hides beneath its granite bosom the richest stores of mineral wealth,
almost four centuries of failure and disappointment were needed to rid
men's minds of the notion that the jungles and the tropical forests were
the most abundant hiding-places of gold and precious stones. The wild
beauty of the tropics, the cloudless skies, the tangled thickets, ever
green and rustling with a restless animal life, the content and
amiability of the natives, combined in a picture irresistibly attractive
to the adventurer. Surely where there was so much beauty, so much of
innocent joy in life, there must be the fountain of perpetual youth, there
must be gold, and diamonds, and sapphires--all those gewgaws, the worship
of which shows the lingering taint of barbarism in the civilized man, and
for which the English, Spanish, and Portuguese adventurers of three
centuries ago, were ready to sacrifice home and family, manhood, honor,
and life.

So it happened that in the early days of maritime adventure the course of
the hardy voyagers was toward the tropics, and they made of the Spanish
Main a sea of blood, while Pizzarro and Cortez, and after them the dreaded
buccaneers, sacked towns, betrayed, murdered, and outraged, destroyed an
ancient civilization and fairly blotted out a people, all in the mad
search for gold. Men only could have been guilty of such crimes, for man
along, among animals endowed with life, kills for the mere lust of
slaughter.

And yet, man alone stands ready to risk his life for an idea, to brave the
most direful perils, to endure the most poignant suffering that the
world's store of knowledge may be increased, that science may be advanced,
that just one more fact may be added to the things actually known. If the
record of man in the tropics has been stained by theft, rapine, and
murder, the story of his long struggle with the Arctic ice, offers for his
redemption a series of pictures of self-sacrifice, tenderness, honor,
courage, and piety. No hope of profit drew the seamen of all maritime
nations into the dismal and desolate ice-floes that guard the frozen
North. No lust for gold impelled them to brave the darkness, the cold, and
the terrifying silence of the six-months Arctic night. The men who
have--thus far unsuccessfully--fought with ice-bound nature for access to
the Pole, were impelled only by honorable emulation and scientific zeal.

The earlier Arctic explorers were not, it is true, searchers for the North
Po