The captain of the Windward would be John Bartlett, an experienced Newfoundland skipper. Bartlett offered the post of first mate to his nephew, Bob.
“What sort of a man is Peary?” young Bartlett asked his uncle.
“He’s like a T-square, Bob. He thinks in a straight line. And you can’t bend him any more than you can bend steel.”
“Does he know his business?”
“He’s the kind that doesn’t make it his business unless he does know it.”
“Is he a rough handler?”
“Not by our way of thinking. He doesn’t ask a man to go where he wouldn’t go himself.”
Bob Bartlett took the post, and for the next decade his career was inextricably bound up with Peary’s.
In the spring of 1898, the nucleus of what would soon be called the Peary Arctic Club was forming around Jesup. This powerful organization, which would finance, protect, and defend Peary in the turbulent years to come, included among its members Herbert L. Bridgman, part-owner of the Brooklyn Standard Union, Henry W. Cannon, president of the Chase National Bank, and James J. Hill, the man who built the Great Northern Railway. The name was not adopted officially until January 1899, when Peary was in the Arctic. The club was incorporated in 1904, and by then it numbered among its members company directors, presidents of insurance companies and banks, manufacturers and transportation magnates (from the founder of the Remington Typewriter Company to the chairman of the Erie Railroad).
Why would a group of millionaires band together to finance and support a decade of polar exploration by one man? A letter that Peary sent out in 1900 soliciting further funds supplies one answer: “… if I win out in this work, the names of those who made the work possible will be kept through the coming centuries floating forever above the forgotten and submerged debris of our time and day. The one thing we remember about Ferdinand of Spain is that he sent Columbus to his life work.” In short, Peary was offering these self-made men something that money usually could not buy – a chance at immortality. And there was one more appeal to the pocketbook. Sverdrup, a foreigner, was apparently after the same prize as Peary. The “race to the Pole,” as it was called, was on. It was imperative that an American should win.
Peary rushed his plans forward and left hurriedly on July 4, 1898, in order to forestall Sverdrup, whose four-year plan had nothing to do with any kind of race. Sverdrup’s view – that an attempt on the Pole was a useless adventure – was echoed by other explorers including the veteran Sir Clements Markham, who declared that “since Nansen’s discovery that the Pole is in an ice-covered sea there is no longer any special object to be attained in going there.”
But to Peary and the men who backed him, the Pole was the one great geographical prize remaining in northern exploration. The Windward forced its way through Smith Sound, past Cape Sabine, and into Kane Basin as far as Princess Marie Bay. It was blocked by ice off Cape Hawks, and there, on a scouting trip, Peary encountered the man he considered his rival. In his published account of the expedition, Peary made no mention of the meeting, though Otto Sverdrup did in his. Peary’s only reference to the Norwegian explorer appeared indirectly in his preface when he referred to “the introduction of a disturbing factor in the appropriation by another of my plan and field of work.…”
With Sverdrup already on Ellesmere, Peary was frantic to get as far north as possible. From Fort Conger, Greely’s old headquarters on Lady Franklin Bay, he had two possible routes to the Pole: either from the tip of Ellesmere Island on the west or from the tip of Greenland on the east.
Convinced that Sverdrup had the same idea, he refused to wait for better weather. It was a foolhardy undertaking, as Matt Henson realized: “But, Lieutenant, this is the dead of winter. It’s stormy and damned cold on the trail. Wouldn’t it be better to wait until spring?”
Peary was adamant. “No! I can’t possibly afford to lose my one chance of a northern base to a competitor.…”
In December, the worst possible month, he set out on the twentieth with Henson, Dr. Tom Dedrick, four Eskimos, and thirty-six dogs. The thermometer dropped below –60° F. Most of the journey was made in utter darkness. The nightmare ended in the early hours of January 7, when the party stumbled into the barn-sized hut that the Greely party had left. By then Peary was close to collapse.
