The _Roosevelt_ lies below me, on one side the frozen shore of the Arctic “Ultima Thule,” on the other the great white disk of the central Polar Sea with its mysteries and its terrors, its story of heroic effort, and its still unconquered secret. No other ship has been so far north in this region and but one other ship has reached so high a latitude anywhere in the entire circuit of the Polar Sea, and that one did not attain her vantage ground by stress of continued battle, as has the _Roosevelt_, but drifted to her position—helpless and inert in the grasp of the ice. Yet the _Roosevelt_ lies there, sturdy but graceful, her slender masts piercing the fog and falling snow; a nimbus-circled glow of light at every port, and a broad bar of yellow luminance from the galley lamp shining forward over her and out through the mist, just as if she were a steamer anchored in the North River in a foggy night. As I look at her a whole series of pictures rises before me. The bright days at Bucksport, Maine, when I and one other watched her grow into sturdy shape under the fostering care of her builder, Captain Dix; the launching, when Mrs. Peary, smashing an ice-encased bottle of wine against the steel-clad stern, christened her “_Roosevelt_”; New York Harbour, with the tribute to her mission, from all the surrounding craft; that black night in the straits of Belle Isle; the fog-shrouded swell of the North Atlantic and Davis Strait; the familiar black cliffs of Cape York rising directly over her bow; the perfect summer day at Bache Peninsula; the battleroyal with the huge floes as we crossed and recrossed Kennedy and Robeson Channels; the towering cliffs of Cape Constitution, Franklin Island and Polaris Promontory as she breasted the fierce north wind blowing down the Channel, with her engines stubbornly throbbing “Northward, Northward, Northward”; and finally the view that gray September morning when we rounded Rawson and opened up the ice-bound northern shore of Grant Land, with the wide-stretching ice-fields of the central Polar Sea fading away under the northern horizon. CHAPTER IV THROUGH THE “GREAT NIGHT” ON THE SHORES OF THE CENTRAL POLAR SEA The winter, which for convenience I assume to comprise the time from November 1st to February 7th, the date of the return of the last of the field parties, was marked by practically the same ice and atmospheric conditions as the fall, accompanied of course by a greater degree of cold and almost entire absence of light.