My Arctic Journal 1891. A Year Among Ice Fields and Eskimos

This plain and simple narrative of a year spent by a refined woman in the realm of the dreaded Frost King has been written only after persistent and urgent pressure from friends, by one who shrank from publicity, and who reluctantly yielded to the idea that her experiences might be of interest to others besides her immediate friends.

I have been requested to write a few words of introduction; and while there may be some to whom it might occur that I was too much interested to perform this task properly, it must nevertheless be admitted that there is probably no one better fitted than myself to do it. Little, indeed, need be said.

The feeling that led Mrs. Peary through these experiences was first and foremost a desire to be by my side, coupled with the conviction that she was fitted physically as well as otherwise to share with me a portion at least of the fatigues and hardships of the work. I fully concurred in this feeling, and yet, in spite of my oft-expressed view that the dangers of life and work in the Arctic regions have been greatly exaggerated, I cannot but admire her courage. She has been where no white woman has ever been, and where many a man has hesitated to go; and she has seen phases of the life of the most 

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northerly tribe of human beings on the globe, and in many ways has been enabled to get a closer insight into their ways and customs than had been obtained before.

I rarely, if ever, take up the thread of our Arctic experiences without reverting to two pictures: one is the first night that we spent on the Greenland shore after the departure of the “Kite,” when, in a little tent on the rocks—a tent which the furious wind threatened every moment to carry away bodily—she watched by my side as I lay a helpless cripple with a broken leg, our small party the only human beings on that shore, and the little “Kite,” from which we had landed, drifted far out among the ice by the storm, and invisible through the rain. Long afterward she told me that every unwonted sound of the wind set her heart beating with the thoughts of some hungry bear roaming along the shore and attracted by the unusual sight of the tent; yet she never gave a sign at the time of her fears, lest it should disturb me.

The other picture is that of a scene perhaps a month or two later, when—myself still a cripple, but not entirely helpless—this same woman sat for an hour beside me in the stern of a boat, calmly reloading our empty firearms while a herd of infuriated walrus about us thrust their savage heads with gleaming tusks and bloodshot eyes out of the water close to the muzzles of our rifles, so that she could have touched them with her hand, in their efforts to get their tusks over the gunwale and capsize the boat. I may perhaps be pardoned for saying that I never think of these 

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two experiences without a thrill of pride and admiration for her pluck.

In reading the pages of this narrative it should be remembered that within sixty miles of where Kane and his little party endured such untold sufferings, within eighty miles of where Greely’s men one by one starved to death, and within less than fifty miles of where Hayes and his party and one portion of the “Polaris” party underwent their Arctic trials and tribulations, this tenderly nurtured woman lived for a year in safety and comfort: in the summer-time climbed over the lichen-covered rocks, picking flowers and singing familiar home songs, shot deer, ptarmigan, and ducks in the valleys and lakes, and even tried her hand at seal, walrus, and narwhal in the bays; and through the long, dark winter night, with her nimble fingers and ready woman’s insight, was of inestimable assistance in devising and perfecting the details of the costumes which enabled Astrup and myself to make our journey across the great ice-cap in actual comfort.

Perhaps no greater or more convincing proof than this could be desired of what great improvements have been made in Arctic methods. That neither Mrs. Peary nor myself regret her Arctic experiences, or consider them ill-advised, may be inferred from the fact that she is once more by my side in my effort to throw more light on the great Arctic mystery.

R. E. Peary,

Civil Engineer, U. S. N.