What made the public so incredulous of Peary? There were several reasons, but a summary answer may be that Peary made so many wrong moves. He knew, for example, that Bartlett, a skilled navigator as well as a white man, was an especially “credible” witness. So he permitted Bartlett, rather than one of the four young white Americans, to lead the last support party and travel to a record north which surpassed that of the then-current record holders, Fridtjof Nansen of Norway and Umberto Cagni [under Duke Abruzzi] of Italy. This put Bartlett in the record books. But why did he not let Bartlett travel above the eighty-eighth parallel, say, to within seventy-five miles of the Pole—or fifty miles or twenty-five miles?
Peary said that Bartlett would have been nothing more than a “passenger” if he had taken him farther. But Peary also felt that no one would ever question his ability to travel the last one hundred miles, especially with Matthew Henson, Ootah, and the three loyal, younger Eskimos.
Peary was also well aware that any distance beyond the eighty-eighth parallel would not only establish a record distance north; it would also essentially put him at the top of Earth. Thus, to carry Bartlett farther meant that he would have to share the glory of the victory with him. The same did not apply to Henson. Like the four Eskimos, he would never be accorded the status of “co-discoverer,” on racial grounds alone.
Yet that was not the principal reason why Peary selected Henson to accompany him on the final leg of the journey. As Peary confided in MacMillan at the outset of the 1909 expedition: “Henson must not turn back. I cannot get along without him.”17 This was true for several reasons. First, Henson had more sledging and Arctic navigation experience than any of the other Americans. Second, he was the man who built and repaired sledges and alcohol stoves and who drove the dogteams with the skill of an Eskimo. Third, he was the only man on the expedition who could speak the Eskimo language fluently and who could persuade the Eskimos to travel so far out on the ice. The Eskimos trusted him thoroughly.
Much has been made of the fact that on the return trip to Cape Columbia, Peary barely spoke to Henson. Wally Herbert, for example, interpreted this silence as evidence of Peary’s bitter disappointment and personal “anguish”—a tacit admission, as it were, that he had failed to reach the Pole. But Henson himself offered a different explanation for Peary’s behavior. In a 1910 article in the Boston American, he revealed that on the last leg of the journey he and two of the Eskimos had pushed on to the final campsite in defiance of Peary’s specific orders. Although they thought they had stopped at a point just short of their ultimate goal, Peary’s subsequent calculations showed that the camp was situated virtually at the Pole itself. It was this realization that left Peary despondent and provoked his anger toward Henson. “For the crime of being present when the Pole was reached Commander Peary has ignored me ever since,” Henson explained.
In any event, looking back, it seems clear that Peary would have been better off had he taken both Bartlett and Henson to the Pole. In this way, he would have had his “credible” white witness to satisfy the Americans and Europeans, and Henson, the master explorer and expert in Eskimo sledging, culture, and language, to get them there.
Yet of all the sources of mistrust in Peary, none looms larger than Frederick Cook, the affable doctor who had served as Peary’s assistant on an earlier expedition and who claimed to have reached the North Pole in 1908. Cook was a popular and charismatic all-American boy. By contrast, Peary was viewed as arrogant, distant, well connected, and heavy-handed. The great Danish explorer Peter Freuchen, who knew both men, once remarked that “Cook was a gentleman and liar; Peary was neither.”
Objective examination of Cook’s records would lead even his most ardent supporters to conclude that he never got within several hundred miles of the North Pole. It took four support groups, 133 dogs in seven teams, and tons of food, fuel, and other supplies to get Peary, Henson and the four Eskimos to the Pole. Cook would have us believe that he reached the North Pole and returned with two Eskimo assistants, two dogteams, and two sleds of food and fuel.
