Nearest the Pole: a narrative of the polar expedition of the Peary Arctic Club in the S.S. Roosevelt, 1905-1906Peary, Robert E. (Robert Edwin)
History
Nearest the Pole: a narrative of the polar expedition of the Peary Arctic Club in the S.S. Roosevelt, 1905-1906
Peary, Robert E. (Robert Edwin)
Arctic regions
The two following marches were made in a thick fog, through which we
groped our way northward, over broken ice and across gigantic, wavelike
drifts of hard snow. One more march in clear weather over frightful
going—consisting of fragments of old floes; ridges of heavy ice thrown
up to heights of twenty-five to fifty feet; crevasses and holes, masked
by snow; the whole intersected by narrow leads of open water—brought us
at 5 A. M. on the 16th of May to the northern edge of a fragment of an
old floe bounded by water. A reconnoissance from the summit of a
pinnacle of the floe, some fifty feet high, showed that we were on the
edge of the disintegrated pack, with a dense water sky not far distant.
My hours for sleep at this camp were occupied in observations, and
making a transit profile of the northern coast from Cape Washington
eastward.
The next day I started back for the land, reached it in one long march
and camped.
Within a mile of our next camp a herd of fifteen musk-oxen lay fast
asleep; I left them undisturbed. From here on, for three marches, we
made great distances over good going, in blinding sunshine, and in the
face of a wind from the east which burned our faces like a sirocco.
The first march took us to a magnificent cape (Cape Bridgman), at which
the northern face of the land trends away to the southeast. This cape is
in the same latitude as Cape Washington. The next two carried us down
the east coast to the 83d parallel. In the first of these we crossed the
mouth of a large fiord penetrating for a long distance in a
southwesterly (true) direction. On the next, in a fleeting glimpse
through the fog, I saw a magnificent mountain of peculiar contour, which
I recognised as the peak seen by me in 1895, from the summit of the
interior ice-cap south of Independence Bay, rising proudly above the
land to the north. This mountain was then named by me Mt. Wistar.
Finally the density of the fog compelled a halt on the extremity of a
low point, composed entirely of fine glacial drift, and which I judged
to be a small island in the mouth of a large fiord.
From my camp of the previous night I had observed this island (?) and
beyond and over it a massive block of a mountain, forming the opposite
cape of a large intervening fiord, and beyond that again another distant
cape. Open water was clearly visible a few miles off the coast, while
not far out dark water clouds reached away to the southeast.
At this camp I remained two nights and a day, waiting for the fog to
lift. Then, as there seemed to be no indication of its doing so, and my
provisions were exhausted, I started on my return journey at 3:30 A. M.
on the 22d of May, after erecting a cairn, in which I deposited the
following record:
COPY OF RECORD IN CAIRN AT CLARENCE WYCKOFF ISLAND
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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