The Arctic Grail

by Pierre Berton

  There was a worse setback, albeit a familiar one. On March 5, when no more than fifty miles from land, the forward parties were halted by a broad channel, apparently that same Big Lead that had held them up on the previous expedition. There it lay, blocking Peary’s route to the Pole, a malevolent expanse of inky water, its sinister appearance enhanced by the clouds of vapour that rose from its surface, misting the yellow orb of the noon sun that moved low across the southern horizon.

  For Peary, the five-day wait that followed was intolerable. Once again, as in 1906, the meticulous planner found his way blocked by forces over which he had no control. Plagued by “the gnawing torment of those days of forced inaction,” he paced impatiently back and forth in front of the group of igloos built by the forward party. He scarcely spoke. Every little while he climbed a pinnacle of ice to peer through the dim light, hoping to find a way across. He slept fitfully, waking every few hours to catch the slightest noise and often rising to go outside and listen for the sound of approaching dogs. Where were Marvin and Borup with the supplies and fuel he needed for his march to the Pole?

  Both men had been held up by a similar lane of open water. “There may be a HELL in the next world,” Borup wrote, “but nothing worse could be devised by fiends than the gnawing agony of that long wait beside that black lead which wouldn’t close, and, ever widening, would not let itself be frozen over.”

  To add to Peary’s frustration, the weather was splendid for travelling. “Seven precious days of fine weather lost,” Henson recorded, adding that “fine weather is the exception, not the rule, in the Arctic.” To Peary, history was repeating itself.

  On March 11, ice formed on the water and he and the others scurried to get over. Crossing such leads, Peary later remarked, was rather like crossing a river on a succession of gigantic shingles, all afloat and moving. He scribbled a note for Marvin and left it in his igloo: “It is vital you overtake us and give us fuel.” Marvin and Borup caught up with him three and a half days later. At that point they were 370 statute miles from the Pole.

  The supporting parties had already began to turn back, first Dr. Goodsell, then, on March 15, Donald MacMillan. The following day, Henson, breaking trail up ahead, was facing terrifying conditions. The ice began to break with a deafening roar. Another open lead barred his way. Although the floes were scarcely big enough to hold a dog, Henson chanced a crossing, knowing that a single awkward step could mean the end. He made it, only to find the far side even more treacherous, so unstable that three sledges were smashed. He managed to fashion two sound ones from the wreckage. With Peary delayed by more open water, the party was not reunited until March 17.

  Now Peary sent Marvin ahead to plot a route through the chaos while the others rested. They started off next morning in –40° weather through a wilderness of hummocks that damaged two more sledges. The following day they fought their way through pressure ridges sixty feet high, breaking trail over mountains of ice and shuttling back to haul up their sledges, “pushing from our very toes, straining every muscle, urging the dogs with voice and whip,” in Henson’s description.

  Sometimes the dogs gave up and the men would have to struggle to prevent the sledges from sliding back until the dogs could be started again. The descent on the far side was even more hazardous. Coming down a pressure ridge, one sledge broke away, tumbling thirty feet and terrifying both animals and men.

  Peary caught up again on March 19 and told Henson to choose the best dogs for the remainder of the journey. The others would be taken back to land the following day by Borup, who took the order philosophically, although as he said, “I would have given my immortal soul to have gone on.” Borup, who enlivened the journey with college yells and songs and sprinkled his later narrative (A Tenderfoot with Peary) with “gee whizzes” and “Holy Smokes,” wrote that “when the Captain of your eleven orders you to go to the sidelines, there’s no use making a gallery play by frenzied pleas to be allowed to go on.”

  Peary arranged to shuttle the remainder of the expedition forward in two groups. While the main party slept, Bartlett and his Eskimos would break trail with Henson and his natives acting as scouts. Then the trail-breaking party would rest while the main party moved forward on the route prepared for it. Borup, who travelled back at a speed of twenty-two miles a day, was directed to set up a cache of supplies at Cape Fanshaw Martin, eighty miles to the west of Cape Columbia, in case of westward drift. Six days later, Ross Marvin took his final sighting and prepared to turn back with his team. The expedition had now reached 86° 38′ – about 230 statute miles from the Pole.

