Peary at first dismissed this talk and refused to believe other rumours – that Cook had faked the Mount McKinley climb. “Cook is an honourable man,” he told Vilhjalmur Stefansson. And to a friend who predicted that Cook intended to fake the polar journey, Peary replied, “Oh, no. I do not believe Cook would do that.”
But when Bradley returned to the United States that fall and announced that Cook intended to try for the North Pole in 1908 by a new route, taking dogs and Eskimos from the Etah area, Peary was outraged. Cook was about to steal his route to the North Pole – the route he had been exploring and surveying for the best part of twenty years. More, Cook was planning to steal his Eskimos, the very ones he had painstakingly trained in the Peary System. Peary made no bones about his title to that part of the Arctic and its people. It was, he once wrote, “as much a part of his [the explorer’s] capital as the gold and silver in the vault of a bank.” Until an explorer abandoned the route he had pioneered, “no one else, without his consent, has any more right to take it and use it, than a stranger has to enter the vaults of the bank, and take its treasure.”
Even before Bradley returned, Peary was alerting his long-time sponsor, the National Geographic Society, to the facts about what he considered Cook’s infamy and Bradley’s dubious credentials. He sent documents to Gilbert Grosvenor, the editor of the National Geographic, for his private information: “Dr. Cook’s backer … is known in certain New York circles as ‘Gambler Jim.’ I have been informed that he was at one time a card sharp on the Mississippi River until turned out. It is a well known fact that he is the owner of a gambling hell at Palm Beach, in which I am told women, as well as men, gamble. I feel the whole spirit and method of execution of this last move of Dr. Cook is of a nature that should receive, as a matter of principle, the distinct dis-approval of all reputable Geographic and scientific organizations and individuals.” Thus did Peary begin to lay the groundwork for the controversy that followed.
Peary’s plan for a new start in 1908 suffered another blow when his chief financial supporter, Morris K. Jesup, died. Nonetheless, his widow provided five thousand dollars, and General Thomas Hubbard, who succeeded as president of the Peary Arctic Club, provided a good deal more. The ever-helpful President Theodore Roosevelt, at Peary’s prodding, persuaded the Navy to put him back on full pay on the excuse that he would carry out tidal observations along the northern coasts of Greenland and Ellesmere Island. But Peary needed another twenty-five thousand dollars before the Roosevelt could sail. There was considerable jealousy among senior naval officers over the ease with which Civil Engineer Peary got what he wanted, especially when he continued to allow himself to be called “Commander.” When that title appeared in an advertisement announcing his lecture at Washington’s Belasco Theatre, he received a stiff letter from the Navy Department, pointing out the title was “unauthorized and contrary to naval regulations” and demanding an explanation. Peary curtly replied to the Secretary of the Navy that he wasn’t responsible for the advertising. The press continued to use the improper title.
In June 1908, he took a gamble. With his ship not yet ready and the full sum required for the voyage still unavailable, he boldly announced that he would sail north that season. At the same time he was shooting off letters to every possible supporter, seeking financial help. When Zenas Crane, vice-president of the Peary Arctic Club, donated five thousand dollars to the expedition, Peary was quick to use the gift as a lure to other possible donors.
In a typical letter to A.W. Douglass, vice-president of the Simmons Hardware Company in St. Louis, he explained the value to a commercial firm of associating its name with the polar attempt. “Mr. Crane’s generous gift was made on Friday,” Peary wrote. “Saturday his name and the fact of his gift was known in every state and city and town in this country, and was wired to the principal papers in Europe. Incidentally the papers have noted that Mr. Crane is a partner in a great paper manufacturing concern in Massachusetts.…” A gift from Douglass or his boss, Simmons, “would carry your name to every city in the country and incidentally that you were members of the great firm of Simmons Hardware Company, and the papers of your city and state would take it up as a matter of state pride.” Shades of Sir John Ross and Felix Booth’s gin!
The age of hype was dawning, and Peary was one of its early practitioners. “Of course you know,” he wrote to Douglass, “that thousands of people today are using Lipton’s Tea who had never heard of Lipton’s Tea until they knew of Sir Thomas, through his interest and association with the International Yacht races.”
