It was broad daylight and getting brighter, and accordingly I knew little fear, though I did think of the ghosts of other parties, flitting in spectral form over the ice-clad wastes, especially of that small detachment of the Italian expedition of the Duke D'Abruzzi, of which to this day neither track, trace, nor remembrance has ever been found. We crossed lead after lead, sometimes like a bare-back rider in the circus, balancing on cake after cake of ice, but good fortune was with us all of the way, and it was not until the land of recognizable character had been lifted that we lost the trail, and with the land in sight as an incentive, it was no trouble for us to gain the talus of the shore ice and find the trail again.
When we "hit the beach for fair" it was early in the morning of April 23, 1909, nearly seventeen days since we had left the Pole, but such a seventeen days of haste, toil, and misery as cannot be comprehended by the mind. We who experienced it, Commander Peary, the Esquimos, and myself, look back to it as to a horrid nightmare, and to describe it is impossible for me.
Commander Peary had taken the North Pole by conquest, in the face of almost insuperable natural difficulties, by the tremendous fighting-power of himself. The winning of the North Pole was a fight with nature; the way to the Pole that had been covered and retraced by Commander Peary lay across the ever moving and drifting ice of the Arctic Ocean. For more than a hundred miles from Cape Columbia it was piled in heavy pressure ridges, ridge after ridge, some more than a hundred feet in height. In addition, open lanes of water held the parties back until the leads froze up again, and continually the steady drift of the ice carried us back on the course we had come, but due to his deathless ambition to know and to do, he had conquered. He had added to the sum of Earth's knowledge, and proven that the mind of man is boundless in its desire.
The long quest for the North Pole is over and the awful space that separated man from the _Ultima Thule_ has been bridged. There is no more beyond; from Cape Columbia to Cape Chelyuskin, the route northward to the Pole, and southward again to the plains of Asia, is an open book and the geographical mind is at rest.