The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1909-09-11

blocks, stretching as far as the hori- zon. There is not much sense i'll keep ing on longer. We are sacrificing val uable time and doing little. If three be much more ice between here and Franz Josef Land, we shall indeed want all the time we have. I there fore determined to stop and shape our course for Cape F1igely."
 Dr. Nansen's latitude was then S6 degrees, IA minutes, while Captain Cagni had reached SC. degrees 34 min utes. In both cases they were trou- bled on their return march by bad ice conditions and Captain Cagn1 and his party had nearly lost their lives through starvation by being carried away on the drifting ice.
 yPeary's own history in the past has been a hard one in fighting almost
 impossible ice and one can only help but feel that the last two years have been exceptional ones, both in the case of Dr. Cook and Commander Peary, and that the smooth ice which made their success possible did not exist for previous explorers.
 So much depends on conditions in
 the Arctic, for example, Commander Parry of the English navy reached 82 degrees, 45 minutes in 1927, after a
 most awful experience of hard work.
 He and his men dragged the boats
 over ridges of ice which were Inter sected by numerous channels on
 Wn1Cn the DOdIS IldQ lo OC lcoiASAS0 and drawn up again on the opposite
 shore and thus had to be continually
 unloaded and loaded. As this jour ney was made in the summer time,
 the snow was softened by the h1gh
 temperature and the sailors sank into it up to their waists. While they
 were straining every nerve to make
 the northern record, the ice was float ing with them at the rate Of four
 miles per day to the south. The lat itude he reached of S2 degrees, 45 mn utes, remained for many years the highest attained by man.
 A few years ago the Duke of Or leans comfortably seated on the deck of his steamer, passed over this same
 ground where Parry had his heart breaking experience, steamlng III practically open water.
 After reading the stories of these other explorers and the hard exper- fences they have had, and thinking or Peary's own disappointment on prev ious occasions, we cannot help put
 means more because Of these three hundred years of previous effort You must admire the men that Peary had with him, and the natives, with whose help his success was made pos sibIe These wild children of the North, who followed their leader with out question to that mysterious place
 on the ice, which did not seem to be any different from any other place on
 the ice after all their effort and hard
 work to get there; even to the natives, their easy success seemed so strange.
 In Peary's description, he tells of how Ootah sat down on his sledge and re- marked in Eskimo: "The devil IS asleep or having trouble with his wife, or we never should have come back so easily"
 When the party reached Cape Go lunbia, Peary tells of how the Esk1-
 mos yelled and called and danced themselves helpless, in fact they act ed as if they had gone crazy. They had a right to! They had gone from the Pole to land-from 90 degrees north to about 83 degrees-in 16 days Never has there been travel like that before on the Polar ice. No matter
 how we look at it. the sledge expedi- ton of Commander Peary to the Pole and back will always stand as one of l the quickest trips ever made in the north.