One is hard put to find any serious scholar, explorer, or scientist who believes that Cook came within four hundred miles of the North Pole. But strangely, some of Cook’s supporters are willing to overlook his many inexplicable and weak excuses for acts unbecoming of a serious explorer. Cook’s explanations for his lack of proof of his “attainment of the Pole” always seemed a little too convenient. For example, he claimed to have left the “proof” of his attainment of the Pole (i.e., papers and instruments) behind in Greenland in the care of a friend, while he traveled to Denmark to celebrate his victory. In the minds of the world public of that time, reaching the North Pole was tantamount to reaching the moon in our time. And how much “proof” was required? Notebook? Compasses? Peary is today being challenged on the basis of his “proofs” in a small pocket-sized notebook kept in the National Archives. Rawlins even used scribbles of Peary’s notes on a single scrap of paper as “proof” for his claim that Peary faked the discovery. And yet Cook did not have in his possession even a single pad of navigational measurements. He “left them behind,” where they are said to have been buried (and later destroyed by the elements) by his friend because Peary would not let him bring them to the United States aboard his ship.
Rather than attempt here to present the numerous other reasons that make it extremely improbable that Cook reached the Pole (many arguments have already been presented by Arctic historians), I will cite what in my opinion is one of the strongest arguments against his claim.
One of Cook’s biggest mistakes was that he, like Peary, thought of the Eskimos as an inferior race of people. He was convinced that they would be unable to understand or report his movements around the islands of northern Canada in his so-called attainment of the Pole and that they would not be credible witnesses among white people. Cook, who had maintained little or no contact with the Polar Eskimos since his visit to Greenland in 1891, would also have us believe that he simply appeared in their villages seventeen years later and convinced them to travel with him on foot and by dogteam some 300 nautical miles from their village at Etah to the northern tip of Canada and an additional 413 miles to the North Pole (a round-trip of about 1,800 miles). Even Peary and Henson, who had known every Eskimo member of their team since they were youngsters, had great difficulty getting them to travel out on the dreaded Arctic Ocean ice. The Eskimos almost never traveled out of view of land on the sea ice, and they feared the ever-present danger of accidents on the ice, which they referred to as being swallowed up by the evil spirit of Tornarsuk. Although Peary paid each man handsomely with material goods and promises, a number of the Eskimo assistants deserted the expedition after a few days out on the ice. Others tried to abandon Peary as the expedition traveled farther north, but were persuaded by Henson and MacMillan, through promises of exorbitant pay, to remain.
By all accounts, Cook could not even speak Eskimo except to babble a few words, let alone enough to persuade them to travel out on the Arctic Ocean. Also, for some strange reason, after being dropped off near Etah by a fishing schooner, Cook left his single white assistant, Rudolph Francke, behind in an Eskimo village. He then set off “for the Pole with four Eskimos.” After traveling about twelve miles out on the Arctic Ocean, two of the Eskimos returned to their village, leaving Cook, Etookahshoo, and Ahpellah alone in a snow house (igloo) they had built. There, Cook is believed to have raised the American flag over the snow house and taken a photograph of what he later called the North Pole. Cook then traveled south to one of the upper Canadian islands and found an old abandoned earthen igloo, where he and the two Eskimos wintered. In early spring, he made his way back to Etah to announce his “Attainment of the North Pole.” His two Eskimo assistants later said during questioning that they did not know whether they had traveled to the North Pole with Cook, but they were certain that wherever they traveled they were “never out of sight of land.” No land can be seen from the North Pole.
The two E
skimos were later interviewed by the Eskimo-Danish explorer and anthropologist Knud Rasmussen, who reported their story. The highly respected Rasmussen had initially believed Cook’s claim of having reached the North Pole, but after talking with Cook’s Eskimo hirees and reviewing the records of his journey, he concluded, “I realized it was a scandal.” Rasmussen’s interview of Peary and Henson’s Eskimo assistants, on the other hand, corroborated their report of the polar journey.
It is worth nothing that Cook may have first conceived the idea of challenging Peary for the Pole around 1901 when, at the request of Peary’s friends, he gave Peary a medical examination and found him in such poor health that he was not likely to be able to continue his polar quest. In any event, he did more than anyone to deprive Peary and Henson of the North Pole prize they rightly earned.
