On April 13, the wind dropped at last and the weather cleared, the sky a brilliant blue flecked with “mare’s tail” clouds. Now he made a rash decision. He would jettison all unnecessary baggage and make a run, if not for the Pole, at least for a record. The speeds he claimed from this point on were little short of miraculous. On the first two days out of Storm Camp he said that he travelled at least sixty miles in spite of crossing eleven leads. Between April 14, when he left Storm Camp, and April 21, when he claimed to have beaten the Italian record by thirty-six miles, he travelled by his own reckoning 130 statute miles due north – an average speed of nineteen northerly miles a day with nobody to break trail for him and no allowance for ice drift or detours; all this was based on a single position line, which Peary listed as 87° 6′ N. (In fact, he had covered more than 130 miles, for his own map showed that he believed he had also come forty miles east.) Yet his earlier average speed between Point Moss and the Big Lead – a distance of at least 147 miles, taking into account his westerly drift – had been little more than seven miles a day. In short, in his final dash north, Peary had claimed three times his normal speed.
For this astonishing feat the world had only Peary’s word. There were no reliable witnesses, since neither Henson nor the Eskimos could make astronomical calculations. Peary’s critics have emphasized his failure to document his achievements by taking the other usual observations. He was still about two hundred miles from the Pole, but there is no evidence that when he reached that point he took a longitudinal reading; nor did he check his compass variations as he had on earlier occasions. That documentation would have established that he was where he said he was. Yet he didn’t bother with it.
Exhausted or not, he did not stop to camp. “When I looked at the drawn faces of my comrades,” he wrote later, “at the skeleton figures of my few remaining dogs, at my nearly empty sledges … I felt I had cut the margin as narrow as could reasonably be expected.” He turned about to follow the half-obliterated trail back to Storm Camp and then on to the Big Lead, knowing that if he could not get across that dark gash in the frozen sea he and the others would starve to death. Later he would claim that he made a beeline down the 50th meridian to the Big Lead, apparently without a single deviation, but that is hard to believe.
To his dismay, when he reached his “river Styx,” he found half a mile of black water stretched before him. The party moved east seeking a safe crossing. A day later, they found a kind of bridge formed by ice rubble that appeared just strong enough to bear their weight. They were wrong. The ice began to bend beneath them as they scrambled back to safety. By this time Peary was killing his dogs and roasting them over a fire built from abandoned sledges.
His own account of this return trip is remarkably vague, with scarcely a date or a mileage figure to serve as a signpost to the reader. Words like “one day” and “later” so fuzz the narrative that it’s difficult to know exactly where Peary, Henson, and the natives actually were during their thirty-seven-day journey back to the ship at Cape Sheridan, or how many days he was held up at the Big Lead. For this period, apparently Peary did not keep a diary.
The later description of his eventual crossing, however, is graphic enough. His Eskimo companions discovered a film of young ice, barely enough to bear a man’s weight, some miles to the east. The members of the party fastened on their snowshoes and then advanced gingerly in extended line across this filament, each man fifty feet from his neighbour, none daring to raise his feet, so that they glided rather than walked.
Without the snowshoes, the venture would have been impossible; a slip or a stumble would have been fatal. Once they started they could not stop. Peary was later to admit that this was the first and only time in all his Arctic work that he’d felt doubtful about the outcome. At one point he heard a cry from somewhere down the line as the toe of someone’s snowshoe broke through the ice. “This is the finish,” he thought. But he could not look up or take his eyes for an instant from the steady, even gliding of his feet. To his relief they made it – but without a moment to spare. Even while they were removing their snowshoes they saw a jagged gap appear in the ice as the lead opened up again.
The coast of Greenland lay 113 miles to the south. Again Peary’s account of the journey is confused and contradictory. He insisted that his party moved south in a straight line, apparently avoiding the drift and deviation that had pulled them sideways on the way north. Yet he also admitted that after crossing the Big Lead, they encountered “a hell of shattered ice” such as he had never seen before. He described the spectacle: some blocks the size of paving stones, others ranging to enormous heights as high as the dome of the Washington capitol – almost certainly an exaggeration inserted by one of his ghost writers. Peary also declared that “it did not seem as if anything not possessing wings could negotiate it.” Yet he insisted that he did not deviate as much as a mile from his straight-line course.
