Polar Pathways: Robert E. Peary's Arctic Expeditions
The North Pole - A Series of Delays
"On the last day of February Bartlett and Borup
got away to the North with their divisions, as soon as it was light enough
to travel... On leaving the Roosevelt I had in the field exactly
enough dogs to put twenty teams of seven dogs each on the ice, and had
counted on doing this; but while we were at Cape Columbia the throat distemper
broke out in one team, and six dogs died. This left me only enough for
nineteen teams.
"My plans were further disarranged by the disabling of two Eskimos...
"When I awoke before light on the morning of March 1st, the wind was whistling
about the igloo. This phenomenon, appearing on the very day of our start,
after so many days of calm, seemed the perversity of hard luck. I looked
through the peep-hole of the igloo and saw that the weather was still clear,
and that the stars were scintillating like diamonds. The wind was from
the east—a direction
from which I had never known it to blow in all my years of experience in
that region. This unusual circumstance, a really remarkable thing, was
of course attributed by my Eskimos to the interference of their arch enemy,
Tornarsuk—in plain
English, the devil—with my plans."- Robert E. Peary in The
North Pole, published in 1910
