The Arctic Grail

by Pierre Berton

  Even before parting with Bartlett, Peary was meticulously considering the benefits his discovery would bring him: adulation from his peers, public applause, social standing, and, not least, hard cash. On March 26, the day Marvin turned back, he began to jot down in the margins of his diary the various methods he might use to exploit his triumph for its maximum rewards. These notations to himself, which continued for three weeks, confirm that Peary was not primarily interested in geographical or scientific discovery. He coveted the Pole as a prize that would guarantee not only international recognition but also commercial benefits.

  It was his intention to cash in on his discovery by patenting and selling everything from special North Pole clothing to ivory-mounted snowshoes. If Elisha Kent Kane could get seventy-five thousand dollars in book royalties, Peary intended to try for one hundred thousand. If Nares could be knighted and Schley and George Melville (of the ill-fated Jeannette expedition) made admirals, if Parry could receive one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars from a grateful government, then why not Peary? These marginal notations are so astonishing, so revealing, and (some would say) so crass that they deserve to be quoted in detail:

  March 26: Have set of ivory mounted sledge implements made.… Ivory mounted snowshoes? Think up some ivory articles to be made for the home folks.…

  Present sextant … to Navy Museum (Annapolis?). Have my eye glasses gold mounted for constant use. Have extra pair ditto as a present to someone.…

  March 28: Suggest sending piece of fringe to each local or state division D.A.R.… piece of N.P. bearskin fringe for souvenirs to women. The N.P. flag with white bar. This as a stamp on all N.P. articles?

  April 4: Have special pair of “Peary North Pole” snowshoes made. Raised toe and heel, curved body, lacquered bows, ebony crossbars, silver keel & name plate white gut lacing.…

  Have Henson make pattern “Peary North Pole sledges”.… For miners, prospectors, lumbermen, explorers, children.

  April 5: North Pole coats, suits, tents, cookers at Sportsmens Show with male & female attendants in Eskimo costume.…

  Jewel for Order of the North Pole. Have Borup take a 5″ × 7″ 3 ½ to 4 pl. focus portrait of me in deer or sheep coat with bear roll (face unshaven), & keep on till satisfactory one obtained. Have Foster color in a special print of this to bring out the gray eyes, the red sunburned skin, the bleached eyebrows & beard, frosted eyebrows, eye glasses, beard.

  April 6: Have Harpers take entire matter, book, magazine articles, pictures & stories (100). Kane got 75 from his books, Nansen 50 for his.

  … flag with diagonal white bar to be my personal flag. Fly a fine one at Eagle I.

  April 9: … send photo Pres. & self shaking hands to him … send R a Pole Peary sledge.…

  April 10: U.S. made Melville & Schley Admirals and Greely Brigadier General for their arctic work. England knighted James & John Ross, Parry, Franklin, Nares, McClintock, Richards (?), Beaumont etc. etc. Paid Parry $125,000.…

  April 19: … have aluminum case Harvard watches repaired by makers & put gold hunting cases for presents. One properly engraved to be given to Bridgman This watch carried by me to the North Pole, is given to my friend H.L. Bridgman as a slight token of my appreciation of his invaluable assistance and loyal devotion to the cause for years, R.E. Peary.

  Peary reached Cape Columbia on April 23, 1909 – only five days behind Bartlett. “My life work is accomplished,” he wrote in his diary. “The thing which it was intended from the beginning that I should do, the thing which I believed could be done and that I could do, I have done. I have got the North Pole out of my system. After 23 years of effort, hard work, disappointments, hardships, privations, more or less suffering, and some risks, I have won the last great geographical prize … for the credit of the United States, the Service to which I belong, myself and my family. My work is the finish, the cap and climax, of 300 years of effort, loss of life and expenditure of millions, by some of the best men of the civilized nations of the world, and it has been accomplished with a clean cut dash, spirit, and I believe, thoroughness characteristically American. I am content.”

  Two days later he was aboard the Roosevelt, where Bartlett, without waiting for Peary to greet him, came up to shake his leader’s hand. “I congratulate you, sir,” he said, “on the discovery of the Pole.”

