But even these successes did not satisfy the royal adventurer. He looked around for other fields to conquer, and found that the loftiest peak in the Ruwenzori range in Africa, the “Mountains of the Moon” of Ptolemy, had never been scaled. He conquered this awe-inspiring height in 1906.
In 1909 he tried to conquer Mt. Godwin-Austen in the Himalayas. This peak is the second highest known in the world. It rises 28,250 feet in the air. The duke reached a little over 19,000 feet; but was compelled to give up the attempt. But he turned to Bride Peak, near at hand, rising 25,100 feet, and ascended it a distance of 24,580 feet, the world’s record for altitude.
And notwithstanding the fact that he has accomplished so many big things and done so many brave deeds, the Duke of the Abruzzi is very modest, and rarely wears any of his innumerable decorations and medals.
The North Pole! One white man, a negro, and four Eskimos treading where never before had trodden human foot! And Old Glory flying free at the top of the world! That was on April 6, 1909. After years of such effort as only those can appreciate who have struggled with the frozen North, Robert E. Peary had reached the goal of which he had dreamed for a quarter of a century. The thought, the plan, the untiring effort, were all his, and now the everlasting glory and honor of the achievement were to be his also.
Robert E. Peary is a man peculiarly fitted by nature to be the discoverer of the North Pole. He was born in Pennsylvania on May 6, 1856. He comes of an old family of Maine lumbermen, an active, adventurous, outdoor stock of French-Anglo-Saxon origin. His father died when he was three years old, and his mother moved to Portland, Maine, where the boy grew up with the sea and its swimming, rowing, and sailing on one side of him, and the woods and fields to stimulate his love for nature on the other.
He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1877, second in a class of fifty-one. In college, besides being a brilliant student, he was a good athlete, being especially proficient in running, jumping, and walking. After graduating he was first a land surveyor, and then in 1879 secured a place in the Coast and Geodetic Survey at Washington. Then he was appointed a member of the Navy Department of Civil Engineering, with the rank of lieutenant. In the first year of his service (1881) he saved the government nearly thirty thousand dollars on a pier that he built at Key West, Florida. He was then sent to Nicaragua as sub-chief of the Interoceanic Canal Survey. There he learned to manage men; he gained experience in equipping expeditions, in making camp under adverse conditions, in traversing wild and unexplored country.