Peary also alienated many Americans with his aloofness and his catering to narrow, special-interest groups. For example, he carried the flags of the Daughters of the American Revolution and his Bow-doin College fraternity to the Pole, and he raised them along with the American flag. Some have even suggested that Peary was perceived by many Americans as being too closely allied with big-name Republican interests, making him a target for Democrats who traditionally supported underdogs like Cook. Predictably, he also overreacted to Cook’s ruse, appearing to the American public to be mean-spirited and despotic, while Cook came off looking magnanimous. “Two records are better than one,” said Cook when he heard that Peary had reached the Pole. Peary responded by calling Cook a “liar” who had “sold the American public a gold brick.”
Some of Peary’s critics also charge him with treating the North Pole as if it were “his domain” and calling the Greenland-Canadian route to the Pole “his” route. Indeed, Peary and Henson had spent eighteen years searching for and reporting in public journals the best route to the Pole. Moreover, Peary was not unusual or irrational in his insistence that he was the American representative in the race to the North Pole and that the Cape Columbia meridian route was his. Every nation involved in the race usually had one man who was by reputation and experience its sole representative in the North Pole contest, and that nation threw its support behind its man. In Italy, for example, the duke of Abruzzi with his associate Umberto Cagni were the “official” contestants for the North Pole. In Norway, until 1900, it was Fridtjof Nansen. One cannot imagine any other Italian attempting to compete with Cagni and the duke for the prestige of the North Pole or any other Englishman challenging Scott for the South Pole. In the explorers’ world of that era, it was considered dishonorable for one explorer to invade the ongoing exploration of another. But in America, the land of opportunity (and opportunists), Cook did not have to adhere to these unwritten gentlemen’s rules.
Most of Peary’s detractors use a simplistic and time-tested formula: if you discredit Peary’s character and motives and make him appear to have been an irrational, dishonest, and blindly ambitious man, and you then eliminate Henson and the Eskimos as “credible” witnesses, you can sow enough “reasonable doubt” to deprive Peary of his claim.
No one, however, can impugn the courage of the men who undertook the historic 1909 expedition. Every successful polar expedition since that time has required the use of aircraft or other advanced technology for backup and resupply. It is well known to psychologists and physiologists that such security serves as a source of comfort and physical resilience, enabling a person to husband special psychic and somatic resources for a dangerous and difficult task. This was an advantage that Peary, Henson, and the other members of the team did not enjoy. They knew that once they ventured out onto the Arctic they could not be rescued. The loss of a supply sled through a break in the ice, the opening of an impassable sea lane, a sudden violent storm, a broken or frostbitten limb—any of these or countless other accidents could result not only in disappointment and delay but in death. Yet somehow they overcame these obstacles, found their way to the Pole, and returned to the same spot on land.
Or did they? To settle the dispute once and for all, the National Geographic Society commissioned the Navigation Foundation, a highly respected private association of navigation specialists based in Rockville, Maryland, to review all the evidence related to Robert Peary’s claim. The foundation spent more than a year poring over some 225 cubic feet of documents contained in the Peary Collection at the National Archives as well as other relevant papers collected at the American Geographical Society, the National Geographic Society, the Explorers Club in New York, and other institutions. It also solicited testimony from a range of experts who had studied the evidence. I, too, submitted my findings.
Among the first conclusions reached by the Navigation Foundation was that Dennis Rawlins’s analysis of Peary’s data was “completely erroneous.”18 Far from cracking some hidden “code,” the foundation reported, the equations Rawlins used to prove Peary’s failure were actually drawn from the serial numbers of Peary’s three navigational watches. The report went on to suggest that anyone with even a modicum of navigational experience would not have made such errors in analyzing Peary’s notes, which were apparently taken on an earlier expedition and from land.
