Polar Pathways: Robert E. Peary's Arctic Expeditions
1908- Lincoln Bay: Dangerous Cracks
“On Sunday, the sixth day out from Etah... as we
were nearing Lincoln Bay... A cable was run out, and the ship secured
to a great floe, which extended some two miles to the north and several
to the east. The tide, which was running north at the time, had carried
the smaller ice with it, leaving the Roosevelt in a sort of
lake. While we were resting there, some of the men observed a black
object far out on the great ice floe to which we were attached, and
Dr. Goodsell and Borup, with two Eskimos, started out to investigate.
This walking across the floes is dangerous, as the ice is full of cracks,
some of them quite wide, and on the day in question the cracks were
for the most part concealed by a recent snowfall. In jumping across
a lead, the men had a narrow escape from drowning, and when they got
within shooting distance of the black object they were seeking, it proved
to be only a block of stone.”
– Robert E. Peary in The North
Pole, published in 1910
