THE NORTH POLE FOUND . 43 



Thousands of men seized thousands of maps and searched for the spot 

 whose attainment had caused all this uproar. They found ragged lines show- 

 ing where continents had been traced by voyagers of former years; and then 

 they found a blank — a blank indicating the spaces never penetrated. They 

 found a circle, the imaginary line tracing the realm of the arctic, and other 

 circles showing 80 degrees north latitude, and 85 degrees north latitude, and 

 in the center of it all, that blank. Some now drew a dotted line from Green- 

 land to the middle of this vacant spot, and they began to understand what Dr. 

 Cook had done. 



What he did was to enter one of the few fastnesses of the earth, to explore 

 one of the two spots thus far left unexplored, — one the North Pole, and the 

 other the South Pole. lie had been to the axis of the globe, the center around 

 which it whirls. He had been to a place where, says Sir Robert Ball, the 

 noted English astronomer, "the sun rises and sets only once a year — six 

 months daylight, six months night, mitigated only by a little twilight at the 

 beginning and end of a period of awful gloom, broken by occasional moon- 

 light or aurora. 



"The pole is truly a unique spot on the globe. Cook, standing there, faced 

 due south, whichever way he looked. He was more than twenty miles nearer 

 the center of the earth than if he stood at the equator. His weight was 

 greater than anywhere else on the surface of the globe. A plumbline in his 

 hand pointed vertically upward to the pole of the heavens, around which all 

 stars revolve. 



"Half of the stars he could never see ; the other half never went below his 

 horizon and would have been visible throughout the six months of night. 

 The famous constellation Orion ever circled around and around this horizon. 

 The pole star stood directly over his head." 



In summing up the meaning of what Dr. Cook did, Herbert L. Bridgman, 

 secretary of the Peary Arctic club of New York, used these telling words : 



"The question naturally arises. What is the value of this achievement? 

 Viewing the matter from viewpoints of the general public — as a great triumph 

 of man over nature, as the achievement of a daring physical feat of the first 

 magnitude — the news from Copenhagen makes Dr. Cook deservedly one of 

 the great figures of the decade. He is the Columbus of the Arctic. What 

 he has done no one can ever excel. There is no point further north — nothing 

 left for any rival explorer to accomplish which can outdo his performance." 



