THREE FAREWELLS TO PEARY 



a short season and a merry one, and like them, closed it 

 in a blaze of glory. Not even its great naval review, 

 when the stars and stripes of America, the red ensign of 

 Great Britain, and the white crosses of Norway, were 

 simultaneously displayed in its little harbor — an event 

 never seen on sea or land before — could match in spon- 

 taneous, popular enthusiasm, the departure of the Diana 

 for home on Monday morning, August 28. In the lan- 

 guage of the effete South, we should say we left shortly 

 after midnight; in the more correct language of Etah, 

 where there is neither noon nor midnight, we departed 

 soon after the sun had crossed the lower meridian. 



Hardly had Monday begun when the Diana's lines were 

 cast off from the rocks, a natural pier along which she 

 was moored with 70 feet of water under her keel, and riding 

 at 40 fathoms of anchor chain, and the steamer slowly 

 swung off into her course, heading westerly and outward, 

 down the bay. On the summit of the rocky knoll, under 

 the flag of his country, bareheaded, and in the familiar blue 

 flannel field suit, stood Peary with his two companions 

 and his faithful native allies, while strewn all along the 

 cliffs in wild confusion, were the hundreds of packages, 

 many tons of provisions which we had worked hard to 

 land the day before, looking as if a first-class freight wreck 

 on a trunk line had just occurred. All the Diana's flags, 

 the stars and stripes at the fore, were flying; over Peary's 

 little red caboose and on several of his tents the same flags 

 were displayed, and as the propeller turned and we began 

 to move, everybody cheered again. First, the quarter- 

 deck winding up with a tiger; next the men on the fore- 

 castle deck; then the hoarse whistle of the Diana woke 

 the echoes far up the fiord, and answering from the shore 

 came the response, American and Eskimo voices uniting 

 in good hearty soul-stirring tones. Then the Princeton 

 rifles took it up, and volley after volley pierced the air to 

 be answered in like manner but in less volume from the 

 shore, for ammunition to those who stay is not the burden 

 to those who go, and as we steamed steadily along down 

 the harbor to Sunrise Point, we watched the forms on 

 the shore grow dim in the dusky dawn and mingle indis- 

 tinguishably with the sombre and rocky background. Then 



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