Note 5 — TO THE LIMITS OF NAVIGATION

Before he sailed on his last Northern expedition Mr. Peary, learning that I had preceded him, took the initial step in his campaign to discredit me by issuing a statement to the effect that I was bent upon the unfair and dishonest purpose of enlisting in my aid Eskimos which he had the exclusive right to command. Mr. Peary's attitude that the Eskimos, because he had given them guns, powder and needles, belong to him, is as absurd as his pretension to the sole ownership of the North Pole. Although Mr. Peary had spent about a quarter of a century essaying the task by means of luxurious expeditions, he had done little more than other explorers and did not, in my opinion, either secure an option on the Pole or upon the services of the natives. In giving guns, etc., to the natives he also did no more than other explorers, and the Danes for many years, have done. Nor was this with him a magnanimous matter of gracious bounty, for, in prodigal return for all he gave them, Mr. Peary on every expedition secured a fortune in furs and ivory. The Eskimos belong to no one. For ages they have worked out their rigorous existence without the aid of white men, and Mr. Peary's pretension becomes not only absurd but grotesque when one realizes that following the arrival of ships with white crews, the natives have fallen easy victims of loathsome epidemics, mostly of a specific nature, for which the trivial gifts of any explorer would ill repay them.