Polar Pathways: Robert E. Peary's Arctic Expeditions
1891- The Duck Islands: Gathering Food for the Voyage
An
adult male eider duck
“Past many giant mile-stones by which the whalers measure their advance in their annual battles with the ice-floes, we steamed without seeing a bit of ice, and at six o’clock in the morning reached the Duck Islands… At these islands we stopped till afternoon, laying in a supply of eider ducks which breed here in thousands. Unfortunately, we were too late to get eggs, they being too far advanced to be edible.” -Robert E. Peary, Northward over the Great Ice, published in 1898
"Eider- male, mounted", Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum Collections
