To the Edges of the Earth

by Edward J. Larson

  These two journeys by Peary, the first completed with only one other man and the second with two, each averaged about 13 miles per day (or over twice the rate of the skiing and sledding part of Nansen’s polar trek). Such speed led the duke to believe that, if he traveled light like Peary but used more dogs and men, his team could sprint the 1,200 miles from the northernmost reaches of Franz Joseph Land to the pole and back in three months. This would allow the trip to be completed within the one-hundred-day sledging season between the return of daylight in late winter and the breakup of the Arctic icepack in late spring.22

  “The plan, as thus conceived, had certainly its drawbacks,” the duke readily conceded.23 He did not know if the speeds Peary reported on the Greenland ice sheet could be duplicated on sea ice—certainly Nansen had not been able to achieve them. Nor did he know if more men and additional dogs would accelerate or slow the process. Yet it offered the prospect of achieving something grand. “The practical use of Polar expeditions has often been discussed. If only the moral advantage to be derived from these expeditions be considered, I believe that it would suffice to compensate for the sacrifice they demand,” the duke wrote, in justification of an endeavor that offered little in the way of material reward, scientific purpose, or territorial gain. “As men who surmount difficulties in their daily struggles feel themselves strengthened for an encounter with still greater difficulties, so should a nation feel itself still more encouraged and urged by the success won by its sons, to persevere in striving for its greatness and prosperity.”24 Viva l’Italia!

  EXECUTING THE DUKE’S PLAN, the expedition left Norway in June 1899, aboard the same ship Nansen had used for two Greenland expeditions, now refitted and rechristened the Stella Polare (or Polar Star). It steamed to Franz Joseph Land’s most northerly island, Rudolph Island, where it wintered in an icebound bay at 82°47' north latitude. Damage to the ship from twisting ice forced the party to camp on shore in makeshift tents rather than sleep on board. In midwinter darkness, the duke and his men began training the dogs and learning how to drive them. “The first attempts were enough to make us despair,” the duke wrote, yet it was on those dogs that all their hopes rested.25 “Dogs are undeniably the most useful animals for man in his expeditions with sledges over the ice of the Polar Sea,” the duke explained. “They have this advantage, too, that, unlike horses and reindeer, they readily eat their fellows.”26 But they are of no use if their drivers do not know how to mush them. Two days before Christmas, the duke severely frosted his left hand in a sledging accident caused by runaway dogs. This ultimately led to the amputation of parts of several fingers, putting the duke out of commission for the spring dash for the pole. Cagni would take his place as its leader while the duke remained in camp.

  After one false start, the polar party set off on March 11, 1900, with ten men, four kayaks, thirteen sledges carrying about 550 pounds each, and one hundred and two dogs. According to the original plan, three of the sledges were to carry all the food for the first part of the trek and turn back at the 85th parallel with a detachment of three men. Three more sledges were to carry food for the next part and turn back at the 88th parallel with another three-man detachment. A final detachment of four men would then sprint for the pole. As it turned out, the sea ice posed relentless problems from the outset, with open leads, massive pressure ridges, and a southward drift that all but negated the party’s forward progress. None of the preset goals were met.

  After making only about 45 net miles in ten days, Cagni sent back the first detachment of three men. They were never seen again. Nine days later, having barely exceeded 83° north latitude, Cagni sent back the second three-man detachment. After nineteen days of heavy sledging, with the dogs having to eat other members of the pack after they ran out of dog food on the thirteenth day, one member of this detachment was able to kayak the last 6 miles of open water to the base and rescue the other two. Once the first two detachments left, and knowing that their own small party could never reach the pole due to their slow start, Cagni, with an Italian navy sailor, Simone Canepa, and two Italian mountain guides, Joseph Petigax and Alexis Fenoillet, gamely tried for the farthest north possible.

  “We are alone on the immense plain, the northern boundary of which meets the sky,” Cagni wrote in his diary, capturing the explorers’ esprit de corps. “Behind us, the departure of our friends has severed the last link which united us to the world. . . . [Ahead,] the boundless desert seems to call upon us to perform our task, to fulfill our duty. It does not inspire us with a feeling of terror, but seems to say, ‘Now, all depends on you.’”27 They pushed on with forty-nine dogs and six sledges, carrying food enough for three weeks out and forty days back.

