By June 1891, he was ready to go north again. He had spent the intervening years raising ten thousand dollars for the venture – not an easy task after the twin tragedies of the Greely and the Jeannette expeditions. He sailed on June 21 with seven companions, including Matthew Henson, his black body-servant, John Verkoeff, a young geologist who contributed two thousand dollars to the venture, Eivend Astrup, an enthusiastic young Norwegian who hero-worshipped his leader, and a genial Brooklyn doctor, Frederick Albert Cook, whose name would forever be intertwined with Peary’s. The most controversial member of the party was Josephine Peary, the explorer’s tall, attractive, and strong-willed wife, the first white woman ever to venture into the Arctic. Many disapproved of a woman accompanying a dangerous expedition, but Peary believed, as the Eskimos did, that women were an important source of morale on any journey. Indeed, he advocated that his men take native women with them whenever possible.
The party wintered on the Greenland coast. On April 30, 1892, Peary set off on a sledge journey that more than equalled any earlier one. With only Astrup as his companion for most of the way, he cut across the northwest corner of the great island – a distance of some five hundred miles – to reach what he believed to be its northernmost point. In doing so he established its insularity – or so he thought. He reached a large indentation in the coast, which he named Independence Bay, and climbed an escarpment he called Navy Cliff. From here, he claimed, he saw a channel marking Greenland’s most northerly boundary and beyond that a vast new land. He named the channel Peary Channel and the new land Peary Land. Astrup, in his own account of the arrival at Independence Bay and the scaling of Navy Cliff, made no mention of the Peary Channel – and with good reason: it did not exist. But a generation passed before Peary’s error was discovered. Greenland actually continued on for some distance. Peary, in spite of his claim, had not crossed the island.
These phantom discoveries may have been the results of wishful thinking, a weakness that dogged more than one Arctic explorer. Even without them, Peary had made a remarkable trek. In a singular feat of endurance he and Astrup had managed the longest sledge journey of its kind – more than 1,100 miles over a period of eighty-five days. Nansen, by contrast, had gone 235 miles in forty days, and Peary’s speeds were double those of Nansen. With this one feat, Peary had vaulted into the ranks of the world’s leading explorers.
Peary’s two expeditions across Greenland, 1892 and 1895
The excursion had not been without its tensions. The independent-minded John Verkoeff had chafed under Peary’s authoritarian command and even more under Mrs. Peary’s domination. “I will never go home in the same ship with that man and that woman,” he told Dr. Cook. That was to be his undoing. During a winter trip around Inglefield Gulf, he left the main party, never to be seen again.
Peary reached the United States determined to return to the Arctic as soon as feasible. He set himself a gruelling pace on the lecture circuit, giving 165 speeches in 103 days. The sizable fees – as much as two thousand dollars a day – augmented by additional contributions from wealthy supporters funded the expedition that left for Greenland in the summer of 1893. This time the amiable Dr. Cook declined to be a member of the Peary party; he had asked his leader’s permission to publish a report on his ethno-biological studies, but Peary, who wanted no rival for the public’s attention, turned him down. So Cook quit. Like all members of all of Peary’s expeditions, Cook’s contract was specific: Peary, he had agreed, would be sole commander, his instructions and directions would be law, no one but Peary would write or lecture or give out any information about the expedition, and all journals and diaries were his property and must be turned over to him.
Peary’s ship, the Falcon, slipped across the treacherous Melville Bay in an astonishing twenty-four hours and dropped the party off at Bowdoin Bay in Inglefield Gulf on the Greenland coast. There Peary set up his headquarters, which he named Anniversary Lodge; and there, on September 12, Jo Peary gave birth to a blue-eyed baby girl, Marie Ahnighito, a curiosity for the Eskimos, who travelled for miles to see the “Snow Baby,” as they called her.