  But Ross Marvin never returned to land. On the way back, one member of his team, Kudlukto, got into an argument because Marvin, who tended to be overbearing, had refused to allow one of the young Eskimo boys – Kudlukto’s cousin – to ride on the sledge. The boy was exhausted and pleaded to be given a chance to rest; when Marvin refused, Kudlukto shot him and pushed his body through the thin ice of an open lead. The party moved on with the boy riding on the sledge. Kudlukto reported that Marvin had accidentally drowned. The true story didn’t emerge until fifteen years later, when Kudlukto became a Christian and confessed. He was not punished because no one could be certain under what jurisdiction the murder had occurred.

  Peary’s polar records, 1906 and 1909

  Oblivious of this tragedy, Peary, Bartlett, Henson, and the Eskimos continued north. On March 31, Bartlett’s calculations showed that they had reached a latitude of 87° 47′ – the farthest north ever recorded. For the last fortnight, they had been travelling at a rate of about twelve miles a day. Since the Pole was still about one hundred and fifty miles ahead, at that rate it would take them close to thirteen days to reach it. Bartlett, who had noted a speed-up during the previous week, thought it might be done in eight days.

  Peary now prepared for the polar dash. He told Bartlett that he was to go back on the following day, April 1, 1909, to help prepare the return trail for the polar party, which would be made up of Peary, Henson, and four natives – Egingwah, Seeglo, Ootah, and Ooqueah. Almost certainly, Bartlett felt that this was a betrayal. In 1905, he had agreed to captain the Roosevelt only if Peary allowed him to accompany the polar party, a promise Peary apparently reaffirmed before this voyage. In his memoirs, written years after the event, he was philosophical about the decision, insisting that Peary’s reasoning was sound, that Henson was a better dog driver, and that he had “never held it against him.” But that September, when he returned to civilization, he was still smarting over the incident and blurted out to the New York Herald that “it was a bitter disappointment. I got up early the next morning while the rest were asleep and started north alone. I don’t know, perhaps I cried a little. I guess perhaps I was a little crazy then. I thought I could walk on the rest of the way alone. It seemed so near.”

  His account may well have been exaggerated by the journalistic licence of the time. On the other hand, both Peary and Henson recorded that Bartlett did walk several miles out of the camp. The reason, they said, was that he wanted to be able to say that he had reached the 88th parallel before turning back. But, as Bartlett well knew, that was more than a dozen miles away. Why didn’t he take a sledge and team?

  Peary’s jettisoning of Bartlett at this crucial moment forecast the furious controversy that would erupt after the expedition’s return. Once again, as in the case of Jesup Land, Crocker Land, and his own Farthest North, Peary was setting off into the unknown without a reliable witness, since neither Henson nor the Eskimos knew how to calculate observations.

  Peary later gave several explanations for his decision, some of them distasteful. If he had sent Henson south instead of Bartlett, he said, Henson might not have reached land. “While faithful to me, and when with me more effective in covering distance with a sledge than any of the others, he had not as a racial inheritance the daring and initiative of my Anglo-Saxon friends. I owed it to him not to subject him to dangers and responsibilities with which he was temperamentally
unable to cope.”

  At another point, Peary gave an entirely different explanation, which was certainly in keeping with his character: “The pole was something to which I had devoted my life; it was a thing on which I had concentrated everything, on which I had expended some of myself, for which I had gone through such hell and suffering as I hope no man … may ever experience, and in which I have put money, time, and everything else, and I did not feel under those circumstances I was called upon to divide with a man who, no matter how able and deserving he might be, was a young man and had only put in a few years in that kind of work, and who had, frankly, as I believed, not the right that I had to it.…” If he took Henson and not Bartlett, and reached the Pole, Peary could claim that he was the only white man to capture that honour. The black man and the Eskimos did not count.