The Simmons company responded not with cash but with kind – five sets of their Keen Kutter tools “for distribution among your favourite Eskimos.” All Douglass wanted in return was some sort of native testimonial. “See if you can teach them in English to call them KEEN KUTTER goods,” he asked Peary, “or tell me what the equivalent would be in Eskimo language.”
Throughout June, Peary was bombarded with various offers, some impractical, some financially attractive. Turned down by his former backer, the New York Herald (which thought, mistakenly, that its readers had had enough Arctic tales), he got a four-thousand-dollar advance from the New York Times – conditional on his actually reaching the Pole. He was offered free a variety of commercial products, from Horlick’s Malted Milk to Huyler’s Chocolate Dipped Triscuits. The Twentieth Century Globe company agreed to pay him a fifty-cent royalty on every globe it sold in return for a testimonial letter; and the American Mutuoscope and Biograph film company, which lent him a movie camera, agreed to pay a two-cent royalty on every foot of processed film of his Arctic venture that it was able to sell.
One private citizen even sent a thousand-dollar cheque with “no strings” for “Peary the Man, and not necessarily the Explorer – in other words to make any use you wish of the cheque, without feeling under obligation to devote it to the expeditionary fund.” That must have been a cheering note. In the midst of the letters urging Peary to use or plug every kind of product, from dehydrated food to piano rolls, were less welcome letters dunning him for money. “We regret very much indeed,” one merchant wrote, “that you do not see fit to even answer our letters regarding our account which is long overdue.… We have written you pleasantly about the matter a number of times, and really see no way now but to place the matter in the hands of our attorneys.…”
The matter, apparently, was settled. General Hubbard came up with another substantial contribution, Crane with an additional ten thousand. Peary had his money at last and on July 6, 1908, the Roosevelt got away to the usual accompaniment of cheers and tugboat whistles. One hundred guests of the Peary Arctic Club accompanied the ship down the East River as far as the Stepping Stone Light. The following morning at Oyster Bay on Long Island, the president himself climbed aboard, wearing a white duck suit and booming out his favourite adjective. “Bully!” cried Theodore Roosevelt, or so it was reported. After an hour’s inspection he left, having peered into every cranny on the ship, shaken hands with all the crew, and even examined Peary’s Eskimo dogs. “I believe in you, Peary!” he roared as he went over the rail.
At Sydney, Nova Scotia, Peary once again said good-bye to his wife and family. “Another farewell,” he was later to recall. “And there had been so many! Brave, noble little woman! You have borne with me all the brunt of my Arctic work.” Or at least that was the way his ghost writer, the dedicated but effusive Elsa Barker, was to phrase it. (“The divine fire that produces literature cannot be hired by the week, nor does it come at call” is the way she described her work to Peary.) Nonetheless the leave-taking was not as wrenching as it had been on previous ventures. Both Peary and his wife realized that this must be his last expedition.
Peary’s crew included some old hands from previous polar attempts: Bob Bartlett and Matt Henson, of course, the earnest, quiet Professor Marvin, and Charles Percy, his steward. Three newcomers were added to the expedition – “tenderfeet” as Peary called them: Donald MacMillan, a mathematics and physica
l training instructor at a small Massachusetts college; Dr. John Goodsell, a massive, swarthy surgeon; and an enthusiastic twenty-one-year-old college athlete, George Borup.
Peary’s plan differed from that of 1906 only in detail. This time, he would jump off from Cape Columbia, about forty miles west of Point Moss, to try to compensate for the drift of the ice. He would keep his support divisions much closer together and he would establish his base camp well north of the Big Lead, about 170 miles from the Pole. He would keep the best dogs, the best supplies, and the best men for the final dash. Meanwhile, the supporting parties would keep the homeward trail open to speed the polar party on its return.
The Roosevelt, accompanied by the sealer Erik, loaded with eight hundred tons of coal, reached Etah on August 12; Bartlett had no intention this time of running out of fuel. And there, in Henson’s description, they encountered “the most hopelessly dirty, unkempt, filthy-littered human being any of us had ever seen.” This was Rudolph Franke, a twenty-nine-year-old German, who had been left behind at the neighbouring village of Anoatok by Dr. Frederick Cook to guard his supplies during his absence.
