CHAPTER X. 



PEARY'S FINAL DASH 



"It's just like every clay." 



Capt. Bartlett, navigator of Peary's ship and his faithful companion 

 through two Arctic journeys, said the above as he and his chief were toiling 

 within a few hundred miles of the pole. The remark gives the keynote to 

 Peary's manner of describing a great feat. True to the traditions of the navy, 

 as well as to those of the serious explorer, Peary adopted a calm, matter-of-fact 

 tone in his narrative. His statements were brief, clear and cold. His various 

 accounts of the trip have the lofty serenity, the contempt of sentiment, natural 

 to one who has concjuered himself as well as the pole. 



Like Cook, Peary stood practically alone amid the desolation of "farthest 

 north." Cook had with him two Eskimos who, as described by him, were panic- 

 stricken and prayed to their deity for deliverance. They were in no sense 

 sharers of the emotions of their white master. And so it was with Peary, with 

 the difterence that his colored personal attendant was there to witness the tri- 

 umph. One Eskimo — who was there — Eginguah by name — no doubt looked 

 on rather cynically at Peary's deeds. He was a mighty hunter and a great man 

 in Greenland, was Egingwah. AMiat cared he for a pole or two ? 



Here was a situation never to be duplicated in any branch of human en- 

 deavor. Let the reader's imagination picture Peary, wrapped in his seal-skins, 

 and with hard determined face peering out from his hood, drawing rein there at 

 the coveted finish of the race; stopping in the glittering, lonely plain of ice; 

 searching the horizon in vain for some animate thing ; then taking his observa- 

 tions and proving he stood under the north star, at latitude 90 ! He, too, like 

 Cook, felt as if he were the happiest man alive. He did not know there was an- 

 other "happiest man," whose joy was due to the same cause. He supposed his 

 eyes to be the first ever to have gazed upon that scene ; yet, a year before a rival 

 explorer had set up the glittering instruments that made the Eskimo's eyes grow 

 big, and had looked up to the sky in thankfulness to providence. 



That Peary sent back all his white companions and pushed on alone to the 



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