the house where I
wintered in 1901-2. A flood of memories rushed over me at sight of the
place. It was in Payer Harbor that Mrs. Peary and my little daughter had
waited for me, on the _Windward_ from September, 1900, to May, 1901, the
ice being so heavy that year that the ship could neither reach Fort
Conger, three hundred miles beyond, where I was, nor regain the open
water to the south and return home. That was the spring when I had been
obliged to turn back at Lincoln Bay, because the exhaustion of my
Eskimos and dogs made a dash for the Pole impossible. It was at Payer
Harbor that I had rejoined my family; it was at Payer Harbor that I had
parted from them, determined to make one fight more to reach the goal.

"One fight more," I said in 1902; but I had only reached 84 deg. 17'.

"One fight more," I had said in 1905; but I had only reached 87 deg. 6'.

And now, at Payer Harbor again, on August 18, 1908, it was still "One
fight more!" Only this time I knew it was the last, in truth, whatever
the result.

At ten o'clock that night we were steaming past the desolate, wind-swept
and ice-ground rocks of Cape Sabine, the spot that marks one of the most
somber chapters in arctic history, where Greely's ill-fated party slowly
starved to death in 1884--seven survivors only being rescued out of a
party of twenty-four! The ruins of the rude stone hut built by these men
for shelter during the last year of their lives can still be seen on the
bleak northern shore of Cape Sabine, only two or three miles from the
extreme point. It is doubtful if a more desolate and unsheltered
location for a camp could be found anywhere in the arctic regions, fully
exposed to the biting winds from the north, cut off by the rocks back of
it from the rays of the southern sun, and besieged by the ice pack
surging down from Kane Basin in the north.

I first saw the place in August, 1896, in a blinding snowstorm, so thick
that it was impossible to see more than a few yards in any direction.
The impressions of that day will never be forgotten--the pity and the
sickening sense of horror. The saddest part of the whole story for me
was the knowledge that the catastrophe was unnecessary, that it might
have been avoided. My men and I have been cold and have been near to
starvation in the Arctic, when cold and hunger were inevitable; but the
horrors of Cape Sabine were not inevitable. They are a blot upon the
record of American arctic exploration.

Fro