  Bartlett and his Eskimos left on April 1. Peary, Henson, and the four natives started for the Pole early the following morning and achieved phenomenal – one might say unbelievable – speeds. They did not need twelve or thirteen days to reach final camp, or even eight days, as Bartlett had figured. According to Peary’s own claims, he made it in five, an average speed of twenty-nine statute miles a day. Although he always insisted that he made a beeline for the Pole, it is hard to believe that suddenly there were no obstacles that would force him into detours. Peary’s average speed to the Pole without educated witnesses is almost three times faster than his average speed from Crane City with such witnesses.

  There is a remarkable similarity between Peary’s story of his journey to the Pole and back in 1909 and his earlier account of his Farthest North in 1906. In each case he lists phenomenal speeds; in each case he claims the going suddenly got easier; in each case he insists he returned straight down the meridian without detours. In each case he had no one with him who could confirm his observations.

  His account of the last five days of his 1909 journey to the Pole does differ from Henson’s, however. Henson may not have been able to work out astronomical observations, but he knew a pressure ridge when he saw one. In his own account, which was also ghost-written, he told of open water that necessitated “detours east and west” (Peary claimed the leads all ran north and south), of the men repeatedly falling down in their tracks, and of pressure ridges that had to be attacked with pickaxes. Later explorers confirm Henson’s version – that there is little difference between ice conditions close to the Pole and those farther south. Aerial research in the mid-1930s, for example, revealed two pressure ridges to the mile in the same area. Polar explorers in the 1960s and 1980s reported a devastated world of broken ice blocks and a wilderness of hummocks.

  On April 6 at 10 a.m. (Peary’s account; Henson says it was that evening), Peary stopped and, while his Eskimos built a snow house, opened a parcel, withdrew a small taffeta flag, fastened it to a staff, and placed it firmly on the igloo. Henson figured the camp must be an important one and asked Peary what he would call it.

  “This, my boy, is to be Camp Morris K. Jesup,” Peary replied, “the last and most northerly camp on the earth.” But he did not say he had reached the Pole.

  He consulted his chronometer. If he was still on the same meridian on which he had left Cape Columbia, it must be approaching noon local time. He took an observation with his sextant but did not show the results to Henson, as he usually did. (Henson could use a sextant but could not do the calculations.) It was usual for Henson to note such positions in his diary, but this time he was not invited to do so or to sign Peary’s sheet of calculations, as Borup and Marvin had always done. Thus Peary’s observations at Camp Jesup were the only ones that no one else looked at.

  This is inexplicable. By getting Henson to record the results independently, Peary could have copper-plated his claim to achieving the Pole. Why didn’t he? Here was a meticulous planner who likened his attainment of the Pole to winning a game of chess – all the moves planned in advance, every earlier defeat analysed as to its causes “until it became possible to believe that those causes could in future be guarded against … and the losing game … turned into one final, complete success.” He had designed an assault on the North Pole that would impress any modern military commander. Why, then, did he fail to take the final step to pin down the certainty of his victory? There can be only two explanations: either he didn’t expect that another person would also claim the Pole and therefore believed his own feat would not be questioned (as had been the case in the past), or he simply faked the whole story.

  According to Peary, his latitude at Camp Jesup showed he was about five statute miles from the Pole. Henson, sensing this, removed a glove and extended a hand in congratulation. Peary didn’t see it. “I was actually too exhausted to realize at the moment that my life’s purpose had been achieved.” He rubbed his eyes, stumbled into his igloo, and slept for four hours.

  Oddly, his diary contains no references for April 7, when Peary was at the Pole, or the day following. In that journal, which may well be a copy of his original, since it is clean and not stained with oil or soot, there is a loose sheet of a different kind of paper, undated, which reads: “The Pole at last!!! The prize of 3 centuries, my dream and ambition for 23 years MINE at last. I cannot bring myself to realize it. It all seems so simple and commonplace, as Bartlett said ‘just like every day.’ I wish Jo could be here with me to share my feelings. I have drunk her health and that of the kids from the Benedictine flask she sent me.

