THE CONQUEST OF TIME AND SPACE 



futile quest; and when finally it had been clearly es- 

 tablished that no northwest passage to the Pacific could 

 be made available, owing to the climate, the zest for 

 arctic exploration did not abate, but its goal was 

 changed from the hypothetical northwest passage to 

 the geographical pole. 



Henry Hudson had in his day established a farthest 

 North record of about the eighty-second parallel of 

 latitude — leaving only about five hundred miles to be 

 traversed. But three centuries were required in which 

 to compass this relatively small gap. Expedition after 

 expedition penetrated as far as human endurance under 

 given conditions could carry it. Some of the explorers 

 returned with vivid tales of the rigors of the arctic cli- 

 mate; others fell victim to conditions that they could 

 not overcome. But the seventeenth, eighteenth, and 

 nineteenth centuries passed and left the "Boreal Cen- 

 ter'* undiscovered. 



Toward the close of the nineteenth century the efforts 

 of explorers seemed to be redoubled and one famous 

 expedition after another established new records of 

 "farthest North." The names of Nansen, the Duke of 

 the Abruzzi, and Peary, became familiar to a genera- 

 tion whose imagination seemed curiously in sympathy 

 with that lure of the North which determined the life 

 activities of so many would-be discoverers. So when 

 in the early Autumn of 1909 it was suddenly announced 

 that two explorers in succession had at last, in the pic- 

 turesque phrasing of one of them, "penetrated the 

 Boreal Center and plucked the polar prize," the popu- 

 lar mind was stirred as it has seldom been by any other 



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