The Arctic Grail

by Pierre Berton

  Cook, in fact, lived a day-to-day Micawber-like existence, putting off the inevitable with pledges he couldn’t fulfil, promises he couldn’t keep, statements he couldn’t back up – hoping, perhaps, that something might turn up to postpone the fateful moment when he would be found out, then fleeing when he was unmasked, as he had done in 1909. Indeed, it is more than possible that he set off on the cruise with Bradley in order to escape the inevitable showdown that was building up at the Explorers’ Club among those members, including Parker and Brown, who were openly disputing his claims to the McKinley record.

  It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Cook, like so many con-men, was his own worst victim. He conned himself into believing he wouldn’t be found out. He blurted out his remarkable stories without realizing what the consequences might be. He had the con-man’s easy geniality and bluff composure. In the fiercest moments of the controversy he remained outwardly calm, answering the reporters’ toughest questions with a disarming smile. It was hard not to like him – he seemed so ingenuous. Peter Freuchen, who thought him a liar, also thought him a gentleman – Peary, said Freuchen, was neither!

  Yet Peary’s claim to have reached the Pole rests on no firmer ground than Cook’s – a fact that was glossed over in the days when Cook was being vilified. He did not present a shred of scientific evidence to show that he had got closer than 150 miles, while the circumstantial evidence against him is damning. The best that can be said of him is that he got closer than any explorer to that time; Bartlett’s independent sextant readings confirm it. The best that can be said of Cook is that he reached the tip of Axel Heiberg Island and probably wintered there before making the return journey south.

  For most explorers that might have been enough. Cook’s incredible trek across Ellesmere to Axel Heiberg Island and then south through Jones Sound has no parallel in polar annals. His winter at Cape Sparbo, where he lived like a caveman with only two companions, was a masterpiece of Arctic survival for which he would have been lauded and honoured, had it not been for his claim on the Pole.

  Peary’s system of trail-breaking and support parties carried him farther north than any man up to his time. His methods are still used by mountaineers; they helped Hillary and Tenzing reach the peak of Everest. His meticulous planning and adaptation of native methods broke new ground. Peary had many failings, but he cannot be faulted for lack of intelligence, industry, or executive ability.

  The tragedy is that neither man was satisfied with those genuine and considerable achievements. It was the Pole that obsessed them, as it had obsessed so many others, and the Pole that, in the end, tarnished both their reputations. Although Peary was for years hailed in the textbooks and reference works as “discoverer” of the North Pole, his claims have not stood the intensive scrutiny of such modern critics as Dennis Rawlins. A leading American astronomer and professor of physics, with at least one significant celestial discovery to his credit, Rawlins in 1973 published a detailed critique of the Peary record. The book was titled Peary at the Pole: Fact or Fiction? Unlike so many of Peary’s critics, Rawlins also dismissed Cook as a charlatan. In his book he made no bones about his conviction that Peary’s account of his discovery of the Pole was more fiction than fact. The following year, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in its Fifteenth Edition, rephrased its previously unequivocal entry about Peary to say that he is “usually credited” with the discovery.

  It would diminish the story of the long quest for the Arctic Grail to leave it on such a low note; nor would it be fair. In all the argument about who did what and who got where, one remarkable record has been overlooked. Pole or no pole, Robert Edwin Peary did something that no explorer before him was able to do, and that none has managed to do since. Without mechanical aid he got farther north than had any human being before him – and he got back. It is one thing to get within striking distance of 90° North by dogteam; it is quite another to make the return trip. No one has yet managed that feat overland. In Peary’s day, every scrap of food had to be hauled north over the ice, with enough left to sustain life on the route back to land. And since fuel was needed to melt snow as well as to warm the body, every ounce of that had to be carried both ways. Peary came closest to solving the problem of weight by his system of support parties. But his claimed speeds – which pass all comprehension – suggest that he was in fact forced to shave about two hundred miles off his intended journey in order to make it back before he died of starvation or thirst.