Now, in the gloom of an Arctic morning, he gazed by candlelight on a scene that had been frozen in time for almost two decades. The floor was littered with boxes, pieces of fur, cast-off clothing, and rubbish of every description – just as the departing Greely expedition had left it. Partially consumed tins of provisions, tea, and coffee were scattered on the table and floor. Dishes set out for a final meal remained as they had been when Greely left the fort. Biscuits were strewn about in every direction. Peary found them tough but edible. Even the coffee was drinkable.
While he was sipping Greely’s coffee, Peary became aware of a wooden feeling in his feet. When Henson ripped off the sealskin boots he saw that the explorer’s legs were bloodless white to the knee. As he tore off the undershoes, two or three toes from each foot clung to the hide and snapped off at the joint.
“My god, Lieutenant!” he cried. “Why didn’t you tell me your feet were frozen?”
“There’s no time to pamper sick men on the trail,” Peary told him, and added, “besides, a few toes aren’t much to give to achieve the Pole.”
Peary’s almost maniacal urge to beat Sverdrup to Fort Conger had crippled him permanently. Dr. Dedrick was forced to amputate seven of his toes. For a month Peary couldn’t move; then the others strapped him onto one of the sledges and dragged him back on a winding 250-mile trip to the Windward, a journey they completed in a remarkable eleven days. All this time Peary suffered excruciating pain but uttered not a whimper. On the walls of Fort Conger he had scrawled a quotation from Seneca: Find a way or make one. The adjective “indomitable” has been used to describe more than one polar hero, but it fits no other so neatly as it does this single-minded and desperately driven forty-two-year-old American, who would for the rest of his life hobble on the stumps of his feet, yet feel it a small price to pay for the fulfilment of a dream.
After he reached the ship, Peary underwent a second operation that left only his little toes. He still couldn’t believe the Norwegians weren’t seeking the Pole, even when, on March 13, Victor Baumann, Sverdrup’s second-in-command, paid him a visit. Baumann explained that Sverdrup wanted to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort with Peary, but Peary, ever suspicious, hid from him the fact that he’d already been to Fort Conger. When Baumann sympathized over the condition of Peary’s feet, he received a laconic answer. “You must take your chances up here, you know,” said Peary. Baumann returned to report to Sverdrup, who set off across Ellesmere to investigate the unknown land to the west – the archipelago that would be called the Sverdrup Islands.
The Windward crossed over to Etah on the Greenland coast in August 1899. There Peary encountered the relief ship Diana, financed and sent north by the newly formed Peary Arctic Club. And there a letter told him that the previous January, while he was at Fort Conger, his wife had given birth to another baby girl, Francine. Life, Jo Peary wrote, was slipping away; he had been absent for a year and was planning to be gone for three more.
Peary agreed glumly, but there was nothing he felt he could do. “You are right, dear, life is slipping away. That cannot come to you more forcibly than it has repeatedly to me in times of darkness and inaction the past year. More than once I have taken myself to task for my folly in leaving such a wife and baby (babies now) for this work. But there is something beyond me, something outside of me, which impels me irresistibly to the work.…”
He returned to Fort Conger, decrying the folly of Greely for abandoning such a base – “a blot upon the record of Arctic exploration,” he later called it – a remark that, when it reached the general, caused a breach between them that was never healed.
The following spring – 1900 – he set off on
another extraordinary journey across Greenland, hobbling and shuffling on his mangled feet or riding in one of the sledges. On May 8 he reached Lockwood’s farthest point and picked up from a cairn the record that Lockwood and Brainard had left eighteen years before, still in prime condition. The two men had reported sighting in the distance to the northeast a headland that they called Cape Washington. Would this turn out to be the most northerly point of land on the globe? If so, Peary would be robbed of a first. To his immense relief when he reached it, he saw farther on another headland surrounded by twin glaciers. “It would have been a great disappointment to me,” he wrote, “after coming so far to find that another’s eyes had forestalled mine in looking first upon the coveted northern point.”
Five days later he did reach the top of Greenland. He named it for his benefactor – Cape Morris Jesup – one of several landmarks that would bear the names of his backers. And now, for the first time, Peary set his eyes on the awesome polar sea – a forbidding realm of broken ice and open water. He ventured out for a few miles, enough to convince him that this was not a good route to the Pole.