Cook, with two young Eskimos, was heading for the Pole. Nothing had been heard of him since March 1908, when he had sent back a note from Cape Thomas Hubbard, at the tip of Axel Heiberg Island, reporting that he was starting out onto the polar ice.
Franke was in a bad way, suffering from scurvy and an injured leg. Dr. Goodsell pronounced him unfit to remain in the North, and since Cook had given him permission to leave if necessary, Peary grudgingly offered him a berth on the Erik – for which he was later billed one hundred dollars – and a loan of fifty dollars, which Mrs. Cook eventually repaid. Cook had left a quantity of supplies, furs, and narwhal and walrus tusks at his hut in Anoatok. Peary assigned his illiterate and surly bosun, John Murphy, and his young cabin boy, Billy Pritchard, to guard them.
In the later controversy that erupted between the two explorers, much was made of Peary’s “seizure” of Cook’s supplies. The record is muddied by rumours and countercharges. On the one hand, Cook had been given up for dead and his man, Franke, was unable to stay at Anoatok to guard his cabin against looters. Peary gave Murphy that job. On the other, the ailing Franke was persuaded to turn over all of Cook’s supplies – under duress, as he later claimed. In Peary’s view, Cook no longer had any claim on them.
Murphy’s main task was not to guard the Cook hut but to trade with the natives for furs, hides, and narwhal tusks, all of which Peary planned to sell for profit. Harry Whitney, a wealthy sportsman who had come up on the Erik to hunt for game, decided to stay over the winter and was also given permission to use Cook’s hut at Anoatok. Peary was later attacked by Cook’s supporters for refusing to let Franke take any of Cook’s goods home on the supply ship Erik. Franke, who valued them at ten thousand dollars, later declared, “I had to hand over the furs, just as the enemy has to hand over their arms to the victorious party.” But that was after the controversy reached its height. A letter Franke wrote to Peary at Etah on August 13, 1908, is genial enough. It authorizes Peary to take Cook’s property into his care and to receive a narwhal horn as a present “for your kindness and hospitality.”
On August 18, the Erik returned south and the Roosevelt turned its prow north again through the narrow channels that led to the top of Ellesmere, “fighting for every foot of the way against the almost impossible ice,” in Henson’s words. It was, according to Peary’s account, “a theatre of action which for diabolic and Titanic struggle makes Dante’s frozen circle of the Inferno seem like a skating pond.” The description owes more to Elsa Barker’s literary ornamentation than it does to the matter-of-fact explorer’s own blunt style.
The trip certainly was a horror. Crammed aboard a vessel no bigger than a Hudson River tug were Peary’s party of twenty, plus sixty-nine Eskimos, 550 tons of coal, seventy tons of whale meat, the blubber of fifty walruses, and 246 dogs, all fighting and howling. “To my dying day,” Bartlett wrote, “I shall never forget the frightful noise, the choking stench and the terrible confusion that reigned aboard.…” On the first night out, as the stubby little ship nosed its way into Kane Basin, they tried to eat some canned peaches for supper. “But the odor about us was so powerful that the peaches simply felt wet and cold on one’s tongue, having no fruit flavor whatsoever.”
For the next thirteen days, neither Peary nor Bartlett was able to change clothes as the Roosevelt bored and twisted her way through 350 miles of almost solid ice. With Bartlett in the crow’s-nest scouting the frozen desert ahead, Peary, on the bridge, exhorted his chief engineer not to let the engines fail, for the slightest hesitation would have meant loss of the ship. “Chief,” Peary shouted through the speaking tube, “you’ve got to keep her moving until I give you the word, no matter what happens.” On more than one occasion, with the vessel stuck between the corners of two converging floes, Peary told the engineer, Wardwell, “to jump her now … fifty yards.” He could feel the ship shake beneath him as she seemed to take a flying leap forward under the pressure of live steam poured directly from the boilers into the cylinder.