  Since Peary’s time a number of attempts have been made on the Pole by dogteam, motorcycle, skis, and snowmobile. All have been one-way trips, the participants airlifted out when they reached their goal. All but one expedition have been supplied en route by air, and that one – Will Steger’s 1986 dash by dogsled – reached its destination only after jettisoning most of its equipment and with only a few pounds of food to spare.

  Thus, unless somebody in the future manages to go over the Arctic ice to the Pole and back again without re-supply, an almost impossible feat, Peary’s record remains. In spite of his carefully designed sleds, his team of picked dogs, his methodically trained retainers, he could not complete his quest. But then, neither could the knights of Camelot with their palfreys, their squires, and their suits of shining armour. The sacred chalice the Arthurians sought was always just beyond reach. That, after all, was the secret of its lure.

  Afterword:

  The chart of immortality

  “There is nothing worth living for but to have one’s name inscribed on the Arctic chart,” Tennyson wrote during the search for Franklin. For those who sought to live forever, the poet was right. In his day it was the certain way to ensure immortality. The chart itself makes that obvious; the place names provide a roster of those who might otherwise have been forgotten.

  If one wonders why gin-makers and merchant princes would want to throw away thousands of pounds or dollars on shaky investments in implausible expeditions, one has only to examine the map. Their names are emblazoned on land masses north of the Circle. Henry Grinnell has his peninsula jutting from the forlorn expanse of Devon Island; Morris Jesup and Thomas Hubbard have their names inscribed in perpetuity on capes at the very top of the world. John Ross’s name may be missing (though that of Sabine, who quarrelled with him, is not), but that of his sponsor appears boldly on a gulf, a peninsula, and a harbour.

  Ross was an exception; none of his colleagues, apparently, wanted to honour that crusty and difficult seadog. But almost every other major explorer, and a good many minor ones, had his name so enshrined. Parry’s name dominates, as no doubt it should, since he was the first white explorer to pierce the mysterious Arctic archipelago. Today, all the unknown lands that loomed up on his starboard bow, from Devon to Melville, are known as the Parry Islands. Parry’s subordinates, Lyon and Liddon, are there by name in smaller type, and even his ships, Hecla, Griper, and Fury, are rendered forever familiar by a strait, a bay, and that wan and chilly beach where more than one expedition was restored by the provisions taken from the foundering Fury.

  Whose Arctic is it? The question, which is raised intermittently when Canada’s sovereignty over the frozen waters comes into dispute, is answered by the map. It is obvious who got there first. British place names abound – Devon, Somerset, Kent, and Cornwall islands – and so do the names of British heroes (Wellington Channel, Cornwallis Island), British institutions (Admiralty and Navy Board inlets), and British statesmen (Melville Island and Peel Sound).

  The British royal family is represented from the Prince Regent to King William, from the Princess Royal to Princess Adelaide, from Prince Leopold of Saxe-Cobourg to his nephew, the Consort, who has both a sound and a peninsula named for him – both appropriately part of that vaster and more formidable island that bears the name of his Queen. As for Albert Edward, the plump and much abused “Bertie,” Prince of Wales, his name is commemorated by a strait, an island, and a bay all quite properly in the periphery of Victoria Land.

  But the Arctic chart m
emorializes more than men of rank, power, blood, or property. The real immortals, whose names are sprinkled throughout the Arctic on bays and bights, capes and channels, are those who dared and sometimes died so that the map might take form.

  The name of Franklin, the man who wouldn’t hurt a fly but caused more deaths than all the others combined, is everywhere. That is only proper. Since the search to discover his fate filled up the blank spaces on the map, it is just that an entire Canadian territorial district should honour him. There is more: a deep bay on the Arctic coast recalls his first disaster; a point on King William Island takes note of his last. George Back, whom he didn’t much care for, named a lake for him at the mouth of the Great Fish River. The name of the river was changed, in turn, to honour Back.

