ion of what they meant. When I first saw Sontag's grave, at
Etah, I carefully replaced the stones around it, as a tribute to a brave
man. At Cape Sabine, where Greely's party died, I was the first man to
step into the ruins of the stone hut after the seven survivors were
taken away years before--the first man, and I stepped into those ruins
in a blinding snowstorm late in August, and saw there the mementos of
those unfortunates.

Passing the Duck Islands on the upward voyage, approaching Cape York in
1908, and thinking of the graves there, I little dreamed that a loved
member of my own party, Professor Ross G. Marvin, who ate at my table
and acted as my secretary, was fated to add his name to this long list
of arctic victims, and that his grave, in uncounted fathoms of black
water, was to be the most northerly grave on this earth.

We reached Cape York on the first day of August. Cape York is the bold,
bluff headland which marks the southern point of the stretch of arctic
coast inhabited by my Eskimos, the most northerly human beings in the
world. It is the headland whose snowy cap I have seen so many times
rising in the distance above the horizon line of Melville Bay as my
ships have steamed north. At the base of the headland nestles the most
southerly of all the Eskimo villages, and it has marked the point of
meeting, year after year, between the members of this tribe and myself.

At Cape York we were on the threshold of the actual work. I had on board
the ship when I arrived there all the equipment and assistance which the
civilized world could yield. Beginning there, I was to take on the
tools, the material, the personnel, that the arctic regions themselves
were to furnish for their own conquest. Cape York, or Melville Bay, is
the dividing line between the civilized world on the one side and the
arctic world on the other--the arctic world with its equipment of
Eskimos, dogs, walrus, seal, fur clothing, and aboriginal experience.

Behind me lay the civilized world, which was now absolutely useless, and
which could give me nothing more. Ahead of me lay that trackless waste
through which I must literally cut my way to the goal. Even the ship's
journey from Cape York to winter quarters on the north coast of Grant
Land is not "plain sailing"; in fact, it is not sailing at all during
the later stages; it is jamming and butting and dodging and hammering
the ice, with always the possibility that the antagonist will hit ba