  Oddly, Peary made no reply. In his first few days aboard the Roosevelt, he showed none of the elation to be found in his diary entries. Indeed, he forbore to mention the crowning achievement of his life to anyone aboard ship. He appeared to avoid Henson, who wrote that for three weeks after their arrival, he caught no more than a fleeting glimpse of his commander. “Not once in all that time did he speak a word to me.… Not a word about the North Pole or anything connected with it.”

  To the others he was surprisingly coy. One might have expected him to send an exultant message to MacMillan, who was across the Robeson Channel on the Greenland side. But he didn’t mention either the Pole or the date on which he claimed to have reached it. “Northern trip entirely satisfactory,” was all he wrote. And when Dr. Goodsell put the question to him directly, he received an oblique response: “I have not been altogether unsuccessful.”

  Why this enigmatic silence? Even though the news of Marvin’s death must have dampened his natural jubilance, Peary’s reticence is out of character. Was he still unsure whether he should claim the Pole? Or was he simply trying to keep it a secret from his associates so that the word would not get out before he could proclaim his success to the public? His sledgemates certainly believed he had reached the Pole, and when they discussed it at the dinner table, Peary did not correct them. Henson mentioned to Dr. Goodsell that the sun appeared to have made a uniform circle of the horizon, as it would at 90° N, but hurriedly added that it “might have dipped a little to the south.”

  On June 12, Borup and a party of natives erected at Cape Columbia the standard cairn that contained the details of the expedition – something Peary himself had neglected to do. That was the first specific public record of his success. This apparent indecision is reminiscent of his so-called discovery of “Jesup Land,” which he had delayed reporting officially for three years, and “Crocker Land,” which he claimed to have seen in June of 1906 but didn’t mention publicly until February of 1907.

  The Roosevelt broke out of her harbour at Cape Sheridan on July 17. A month later, after a long and stormy struggle with the ice, she reached Etah, where the descendants of John Ross’s Arctic Highlanders rushed to greet her. In the crowd was Peary’s boatswain, Murphy, and his cabin boy, Pritchard, who had been guarding Peary’s own supplies at Etah and Frederick Cook’s at neighbouring Anoatok. And there, too, looking more like an Eskimo than the natives themselves, was Harry Whitney, the sportsman, who had spent the winter with the other two.

  Here Peary got confirmation of what some Eskimos had told him on one of his stops down the Greenland coast: Dr. Cook had returned from Ellesmere Island alive, with two native companions. Where had he been? What had he done? Peary was intent on finding out; but that wasn’t easy, because Cook, before he left for the south, had sworn both Whitney and the Eskimos to silence. Peary called young Billy Pritchard into his cabin and subjected him to what the cabin boy later described as a “third degree.” Pritchard broke down and confessed that he had heard Cook tell Whitney, “I’ve been to the Pole,” after which Cook swore both men to secrecy. “He said he didn’t want Mr. Peary or anyone else to know anything about it.”

  There is nothing in Peary’s own account to hint at his feelings at this disturbing revelation. Henson, too, glosses over it, simply writing that the idea of Cook making such an astounding claim “was so ludicrous that after our laugh, we dropped the matter altogether.”

  But, of course, they did not drop the matter. It is not difficult to guess at Peary’s bitterness and fury. Here was an upstart claiming to have beaten him to his prize in the most casual fashion, without any of the meticulous planning and the military preci
sion of the Peary System! It was too much. Once again it seemed another had “forestalled” Peary and turned his triumph to gall. From that moment on, Robert Peary’s purpose, to which he devoted all his considerable talents, was to expose his rival as a fraud. He and his supporters would not be content until Cook was demolished, flattened, ridiculed, and driven from the society of his peers.