  Back’s partner, the waspish Dr. King, is ignored by cartographers, but two other overland explorers, the easy-going Dease and the doomed and bitter Simpson, both have straits to commemorate their explorations. So does that consummate traveller, the knowledgeable John Rae. The isthmus that he crossed to prove that Boothia Felix was a peninsula bears his name, as it should; so does a small river not far from the Coppermine’s mouth, which parallels a similar stream that pays tribute to Rae’s travelling companion, John Richardson.

  The area of the Great Search is studded with the names of the searchers. The unspeakable Belcher has a channel, the bluff whaler Penny a strait. The most literary of all the explorers rejoices in several memorials: Cape Osborn, Cape Sherard, and Point Sherard Osborn. Kellett, who was a gentleman, has his name in small type on a cape and a river; McClure, who was not, has his in large type on the strait that he discovered leading to a North West Passage.

  M’Clintock, the prince of sledgers and captain of the Fox, is memorialized by the great channel that leads south to the island where he found the Franklin relics. The cautious Richard Collinson’s name can be found in the same area – a rounded cape to the north and, more to the point, the very peninsula across from King William Island from which he might have launched a search to discover the missing explorer’s fate.

  Amundsen’s track is to be found everywhere – in Rasmussen Basin, in the Nordenskiöld Islands, and in the great gulf itself that commemorates his conquest of the Passage in 1905.

  Farther to the north, American names abound – Kane and Hall basins, Greely Fiord, and Peary Channel (the real Peary Channel, west of Axel Heiberg Island, not the mirage off Greenland’s tip). The Scandinavians, too, have left their memories. The archipelago west of Ellesmere is named for Sverdrup, who first explored it.* There is also a Danish Strait, a Nansen Sound, and a Prince Gustav Adolf Sea.

  Could the Americans and the Scandinavians, then, lay claim to this bleak land of crags and glaciers? Scarcely, for the British were here first, and the names remind us of their presence in 1875, at the very top of Ellesmere. Alert, Canada’s farthest north weather station, is named for George Nares’s ship that spent the winter there. Fifty miles to the south lies the historic bay, the most prominent of four, named for Lady Franklin. How odd that that most impressive of Englishwomen, who did so much to erect memorials to her husband, should have her own so far from his final resting place!

  The story of the Nares expedition is told in the place names at the top of the world. Clements Markham, who lobbied so hard for another attempt at the Pole, is remembered by an inlet, his cousin, Albert, whose men almost died of scurvy, by a fiord. Nares’s name is on a cape, a minor tribute to that doughty captain who took an unfair share of the blame for the disaster.

  They are all on the Arctic chart, with Tennyson – amateurs and professionals, knaves and heroes, opportunists and idealists. That enthusiastic and attractive French naval officer “little Bellot,” as Sophia Cracroft fondly called him, has the littlest of straits named for him. An islet off the coast of Ellesmere honours Bedford Pim, the man who saved McClure. Another, in Coronation Gulf, pays its tribute to John Hepburn, the seaman who survived the first Franklin tragedy, near the headwaters of the Coppermine.

  But what of the man who saved him? What of Akaitcho, the chief of the Copper Indians, without whose presence all would have perished? One searches the map in vain to find his name. And where are the Eskimos, without whom no white explorer, from Parry to Peary, could have conquered the frozen world? Where is the name of Tookolito, known to the white men as Hannah? Or Ebierbing, whom everybody called Joe? Their names are not writ large on the chart of the Arctic; you will not find them in an ordinary atlas. Hall’s name is there in bold type – but could he have found the Frobisher relics without them? And where is Kalutunah, Hayes’s companion, or Hans Hendrik? No type at all for them.

