Chapter Thirteen
1
Nearest the Pole
2
“Mine at last!”
3
Dr. Cook’s strange odyssey
4
Cook versus Peary
5
The end of the quest
Peary’s North Pole expedition crossing pressure ridges (illustration credit 13.1)
1 Nearest the Pole
In July of 1905, as Roald Amundsen was preparing to leave Gjöa Haven on the final leg of his long voyage through the North West Passage, Robert Edwin Peary was about to set off from New York to make what he thought would be a final successful assault on the North Pole.
The shaggy American and the solemn Norwegian shared certain similarities. Both were fiercely ambitious; both were meticulous planners; both had mastered the techniques of the Eskimos. But the contrasts between the two ran deeper. As a leader, Amundsen was the first among equals; his crew was a team. Peary, on the other hand, was a dictator. One cannot imagine Amundsen forcing his fellow Norwegians to sign the kind of feudal agreement that bound Henson and the others to Peary. On the other hand, it’s not possible to imagine Peary remaining two seasons at Gjöa Haven to perform scientific observations while the Passage beckoned. Amundsen saw himself as a scientist as well as an explorer; Peary had little interest in anything but reaching his goal; his own observations, when he took them at all, were appallingly slipshod. To him, the polar expedition was a sporting event, not a scientific exercise.
His previous four years of exploration in the High Arctic had made Peary a national figure, yet that wasn’t enough for him. He had rounded the northern coast of Greenland, covered fifteen hundred miles of Ellesmere Island by sledge, climbed to the peak of the vast Agassiz Glacier, and gone farther north by way of the so-called American route to the Pole than any other man. While Amundsen and his comrades were lost from sight on King William Island, Peary was making his plans for another expedition to the frozen world. His considerable accomplishments would have satisfied an ordinary explorer (if any explorer can be called ordinary), but Peary craved some more conspicuous feat that would be forever identified with his name.
He had already made a stab at immortality – or thought he had. In June of 1899, while Amundsen was still studying navigation, Peary, standing on an ice-sheathed peak on Ellesmere’s great inland glacier, thought he saw a mountainous land off to the northwest. What he probably saw were the Blue Mountains of Ellesmere’s west coast, just to the north of Greely Fiord. But Peary, in his eagerness to discover something, transformed this misty vision into a distinct geographical feature, which he named for his chief supporter, Morris K. Jesup.
Clearly unsure of his ground, Peary didn’t even mention “Jesup Land” in his report a year later to the Peary Arctic Club. It wasn’t until 1903, when Otto Sverdrup reported that he had circled and charted a vast new island, which he named Axel Heiberg, that Peary announced he’d seen it first. It was a flimsy claim. He’d seen some mountains in the misty distance from the top of a peak. Sverdrup had circumnavigated Axel Heiberg and charted it so carefully that modern maps differ little from his original. Peary’s “discovery” and Sverdrup’s were not identical either in shape or in geographical position. Whatever Peary saw, it wasn’t Sverdrup’s island. Even the National Geographic Society, always an ardent Peary supporter, rejected his claim.
Was this phantom sighting another innocent mistake, like the ephemeral Peary Channel? The most charitable explanation is that the explorer was engaging once more in an act of self-deception, fuelled by an inner need to produce some tangible trophy on his return to civilization. If it couldn’t be the Pole, it must be something that could bear his stamp – a body of water, a mysterious meteorite, a new island.
There is, as well, a darker possibility – that Peary was manufacturing evidence to support his claims. A recent modern critic, Dennis Rawlins, has pointed out that Peary in 1903 apparently reshaped and moved Jesup Land on his map to conform to Sverdrup’s original drawing. Yet, writing in 1906, Peary brazenly insisted he had seen it and named it “though Sverdrup has later given it the name of Heiberger [sic] land.”
