The full accounts of the adventures and sufferings of Lieutenant
Peary and his party in the Arctic regions have come to hand during the week. Ill-luck attended the expedition throughout its course, and but for the splendid devotion shown by Lieutenant Peary and his companions, it must have ended in utter failure. As it was, their absolute refusal to be beaten enabled them to gain a great deal of scientific information, and greatly to extend our knowledge of Northern Greenland. Its insularity has been finally established, and a northern archipelago stretching towards the Pole has been discovered. The cause of the disaster was the loss of a cache of over a ton of provisions and neces- saries, which was made in 1894. When, last March, Lieutenant Peary went to dig up his stores, he found them buried under a deep fall of snow, and all chance of rediscovering them entirely gone. Most men confronted with such a calamity would have given up all idea of journeying twelve hundred miles northward, but Lieutenant Peary determined to keep to his plan ; and accordingly he started on April 1st, with improvised stores of reindeer-flesh for himself and his companions, and of walrus - flesh for the sledge - dogs. This absolute refusal to give in, in spite of the pro. digious odds against him, was really heroic. It re- mains to be said that on two occasions the party were only saved from starvation by timely accidents, and that their last bit of food was finished twenty-one miles from Anniversary Lodge, their depot. They took forty hours to cover that distance ; and when they finished their journey, they were so much exhausted that for ten days they were utterly prostrate.
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