  Peary made sure his wealthy backers received their due on cape and headland. Every school atlas records their names. But only the large-scale charts show the tiny features named for Egingwah and Henson, the men who struggled with him toward the Pole. When the National Geographic Society gave gold medals to Peary and Bartlett, it ignored the black man who had gone farther north than the white sea captain. Like the Eskimos, he was the wrong colour.

  This saga of the double quest for the Pole and the Passage began with Ross and Parry in their cocked hats and buckled shoes greeting the Etah Eskimos in their furs and mukluks – strangers from different worlds, baffled by one another. In the ninety years that passed before Peary and Cook set off on their missions, the gap between the two worlds had certainly narrowed. To the Innuee, the kabloonas were no longer superhuman beings who came from the sun or the moon but men like themselves with human weaknesses and failings. To the kabloonas, the Innuee were no longer disgusting savages, indolent and ignorant, desperately in need of a Christian civilized upbringing. But the gap still needed to be closed, as the map shows, for the haunts of the original people continued to bear the names of the strangers – and still do today.

  This didn’t bother the originals. The squat little men who fed John Ross’s company in the Gulf of Boothia, who cheerfully extended their hospitality to Parry and Lyon at Repulse Bay and Igloolik, who taught Rae, Hall, and Peary how to exist under polar conditions, gave no thought to such white concepts as fame, ambition, or immortality. These abstract ideas had no meaning; the future to them was no farther away than the next fat seal; beyond that, they did not care to consider its rewards or its terrors. Nor would it concern them for an instant that their names should be left off the maps of the Arctic; after all, they had their own names for the snowy peaks and the frozen inlets that formed their world. It is not their loss that the map ignores them; it is our own.

  *On November 11, 1930, Canada paid Otto Sverdrup $67,000 “for services rendered” in exploring the islands that bear his name. On the same day, Norway formally recognized Canada’s title to the islands.

  Author’s Note

  The bibliography of the Arctic quest is interminable. Scores of books deal with the search for the North West Passage; scores more deal with the fate of Sir John Franklin; an entire library concentrates on the quest for the North Pole. Most major explorers published their own accounts. Almost every one has had his biographer; some have had several.

  Apart from Lawrence Kirwan’s short work, The White Road, I know of no other study that treats the entire period, from Parry to Peary, as a single narrative. This I have tried to do in some detail for it seems to me the stories of the search for the Passage, the Pole, and for Sir John Franklin, are so intertwined that it is difficult to unravel them. They form the three acts of a seamless drama that has fascinated the world for the best part of two centuries.

  Readers who have come this far will know that this is a book as much about explorers as it is about exploring. I have done my best to rescue the men who sought this Grail from the dead hands of adulatory biographers and the must of history, to examine their characters and personalities, their strengths and their weaknesses and restore them as human beings with human flaws and human ambitions.

  This is also a book about the Inuit, those much neglected native people (whom I have called Eskimos,
the name used almost exclusively during the period, to avoid confusion). Too many historians have given them short shrift; but without the presence of these cheerful and accommodating people the story would not be complete.

  The Arctic Grail is based very largely on original documents – the letters, journals, and personal papers of the leading characters and their associates. I have, whenever possible, examined the handwritten accounts, which in many cases differ substantially from the published ones. Elisha Kane, for instance, emerges as a different personality when one compares his original journal with his published work. The contemporary newspapers and periodicals and government documents – especially reports of investigating committees – have also been extremely useful.

  A work of this complexity would not be possible without the dedicated spadework of a good many predecessors. I stand in awe of Frances J. Woodward, whose diligence in ploughing through the voluminous correspondence of Lady Franklin produced her remarkable Portrait of Jane, a work that no student of the period can neglect. Mrs. Gell’s John Franklin’s Bride (Eleanor Anne Porden) and Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Sir John Franklin in Tasmania were also invaluable secondary sources. Richard Cyriax’s scholarly and definitive Sir John Franklin’s Last Arctic Expedition is another essential secondary source for the Franklin era.