ARCTIC and ANTARCTIC EXPLO RATIONS, expeditions projected to ex plore the regions surrounding the North Pole. The object with which these en terprises were commenced by the Eng lish was to obtain a passage by way of the polar regions to India. They have continued at intervals to our own times, and are not likely ever to cease. Two of the most notable events in their his tory which have hitherto occurred have been the discovery of the northwest pas sage by Captain McClure, of the "In vestigator," on Oct. 26, 1850, and the tragic deaths of Sir John Franklin and his crew, about the year 1848, the catas trophe being rendered all the more im pressive to the public mind by the un certainty which long hung over the gallant explorers' fate.
In September, 1895, Lieut. Robert E. Peary, of the United States navy, re turned from an Arctic expedition, after an of two years. He did not get so far north as some of his predeces sors, but in scientific results his expedi tion surpassed all others of recent years. His surveys and maps extend our knowl edge of the coast northward 2°. He started on another expedition in 1897. On Aug. 13, 1896, Dr. Fridtjof Nansen, of Norway, returned from an Arctic ex pedition, after an absence of more than three years. The most northerly point reached by him was 86° 14' N. latitude, or 200 miles nearer the Pole than ever reached before. He found no indications of land N. of 82° N. latitude, and in the higher latitudes no open sea, only nar row cracks in the ice. The lowest tem perature recorded during the voyage was 62° F., and the highest 371/2° F.
The following are the farthest points of N. latitude reached by various Arctic explorers to 1920: Discovery of the North Pole.—The final conquest of the North Pole was the achievement of Peary. The date of his discovery was April 7, 1909. It is a curious fact in the history of polar exploration that the three great goals, the northeast passage, the north west passage, and the North Pole itself were all finally attained within the com pass of less than a quarter century.
The first two were relatively unimpor tant. Both the northeast and the north west passage had been sought for cen turies as a goal of commerce with the Orient. They were finally traced merely as feats of polar exploration, both by Norwegians—in the last of the nineties and first decade of the twentieth cen tury; the former by Baron NordenskjOld in 1878-1879, and the latter by Raold Amundsen in 1903. The search for the magnetic north pole of the earth, culmi nating in Peary's triumph, had been con stant and eager for the half century pre ceding.
Peary's third voyage in 1898 had the conquest of the Pole for its immediate object. He was by this time fully con vinced that the only possible way to get there was to adopt the manner of life of the Eskimos, their food, clothing, snow houses; to live as much as possible on the game which he had so far found comparatively abundant, thus avoiding scurvy, and to train Eskimos as his sledge-crews. His whole plan and equip ment also in many respects was different from any man's before him. He was gone this time nearly four years, achieved further surveys and re-surveys in Smith Sound, Grinnell Land, and to the north of the mainland of Greenland, passed Lieutenant Lockwood's farthest north of 1883, to a point 83° 39' N., and made a brilliant record in sledge-work. But he did not reach the Pole by 456 miles. He had tried each year by sledges, from a base about 700 miles from his objective, and during these journeys he mapped hundreds of miles of coast line in a hitherto unmapped region.
The second voyage in the "dash for the Pole," as Peary called his sledge-jour neys, was undertaken in a specially con structed vessel which reached the high est point in shipbuilding for its partic ular purpose, and was named the "Roosevelt" in honor of Theodore Roose velt, which left the shores of America in June, 1905. The result of this voyage was the attainment of a still farther lat. 87° 6'—the highest yet won.