enfeebled constitution could not stand the shock
of the necessary amputation of his mutilated limbs. The nine bodies
buried in the shallow graves were exhumed and taken to the ship, Private
Henry's body being found lying where it fell at the moment of his
execution. At that time the castaways were too feeble to give even hasty
sepulture to their dead. A horrible circumstance, reported by Commander
Schley himself, was that the flesh of many of the bodies was cut from the
bones--by whom, and for what end of cannibalism, can only be conjectured.

Following the disaster to the Greely expedition, came a period of lethargy
in polar exploration, and when the work was taken up again, it was in ways
foreign to the purpose of this book. Foreigners for a time led in
activity, and in 1895 Fridjof Nansen in his drifting ship, the "Fram,"
attained the then farthest North, latitude 86 deg. 14', while Rudolph
Andree, in 1897, put to the test the desperate expedient of setting out
for the Pole in a balloon from Dane's Island, Spitzbergen; but the wind
that bore him swiftly out of sight, has never brought back again tidings
of his achievement or his fate. Nansen's laurels were wrested from him in
1900 by the Duke of Abruzzi, who reached 86 deg. 33' north. The stories of
these brave men are fascinating and instructive, but they are no part of
the story of the American sailor. Indeed, the sailor is losing his
importance as an explorer in the Arctic. It has become clear enough to all
that it is not to be a struggle between stout ships and crushing ice, but
rather a test of the endurance of men and dogs, pushing forward over solid
floes of heaped and corrugated ice, toward the long-sought goal. Two
Americans in late years have made substantial progress toward the conquest
of the polar regions. Mr. Walter Wellman, an eminent journalist, has made
two efforts to reach the Pole, but met with ill-luck and disaster in each,
though in the first he attained to latitude 81 deg. to the northeast of
Spitzbergen, and in the second he discovered and named many new islands
about Franz Josef Land. Most pertinacious of all the American explorers,
however, has been Lieutenant Robert E. Peary, U.S.N., who since 1886, has
been going into the frozen regions whenever the opportunity offered--and
when none offered he made one. His services in exploration and in mapping
out the land and seas to the north of Greenland have been of the greatest
value to geographical