Whitney traveled with Peary to Greenland in 1908 and spent the year only with Eskimos north of Etah at Annootok, while Peary was making his north pole attempt. Whitney is the complete hunter, rich and well-provided, and demonstrates some intellectual curiosity about the natives and about the natural resources, and does try to master their language, but he evidently reads little except under the duress of prolonged inactivity.
Introduction by Dillon Wallace: Hardly a chapter but contains an unusual adventure. Mr. Whitney is a very modest man, however, and in his record he has so undervalued the hazard and peril of many of the positions in which he was placed, that one must read between the lines to fully appreciate them.
I lay down the manuscript with reluctance. I am sorry to say farewell to old Kulutinguah, to Ilabrado, to the excitable Tukshu and Sipsu, and the other notable ones of the tribe whom one cannot fail to like and respect.
Mr. Whitney has given us a book that is worth while, and one that should take and hold a prominent place in the literature of travel and adventure.
p. 244: Before going, Ilabrado gave me a valuable and highly prized relic—a little china gravy bowl picked up at Fort Conger a few years before by one of his sons and supposed to have belonged to the Greely Expedition. He also had some law books that had belonged to Greely.
p. 257-58: In periods of inactivity during the long night I had read a great deal. Fred Norton gave me a box of books when the Erik left for the south, and Mr. Peary and Captain Bartlett gave me several more. All of these I had read—some of them more than once—and now when the storms held me indoors I longed for more. The old ones had become stale. This was a reason why confinement indoors seemed harder to bear than at any previous time during the winter.
p. 268ff, recounts a meeting with Frederick A. Cook at end of his north pole excursion.
p. 270: During the previous autumn Captain Bernier of the Canadian steamship Arctic had left some supplies near Etah for Dr. Cook. The contents of the boxes were wrapped in New York and Washington newspapers, and although the news was several months old I seized upon the papers and read them eagerly.
[What made the deprivations worthwhile for Whitney was the killing of musk-ox (see p. 291ff). The book is a modest one but pretends to be no more than that.]