leasure to reflect that even had we failed, I should have had nothing
to reproach myself with in the way of neglect. Every possible
contingency that years of experience had taught me to expect was
provided for, every weak spot guarded, every precaution taken. I had
spent a quarter of a century playing the Arctic game. I was fifty-three
years old, an age beyond which, perhaps, with the one exception of Sir
John Franklin, no man had ever attempted to prosecute work in the Arctic
regions. I was a little past the zenith of my strength, a little
lacking, perhaps, in the exuberant elasticity and elan of more youthful
years, a little past the time when most men begin to leave the strenuous
things to the younger generation; but these drawbacks were fully
balanced perhaps by a trained and hardened endurance, a perfect
knowledge of myself, and of how to conserve my strength. I knew it was
my last game upon the great Arctic chess-board. It was win this time or
be forever defeated.

The lure of the North! It is a strange and a powerful thing. More than
once I have come back from the great frozen spaces, battered and worn
and baffled, sometimes maimed, telling myself that I had made my last
journey thither, eager for the society of my kind, the comforts of
civilization and the peace and serenity of home. But somehow, it was
never many months before the old restless feeling came over me.
Civilization began to lose its zest for me. I began to long for the
great white desolation, the battles with the ice and the gales, the
long, long arctic night, the long, long arctic day, the handful of odd
but faithful Eskimos who had been my friends for years, the silence and
the vastness of the great, white lonely North. And back I went
accordingly, time after time, until, at last, my dream of years came
true.

CHAPTER II

PREPARATIONS

A great many persons have asked when I first conceived the idea of
trying to reach the North Pole. That question is hard to answer. It is
impossible to point to any day or month and to say, "Then the idea first
came to me." The North Pole dream was a gradual and almost involuntary
evolution from earlier work in which it had no part. My interest in
arctic work dates back to 1885, when as a young man my imagination was
stirred by reading accounts of explorations by Nordenskjoeld in the
interior of Greenland. These studies took full possession of my mind and
led to my undertaking, entirely alone, a summer