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Peary's description of native smells in Greenland. The short path back to our steamer lay through a poplar grove, and under our feet was spread a carpet of brown and yellow leaves, which, in the cool night air, smelled ripe and woodsy. Next came Fort Hamlin, where we again saw some of Uncle Sam's boys, and where we trudged out through the soft light snow and took some kodak views.
Cook had been hailed as the discoverer of the north pole by European scientists, especially those of Denmark, who accepted his story of the accomplishment of this task in April, 1908, one year earlier than the date of Peary's discovery. Many honors were conferred upon him when he reached Copenhagen, September 4, 1909.
Sayre, was just about to leave for America, and at Peary's request he transferred to the Roosevelt with his typewriter, to help the Commander with a few of his many notes and records. I dare say that he got an inside view of the question then agitating the world from Washington to Copenhagen; but if so, he has remained forever silent about it.
At the same time there was no period in 1917 up to the time of Admiral Peary's statement, or indeed up to that of the preparation of this book, when it was not felt that the cause of the Allies was in danger because of the swarms of German submarines.
Eivind Astrüp, of Christiania, Norway, who had the honor of being the companion of Commander Peary in the first crossing of North Greenland and of having an Esquimo at Cape York become so fond of him that he named his son for him! It was on this voyage north that Peary's leg was broken. Mr. John M. Verhoeff, a stalwart young Kentuckian, was also an enthusiastic member of the party.
Day does not break in the Arctic regions, it just comes on quietly the same as down here, but I must say that at daybreak on March 1, 1909, we were all excitement and attention. A furious wind was blowing, which we took as a good omen; for, on all of Commander Peary's travelings, a good big, heavy, storm of blinding snow has been his stirrup-cup and here he had his last.
But wireless telegraphy to a large extent has made its own field and here its work has been greatly successful. Thus when Peary's message announcing his discovery of the North Pole came out of the Frozen North, it was by way of the wireless station on the distant Labrador coast that it reached an anxious and interested civilization.
To us, up there at Etah, such a story was so ridiculous and absurd that we simply laughed at it. We knew Dr. Cook and his abilities; he had been the surgeon on two of Peary's expeditions and, aside from his medical ability, we had no faith in him whatever.
Just as he had absented himself in Africa for a year, after retiring from the Presidency, so Roosevelt decided to make one more trip for hunting and exploration. As he could not go to the North Pole, he said, because that would be poaching on Peary's field, he selected South America.
There seemed to be, and there will always remain, a certain vulgarity in the way the North Pole was discovered, and the way the whole world behaved in regard to it, and the secret seems to have been in Captain Peary's failure to be a Wilbur Wright. He allowed the Pole to be a Crowd affair.
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