  Their first week proved as maddening as the previous two, with four days trapped in place by a blizzard, two of modest advance amid what Cagni depicted as an “endless network of channels and pressure ridges,” and only one covering more than the hoped-for average of 13 miles per day.28 The open-water leads could be anywhere from a few inches to many hundred feet wide; Cagni estimated that some of the ice ridges reached 45 feet in height. Either could extend for miles, forcing long detours or slow crossings. In accord with the survival-of-the-fittest spirit of early twentieth-century polar exploration, from the first day they began butchering the weakest dogs to feed the rest, a duty Cagni depicted as “disagreeable but necessary.”29

  The next two weeks were a mixed bag. Some days the party raced forward over level fields of new ice and light snow; most days it dodged and weaved around leads and ridges for modest gain; and some days high winds and blinding snow kept it in camp. The rapid advances, when they occurred, exhausted the dogs. “We beat them to force them on,” Cagni complained on one such occasion, “and it is very hard work, which hurts the back, to push the sledges forward every moment, because the dogs will not start when they are bid.”30 Temperatures of minus 30°C and below intensified the pain from Cagni’s right forefinger, which had suffered frostbite in the same accident that had incapacitated the duke. Taking off the bandage for the first time on April 15, Cagni found the digit half putrefied. “I took away with forceps as well as I could the pus and dead flesh,” he noted.31

  Despite the obstacles, the men crossed the 84th and 85th parallels during this period and were halfway to the 86th when the third week ended and the prescribed turning point was reached. They had covered 16 miles the previous day, however, and Nansen’s farthest north seemed so close. “Now, with six or seven days’ marching like yesterday,” Cagni urged his colleagues, “we might obtain, if not complete success, at least a very satisfactory result.”32 And so they voted to go on with reduced rations in the hope that, with lighter sledges and more experience, they could return to the base more quickly than they had come from it. “Will God abandon us just at this moment?” Cagni asked. “I am full of hope.”33

  The next three days provided near perfect sledging, with Cagni depicting the ice as “level and smooth, and later on undulating.”34 Pushing themselves and their dogs—“Never have I felt more weary,” the famously indefatigable captain reported—the four Italians reached Nansen’s mark at 10 P.M. on the second added day and stopped for the night to celebrate.35 “We searched hastily in the kayak for our little flag; tied it to a bamboo pole and waved it to the cry of ‘Long live Italy! Long live the King! Long live the Duke of the Abruzzi!’” Cagni reported in a passage giving voice to the glory then afforded to polar firsts and farthests. “For never shall a conquest won by sword, nor by the favors of fortune, adorn the Crown of the House of Savoy with greater lustre!”36 They toasted their achievement with cognac: “We have conquered! We have surpassed the greatest explorer of the century!”37

  Adding cushion to their record north, the men pushed on the next day until stopped at 6 P.M. by a broad lead, where they called a halt to their quest at 86°34' north latitude, 68° east longitude. “We have reached the end of all our fatigues,” Cagni wrote on April 24, 1900.38 Yet they still needed to make it back to
the ship, which lay frozen in place some 280 miles away. And they had taken forty-five days to get from the ship to this desolate point on the sea ice but had only thirty days of full rations left for the return trip. Of course, fewer rations meant less hauling weight, yet they now had only thirty-four dogs left to pull, and these were culled frequently for dog food. Cagni’s infectious optimism bordered on the irrational.

  The return trip began even better than Cagni could have hoped. With generally clear weather and firm sea ice for the first two weeks, the sledges went so fast at times that the men occasionally jumped aboard just to keep pace. They covered over 20 miles some days and had crossed half the distance to the ship in the first ten. The men began guessing that they would get back by the end of May. The worst problems were medical, with snow blindness among the men and Cagni’s finger reaching such a critical stage that he had to amputate the distal bone with the crude instruments available.