These were the same Etah Eskimos that John Ross in 1818 had named the Arctic Highlanders and who had, over the best part of a century, aided and succoured so many exploring parties. Peary called them the Polar Eskimos and adopted a proprietary attitude toward them. They were “my Eskimos” or sometimes “my children.” He boasted that he had trained them in what became known as the Peary System. But if Peary trained the Eskimos, it was also true that the Eskimos trained Peary.
Peary’s attitude toward these natives was ambivalent. He liked and admired them. He did not believe, as the early explorers had believed, that they should be Christianized or civilized – quite the opposite. Nor was he in the least offended, as others had been, by their morals. In fact, he took an Eskimo mistress. She bore him a child, and he even published a nude photograph of her in one of his books, horrifying several of his wealthy benefactors.
On the other hand, Peary always thought them an inferior race. Like the dogs who pulled his sledges, they were a means to an end. “I have often been asked,” he wrote, “ ‘Of what use are the Eskimos to the world?’ They are too far removed to be of any value for commercial enterprises; and furthermore they lack ambition. They have no literature, nor, properly speaking, any art. They value life only as does a fox, or a bear, purely by instinct. But let us not forget that these people, trustworthy and hardy, will yet prove their value to mankind. With their help, the world shall discover the Pole.”
Like Matthew Henson, his black servant, whom he once upbraided for failing to call him “Sir,” the Eskimos, to Peary, were no more than tools. Henson had learned to speak their tongue, even though he was paid less than his white companions (forty dollars a month in contrast to eighty or one hundred). But Peary, in all his years in the Arctic, never learned the language of “his” Eskimos, although from time to time some of his supporters hinted that he was fluent. Nor did he produce a single useful ethnographical or archaeological study.
On the other hand, Peary must be credited with adapting native methods to modern sledging parties to a remarkable degree. More than any previous explorer, he understood the value of dogs. Others had been forced on occasion to eat their animals; Peary planned to eat his, thus extending the range of his light, flexible sledges. Like Rae, he carried no tents, relying entirely on snow houses. He didn’t pack a sleeping bag, either; he wore it, as the fur-clad natives did. He lived off the land wherever possible, with the help of experienced native hunters. And he even improved the quality and the flavour of the pemmican that was still the staple food in polar exploration.
None of these techniques, however, was very effective in March 1894, when he tried and failed to cross the Greenland ice cap. He managed 128 miles and then was forced to give up with nothing to show for his efforts. But he refused to admit defeat. The others might return gratefully to America when the ship arrived, but he, Peary, insisted on staying another winter to try again – alone, if necessary. He had a brief reunion with his wife when he returned to the Greenland coast and then bid her and all his crew good-bye, save for the faithful Henson and a young man named Hugh Lee, who volunteered to remain.
It is impossible not to admire Peary’s strength of will during these last moments of leave-taking. It could not have been an easy parting. On that melancholy morning of August 26, when the ship left, he wrote that he had “eyes only for the white handkerchief fluttering from the port of Jo’s cabin.” But those last good-byes were to him no sadder than his recent failure. “So ends with the vanishing ship the ill-omened first half of my expedition.…” he declared. That night he found he could not bear to sleep in the room that the two had shared; instead, he rolled himself up in a couple of deerskins in the dining room.
On April 1, 1895, Peary set off again for the northwest tip of Greenland, again seeking a possible route to the North Pole. “The winter has been a nightmare to me,” he wrote to Jo bef
ore taking off, “… the cold, damp, frost-lined room has made me think of the tomb. The only bright moments have been when I was thinking of you.… I have kissed the place where your head rested, have kissed my blue-eyed baby’s socks, and I carry with me next my heart your last letter.…”
The struggle would be gruelling. Almost at the outset he discovered that the caches he had laid out for the journey could not be found. At the foot of the great ice cap he sent his four native companions back to the coast. With Henson, Lee, and forty-two dogs, he would attempt the main journey alone. When the trio reached the crest, five hundred miles from Anniversary Lodge, they had eleven animals left and not enough food to ensure a return journey. Peary determined to continue towards Independence Bay. Lee was forced to drop out; the other two pushed on. At last, fortified by a kill of muskoxen, they reached Independence Bay and climbed Navy Cliff, which Peary and Astrup had first climbed in 1892. In the distance, Peary declared later, he could see a line of black, precipitous cliffs and a towering mountain, seventy-five miles due north, which he named Mount Wishtar.