  3 Dr. Cook’s strange odyssey

  It was impossible not to like Frederick Cook. He belonged to that human subspecies whose members seem forever courteous, gentle, and apparently open. In 1907, when he set off on his polar journey, he had few antagonists apart from Peary. Even Peary, on first acquaintance some years before, had called him “a thoroughly decent fellow.” Roald Amundsen, who spent a winter with him in the Antarctic, went further. He was, Amundsen recalled, “loved and respected by all, a man of unfailing courage, unfailing hope, endless cheerfulness, unwearied kindness.” He was genial, inventive, eager to help out, and incurably optimistic. People took to Cook on first meeting: he was so ingenuous, so direct, with his clear blue eyes and his shock of ash blond hair that hinted at his German ancestry.

  This affability concealed certain flaws in the Cook character. When the full record is examined, he emerges as a remarkably careless human being – careless with the truth, careless with his financial obligations, careless of the consequences of his actions. The world is full of Cooks – charming, child-like people who rarely look ahead but leap from one of life’s pinnacles to the next, hoping always to land unharmed.

  The contrast between the two remarkable explorers, each of whom claimed the North Pole, could not have been more extreme. Cook was later to write of his polar quest that he had “a personal ambition, a crazy hunger I had to satisfy.” It was, of course, the popular thing to say; it fitted the public’s concept of what an explorer should be – a man who sacrificed everything for a dream. But there is little suggestion of any “crazy hunger” in Cook’s actions before or after his attempt on the Pole – none of the fierce, obsessive will to succeed that drove Peary. On the contrary, Cook was remarkably casual. He had none of Peary’s superb organizational skills, and it wasn’t in his nature to indulge in the kind of military precision that Peary brought to his long-range planning. Cook’s various ventures seem to have been entered upon almost by chance, or as an afterthought, or as the result of a sudden spur-of-the-moment decision. That was certainly true of his much-trumpeted conquest of Mount McKinley in 1906. It was also true of his first trip to the Arctic with Peary in 1891. He spotted an advertisement in the Brooklyn Standard-Union asking for volunteers to join Peary in his first North Greenland expedition. Cook, who had been enthralled by Kane’s accounts of the Arctic just as Peary had been, answered the ad and was surprised to find himself accepted. His assault on the Pole was equally impulsive. Though he had certainly talked with John Bradley about his hopes before leaving New York, he didn’t make up his mind until he reached Anoatok and found weather conditions favourable.

  In 1907, when he was heading north once again, he was forty-two years old and already one of the best-known explorers in the world. One of five children born to a German immigrant (Cook was originally “Koch”), he had had his share of vicissitudes and hardships. His widowed mother supported her family by working in a sweatshop. Cook put himself through medical school by delivering milk door to door at three in the morning. His first wife died of peritonitis. His first attempts at a practice in Brooklyn were a failure. But in 1907 he was a public figure, respected by his fellow explorers. He had been four times to the Arctic, once to the Antarctic, had written two best-selling books on his adventures, had succeeded Adolphus Greely as president of the Explorers’ Club (the third – Peary would be the fourth), was founder and first president of the Arctic Club of America and the recipient of honours and medals from both sides of the Atlantic. Standing five feet nine inches in his Eskimo furs, a stocky, rugged figure with weather-beaten features, he looked the very model of a modern American explorer.

  Cook’s voyage to Greenland with “Gambler Jim” Bradley was planned as a hunting expedition. Cook had no fixed or definite intentions, apart from furthering his studies of Eskimo culture, but the idea of a polar attempt lurked somewhere in the back of his mind. Bradley was happy to have such a noted explorer with him, while Cook, as he told Cyrus Adams of the American Geographical Society, “half hoped” that he might “make the expedition a jumping-off point for the Pole.” Bradley told Cook that if he did decide to go, he was prepared to underwrite the cost.

  When the yacht reached the Greenland coast, the pair set off for the Eskimo hunting grounds at Anoatok, thirty miles north of Etah. There they found a bear hunt in progress. The best dogs in the area and the most capable natives (many of them doubtless trained by Peary) were assembled in a region abounding with game. In Cook’s mind every essential for Arctic exploration was present. He decided on the spot to make an attempt on the Pole the following spring. What Anoatok could not supply, Bradley certainly would.