  During the third week, however, the pack beneath them began breaking up with the spring thaw, and their troubles multiplied. Leads opened and closed around them. Pressure ridges rose and fell. Pools formed on the surface, and the snow became soggy. All this slowed their progress to a crawl and increased the work for men and dogs. “It is impossible to follow one [direction] continuously, and it is difficult to keep an exact account of all the windings and deviations which broken ice or channels force us to make,” Cagni complained.39

  Then, on May 10, when Cagni calculated their longitude, the party learned that the winds or currents had been pushing the pack westward, so that they were many miles farther from the ship than they thought and drifting still farther away. Cagni compared their plight to that of a caged squirrel running in a wheel: working hard but getting nowhere. “The difference between the ice-pack in March and that of the present time is remarkable; one might say they were the product of two absolutely different seas,” he wrote on May 12, “and the ice-pack which we found to the north of the 85th degree might well be typically placed between the two.”40 Making matters worse, soon they began entering belts of upturned ice pinnacles, or “séracs,” surrounded by soft, deep snow. “We find ourselves in the midst of such difficult séracs that we cannot advance 200 yards in an hour. We work without ceasing with the ice-axes, often carry the sledges, and are worn out and breathless by fatigue,” Cagni wrote on June 7.41 By this point, the men were alternating between slogging through ankle-deep slush and sinking waist-deep in snow, when not breaking through the thin ice altogether.

  As day upon added day produced little or no progress, food and fuel became the overriding concerns. Daily rations dropped, biscuits ran out, horse-meat pemmican meant for dogs became food for men, and more dogs were killed, at first to feed other dogs but later the men too. “We sacrifice my personal friend Grasso (Fatty), because he is still worthy of his name; his flesh is plentiful and good,” Cagni reported in June about a dog that Nansen had given to the expedition from among those born on the Fram.42 When the fuel ran out, the men cooked by heat generated from burning sailcloth wicks in shallow tins of dog fat. No one ever managed to catch native wildlife, even though seals appeared in the open leads and bear tracks abounded. “At times it seems to me that it must all end by some catastrophe; our provision will be exhausted; we shall be unable to keep up this terrible struggle against the drift,” Cagni lamented. “The terrible end of De Long, and still more that of Greely’s expedition, comes to my mind with all its horrible details.”43 The men dreamed of food and what they would eat should they survive. The weather too turned against them, with persistent snow, fog, and wind.

  “Our future is as dark as the atmosphere,” Cagni observed in June.44

  Slowly, however, the party made progress against the drift, which carried them southwest of their destination so that they ultimately had to aim for parts of Franz Joseph Land below Rudolph Island and work their way north over the shore ice and intervening channels to the base. One by one the men discarded their sledges as they consumed or cast off their supplies and ate their dogs until they had only two half-loaded sledges and seven dogs by the end. Their kayaks being useless by this time because of leaks, when they could not go around leads or channels they waited until they closed or ferried across on ice floes, once raising a kayak’s sail on a floe to speed the crossing. Often the party had to backtrack before obstacles or circle back to where they had been. “It drives one to despair! After toiling for so many hours we find ourselves at the same place!” Cagni exclaimed on one such occasion.45

  Yet on June 23, more than a month after it was due and one hundred four days after it left, Cagni’s party reached Rudolph Island from the south and descended a glacier into camp, to the amazement and delight of their colleagues. “Captain Cagni, Petigax, Fenoillet, and Canepa had the appearance of suffering much,” the duke noted. “Their clothes were in rags.”46 Their farthest north, however, became the expedition’s defining achievement and the pride of Italy.

  Following the party’s return, it took nearly seven weeks to make the Stella Polare seaworthy and free it from the shore ice with explosives. Then, ice in the main channel through the Franz Joseph Land archipelago held it up for another two weeks and threatened to trap the expedition for a second winter. Finally, on September 5, at his first stop in Norway, the duke could wire to his cousin, Italy’s new king, Victor Emmanuel III: “The steadfast courage and determination manifested by the leader of the sledge operation [Cagni] and by all those who composed it, in spite of immense hardships, assured its success, and acquired fresh glory for our country, by making its flag wave at the highest latitude which has hitherto been reached.”47 Stepping ashore, he still carried his left arm and hand with the amputated fingers in a sling.

