6', I had been obliged to turn back nearly three years before, with exhausted dogs, depleted supplies, and a heavy and discouraged heart.

It seemed to me then that the story of my life was told and that the word failure was stamped across it.
Now, three years older, with three more years of the inevitable wear and tear of this inexorable game behind me, I stood again beyond the 87th parallel still reaching forward to that goal which had beckoned to me for so many years.

Even now, on reaching my highest record with every prospect good, I dared not build too much on the chances of the white and treacherous ice which stretched one hundred and eighty nautical miles northward between me and the end.

I had believed for years that this thing could be done and that it was my destiny to do it, but I always reminded myself that many a man had felt thus about some dearly wished achievement, only to fail in the end.
When I awoke the following day, March 28, the sky was brilliantly clear; but ahead of us there was a thick, smoky, ominous haze drifting low over the ice, and a bitter northeast wind, which, in the orthography of the Arctic, plainly spelled open water.

Did this mean failure again?
No man could say.