Making a good recovery, he set off in May to sledge across North Greenland through snow and over it, and over snow-arched crevasses, often, in cloudy weather, travelling in grey space with nothing visible beyond a foot or two around him. After fifty-seven days' journey to the north-east and along Peary Channel, the northern boundary of the mainland, he left the inland ice for a strange country dotted with snowdrifts and mostly of red sandstone, in which murmuring streams, roaring waterfalls, and the song of snow-buntings formed an agreeable change from the silence of the desert of snow. Four days' hard labouring through this brought him on the 4th of July to Independence Bay on the north-east coast, where from Navy Cliff, nearly four thousand feet high, he looked across to Academy Land on the other side of the bay and beyond it over the region leading down to the farthest north of the Duke of Orleans. "It was almost impossible," he says, "to believe that we were standing upon the northern shore of Greenland as we gazed from the summit of this bronze cliff, with the most brilliant sunshine all about us, with yellow poppies growing between the rocks around our feet, and a herd of muskoxen in the valley behind us. Down in that valley I had found an old friend, a dandelion in bloom, and had seen the bullet-like flight and heard the energetic buzz of the humble-bee." [Illustration: R. E. Peary, U. S. N.] Next year he and his wife were out again to take up their quarters at a house they built at Bowdoin Bay, where, in September, their daughter was born. In March, 1894, he started for another journey across Greenland, with twelve sledges and over ninety dogs, but severe weather drove him back after travelling some two hundred miles. Staying over that winter instead of returning in the _Falcon_, he set out in the spring, and under almost desperate circumstances managed to reach and return from Independence Bay. Following this came his expedition of 1898, in which he spent four winters in the Arctic regions and almost met with Petersen's fate by a venturesome winter sledge journey, which resulted in the freezing of his feet and the loss of eight of his toes. Travelling in Grinnell Land he proved beyond doubt that it was continuous with Ellesmere Land, as had been admitted by those who named it. Following Lockwood's track, he continued it up to 83° 54´, along Hazen Land, practically completing the coast-line to Cape Henry Parish, its furthest east, thus rounding the north of the Greenland archipelago, and even there finding traces of Eskimos and a fauna similar to that of other Arctic lands hundreds of miles further south. And striking northwards over the sea from Cape Hecla, with seven men and six dog-sledges, into the breaking, drifting pack, he made a dash for the Pole which ended at 84° 17´.