It was not until eleven that night when we again picked up the main trail, in Henson's first pioneer march. When, traveling well in advance of the sledges I picked it up and signaled to my men that I had found it, they nearly went crazy with delight. The region over which we had just come had been an open sea at the last full moon, and a brisk wind from any direction excepting the north would make it the same again; or the raftering from a north wind would make it a ragged surface of broken plate gla.s.s.

It may seem strange to the reader that in this monotonous waste of ice we could distinguish between the various sections of our upward marches and recognize them on return. But, as I have said, my Eskimos know who built or even who has occupied an igloo, with the same instinct by which migratory birds recognize their old nests of the preceding year; and I have traveled these arctic wastes so long and lived so long with these instinctive children of Nature that my sense of location is almost as keen as their own.

At midnight we came upon pieces of a sledge which Egingwah had abandoned on the way up, and at three o'clock in the morning of the 19th we reached the MacMillan-Goodsell return igloos. We had covered Henson's three pioneer marches in fifteen and one-half hours of travel.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BREAKING CAMP. PUSHING THE SLEDGES UP TO THE TIRED DOGS]

Another dog played out that day and was shot, leaving me with thirty. At the end of this march we could see the mountains of Grant Land in the far distance to the south, and the sight thrilled us. It was like a vision of the sh.o.r.es of the home land to sea-worn mariners.

Again, the next day, we made a double march. Starting late in the afternoon we reached the sixth outward camp, "boiled the kettle," and had a light lunch; then plunged on again until early in the morning of the 20th, when we reached the fifth outward camp.

So far we had seemed to bear a charm which protected us from all difficulties and dangers. While Bartlett and Marvin and, as I found out later, Borup had been delayed by open leads, at no single lead had we been delayed more than a couple of hours. Sometimes the ice had been firm enough to carry us across; sometimes we had made a short detour; sometimes we halted for the lead to close; sometimes we used an ice-cake as an improvised ferry: but whatever the mode of our crossing, we had crossed without serious difficulty.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LAST CAMP ON THE ICE ON THE RETURN]

It had seemed as if the guardian genius of the polar waste, having at last been vanquished by man, had accepted defeat and withdrawn from the contest.

Now, however, we were getting within the baleful sphere of influence of the "Big Lead," and in the fifth igloos from Columbia (the first ones north of the lead) I pa.s.sed an intensely uncomfortable night, suffering from a variety of disagreeable symptoms which I diagnosed as those of quinsy. On this march we had brought the land up very rapidly so that I had some consolation for my discomfort. In three or four days at the most, barring accident, our feet would again press land. Despite my aching throat and no sleep, I took much comfort from this welcome thought.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SOUNDING]

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

BACK TO LAND AGAIN

We had now reached the neighborhood of the "Big Lead" which had held us in check so many days on the upward journey and which had nearly cost the lives of my entire party in 1906. I antic.i.p.ated trouble, therefore, in the march of April 20-21, and I was not disappointed. Although the "Big Lead" was frozen over we found that Bartlett on his return had lost the main trail here and did not find it again. For the rest of the ice journey, therefore, we were compelled to follow the single trail made by Bartlett instead of our well beaten outward trail. I could not complain.

We had kept the beaten road back to within some fifty miles of the land.

For me this was the most uncomfortable march of the entire trip. It was made following a sleepless night in a cold igloo. For all that my clothes were wet with perspiration, my jaw and head throbbed and burned incessantly, though toward the end of the march I began to feel the effects of the quinine I had taken, and not long after we reached the captain's igloo the worst of the symptoms had departed. But it was hard drilling that day, and our troubles were in no way lessened by the fact that the dogs seemed utterly without energy or spirit.

The beautiful weather which had accompanied us for several days still continued on the next day. It was really a surprising stretch of splendid weather. We marched six hours, then stopped for luncheon, and then drilled along for six hours more. Repeatedly we pa.s.sed fresh tracks of bear and hare, together with numerous fox tracks. Save for these, the march was uneventful, with the exception of two narrow leads which we crossed over thin young ice. All that day the sun was hot and blinding to an almost intolerable degree. It would have been practically impossible to travel with the sun in our faces, so fierce were its rays.

Yet all this day the temperature ranged between 18 and 30 below zero.

The last day's journey before we reached sh.o.r.e began at 5 P.M. in that same brilliant, clear, calm weather. A short distance from camp we encountered an impracticable lead which the captain's trail crossed. In one fruitless attempt to pa.s.s it we got one of our teams in the water.

Ultimately the lead swung to the east, and we found the captain's trail, took it up, and worked around the end of the lead.