He had yet to achieve a Farthest North. Unknown to him then, Umberto Cagni, an Italian naval officer with the Duke of Abruzzi’s North Pole expedition operating out of Franz Josef Land in 1899, had already exceeded Nansen’s record by twenty-three miles, losing three men to starvation in the process. But the ultimate prize eluded the Italians as it had everybody else. Cagni stopped 237 miles short of the Pole.
Peary made the 400-mile trip back to Fort Conger in nineteen days. He spent the following winter at Greely’s old headquarters not knowing that his wife and daughter were only about 200 miles to the south and that his second child had died in infancy. The Windward had returned to the United States and brought the pair back to Etah in August 1900. Jo Peary had no way of communicating with her husband – had no idea, indeed, where he was. The Eskimos thought he had gone to Payer Harbour off Cape Sabine, and so the Windward fought its way across Smith Sound, only to find there was no sign of him. Worse, the ship was driven against the rocks and imprisoned in the ice. Mrs. Peary was condemned to a winter in the Arctic.
She was also faced with an embarrassing situation. A comely young Eskimo woman, Allakassingwah – “Ally” for short – was also aboard the ship. She made no secret of the fact that she was Peary’s mistress and that he had fathered the baby she carried with her. It did not, of course, occur to her that this intelligence might have a devastating effect on Josephine Peary; the natives had a different set of morals. Now the two were destined to spend an entire winter together. Peary’s strong-willed wife was clearly aghast at the revelation, even though she was aware of her husband’s earlier declaration that he considered “the presence of women an absolute necessity to keep men contented.” A letter that she wrote at the time – it would not reach him until the following spring – merely hints at the depth of her despair: “Today I feel as though I should not see you this year.… You will have been surprised, perhaps annoyed, when you hear I came up on a ship … but believe me had I known how things were with you I should not have come.”
Peary was still at Fort Conger, faced with problems of his own. Dr. Dedrick was jealous of Matthew Henson and was demanding that Peary make it clear both to him and to Henson that he, Dedrick, was the party’s second-in-command. Peary prepared a set of notes for a heart-to-heart talk with his black servant:
… you have been in my service long enough to show me respect in small things.
Have a right to expect you will say sir to me always.
That you will pay attention when I am talking to you and show that you hear directions I give you by saying yes sir, or all right sir.…
That April of 1901, while moving down the Ellesmere coast from Fort Conger, Peary encountered a group of natives who were sledging north to meet him and there, for the first time, he learned that his wife and daughter were at Payer Harbour, cooped up with his friend Ally and the baby. If there was a breach with his wife when he reached the ship, it was papered over; she was not one to show her feelings to strangers. The two women had got on reasonably well during the winter, and Peary’s extramarital arrangements in the Arctic (and those of Henson, who also fathered a child) remained a secret for years.
In August, another relief ship, the Erik, financed again by the Peary Arctic Club, arrived with devastating news. Peary’s mother – his friend and closest confidante – was dead. This blow drove him further into a state of melancholia. Also aboard the Erik was Dr. Frederick Cook, who had been persuaded by the explorer’s backers to come north in the belief that another doctor might be needed. Cook examined the despondent Peary, told him he was suffering from anemia, and urged him to return to New York. “You are through as a traveler on snow on foot,” Cook told him, “for without toes and a painful stub you can never wear snowshoes or ski.” Peary ignored him.
He had, meanwhile, fired his own doctor, Dedrick, who was, in his view, becoming a nuisance. Dedrick refused to leave. Cook, by no means an unbiased witness, was later to declare that Dedrick stayed with the Eskimos over the winter of 1901 at Etah, “living in underground holes as wild men do,” because he felt the natives would be needing him. When an epidemic sprang up at Cape Sabine, Dedrick crossed the sound to help out. According to Cook, Peary sent him back. Cook, who saw the unburied bones of the victims in 1908, called this “one of the darkest unprinted pages of Arctic history.” By the time that was written (a decade later) Cook and Peary were bitter enemies. Peary never mentioned that summer nor did his official biographer, who wrote simply that the natives died of dysentery and that Peary did his best to nurse them, giving no thought to summoning Dedrick, to whom he was to refer as his “crazy doctor.”
