The lead ran east and west, meeting our course at right angles. It was an awful-looking hole. We circled for about ten minutes, looking for enough open water to land in. The lead was choked up with a chaotic mass of floating ice floes, and it looked as if some one had started to dynamite the ice pack. Ice blocks standing on edge or piled high on top of one another, hummocks and pressure-ridges, was all that greeted our eyes. It was like trying to land in the Grand Canyon. We came down in a little lagoon among the ice-floes, taxied over to a huge ice-cake, and, anchoring our plane to it, jumped out with our sextant and artificial horizon to find out where we were. Not knowing what to expect, I carried my rifle, but after our long flight I was a bit unsteady on my legs, tumbled down into the deep snow, and choked up the barrel. Our eyes were bloodshot and we were almost stone-deaf after listening to the unceasing roar of our motors for eight hours, and the stillness seemed intensified. Looking around on landing, I had the feeling that nothing but death could be at home in this part of the world and that there could not possibly be any life in such an environment, when I was surprised to see a seal pop up his head beside the plane. I am sure he was as surprised as we were, for he raised himself half out of the water to inspect us and seemed not at all afraid to approach, as he came almost up to us. We had no thought of taking his life, for we expected to be off and on our way again towards the Pole after our observation. His curiosity satisfied, he disappeared, and we never saw another sign of life in those waters during our entire stay in the ice. Our observations showed that we had come down in Lat. 87° 44′ N., Long. 10° 20′ West. As our flight meridian was 12° East, where we landed was, therefore, 22° 20′ off our course. This westerly drift had cost us nearly a degree in latitude and enough extra fuel to have carried us to the Pole. As it was, we were just 136 nautical miles from it. At the altitude at which we had been flying just before descending, our visible horizon was forty-six miles; which means that we had been able to see ahead as far as Lat. 88° 30′ N., or to within just ninety miles of the North Pole. We had left civilization, and eight hours later we were able to view the earth within ninety miles of the goal that it had taken Peary twenty-three years to reach. Truly “the efforts of one generation may become the commonplace of the next.”