INTRODUCTION 



npHE Pole had been discovered. My dreams and 

 -■■ hopes of years had culminated in one short year's 

 work under Peary. When the S. S. Roosevelt, homeward 

 bound, stuck her short stub nose into the ice-fields of 

 Robeson Channel and lay there panting, unable to pro- 

 ceed, I secretly hoped that Torngak, the evil spirit 

 of the North, would keep her there. Only one short 

 year of Arctic work! But that, under the tutelage of 

 a great master, had left me anxious to continue. What 

 a grip the great white ice-fields get on a man! And 

 what a fascination may exist in the most desolate places ! 



When, a few weeks later, North Greenland lay but 

 as a ribbon on the sky-line, I had made up my mind — 

 I was going back. But where .^ Far off in the north- 

 west, beyond the heights of Axel Heiberg and Grant 

 Lands, lay the largest unexplored white spot on the sur- 

 face of the globe, one-half a million square miles in 

 area. And at the very edge of this, with its white head 

 beckoning to man, stood Crocker Land, reported and 

 named by Peary in 1906 after one of his supporters, 

 with the words: "I seem to see more distinctly the 

 snow-clad summits of a distant land in the northwest 

 above the ice horizon." Here was a goal worthy of 

 ambition ! 



My decision to return into the frozen North was not 