Peary, meanwhile, was preparing to make one more attempt to reach the Pole. In March 1902, he started up the Ellesmere coast with Henson and a few natives. He reached Cape Hecla, the northernmost point of the island, in early April. On the sixth they set off across the frozen surface of the Lincoln Sea, heading for the Pole.
Peary’s Farthest North in 1902
It was a nightmare journey. He had already endured a month of travel before he took to the ice and had come four hundred miles. But the Pole was more than that distance to the north. The ice was often impassable. The exhausted party was forced to follow a wavering course over the hummocks and around open water, to hack a roadway using pickaxes through frozen barriers, to hoist their sledges over walls of broken blocks. Finally, a vast open lead barred their way – a semi-permanent channel in the ice, marking the edge of the continental shelf, to which Peary gave a variety of descriptive names: the Big Lead, the Hudson River, the Grand Canal, the Styx. They were forced to wait for it to freeze, but as their daily mileage continued to decrease they had no choice but to give up on April 21. The Pole was still 395 statute miles to the north. Moreover, when Peary determined his latitude and longitude, he discovered that, in spite of his compass readings, he had not been travelling due north. The ice drift had taken him twelve degrees to the west.
Peary was disconsolate. “The game is off,” he wrote in his diary. “My dream of sixteen years is over.… I have made a good fight but I cannot accomplish the impossible.” He was back at Fort Conger on May 3 and three days later, on his forty-sixth birthday, wrote finish to his Arctic adventures: “I close the book and turn to others less interesting but better suited for my years.… I accept the result calmly.… The goal still remains for a better man than I, or more favourable conditions, or both.”
In spite of these fatalistic words, he was merely at a low ebb. Later he described himself as “a maimed old man, unsuccessful after the most arduous work, away from wife and child, mother dead, one baby dead,” and asked, “Has the game been worth the candle?” In his secret heart, of course, he knew that, for him, it had been. “I could not have done otherwise than stick to it… [but] when I think of the last four years, and what I have been through as I think of all the petty details, it all seems so sma
ll, so little worth the while that I could cry out in anguish of spirit.”
The anguish of spirit did not last. Peary would not have been Peary if he had not contemplated another try at the Pole. There was still one bitter moment to come. On August 5, 1902, the Windward returned to Payer Harbour to take him home. His wife and daughter were aboard, and then he learned for the first time that Captain Cagni of the Italian Navy had established a new Farthest North (“We have conquered! We have surpassed the greatest explorer of the century,” his men had exulted, meaning Nansen.).
Matt Henson, who was present when Peary got that news, saw him wince as he learned that Cagni had beaten him by 158 miles. Then he saw Peary’s jaw tighten and listened as he spoke with something very close to a snarl. “Next time I’ll smash that all to bits,” said Robert Edwin Peary. “Next time!”
4 Amundsen’s triumph
When the seventeen-year-old Roald Amundsen stood in the crowd on that sunny summer’s morning in 1889, cheering Fridtjof Nansen, he had felt again the revival of a childhood ambition – to become the first man to navigate the North West Passage.
Now, in June of 1903, the year following Peary’s return from the Arctic, Amundsen set out to do just that and succeeded brilliantly – succeeded where all of those predecessors whom he worshipped so enthusiastically – Parry, Franklin, Collinson – had failed. In the same environment where others suffered hardships and death, Amundsen survived and thrived. It was no picnic, of course, but next to the accounts of earlier struggles it sounds like a picnic. None of the afflictions that had bedevilled earlier explorers – scurvy, starvation, exhaustion, semi-madness – were visited upon him and his comrades. He knew what he was facing and prepared for it. Because he made it look so easy, because he suffered few of the privations that plagued the ponderous British school of navigators, history has tended to downgrade Amundsen.
The Arctic Grail Page 61