A Negro Explorer at the North Pole | Page 5

food, enjoying their pleasures,
and frequently sharing their griefs. I have come to love these people. I
know every man, woman, and child in their tribe. They are my friends
and they regard me as theirs.
After the first return to civilization, I was to come back to the savage,
ice- and rock-bound country seven times more. It was in June, 1893,
that I again sailed north with Commander Peary and his party on board
the Falcon, a larger ship than the Kite, the one we sailed north in on the

previous expedition, and with a much larger equipment, including
several burros from Colorado, which were intended for ice-cap work,
but which did not make good, making better dog-food instead. Indeed
the dogs made life a burden for the poor brutes from the very start. Mrs.
Peary was again a member of the expedition, as well as another woman,
Mrs. Cross, who acted as Mrs. Peary's maid and nurse. It was on this
trip that I adopted the orphan Esquimo boy, Kudlooktoo, his mother
having died just previous to our arrival at the Red Cliffs. After this boy
was washed and scrubbed by me, his long hair cut short, and his greasy,
dirty clothes of skins and furs burned, a new suit made of odds and
ends collected from different wardrobes on the ship made him a
presentable Young American. I was proud of him, and he of me. He
learned to speak English and slept underneath my bunk.
This expedition was larger in numbers than the previous one, but the
results, owing to the impossible weather conditions, were by no means
successful, and the following season all of the expedition returned to
the United States except Commander Peary, Hugh J. Lee, and myself.
When the expedition returned, there were two who went back who had
not come north with us. Miss Marie Ahnighito Peary, aged about ten
months, who first saw the light of day at Anniversary Lodge on the
12th of the previous September, was taken by her mother to her
kinfolks in the South. Mrs. Peary also took a young Esquimo girl, well
known among us as "Miss Bill," along with her, and kept her for nearly
a year, when she gladly permitted her to return to Greenland and her
own people. Miss Bill is now grown up, and has been married three
times and widowed, not by death but by desertion. She is known as a
"Holy Terror." I do not know the reason why, but I have my suspicions.
The memory of the winter of 1894 and 1895 and the summer following
will never leave me. The events of the journey to 87° 6' in 1906 and the
discovery of the North Pole in 1909 are indelibly impressed on my
mind, but the recollections of the long race with death across the 450
miles of the ice-cap of North Greenland in 1895, with Commander
Peary and Hugh Lee, are still the most vivid.
For weeks and weeks, across the seemingly never-ending wastes of the

ice-cap of North Greenland, I marched with Peary and Lee from
Independence Bay and the land beyond back to Anniversary Lodge. We
started on April 1, 1895, with three sledges and thirty-seven dogs, with
the object of determining to a certainty the northeastern terminus of
Greenland. We reached the northern land beyond the ice-cap, but the
condition of the country did not allow much exploration, and after
killing a few musk-oxen we started on June 1 to make our return. We
had one sledge and nine dogs.
We reached Anniversary Lodge on June 25, with one dog.
The Grim Destroyer had been our constant companion, and it was
months before I fully recovered from the effects of that struggle. When
I left for home and God's Country the following September, on board
the good old Kite, it was with the strongest resolution to never again!
no more! forever! leave my happy home in warmer lands.
* * * * *
Nevertheless, the following summer I was again "Northward Bound,"
with Commander Peary, to help him secure, and bring to New York,
the three big meteorites that he and Lee had discovered during the
winter of 1894-1895.
The meteorites known as "The Woman" and "The Dog" were secured
with comparative ease, and the work of getting the large seventy-ton
meteor, known as "The Tent," into such a position as to insure our
securing it the following summer, was done, so it was not strange that
the following summer I was again in Greenland, but the meteorite was
not brought away that season.
It is well known that the chief characteristic of Commander Peary is
persistency which, coupled with fortitude, is the secret of his success.
The next summer, 1897, he was again at the