  Cook, like Peary, saw the so-called “dash” as a kind of sporting event without scientific value. It was a challenge – like the ascent of Mount McKinley – nothing more. But Cook’s attitude was far more casual than that of his rival. “The attaining of this mystical spot,” he wrote later, “did not then, and does not now, seem in itself to mean anything; I did not then, and do not now, consider it the treasure house of any great scientific secrets. The only thing to be gained from reaching the Pole, the triumph of it, the lesson in accomplishment, is that man, by brain power and muscle energy, can subdue the most terrific forces of a blind nature if he is determined enough, courageous enough, and undauntedly persistent despite failure.”

  When winter approached, Bradley returned to New York on his yacht. One volunteer stayed behind with Cook – the yacht’s twenty-nine-year-old steward, Rudolph Franke. The two men spent five months in a gloomy stone hut at Anoatok, “a land of sorrowful dead,” in Cook’s phrase. Rewarded with Bradley’s supply of weapons, tools, and trade goods, the entire band of 250 natives gathered from the surrounding villages cheerfully set about to outfit him for the coming venture – sewing clothes of hides, building light, flexible sledges, gathering grass to insulate boots, and preparing food and other supplies.

  In the dimly lit igloos, the women of the tribe worked industriously, as they had for Peary, drying skins and cutting and sewing them into serviceable garments. Cook moved from igloo to igloo “with an interest that verged on anxiety” because he knew that his life and that of his companions depended on the warmth and durability of the clothing. He was soon reassured, for the skill of these primitive tailors was remarkable. They took his measurements by roughly sizing up his old garments and measuring him by sight. After a preliminary fitting they adjusted the clothes by cutting out and inserting patches of fur. They made their own thread by drying and stripping caribou and narwhal sinews; the white man’s steel needles were so precious to them that if a point or eye was broken, they heated and flattened the appropriate end and shaped a new point or with a bow drill bored a new eye. In the gloom of the snow houses, their vision was extraordinary. They could see objects no white man could have spotted and perform tedious feats that an outsider would have bungled.

  Cook’s plan was to head for the Pole by crossing Kane Basin to Ellesmere Island, sledge over its frozen midriff to the west coast, and follow the fiords north to the tip of Axel Heiberg Island. This remarkable journey would not have been possible without Cook’s Eskimo companions, who repeatedly saved the party from starvation by seeking out and killing muskoxen and bear. Cold was an even worse enemy. Cook claimed that the temperature dropped as low as –83°F – a record that, if true, was never exceeded in the years that followed. At one point, the air was so heavy with frost that Cook realized he could not long breathe it and survive. The Eskimos buried him in a snow bank to prevent him from freezing and then proceeded to build a large igloo – checking on his condition every few minutes to make sure he was still al
ive. A little more than two hours later, the igloo was completed and all the party crammed inside, so tightly that Cook found that he was actually perspiring.

  Cook’s route from Anoatok to Axel Heiberg and return, 1908-09

  On March 8, Cook’s party of ten reached the tip of Axel Heiberg Island and camped beneath the monstrous, black-scarred cliff that Sverdrup had named Svartevoeg. Here Cook prepared to launch himself at the Pole, some six hundred miles to the north. On March 18, with two sledges, twenty-six dogs, and half a ton of food, he set off. Franke and seven of the natives were sent back shortly afterwards. Cook chose two young Eskimos, Ahwelahtea and Etukishook (the spelling is Cook’s) as his sole companions.

  From this point until his return to land, the world has only Cook’s account of what occurred. There’s no doubt that he crossed Ellesmere and reached Axel Heiberg Island. Franke was with him – an educated witness – and Cook’s own photographs and descriptions confirm that he made the journey. But for the details of what Cook achieved on his trip across the polar ice, there is no corroboration.

  His story of that journey repeats the usual tribulations that every polar explorer faced: back-breaking work hacking through pressure ridges, storms that smothered igloos, leads of waters that yawned before them and threatened to engulf them, forced marches to make up lost mileage “until dogs languished or legs failed,” together with hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and despair. At one point, Cook wrote, with half the food gone and the Pole still 160 statute miles away, Ahwelahtea lost all hope. “It is well to die,” he cried, tears streaming down his face. “Beyond is impossible.” But Cook urged him on.