SIDE-LIGHTS ON THE PEARY EXPEDITION 79 



Pole ? We hardly dared to believe it, although we had both left him 

 with conditions favorable for the achievement. 



"We returned from Cape Morris K. Jesup to the ship as quick/,- 

 as we could after completing our observations. 



"Oh, by the way, I haven't told you what I found at Fort 

 Conger, have I?" ejaculated MacMillan. 



The correspondents shook their heads. 



"Well, you may find it interesting," MacMillan remarked as a 

 prelude to his tale. 



This did not belong to the expedition above described, but to 

 one made in November, 1908, when the "Roosevelt" was in winter 

 quarters at Fort Sheridan. He and Borup had started south on a 

 hunting expedition. When ninety miles from the ship, in latitude 

 8 1 degrees 44 minutes, they had come on the base of the Greely 

 expedition. Fort Conger it was then and is still called. Here it 

 was that the expedition had established a base after being landed 

 from the steamer "Proteus" in 1881, and it was this last bulwark of 

 safety that Greely and his men abandoned in 1883 after vainly 

 waiting for the return of the "Proteus." The relief ship had been 

 crushed in the ice, and the consequent tragedy of slow starvation 

 at Cape Sabine, the point reached by them in their retreat south, is 

 common in the annals of Arctic exploration. The particulars of the 

 Greely horror will be given in a later chapter. 



The two hunters came upon the old stronghold of the Greely 

 expedition in the middle of the Arctic night some time in January. 

 The storehouse, with its twenty-seven years of snow blanketing, 

 still stood as it had been left the day that the sorely stricken men of 

 the "Proteus" had forsaken it to turn southward just a monument 

 to the lure of the northland, there alone in the mystery of a dead 

 world. 



MacMillan and Borup entered the place after cutting through 

 the snowbanks blocking the door. They made a light and then, 

 began to examine the relics of men some of whom had afterwards 