  Despite his readiness to ascribe credit where credit was due, the laurels inevitably went to the duke. After all, he was the organizer and leader; he was the aristocrat; he was the known celebrity whose name could sell newspapers. “The Duke of Abruzzi, head of the artic exploring expedition on the Stella Polare, was to-day the recipient of a splendid popular tribute in Christiania,” the New York Times reported about the ship’s arrival in Norway’s capital on September 11, 1900. “This evening the students organized a grand torchlight procession and the streets were thronged with cheering and singing thousands. At the official reception earlier in the day Dr. Nansen spoke, saying that the Duke of Abruzzi not only had renewed the traditions of Italy, of Marco Polo, and of Columbus, but had given the youth of all nations a noble example.” No mention was made of Cagni in that or other early articles in the Times.48 Reaching for the pole was a story made for the media, and the media gave its spin to it.49 History, especially popular history, perpetuated that story. No matter where one looks, the new century’s first farthest north is attributed to Prince Luigi Amedeo, Duke of the Abruzzi.50

  POLAR EXPLOITS HAVING ESTABLISHED the duke as an international celebrity of the first order by 1900, his fame grew over the ensuing decade. He was, of course, a royal in an age of royalty with access to the seemingly limitless funds of the House of Savoy. He excelled on the European circuit at racing both yachts and motorcars even as he chalked up widely publicized first ascents in mountaineering. Further, surely aided by his stature and status but also reflecting his leadership skills, the duke rose in rank within the Italian navy and received command of first the cruiser Liguria and then the battleship Regina Elena, which he took on global goodwill tours. Darkly handsome and devilishly suave, his star-crossed love affair with America’s leading debutante generated headlines in Europe and the United States. By 1909, only an assault on the Pole of Altitude and a world climbing record could add to what the duke had already achieved in exploration and extreme adventure. This became his goal.

  Chapter 2

  The Audacity of Adventure, Circa 1909

  IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN a proud man’s proudest time, but he stood eclipsed in the limelight and allegedly forestalled in his twelve-year quest to reach the North Pole first. In August 1909, returning from th
e most recent of his three grueling expeditions in search of the pole and five other trips to the Arctic, U.S. Navy engineer Robert Peary sailed south to Greenland’s northernmost settlements claiming success. On arrival, he learned that a former subordinate with a spotted reputation as an explorer, Brooklyn physician Frederick Cook, claimed to have beaten him to the prize.

  Before leaving on this final expedition in 1908, Peary had warned anyone who would listen not to believe Cook should he claim the pole. No one could reach it in the impromptu manner proposed by Cook, who had set off with scant preparation and two Inuit sledge drivers on an effort that, by experience, Peary knew required intricate planning and a sizable support party. Now, rather than bask in his hard-won glory, Peary steeled himself to defend his priority.

  “Don’t let Cook story worry you,” he wired to his wife from his ship’s first stop with telegraph connection to the outside world. “Have him nailed.”1 And in telegrams sent to the press from the same site, Peary promised to return with proof that Cook “has simply handed the public a gold brick.”2 Who could have guessed that “the goal of centuries,” as the press then dubbed it, would be claimed twice within a span of nine days?3 The competing claims and the resulting controversy captured the world’s attention.

  Peary’s 1909 dash toward the pole built on his prior Arctic expeditions. Almost on a lark, he had first gone north in 1886 during a summer leave from the navy in an attempt either to cross Greenland’s ice cap or to reconnoiter such an effort—before the trip, Peary suggested the former; after, the latter. Three years earlier, already renowned for leading the first transit of the Northeast Passage above Siberia, Swedish explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld attempted the island’s first crossing. The local Inuit (or Kalaallit, as they call themselves in Greenland) shunned the interior. Instead, for assistance, Nordenskiöld took along three native Sami from Lapland. Reading about this attempt and the attention it generated, Peary wanted to succeed where Nordenskiöld had fallen short.4