The Roosevelt arrived at Cape Sheridan on September 5. The Pole lay five hundred statute miles to the North. Cape Columbia, Peary’s jumping-off point, was ninety miles north and west – 475 miles from the Pole. For much of the winter Peary’s support parties sledged provisions and equipment to “Crane City,” a huddle of snow houses at the foot of the steep cliff that Peary named for his benefactor, the Peary Arctic Club’s vice-president.
By the last day of February, 1909, the entire company was assembled at Crane City, in the –50° cold, ready to set off for the Pole. Bartlett was the first to go; he and his Eskimos were to break trail, using pickaxes if necessary. In a romantic gesture, the husky captain had jettisoned his precious supply of chewing tobacco in favour of a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Borup, the college athlete, followed with his team two hours later. His instructions were to travel for three marches, drop his supplies, return for a second load, and then catch up with the main party.
The next day, March 1, the other divisions left at one-hour intervals – Henson first, with his dogs and Eskimos, and then the remaining teams under Dr. Goodsell, Professor Marvin, and Donald MacMillan. Peary brought up the rear, like a general commanding his troops from behind the lines, following the well-beaten trail and the chain of igloos and caches that formed the life line between Crane City and the forward party. In this way, Peary was able to check on stragglers, keep in touch with the returning parties, and save his energies for the final run to the Pole.
As he set off on this, his last Odyssey, Robert Peary knew that for him it was now or never. He had to reach the Pole. It represented everything he had struggled for since childhood. If achieved, it would make him the most famous explorer in the world, perhaps in history. It would bring him untold wealth – a newspaper series, a magazine series, a lucrative lecture series, a best-selling book, fat fees for testimonials – and, most important of all, perhaps, the adulation and friendship of presidents and kings, the gold medals of geographical societies, and his name enshrined in the encyclopaedias and the history books.
Failure was unthinkable. Peary was already on the verge of bankruptcy. The New York Times contract explicitly stated that if he did not reach the Pole, he must return the advance the paper had paid him for his story. Nobody wanted to read about another Farthest North; no magazine, no book publisher would print that tale again. The merchants who had supplied him with piano rolls and cameras would have no interest in his endorsements. Worse, his most powerful friends, who had raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for his several ventures, would drop away like the leaves of autumn. In the history books he would be just another explorer, one who had tried but failed, a minor paragraph in the reference works, nothing more.
There were, at this point, twenty-four men, nineteen sledges, and 133 dogs on the ice. Up ahead, Bartlett was breaking trail, hard put to make ten miles a day
. The other divisions, travelling in his wake, made better time, although the trail was often half obliterated by blowing snow. Henson and the supply parties also had to use pickaxes to hack their way through. Only the back-and-forth shuffling of each relay division kept the route open at all.
The farther they went, the harder the going. For the first few miles the fast ice attached to the Ellesmere coast was fairly smooth, but the outer edge of this icy fringe rose and fell with the tides. When it came into contact with the moving pack, pressure ridges formed parallel with the shore, barring the way north. Some of these ridges were only a few feet high; some were fifty feet. Some were only a few feet wide; others extended for a quarter of a mile. Through these heaped-up ice masses – the larger ones as big as a two-storey house – Bartlett’s party had to chop its way.
As far as he could see into the mists and blowing snow, Bartlett faced a rumpled, tangled world. Between each ridge was a broken expanse of fragmented ice made up of sheets and chunks, all in constant motion, driven this way and that by the wind. Connecting this moving jumble were thin strips of newly frozen sea ice, forming a corrugated pattern of “unimaginable unevenness and roughness” (Peary’s description) that stretched all the way to the Pole. But that pattern was broken by open lanes of water, some mere cracks in the ice floes, others as straight as canals and as wide as meandering rivers.
The trail from Crane City, laid by Bartlett and repaired by Henson, became harder and harder to follow. The ice drift was not constant. The general drift was from east to west, as Nansen knew, but it could also reverse itself. Sometimes, as Edward Parry had discovered to his chagrin, it moved north and south. Borup, returning to Crane City for supplies, found that the drifting ice had moved the trail fifteen miles to the west. At some points it was almost wiped out. Marvin, who went back for fuel and joined Borup, encountered similar conditions.
The Arctic Grail Page 66