[Ill.u.s.tration: APPROACHING THE PEAKS OF CAPE COLUMBIA OVER THE SURFACE OF THE "GLACIAL FRINGE"]

Only a short distance further on we got our first glimpse of the edge of the glacial fringe ahead of us and stopped our march long enough to take some photographs. Before midnight that night the whole party had reached the glacial fringe of Grant Land. We had now left the ice of the polar sea and were practically on _terra firma_. When the last sledge came to the almost vertical edge of the glacier's fringe I thought my Eskimos had gone crazy. They yelled and called and danced until they fell from utter exhaustion. As Ootah sank down on his sledge he remarked in Eskimo: "The devil is asleep or having trouble with his wife or we should never have come back so easily." We stopped long enough for a leisurely luncheon with tea _ad libitum_ and then pressed on until Cape Columbia was reached.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CRANE CITY AT CAPE COLUMBIA, ON THE RETURN]

It was almost exactly six o'clock on the morning of April 23 when we reached the igloo of "Crane City" at Cape Columbia and the work was done. Here I wrote these words in my diary:

"My life work is accomplished. The thing which it was intended from the beginning that I should do, the thing which I believed could be done, and that I could do, I have done. I have got the North Pole out of my system after twenty-three years of effort, hard work, disappointments, hardships, privations, more or less suffering, and some risks. I have won the last great geographical prize, the North Pole, for the credit of the United States. This work is the finish, the cap and climax of nearly four hundred years of effort, loss of life, and expenditure of fortunes by the civilized nations of the world, and it has been accomplished in a way that is thoroughly American. I am content."

[Ill.u.s.tration: BACK ON THE "GLACIAL FRINGE"

(Land Ice of Grant Land Near Cape Columbia, April 23, 1909)]

Our return from the Pole was accomplished in sixteen marches, and the entire journey from land to the Pole and back again occupied fifty-three days, or forty-three marches. It had been, as a result of our experience and perfected clothing and equipment, an amazingly comfortable return as compared with previous ones, but a little difference in the weather would have given us a different story to tell. There was no one in our party who was not delighted to have pa.s.sed the treacherous lead and those wide expanses of young thin ice where a gale would have put an open sea between us and the land and rendered our safe return hazardous, to say the least.

In all probability no member of that little party will ever forget our sleep at Cape Columbia. We slept gloriously for practically two days, our brief waking intervals being occupied exclusively with eating and with drying our clothes.

Then for the ship. Our dogs, like ourselves, had not been hungry when we arrived, but simply lifeless with fatigue. They were different animals now, and the better ones among them stepped out with tightly curled tails and uplifted heads, their iron legs treading the snow with piston-like regularity and their black muzzles every now and then sniffing the welcome scent of the land.

[Ill.u.s.tration: EGINGWAH BEFORE STARTING ON THE SLEDGE TRIP]

[Ill.u.s.tration: EGINGWAH AFTER THE RETURN FROM THE TRIP]

[Ill.u.s.tration: OOTAH BEFORE STARTING ON THE SLEDGE TRIP]

[Ill.u.s.tration: OOTAH AFTER THE RETURN FROM THE SLEDGE TRIP]

(The Portraits at the Left Were Made by Flashlight on the _Roosevelt_ Before the Journey.

Those on the Right Were Taken Immediately After the Return)

We reached Cape Hecla in one march of forty-five miles and the _Roosevelt_ in another of equal length. My heart thrilled as, rounding the point of the cape, I saw the little black ship lying there in its icy berth with st.u.r.dy nose pointing straight to the Pole.

And I thought of that other time three years before when, dragging our gaunt bodies round Cape Rawson on our way from the Greenland coast, I thought the _Roosevelt's_ slender spars piercing the brilliant arctic sunlight as fair a sight as ever I had seen. As we approached the ship I saw Bartlett going over the rail. He came out along the ice-foot to meet me, and something in his face told me he had bad news even before he spoke.

"Have you heard about poor Marvin?" he asked.

"No," I answered.

Then he told me that Marvin had been drowned at the "Big Lead," coming back to Cape Columbia. The news staggered me, killing all the joy I had felt at the sight of the ship and her captain. It was indeed a bitter flavor in the cup of our success. It was hard to realize at first that the man who had worked at my side through so many weary months under conditions of peril and privation, to whose efforts and example so much of the success of the expedition had been due, would never stand beside me again. The manner of his death even will never be precisely known. No human eye was upon him when he broke through the treacherous young ice that had but recently closed over a streak of open water. He was the only white man in the supporting party of which he was in command and with which he was returning to the land at the time he met his death. As was customary, on breaking camp he had gone out ahead of the Eskimos, leaving the natives to break camp, harness the dogs, and follow. When he came to the "Big Lead," the recent ice of which was safe and secure at the edges, it is probable that, hurrying on, he did not notice the gradual thinning of the ice toward the center of the lead until it was too late and he was in the water. The Eskimos were too far in the rear to hear his calls for help, and in that ice-cold water the end must have come very quickly. He who had never shrunk from loneliness in the performance of his duty had at last met death alone.

