oted. There were opportunities to complete the
brief entries on several occasions while out on the ice, notably the six
days' enforced delay at the "Big Lead," 84 deg. north, the twelve hours
preceding the return of Captain Bartlett at 87 deg. 47' north, and the
thirty-three hours at North Pole, while Commander Peary was determining
to a certainty his position. During the return from the Pole to Cape
Columbia, we were so urged by the knowledge of the supreme necessity of
speed that the thought of recording the events of that part of the
journey did not occur to me so forcibly as to compel me to pay heed to
it, and that story was written aboard the ship while waiting for
favorable conditions to sail toward home lands.

* * * * *

It was in June, 1891, that I started on my first trip to the Arctic
regions, as a member of what was known as the "North Greenland
Expedition." Mrs. Peary accompanied her husband, and among the members
of the expedition were Dr. Frederick A. Cook, of Brooklyn, N. Y., Mr.
Langdon Gibson, of Flushing, N. Y., and Mr. Eivind Astruep, of
Christiania, Norway, who had the honor of being the companion of
Commander Peary in the first crossing of North Greenland--and of having
an Esquimo at Cape York become so fond of him that he named his son for
him! It was on this voyage north that Peary's leg was broken.

Mr. John M. Verhoeff, a stalwart young Kentuckian, was also an
enthusiastic member of the party. When the expedition was ready to sail
home the following summer, he lost his life by falling in a crevasse in
a glacier. His body was never recovered. On the first and the last of
Peary's expeditions, success was marred by tragedy. On the last
expedition, Professor Ross G. Marvin, of Cornell University, lost his
life by being drowned in the Arctic Ocean, on his return from his
farthest north, a farther north than had ever been made by any other
explorers except the members of the last expedition. Both Verhoeff and
Marvin were good friends of mine, and I respect and venerate their
memories.

Naturally the impressions formed on my first visit to the Land of Ice
and Snow were the most lasting, but in the coming years I was to learn
more and more that such a life was no picnic, and to realize what
primitive life meant. I was to live with a people who, the scientists
stated, represented the earliest form of human life, living in what is
known as the Stone Age, and I was to re