280 GREENLAND 



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. 



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', 