There is no reason to doubt Peary’s description of the hardships on this return journey. Henson was a reliable witness to these conditions, even if he couldn’t read a sextant. The trip south must have been a nightmare, with men stumbling painfully across the ice – and none in more pain than their leader, whose stumps of feet were especially vulnerable. Peary wrote that at the end of the day, his jaws ached from the continual grinding of his teeth – his only way of subduing his torment.
Just before reaching the raw and lifeless Greenland shore on May 9, the party encountered one of the supporting divisions, led by Charles Clark, a fireman from the Roosevelt. Clark had reached the Big Lead on his way north one day behind Peary but was unable to cross. He had then turned south and, like Peary, was pinned down by a week-long storm. Again, like Peary, he had been pushed east by the ice drift.
Here was a mystery. If Peary had gone on north to 87° 6′, how could he and Clark both have arrived at Cape Neumayer on the Greenland coast at the same time? Clark had less than half the distance to travel on the return trip from the Big Lead. On April 14, Peary left Storm Camp and headed north. On the same day, Clark left the Big Lead and headed south. Theon Wright is one of several critics who have analysed Peary’s mileage. His calculations have shown that Clark travelled about 180 statute miles from the Big Lead while Peary travelled 414 miles in the same period – a rate of sixteen statute miles a day if no allowance is made for detours and ice drift. Clark was travelling at less than half that speed – about seven miles a day.
Was Clark a slowpoke? Certainly he didn’t have Peary’s sledging experience, but he did have Peary’s trained Eskimos. Clark’s sledging speeds were credible; on the first twenty days out of Point Moss under the same conditions and including his westerly drift Peary hadn’t made much better time. What is remarkable – perhaps incredible – is Peary’s claimed speed when only he, Henson, and the Eskimos, exhausted men driving tired dogs, were allegedly bettering the Italian record. Wright has speculated that he may not have gone north at all after the storm but turned directly east to the 50th meridian and then headed due south across the Big Lead to the Greenland coast. The distance was about 150 miles, which would have given Peary an average daily speed of about six miles. Wright’s theory is certainly as plausible as Peary’s account – indeed, more plausible; but when Peary returned to civilization, nobody was ungentlemanly enough to challenge his figures.
Nevertheless, it would be unjust not to recognize Peary’s remarkable feat of sledge travel in the spring of 1906. He had spent sixty-four days out on the polar ice, far from land, never changing his clothes, enduring appalling physical pain and hardship, and surviving several brushes with death. Having reached the windswept shores of Cape Neumayer, he faced another seventeen days of hard travel west to the north coast of Ellesmere, where the Roosevelt was anchored. Fortunately, on this final stretch of the journey, there was plenty of game to sustain the party.
At first, when he reached the ship, he was too weary to put pencil to paper. Then he wrote: “To think that I have failed once more; that
I shall never have the chance to win again.” The key word here is “win.” What others might have considered a triumph, Peary saw as a failure.
Peary’s exploration of Ellesmere Island, June 1906
He was still seeking some sort of prize to bring back to his supporters at the Peary Club. One week after reaching the ship he was off again, intent on exploring the hundred uncharted miles of Ellesmere’s north coast that lay to the west. The least he could do would be to name the unknown capes and bays for his wealthy supporters, a time-honoured method of rewarding financial backers that went back to the days of John Ross and Felix Booth.
He left on June 2, this time without Henson. On the sixteenth, he passed Aldrich’s Farthest, a record made during the Nares expedition. Ahead lay uncharted territory. Peary was exultant, and in his book Nearest the Pole, he made no attempt to hide from his readers his own naked ambition. Rather, he revelled in it: “… what I saw before me in all its splendid, sunlit savagery, was mine, mine by right of discovery, to be credited to me, and associated with my name, generations after I ceased to be.”
