him to direct and order us, that we were able to keep up the
break-neck pace that enabled us to cover three of our upward marches on
one of our return marches, and we never forgot that he was still the
heart and head of the party.

It was broad daylight and getting brighter, and accordingly I knew
little fear, though I did think of the ghosts of other parties,
flitting in spectral form over the ice-clad wastes, especially of that
small detachment of the Italian expedition of the Duke D'Abruzzi, of
which to this day neither track, trace, nor remembrance has ever been
found. We crossed lead after lead, sometimes like a bare-back rider in
the circus, balancing on cake after cake of ice, but good fortune was
with us all of the way, and it was not until the land of recognizable
character had been lifted that we lost the trail, and with the land in
sight as an incentive, it was no trouble for us to gain the talus of the
shore ice and find the trail again.

When we "hit the beach for fair" it was early in the morning of April
23, 1909, nearly seventeen days since we had left the Pole, but such a
seventeen days of haste, toil, and misery as cannot be comprehended by
the mind. We who experienced it, Commander Peary, the Esquimos, and
myself, look back to it as to a horrid nightmare, and to describe it is
impossible for me.

Commander Peary had taken the North Pole by conquest, in the face of
almost insuperable natural difficulties, by the tremendous
fighting-power of himself. The winning of the North Pole was a fight
with nature; the way to the Pole that had been covered and retraced by
Commander Peary lay across the ever moving and drifting ice of the
Arctic Ocean. For more than a hundred miles from Cape Columbia it was
piled in heavy pressure ridges, ridge after ridge, some more than a
hundred feet in height. In addition, open lanes of water held the
parties back until the leads froze up again, and continually the steady
drift of the ice carried us back on the course we had come, but due to
his deathless ambition to know and to do, he had conquered. He had added
to the sum of Earth's knowledge, and proven that the mind of man is
boundless in its desire.

The long quest for the North Pole is over and the awful space that
separated man from the _Ultima Thule_ has been bridged. There is no more
beyond; from Cape Columbia to Cape Chelyuskin, the route northward to
the Pole, and southward again to the plains of Asia, is an open