Jesup Land had not yet been discredited in 1903 when Peary was elected president of the American Geographical Society after a behind-the-scenes struggle with Adolphus Greely. The following year he again bested Greely to become president of the Eighth International Geographical Congress. These considerable honours failed to satisfy him; he wanted the Pole, and he wanted it desperately, in spite of the pleas of his family. His wife, Jo, had urged Herbert Bridgman, secretary of the Peary Arctic Club, to “let me keep my old man at home.” His eleven-year-old daughter, Marie, begged the father she hardly knew to stay with the family. She was tired of seeing him only in press photographs, she said. “I want to see my father. I don’t want people to think me an orphan.”
But the call of family could not keep the forty-seven-year-old explorer from completing his life’s ambition. Others were seeking the prize. In June 1903, an American businessman, William Ziegler, who longed to have his name associated with Arctic discovery, had dispatched another expedition to try to reach the Pole by way of Franz Josef Land. This determinedly patriotic effort (the ail-American crew included Sergeant Francis Long, one of Greely’s survivors) was the second Ziegler had funded; an earlier attempt had failed. By the time the Peary Arctic Club was incorporated in 1904, the Ziegler Polar Expedition was already in trouble. When its ship, the America, was crushed in the ice and sank, the crew was forced to spend two winters in the open. Anthony Fiala, the leader, made a bold attempt in 1905 to get to the Pole but didn’t manage to get beyond the 82nd parallel. That confirmed Peary’s belief that the only feasible way to the Pole was the so-called American Route – a misnomer, for it hugged the Ellesmere coast and was therefore thoroughly Canadian.
Since his return from the Arctic in 1902, Peary had spent three years raising money and planning his new expedition. He went at it with his usual thoroughness; not for him the slapdash impetuosity of a Kane or a Hall or the obstinacy of the Royal Navy. Peary learned from his mistakes. He was convinced that he must devise a different approach. He would, first of all, have to eliminate the ghastly sledge trips up Ellesmere’s ragged coast from Kane Basin that had exhausted him and his companions long before they reached their jumping-off point. His remedy was to build a special ship that could force its way through the narrow, ice-locked channels between Greenland and Ellesmere and deposit his party on the very rim of the permanently frozen sea.
Second, he would need a larger company than he had once thought necessary. He would divide it into three sections: a pioneer party to break trail and build igloos; support groups to follow behind, shuttling caches of supplies forward; and, finally, the polar party, which would bring up the rear so that rested, refreshed, and lightly equipped it could make the final dash to the objective.
This was the essence of what, with his usual flair for self-promotion, he called the Peary System. It might as easily have been called the M’Clintock System, for it had been used half a century before when Leopold M’Clintock’s satellite sledges had crossed Melville Island. But Peary did improve on M’Clintock: he would use dogs, not manpower; his followers would be dressed in native garb, and they would live in snow houses that could be used on the return journey.
Peary knew that the ship that would take him through Kennedy and Robeson channels would need to be specially designed. For that alone he would need $100,000. The construction of the Roosevelt, as she was to be called, actually began before all the money for the venture was raised. In the end Peary got $50,000 from the ailing Morris K. Jesup, another $50,000 from George Crocker, a director of the Southern Pacific Railroad, and $20,000 more from General Thomas Hubbard, vice-president of the Peary Arctic Club. Peary made up the rest from his own funds, mortgaging himself to the point of bankruptcy.
The vessel that steamed out of New York harbour on July 16, 1905, was the most practical
ship yet to invade Arctic waters and, apart from the Fram, the only one especially constructed for the task. Like the Fram, she was designed to ride up on the ice. Her egg-shaped sides were both elastic and strong – as much as thirty inches thick. She was narrower than Nansen’s ship – 185 feet long with a thirty-five-foot beam – and her prow was flared to let her cut into the floes. Her hull was braced by massive crossbeams, her engine was powerful, her shaft and propellers were oversize. Unlike the Fram, which moved with the ice, the Roosevelt was designed to attack the pack by brute force.
To command this battering ram of a ship, Peary chose the thirty-year-old Bob Bartlett, who had been first mate under his uncle on the previous expedition. Bartlett came from a long line of rugged Newfoundland sealers and whaling masters and looked the part: stocky, powerful, and barrel-chested, with close-cropped hair and a weather-beaten face. Peary was convinced that Bartlett could get him to the top of the world if any man could. When he approached him at the end of the previous voyage and offered him the command of a new vessel, Bartlett had accepted, under one condition: he wanted to accompany Peary on the final dash to the Pole itself. “On the next voyage I’m going to the North Pole,” he told his father. It was a wistful hope that never came true.
