of bitter cold and blizzards, with the risk of falling down ice-cracks hundreds of feet deep, and of starving or freezing to death, in trying to get to the Pole, especially when there is nothing but snow and ice to see there if he ever could find the place. Yet, in his youth, Robert E. Peary had a strange desire to visit the Inland Ice region of Greenland. Robert was a Pennsylvania lad whose father had died when he was three. He grew up to care for his widowed mother. He went to an eastern college and was graduated second in a class of fifty-one. Then he passed the rigid tests for Engineer in the United States Navy. Like young Robert E. Lee, Robert E. Peary was first assigned to engineering duty on the eastern coast, in Florida. Then he was sent as one of a number of experts in science to survey a route through Nicaragua, as many people believed that a ship canal should run through Nicaragua rather than across the narrow isthmus where the Panama Canal was dug afterward. [Illustration: PEARY IN ARCTIC DRESS WITH HIS ESKIMO DOGS _©1909, Doubleday, Page & Co._] So it was not until he was thirty years old that Robert E. Peary was able to realize the dream of his boyhood and explore the bleak and frozen plains even beyond “Greenland’s icy mountains.” Five years later he started out to go farther north than any white man had even been. His first attempt to reach the Pole was in 1891, when he took with him his young wife. This was the first time a white woman ever had made the journey into the unknown regions of the “Great White North.” With the Pearys in this dangerous undertaking went Dr. Frederick A. Cook, a surgeon, and Matthew Henson, the Pearys’ colored helper. On board the _Kite_--the special ship for this journey--the leader’s leg was broken by the sudden slipping of the rudder. This accident kept them from advancing farther north that fall. Through the constant care of his wife, the faithful Matthew, and Dr. Cook, Lieutenant Peary was restored to health and strength by the following spring.