But where was Peary Channel, which he claimed to have seen on that previous expedition? He made no mention of it in his later reports, although, he said, the day was clear – clearer, in fact, than it had been on that previous occasion. Later explorations would confirm that there was no Peary Channel. Was Peary confused by another mirage? Was it a figment of his imagination? It is hardly possible that he could have made the same mistake twice, but if he realized that it was a mistake he kept quiet about it. The territory occupied by the “Peary Channel,” which in his words “marked the northern boundary of the mainland of Greenland,” was later found to contain high land. On two separate trips Peary didn’t mention seeing that. Instead, he again insisted that he had confirmed the insularity of Greenland and for that the world had only his word. Henson, who was “as loyal and responsive to my will as the fingers of my right hand,” could not read instruments. Was Peary actually where he claimed to be on two occasions? If so, was he indulging in a form of wishful thinking? Or, realizing his previous error, did he now gloss over it rather than admit failure? Whatever the answer, he was dead wrong.
A race to the west coast followed – a literal race with death in which they made incredible speeds, travelling more than twenty miles a day. Lee, whom they picked up on the return journey, found it difficult to keep up the pace. He urged Peary to leave him to die, but Peary would have none of that. “We will all get home or none of us will,” he declared. It was a close thing; they stumbled into camp half starved and demented, with just one dog left alive. Lee later said he thought Peary seemed to want to avoid having to go home a failure; he had been strangely reckless about the great crevasses that could easily have swallowed him.
For he had failed. His only real discovery was negative. This was obviously not the route to the North Pole. Peary’s mind seemed to have been affected: he actually toyed with the suspicion that Henson was trying to poison him. He rid himself of that fantasy, but his shattered dreams could not be dismissed so easily.
He must bring back some sort of trophy to show that these two years had not been in vain. In the summer of 1894 he had set out to find the mysterious “iron mountain” that had been a legend among explorers since John Ross’s day. Ross, in 1818, had discovered that of all the Greenland Eskimos he encountered, only his “Arctic Highlanders” were using implements made of iron. The iron came from a “mountain” some twenty-five miles from his anchorage, but although Ross learned the exact latitude and longitude of the find, he was unable to take the time to seek it out. A piece of this iron, brought back to England and analysed, proved to have come from a meteorite.
There was, in fact, very little real mystery and no “mountain,” in spite of the legends. Peary, too, was convinced that the iron was meteoric. There appeared to be three sources, shaped, according to the natives, like a woman, a dog, and a tent, and all hurled from the sky by a supernatural power. The Eskimos were reluctant to take Peary to the site; it was to them a sacred spot and, until traders arrived, had been their only source of metal. In the end, however, they revealed the secret. Digging in the snow, Peary found the “woman,” a shapeless mass of brown ore. He scrawled his initials on it and, with his polar route attempt a failure, was able in the summer of 1895 to raise both the three-ton “woman” and the three-hundred-pound “dog” meteorites and take them back to the United States.
These prizes were not enough for Peary. The only real purpose of his two-year absence from civilization, the route to the Pole, still eluded him, and he was now forty years old. “I shall never see the North Pole unless some one brings it here,” the dispirited explorer told the press on his return. “In my judgement such work requires a far far younger man than I.”
Nonetheless he went back to Greenland on two summer journeys in 1896 and 1897 and in the second year managed to bring back the largest meteorite of all, the one the Eskimos called “the tent.” It weighed 37.5 tons. Peary explained away his apparent theft of three priceless relics by pointing out that the natives no longer needed the iron, thanks to the presence of white traders (of whom he was the leading figure). Besides, he explained, he had rewarded “my faithful Eskimos” with biscuits, guns, knives, and ammunition. It was certainly a profitable bargain. Some time later Jo Peary sold all three meteorites to the American Museum of Natural History for forty thousand dollars.