Other members of the twelve-man company included Bartlett’s grizzled, six-foot cousin, Moses Bartlett, as first mate; Professor Ross Marvin, late of Cornell University, a willowy, earnest academic; and, of course, Peary’s faithful black servant, Matthew Henson, who had been with him since the days of Nicaragua and was now in his fortieth year.
But as usual, it was the Eskimos who would make Peary’s polar journey possible. In Etah he planned to recruit twenty families – the men to build sledges and supply him with fresh meat (not to mention furs and ivory to sell in the South), the women to sew Arctic clothing. They were happy to work for him, for he had been their chief source of wealth over the years. In return for the weapons and ammunition, wood for sledges, metal for harpoons, knives, hatchets, saws, and cooking utensils he provided, they were prepared to take part in a quest that baffled them. To the natives, the Pole seemed tangible; its name suggested a perpendicular object projecting from the ice. They called it the Big Nail, after a useful trade article with which they could identify. But why would anybody wish to go there, across a treacherous desert of heaving ice? No Eskimo really wanted to go far beyond the sight of land, but by threats, cajolery, and bribes Peary managed to subdue their natural fear.
The Roosevelt reached Etah in mid-August and, after taking on supplies and native families, nosed her way up Kane Basin and then into the narrow passageways leading to the Lincoln Sea. “We are beyond the world’s highways now,” Peary wrote, “and we shall see no sail or smoke except our own until our return.”
Under the explorer’s urging, Bartlett drove the ship full speed into the ice. Sometimes she wrenched a passage through; sometimes Bartlett was forced to detour. He was spending almost all his time in the crow’s-nest, conning the ship as she hammered, squeezed, and twisted her way northward at the agonizing speed of half a knot (six-tenths of a mile an hour), “vibrating like a violin,” in Peary’s description. Bartlett recalled that every day of that tortuous journey seemed to him likely to be his last until, on September 5, they reached the tip of Ellesmere and put in at a small cove off Cape Sheridan on the rim of the permanently frozen Lincoln Sea. “I do not believe,” Peary declared (forgetting Nares’s voyage on the Alert thirty years before), “there is another ship afloat that would have survived the ordeal.”
The expedition spent a comfortable winter at Cape Sheridan, living sumptuously on the vast quantities of muskoxen and caribou brought in by the Eskimo hunters. The party’s surgeon, Dr. Louie J. Wolf of San Francisco, who whiled away the time reading Isaac Hayes’s published accounts of his hardships, was impressed and surprised at the contrast between the two expeditions.
On February 9, Peary began to dispatch his supporting parties to Point Moss, twenty miles to the west of Cape Hecla at 83° N. From this point they would leave solid land and move out onto the rough sea ice toward the Pole, almost five hundred miles due north, setting up caches some fifty miles apart all along the route.
He himself reached the jumping-off point at midnight on March 5, a brilliant moonlit night. He was exhausted after his journey but elated, for he was launching his expedition a month earlier than he had in 1902. On that last trip he had reached a north latitude of 84° 17′. Surely this time he could attain 90°! “If I can do as well this time we shall win,” he exclaimed in his journal. “God and all good angels grant it, and let me seize this great trophy for the Flag.”
The additional distance would be 343 nautical miles. Peary used the nautical measurement – one mile to one minute of latitude. The nautical mile is about 800 feet longer than the statute mile, which means that by the more familiar measurement Peary had about 394 miles farther to go beyond his previous record. Peary’s critics always charged that he preferred citing the longer mile because his claimed distances, which were astonishing in any case, would not seem quite so incredible to the layman. All naval explorers used nautical miles.
