pressive to the public mind by the uncertainty which long hung over the gallant explorers' fate.
In September, 1895, Lieut. Robert E. Peary, of the United States navy, returned from an Arctic expedition, after an absence of two years. He did not get so far north as some of his predecessors, but in scientific results his expedition surpassed all others of recent years. His surveys and maps extend our knowledge of the coast northward 2°. He started on another expedition in 1897. On Aug. 13, 1896, Dr. Fridtjof Nansen, of Norway, returned from an Arctic expedition, after an absence of more than
three years. The most northerly point reached by him was 86° 14' N. latitude, or 200 miles nearer the Pole than ever reached before. He found no indications of land N. of 82° N. latitude, and in the higher latitudes no open sea, only narrow cracks in the ice. The lowest temperature recorded during the voyage was 62° F., and the highest 37° F.
The following are the farthest points of N. latitude reached by various Arctic explorers to 1920:
| Year | Explorers | North Latitude | ||
| 1607. | Hudson. | 80° | 23' | 0" |
| 1773. | Phipps. | 80° | 48' | 0" |
| 1806. | Scoresby. | 81° | 12' | 42" |
| 1827. | Parry | 82° | 50' | 0" |
| 1874. | Meyer (on land) | 82° | 0' | 0" |
| 1875. | Markham and Parr (Nares' expedition). | 83° | 20' | 26" |
| 1876. | Payer | 83° | 07' | 0" |
| 1884. | Lockwood (Greeley's party) | 83° | 24' | 0" |
| 1896. | Nansen. | 86° | 14' | 0" |
| 1900. | Abruzzi. | 86° | 33' | 0" |
| 1909. | Peary. | 90° | 00' | 0" |
Discovery of the North Pole.—The final conquest of the North Pole was the achievement of Peary. The date of his discovery was April 7, 1909. It is a curious fact in the history of polar exploration that the three great goals, the northeast passage, the north- west passage, and the North Pole itself were all finally attained within the com- pass of less than a quarter century. The first two were relatively unimpor- tant. Both the northeast and the north- west passage had been sought for cen- turies as a goal of commerce with the Orient. They were finally traced merely as feats of polar exploration, both by Norwegians in the last of the nineties and first decade of the twentieth cen- tury; the former by Baron Nordenskjöld in 1878-1879, and the latter by Raold Amundsen in 1903. The search for the magnetic north pole of the earth, culmi- nating in Peary's triumph, had been con- stant and eager for the half century pre- ceding.
Peary's third voyage in 1898 had the
conquest of the Pole for its immediate
object. He was by this time fully con-
vinced that the only possible way to get
there was to adopt the manner of life of
the Eskimos, their food, clothing, snow-
houses; to live as much as possible on
the game which he had so far found
comparatively abundant, thus avoiding
scurvy, and to train Eskimos as his
sledge-crews. His whole plan and equip-
ment also in many respects was different
from any man's before him. He was gone
this time nearly four years, achieved
further surveys and re-surveys in Smith
Sound, Grinnell Land, and to the north
of the mainland of Greenland, passed
Lieutenant Lockwood's farthest north of
1883, to a point 83° 39' N., and made a
brilliant record in sledge-work. But he
did not reach the Pole by 456 miles. He
had tried each year by sledges, from a
base about 700 miles from his objective,
and during these journeys he mapped
hundreds of miles of coast line in a
hitherto unmapped region.
The second voyage in the "dash for the Pole," as Peary called his sledge-jour- neys, was undertaken in a specially con- structed vessel which reached the high- est point in shipbuilding for its partic- ular purpose, and was named the "Roosevelt" in honor of Theodore Roose- velt, which left the shores of America in June, 1905. The result of this voyage was the attainment of a still farther lat. 87° 6'-the highest yet won.
His record up to and including this one as an advance over Lieutenant Gree- ley's (Lockwood's) farthest in 1882 was: in 1900, 30 miles; 1902, 23 miles; 1906, 169 miles. There remained 174 miles to his goal. In July, 1908, Peary again turned his face northward in the "Roosevelt" to the final accomplishment of his purpose. He was now fifty-two years old, much older than other great polar explorers when they reached the height of their career, but he had been longer in the farthest north than any other explorer ever had been-had passed more winters there-had mapped more country-knew the Eskimo better- in fact had gained their most perfect friendship and had trained them to be his faithful and efficient helpers. All this knowledge and experience intimated the possession of personal qualities of the highest type for his task.
The members of Peary's expedition were Robert A. Bartlett, his Sailing- Master; George A. Wardwell, Chief En- gineer; Dr. J. W. Goodsell, Surgeon; Ross G. Marvin, Donald B. Macmillan, George Borup, and Matthew A. Henson, a negro. Etah in Greenland was reached