  “3 years ago today, the storm began at Storm camp. 7 years ago today, I started north from Cape Hecla.”

  The blanks in the diary, the loose, undated sheet – almost an afterthought – pose unanswerable questions.

  Peary took a series of observations, thirteen in all, “at two different stations, in three different directions at four different times.…” There was a brief gathering for a photograph and the inevitable three cheers. Then, at 4 p.m. on April 7, thirty hours after arriving at their goal, the party turned and headed south.

  Peary had taken leave of Bartlett around midnight, April 1; he arrived back at the same camp at midnight, April 9. It is these eight days that are in question. The distance from the camp to the Pole and back was three hundred miles. Deducting the thirty hours he claimed to have spent there, Peary must have travelled at an average daily speed of at least forty-three miles to cover that three-hundred-mile distance; and that makes no allowance for detours, which, before 1906, Peary had always estimated at 25 per cent.

  In the fortnight before Peary left Bartlett, his best daily speed was twelve miles, not counting detours. A smaller party should have been able to go faster. But even if Peary had travelled an average of fifteen miles a day, he could not have got closer to his goal than ninety miles before turning back.

  Peary’s account simply doesn’t ring true. He was, according to Henson, so exhausted and lame that he was forced to ride all the way back on a sledge, a dead weight that had to be dragged over pressure ridges and around open water. No other explorer had achieved such a record and none has achieved it since. Nansen averaged no more than 14 miles a day and never exceeded 23. Cagni’s speed over 600 miles of polar ice was 6.3 miles a day. Ralph Plaisted, who reached the Pole by snowmobile in 1968, averaged about 11 miles. In 1986, Will Steger averaged about 8.5 miles a day by dogteam, and Jean-Louis Etienne achieved the same rate that year on skis. All but Steger were supplied by air, and none made the return trip; all were flown out.

  Peary’s method of making observations was as casual as it had been in 1906. There is no evidence that he ever knew his longitude. Although he insisted he had headed straight to the Pole and back again, he had no way of knowing whether he had strayed off course or not. Sextant readings for latitude are taken at noon. But when was “noon”? Without having his longitude, Peary couldn’t know the local time.

  After he left Bartlett he took only one latitude reading at what he thought was noon, Cape Columbia meridian time. He made no observations for variations as other explorers had done. “When I was sledging north,”
Albert Markham said, “… I was very careful to check my course by constant observations for the variation of the compass, thus enabling me to shape my course along the same meridian of longitude.” But Peary, who could only guess at his mileage, travelled by dead reckoning, a method made unreliable by zigzagging.

  All the evidence suggests that a beeline journey to the Pole, such as Peary described, would have been impossible. Henson said they “followed the lines of least resistance … frequently … going due east or west in order to detour around pressure ridges, floebergs and leads.” Borup earlier recalled that “we guessed and groped with many a twist and turn.” Yet Peary claimed that his course “was nearly as the crow flies, due north, across floe after floe, pressure ridge after pressure ridge, headed straight for some hummock or pinnacle of ice which I had lined in with my compass.” Plaisted found that through detours and ice drift he had travelled an additional three hundred miles in his five-hundred-mile snowmobile journey to the Pole; Steger, in 1986, found that detours added an extra four hundred miles.

  Other members of the Peary expedition encountered ice drift. Henson wrote that “the way to the Pole lay across the ever moving and drifting ice of the Arctic ocean.… Continuously the steady drift of the ice carried us back on the course we had come.” Borup and Marvin, returning north to join Peary, noticed on March 7 a steady easterly drift – the floebergs moving so swiftly that one they had marked vanished from sight within two hours. Yet Peary insisted that the drift had ceased as he neared the Pole, allowing him to travel in a straight line.

  Why these discrepancies? Why would Peary, a seasoned Arctic hand, with more experience than any other explorer in polar travel – a man who had more than once vividly described to his readers and to his lecture audiences the treacherous nature of the ice pack – why would he continue to insist that he had never veered from his course? The only plausible explanation is that he didn’t want to add any extra mileages to his claimed speeds, which were already suspiciously high.