CHAPTER II 



PREPARATIONS 



A GREAT many persons have asked when I 

 first conceived the idea of trying to reach 

 the North Pole. That question is hard to 

 answer. It is impossible to point to any day or month 

 and to say, "Then the idea first came to me." The 

 North Pole dream was a gradual and almost invol- 

 untary evolution from earlier work in which it had no 

 part. My interest in arctic work dates back to 1885, 

 when as a young man my imagination was stirred by 

 reading accounts of explorations by Nordenskjbld in 

 the interior of Greenland. These studies took full 

 possession of my mind and led to my undertaking, 

 entirely alone, a summer trip to Greenland in the 

 following year. Somewhere in my subconscious self, 

 even so long ago as that, there may have been gradu- 

 ally dawning a hope that I might some day reach the 

 Pole itself. Certain it is, the lure of the North, the 

 "arctic fever," as it has been called, entered my 

 veins then, and I came to have a feeling of fatality, 

 a feeling that the reason and intent of my existence 

 was the solution of the mystery of the frozen fast- 

 nesses of the Arctic. 



But the actual naming of the Pole as the object of 

 an expedition did not materialize until 1898, when the 



first expedition of the Peary Arctic Club went north 



11 