Peary pushed on westward, alone except for his Eskimo companions. To protect the stumps of his feet he had fashioned metal insoles from pemmican tins. Before the trip was over they had been worn down to the thickness of silver dollars. On June 24, he reached Cape Colgate, and from this vantage point he was later to write that “now it was with a thrill that my glasses revealed the faint white summits of a distant land which my Eskimos claimed to have seen as we came along from the last camp.” Four days later, having crossed the frozen channel to Axel Heiberg Island, he climbed to the top of a promontory that he named for General Thomas Hubbard. From there he saw once more, or thought he saw, “snow clad summits of the distant land in the northwest, above the ice horizon. My heart leaped the intervening miles of ice, as I looked longingly at this land, and in fancy I trod its shores and climbed its summits.…”
These words were written by Peary months later in Nearest the Pole. Yet there isn’t a single mention of any mysterious land in his journal for those two days. There is no journal entry at all for June 24, the day of his first “sighting.” There is a voluminous and detailed entry for June 28, but no mention of any sighting on that day. He did not mention the sighting of any new land northwest of Ellesmere in either of the telegrams he sent to the government in November 1906. He did not even mention his discovery to Bob Bartlett or the others when he returned to the ship. He left behind messages in three cairns: one on June 28, the day he climbed Cape Thomas Hubbard, another on June 30, and a third on July 5. All were recovered by later explorers; none made reference to any new land seen by Peary. In fact, Peary’s cairn memorandum describing the view from Cape Hubbard on June 30, two days after his second sighting of the “snow clad summits of a distant land,” merely reported that June 27 and June 28 were “fine clear days giving a good view of the northern horizon from the summit of the cape.”
Like his 1899 location of “Jesup Land,” Peary’s memory of what he saw seems to have come as an afterthought. The first public reference appeared in an article he wrote for Harper’s in February 1907 – more than six months later. At that point he named the new land for his benefactor George Crocker, and Crocker Land it became on the map until 1914, when one of his old associates, Donald MacMillan, led an expedition to seek it, only to discover that it didn’t exist. Like Jesup Land, it had been seen in the misty distance by Peary without any other witness except the natives.
The most charitable explanation for this lapse is that Peary was misled by an Arctic mirage – the same phenomenon that had caused John Ross’s downfall when he, too, hoped to gain support from a powerful figure – Croker, not Crocker, in that case. If Peary did see anything, he must have dismissed it at the time as illusive. Only months later, when he was pushed by the need to raise more funds for another try at the Pole, did he “discover that he had discovered it,” in Dennis Rawlins’s phrase.
Again, there is another, harsher possibility – that Peary’s discovery of Crocker Land was a naked fraud, coldly designed to butter up a rich backer. Unlike Jesup Land, which did not remain long on the maps, Crocker Land was accepted as genuine for seven years after Peary announced his find. Nobody questioned Peary. No scientific body, including the one that sent Donald MacMillan in search of Crocker Land, ever checked Peary’s field notes before they were lost. Nor did Peary produce a scintilla of scientific data to locate the position of his supposed discovery.
The Roosevelt, meanwhile, had broken free of the bay ice and had moved twenty miles down the Ellesmere coast. Peary had three hundred miles of hard travel through the summer slush to reach her. By this time she was a badly crippled ship, having suffered a series of damaging blows that wrecked her rudder, tore off two of her four propeller blades, ripped open a hole in her bottom “almost big enough for a small boy to crawl through” (Bartlett’s phrase), and damaged her sides. Bartlett and his crew patched her up as best they could with a jury-rigged rudder, stuffing the rips in her sides and bottom with a cubic yard of oakum and rags mixed with a barrel of cement. Then, with the pumps working continuously, they pushed off for Etah.