Nor were these Peary’s only trophies. Dr. Franz Boas, the famous anthropologist, then assistant curator of the museum, had suggested that Peary also bring an Eskimo back for study. Peary, who in 1896 had thought nothing of digging up the graves of newly dead natives (some of whom were his friends) and selling the bodies to the museum for profit, obliged in 1897 with no fewer than six. These included Nuktaq, son of the great Kalutunah (Hayes’s friend), and Qisuk, whom Peary called the Smiler, two of his best hunters and dog drivers, together with Nuktaq’s wife, Atanga, his twelve-year-old daughter, Aviak, Qisuk’s son, Minnik, and a sixth youngster, Usaakassak.
As Minnik was later to describe it, “they promised us nice warm houses in the sunshine land, and guns and knives and needles and many other things.” These promises were not kept. The six Eskimos were housed in the basement of the museum, where they soon developed colds that turned into pneumonia. By May 1898, Nuktaq, Qisuk, Atanga, and Aviak were dead and their bodies had been turned over to the museum for examination and study. To keep this knowledge from young Minnik, the museum’s scientists held a bizarre “funeral,” using a log in place of a corpse, in Boas’s words “to appease the boy, and keep him from discovering that his father’s body had been chopped up and the bones placed in the collection of the institution.” Peary appears to have paid very little attention to these tragedies. Certainly in the book he published about his two-year stint in Greenland there is no mention of the incident; on the contrary, he referred to his two male hunters as if they were still alive in the Arctic.
Usaakassak managed to get home, but it was years before Minnik returned. At first he didn’t want to go; later, Peary refused to take him in the belief that it was too late for him to acclimate himself to Eskimo life after the long term in New York. Certainly when Minnik finally reached Greenland, some years after the New York World broke his story, he found he could not fit in. He went back to the United States in 1916, drifted from one job to another, and died of influenza in the fall of 1918.
While his Eskimo friends were dying in Bellevue Hospital, Peary was preparing for another onslaught on the Pole. The gloom he had expressed to the press on his return from Greenland in 1895 had been at least partially dissipated when the American Geographical Society in January 1897 awarded him its first Cullom Gold Medal for establishing the insularity of Greenland. The Royal Geographical Society followed in 1898, awarding him its Patron’s Gold Medal. Thus inspired, Peary prepared for a new assault on the Pole. His plan was to sail as far north as possible and establish a base from which he could make spring drives to his objective
.
As early as 1897 he had tried for a five-year leave from the Navy, a delicate proposition in the light of the threat of war with Spain. Active naval officers were jealous of Peary’s political wire-pulling, but it got him what he wanted – not only leave but also funds for the venture (in spite of the war that was declared in April 1898). His chief supporter was Morris K. Jesup, a philanthropist who had made a fortune in banking and railroad supplies. One of the founders of the American Museum of Natural History and also president of the American Geographical Society, Jesup through his support of Peary would soon have his name stamped on the northernmost point of land in the world.
Jesup persuaded a group of prominent businessmen to back Peary’s newest attempt to reach the Pole. In London, Alfred Harmsworth, the London newspaper magnate, offered his steam yacht, Windward, the same vessel that had rescued Nansen in Franz Josef Land.
Shortly thereafter, Peary learned that Otto Sverdrup was planning to take the Fram into the same area of Smith Sound and Kane Basin. Peary was furious. This was his territory and Sverdrup was poaching on it! He could not believe that Sverdrup had no interest in the Pole. The proposed expedition, he told Jesup, was “an unprincipled attempt … to appropriate my route, my plans and my objects.…” Accordingly, he accelerated his own plans to go north.
The Arctic Grail Page 60