Round About the North PoleGordon, W. J. (William John)
History
Round About the North Pole
Gordon, W. J. (William John)
Arctic regions; North Pole
As it was then the 22nd of June, 1884, and they had had only forty days'
complete rations to live upon, Schley hurried off at once. Had he been
two days later he would have been too late. There was a tent wrecked by
the gale, with its pole toppling over and only kept in place by the guy
ropes. Ripping it up with a knife, a sight of horror was disclosed. On
one side, close to the opening, with his head towards the outside, lay
what was apparently a dead man. On the opposite side was a poor fellow,
alive but without hands or feet, and with a spoon tied to the stump of
his right arm. Two others, seated on the ground, were pouring something
out of a rubber bottle into a tin can. Directly opposite, on his hands
and knees, was a dark man with a long matted beard, in a dirty and
tattered dressing-gown with a little red skull cap on his head, and
brilliant staring eyes. As Colwell appeared, he raised himself a little,
and put on a pair of eyeglasses.
"Who are you?" asked Colwell.
The man made no answer, staring at him vacantly.
"Who are you?" again.
One of the men spoke up. "That's the Major—Major Greely."
Colwell crawled in and took him by the hand, saying to him, "Greely, is
this you?"
"Yes," said Greely in a faint, broken voice, hesitating with his words;
"yes—seven of us left—here we are—dying—like men. Did what I came to
do—beat the best record."
Near at hand were ten graves. The bodies, despite Greely's
remonstrances, were taken up and removed for burial in the United
States. "Little could be seen of the condition of the bodies, as they
had been clothed, and all that appeared was intact. In preparing them
subsequently," says Schley, "it was found that six had been cut and the
flesh removed." One of these, that of a cavalryman serving under the
assumed name of Henry, had a bullet in it. He had been shot, at Greely's
written order, "for stealing sealskin thongs, the only remaining food."
The next to add to our knowledge of the northern coast of Greenland was
Robert E. Peary, of the American Navy, who seems to have devoted his
life to Arctic exploration. On his first expedition in 1886, he
penetrated with Maigaard for some distance into the country in the
neighbourhood of Jakobshavn as a sort of pioneering venture. In 1891,
accompanied by his wife, when outward bound in the _Kite_ in the
Melville Bay pack, he had his leg broken. The ship had been butting a
passage through the spongy sheets of ice which had imprisoned her, when
in going astern a detached cake struck the rudder, jamming the tiller
against the wheel-house where Peary was standing, and pinned his leg
long enough to snap it between the knee and the ankle. In spite of this
he insisted on being landed with the rest of the party at McCormick Bay,
a little to the north of Whale Sound, where a house was built and the
winter spent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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