They arrived on September 16 after a desperate seventy-five-day struggle with the ice. Bartlett in his log described the Roosevelt as “a complete wreck,” but he had no intention of abandoning her. After a six-day pause she limped out to sea again. This journey from the top of Ellesmere Island to the Port of New York stands as one of the most remarkable on record and testifies to Bartlett’s stubbornness and brilliant seamanship. When the Roosevelt ran out of fuel, he used green spruce, whale blubber, and seal oil to stoke her furnaces, together with frozen coal salvaged and sometimes dynamited from old caches. The crippled ship went through four rudders; at one point she was reduced to half a propeller; and the boiler leaked continually. She fought her way through ice, gales, and shoals. At Battle Harbour, Labrador, she was pinned down by a ten-day gale that snapped her lines and broke her main anchor. Bartlett managed to save the ship by mooring her to some rocks with chains. But when he tried to get his rudderless craft into the locks at St. Peter’s Canal, Cape Breton Island, she ran up onto a mudbank, crashed into a fence, and headed straight for a milkmaid, who fled screaming up a hill with her cow scrambling after her. “The poor old Roosevelt, as well as ourselves, was ready for the insane asylum or the dump heap,” Bartlett later recalled.
At last, on Christmas Eve, 1906, the Roosevelt staggered into New York harbour. By then, Peary was home; he had taken the train from Sydney, Nova Scotia. Bartlett could have beached his ship there and waited until spring to repair her, but that was not his way. “We have got to get her back, Captain,” Peary had told him. “We are going to come again next year.” For that project he would again need the Roosevelt, not to mention her tough and plucky captain.
2 “Mine at last!”
Peary reached the United States in the fall of 1906 fully intending to return to the Arctic the following summer. Although he claimed to have been farther north than any other man and to have discovered a vast new island, he thought of himself as a failure. The Pole – and only the Pole – could wipe out the acrid taste of defeat. Its discovery was something “which must be done for the honor and credit of this country,” he told the National Geographic Society when it awarded him its first Hubbard Medal that December – at the hands of Theodore Roosevelt.
Like so many other explorers before him, Peary continued to harp on the patriotic theme; it was, after all, the surest way to the pocketbooks of the nation. As he told the New York Times the following spring, when he officially announced his newest plan, “the attainment of the Pole spells National prestige.” It was, he added (dismissing the whole of the Antarctic), “the last great geographical prize which the world has to offer to adventurous men.”
Through the efforts of the president, now his most ardent supporter, Peary again obtained leave from the Navy – three years this time. Roosevelt, the Rough Rider who had led the charge on
San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War, was also an explorer as well as a writer, conservationist, and big-game hunter who had unwittingly given his name to the teddy bear during an outing in the American West. The bluff and forthright president was captivated by the equally bluff and forthright Peary, who sent him narwhal horns from the Arctic and cultivated his patronage to the point of naming a ship after him. Peary’s public image as a dedicated and unselfish explorer, sacrificing a comfortable family life in his effort to carry the Stars and Stripes to the farthest corner of the earth, fitted the Roosevelt style.
But his leave at first came to nothing, for his ship was so badly damaged she could not be repaired in the time available. In August, 1907, Peary was forced into a rueful announcement. The project, for that year, would have to be abandoned.
There was another reason. Peary did not have the funds to mount an expedition. He was broke and in debt. He had expected to make one hundred thousand dollars in royalties from his new book, Nearest the Pole, but it was a flop. In 1907 it sold only 2,230 copies – a meagre return that didn’t even cover the five-thousand-dollar advance. The world didn’t want to hear about another failed attempt to reach the Pole. It wanted a success story, and Peary could not provide that.
With Bob Bartlett, Peary had stumped the country trying to raise funds, knocking on the doors of millionaires and politicians and giving public lectures. It didn’t work. “I was rebuffed, laughed at, offered jobs, sympathized with and in a hundred ways resisted,” Bartlett recalled. “It was a glorious fight but we failed.…” Bartlett returned to the Newfoundland seal hunt only to be shipwrecked off the east coast, his vessel a total loss, his hoped-for profits wiped out.
Meanwhile, Peary learned that his former associate, the amiable Brooklyn surgeon Frederick Cook, had sailed for Etah aboard a yacht owned by John R. Bradley, a wealthy sportsman. Officially, Cook was Bradley’s guest on a hunting trip. But rumour said that Cook, fresh from his reported conquest of Mount McKinley, North America’s highest peak, was planning an attempt on the Pole.
The Arctic Grail Page 65