Coming along over the trail in his footsteps, the Eskimos of his party came to the spot where the broken ice gave them the first hint of the accident. One of the Eskimos said that the back of Marvin's fur jacket was still visible at the top of the water, while the condition of the ice at the edge seemed to indicate that Marvin had made repeated efforts to drag himself from the water, but that the ice was so thin that it had crumbled and broken beneath his weight, plunging him again into the icy water. He must have been dead some time before the Eskimos came up. It was, of course, impossible for them to rescue the body, since there was no way of their getting near it. Of course they knew what had happened to Marvin; but with childish superst.i.tion peculiar to their race they camped there for a while on the possibility that he might come back. But after a time, when he did not come back, Kudlooktoo and "Harrigan" became frightened. They realized that Marvin was really drowned and they were in dread of his spirit. So they threw from the sledge everything they could find belonging to him, that the spirit, if it came back that way, might find these personal belongings and not pursue the men. Then they hurried for the land as fast as they could go.

Quiet in manner, wiry in build, clear of eye, with an atmosphere of earnestness about him, Ross G. Marvin had been an invaluable member of the expedition. Through the long hot weeks preceding the sailing of the _Roosevelt_, he worked indefatigably looking after the a.s.sembling and delivery of the countless essential items of our outfit, until he, Bartlett, and myself were nearly exhausted. On the northern voyage he was always willing and ready, whether for taking an observation on deck or stowing cargo in the hold. When the Eskimos came aboard, his good humor, his quiet directness, and his physical competence gained him at once their friendship and respect. From the very first he was able to manage these odd people with uncommon success.

Later, when face to face with the stern problems of life and work in the arctic regions, he met them quietly, uncomplainingly, and with a steady, level persistence that could have but one result, and I soon came to know Ross Marvin as a man who would accomplish the task a.s.signed to him, whatever it might be. The tidal and meteorological observations of the expedition were his particular charge, while, during the long dark winter night, his mathematical training enabled him to be of great a.s.sistance in working out problems of march formation, transportation and supplies, and arrangements of the supporting parties. In the spring sledge campaign of 1906 he commanded a separate division. When the great storm swept the polar sea and scattered my parties hopelessly in a chaos of shattered ice, Marvin's division, like my own farther north, was driven eastward and came down upon the Greenland coast, whence he brought his men safely back to the ship. From this expedition he returned trained in arctic details and thoroughly conversant with the underlying principles of all successful work in northern regions, so that when he went north with us in 1908, he went as a veteran who could absolutely be depended upon in an emergency.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MEMORIAL ERECTED TO THE MEMORY OF PROFESSOR ROSS G.

MARVIN, AT CAPE SHERIDAN]

The bones of Ross G. Marvin lie farther north than those of any other human being. On the northern sh.o.r.e of Grant Land we erected a cairn of stones, and upon its summit we placed a rude tablet inscribed: "In Memory of Ross G. Marvin of Cornell University, Aged 34. Drowned April 10, 1909, forty-five miles north of C. Columbia, returning from 86 38'

N. Lat." This cenotaph looks from that bleak sh.o.r.e northward toward the spot where Marvin met his death. His name heads that glorious roll-call of arctic heroes among whom are Willoughby, Franklin, Sontag, Hall, Lockwood, and others who died in the field, and it must be some consolation to those who grieve for him that his name is inseparably connected with the winning of that last great trophy for which, through nearly four centuries, men of every civilized nation have suffered and struggled and died.

The Eskimos of whom Marvin was in command at the time he lost his life fortunately overlooked, in throwing Marvin's things upon the ice, a little canvas packet on the up-standers of the sledge containing a few of his notes, among them what is probably the last thing he ever wrote.

It is so typical of the man's intelligent devotion to his duty that it is here appended as he wrote it. It will be seen that it was written on the very day that I last saw him alive, that day upon which he turned back to the south from his farthest north.

"March 25, 1909. This is to certify that I turned back from this point with the third supporting party, Commander Peary advancing with nine men in the party, seven sledges with the standard loads, and sixty dogs. Men and dogs are in first cla.s.s condition. The captain, with the fourth and last supporting party, expects to turn back at the end of five more marches. Determined our lat.i.tude by observations on March 22, and again to-day, March 25. A copy of the observations and computations is herewith enclosed. Results of observations were as follows: Lat.i.tude at noon, March 22, 85 48'

north. Lat.i.tude at noon, March 25, 86 38' north.