William E. Mollett, a navigation expert who flew ninety-one polar missions with the U.S.A.F. Weather Service between 1952 and 1955, delivered an even more stinging indictment. In material submitted to the National Geographic and the Navigation Foundation as part of their investigation, the retired U.S. Air Force colonel wrote:
The complete amateur, Dennis Rawlins, and the Polar stunt man Wally Herbert were very critical of Peary for not taking transverse sextant sightings (unnecessary), frequent soundings of ocean depth, variation figures, constant wind speed and direction of cloud conditions. Peary was intent on only one thing: reaching the Pole. To call his efforts to obtain a lot of scientific data perfunctory would be an exaggeration. Soundings and unnecessary sextant sightings when the temperatures were so cold to say the least are activities that can easily be skipped. . . . There was a serious error made in the September 1988 article [in National Geographic] when it was assumed that Peary was attempting to navigate the Pole without any celestial references for longitude. His celestial reference was almost constantly available, and only slightly less accurate than references made with a sextant. They could be done without bothering with logarithms and spherical trigonometry and a miserably cold sextant operation. Why use a bubble horizon when the sun is right on the real horizon?19
The Navigation Foundation agreed with Mollett. “We are persuaded,” the foundation reported, after systematically presenting the available evidence, “that Peary’s system of navigation was adequate to get him to the near vicinity of the Pole without taking longitude observations along the way.”20
The foundation also found that the distance and speed Peary claimed to have traveled during the expedition, including the final dash to the Pole, “are entirely credible. Dogs and sleds with far less skillful drivers than Matthew Henson and Peary’s Eskimos have often maintained or exceeded these claimed speeds over much longer distances.”21
Additional confirmation of Peary’s claims was provided by a comparison of recently established Arctic Ocean depths along the seventieth meridian with measurements recorded during the expedition and by “photogrammetric rectification”—a technique involving the mathematical analysis of shadows on photographs to determine the sun’s elevation when the picture was taken. After applying this technique to a series of photographs that Peary claimed to have taken at the Pole, the foundation concluded: “The pictures were taken very close to the vicinity of the Pole. . . . probably within four or five miles of the reported position.” This the foundation regarded as its “final and most conclusive” evidence that Peary, Henson, and the four Eskimos were “essentially at the Pole.”22
Several months later, in April 1990, the foundation issued a “Supplemental Report” after discovering two more photographs from the 1909 expedition.23 Unlike the other thirteen pictures that had been analyzed
through photogrammetry, these photographs showed the position of both the sun and the horizon, making it possible to determine even more precisely the position of the photographer. Analysis of the new photographs moved Peary and Henson’s probable location even closer to the exact Pole.
The Navigation Foundation’s reports should put the matter to rest. But somehow I doubt it. As Robert Peary himself observed, the North Pole was the “Last Great Geographical Prize.” Yet unlike so many other such “prizes”—the South Pole, Mount Everest, even the moon—the North Pole remains shrouded in uncertainty and mystery, a point surrounded by an ever-shifting sea of ice and unidentifiable by the human eye. Perhaps that is its most enduring legacy: it continues to represent human striving for what is approachable but never fully attainable.
NOTES
Chapter 6. Black and White Partners
1. Matthew Henson’s date of birth is commonly believed to be August 8, 1866, but is listed as August 8, 1868, on his marriage license issued on April 13, 1891, by the Clerk of the Orphans’ Court of Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania.
2. Robert E. Peary diary entry, in Robert E. Peary Collection, Record Group 401-1, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
3. Robert E. Peary, Northward over the “Great Ice” (n.p., n.d.), p. 508.
4. Ibid., p. 47.
5. Matthew Alexander Henson, A Negro Explorer at the North Pole (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1912), p. 3.
6. Robert E. Peary Collection, Record Group 401-1, National Archives, Washington, D.C. Unless otherwise noted, all personal letters that I quote from in the text can be found in this collection.
7. John M. Verhoeff diaries, in Robert E. Peary Collection, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
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