When Peary set off the following day, March 6, 1906, Henson and his team of Eskimos were far in the lead, hacking a trail through the pressure ridges and building snow houses. The other support parties followed behind Henson. Peary brought up the rear. Soon the entire polar expedition – six white men, one black, twenty-one Eskimos, and 120 dogs – were strung out for a hundred miles across the frozen sea.
It was heavy going. Broad leads, old floes, broken blocks, young, treacherous ice, and the inevitable pressure ridges barred the way, forcing lengthy detours. Howling winds conspired to slow the advancing parties. Stumbling impatiently forward on his crippled feet, Peary was the captive of a single resolve – to get to the Pole. The time wasted stopping to rest at the igloos that had been built for him drove him to quiet desperation. He could hardly sleep waiting for the dogs to be rested to the point where they could move on. He was plagued by the possibility that some insuperable obstacle might bar his way. That he could scarcely bear to contemplate. “Will it break my heart,” he asked himself, “or will it simply numb me into insensibility?”
He alternately froze and sweated as the temperature dropped to –50° F at night and then soared as high as 65° when the sun shone. Once again, he found himself in the grip of conflicting passions. He longed for home, but he was obsessed by his need to fulfil what he thought of as his destiny. He knew that in two months at the most, “the agony will be over and I shall know one way or the other.” He was comforted by the knowledge that however it turned out, he would be back at his home on Eagle Island before the leaves of autumn fell, “going over the well-known places with Jo and the children, and listening to the birds, and the wind in the trees, and the sound of lapping waves.” Did such things really exist on this frozen planet? he asked himself. Here, when the curtain of whirling snow lifted, it revealed a lifeless terrain, stark white, unending, pitiless.
On March 26, he reached the Big Lead – apparently the same “Hudson River” that had blocked his passage in 1902. At this point, where the “fast ice” (ice frozen fast to the land) met the moving pack, an immense, semi-permanent gap of black water, as much as two miles wide and only partly frozen, halted the parties and forced them to bunch up. In twenty days, Peary had moved north by 124 statute miles from Point Moss – an average of six miles a day. His actual travel mileage was greater; astonishingly, he did not take a longitude reading until he reached the Big Lead. That meant he had no real idea where he was. When he got out his instruments, he found he had strayed eighty miles off course to the west.
For a man of Peary’s temperament, the wait that followed must have been maddening. The weather was almost perfect for Arctic travel – crisp and clear – but he could not move as long as open water barred his way. An agonizing week crawled slowly by. Peary sent his support parties back to Point Moss for more supplies. And then, on Apri
l 2, before they had had time to return, the temperature dropped, allowing enough young ice to form on the water to permit a hazardous crossing. He sent a spare man back with a message for the others to follow him if and when they could. Then he, Henson, and six Eskimos crossed the new ice and headed north.
He had lost a precious week of superb weather. The Pole was still 360 statute miles away. At the rate he was travelling, barring unforeseen holdups, it would take almost two months to reach it and even longer to get back to land.
After just three days of hard travel, he was faced with another setback. The wind sprang up; a blizzard followed. The floe on which they had made their camp broke open, demolishing Henson’s igloo. For the next week Peary was pinned down at “Storm Camp,” as he called it, his ears assaulted day and night by the “hell-born music” of the howling wind. That seven days, he wrote later, felt more like a month. In his desperation, Peary sought an outlet for his nervous energy by pacing back and forth, often on his hands and knees, for three hours a day, across the small floe on which they were trapped.
He must have realized by this time that he could not reach the Pole. Yet he could not return empty-handed, for that would mean the end of his life’s work and all his ambitions. He craved wealth and fame, but this expedition had beggared him; and he knew that the fat lecture fees, book royalties, and testimonials – not to mention his own name and photograph on the front pages of the world’s newspapers – would not be forthcoming. “Unless I win here,” he wrote, “all these things fall through. Success is what will give them existence.”
He needed some trophy to present to the men who had pledged more than one hundred thousand dollars to his cause. At the very least, he knew, he must try to set a new record by getting closer to the Pole than any other explorer. His journal entries began to dwell on Nansen’s Farthest, and Cagni’s, sure evidence that Peary had given up his assault on the Big Nail.
The Arctic Grail Page 64