To the Edges of the Earth

by Edward J. Larson

  By this point, as his private writings make clear, Peary hungered for fame. “I don’t want to live and die without accomplishing anything or without being known beyond a narrow circle of friends,” he wrote to his mother shortly after moving to Washington to work first as a draftsman for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey and then as a civil engineer in the navy. “I would like to acquire a name which shall be an open sesame to circles of culture and refinement anywhere, a name which would make my Mother proud.”5 An only child whose father had died when he was four, Peary was devoted to his mother, who always remained his closest confidant. Arctic exploration offered a ticket to such fame, and Peary knew it.

  Upon reaching Ritenbeck on Greenland’s west coast, Peary encountered the town’s young Danish assistant governor, Christian Maigaard, who convinced him that he should not make the trek alone. Together, they scaled the ice cap to over 7,500 feet above sea level and, by their own reckoning, proceeded 100 miles east before turning back. Because of the crude methods that Peary and Maigaard used for calculating their longitude, coupled with their lack of a working chronometer and the long distances claimed for their daily marches, Fridtjof Nansen later questioned the accuracy of this distance.6

  Although far short of a complete crossing, this achievement was enough to draw attention to the charismatic thirty-one-year-old navy civil engineer when he returned to Washington. He boasted of having penetrated deeper inland “than any white person,” a wording that allowed him not to include the Sami with Nordenskiöld, who had gone farther.7 “My last trip has brought my name before the world,” Peary now wrote home. “Remember Mother I must have fame & cannot reconcile myself to years of commonplace drudgery & a name late in life when I see an opportunity to gain it now.”8 Determined to a fault, Peary planned to go back for a complete crossing but was delayed by being posted to Nicaragua to survey the route for a canal that would never be built. In 1889, upon learning that Nansen had beaten him to the crossing, Peary refocused on discovering Greenland’s northern limit. While he made no mention of seeking the North Pole, Peary knew that some geographers then thought that Greenland extended north to the pole. Two expeditions ensued in rapid succession.

  The first of these two North Greenland expeditions launched Peary forward as an Arctic explorer of note and pioneered the techniques that he would later use in his polar quest. He planned to have a ship deposit a small party on the northwest coast of Greenland, where it would winter with support from the local Inuit, whom Peary invariably called by the American name Eskimos. From there, beginning in the spring, he would travel by dogsled with a small party across the ice cap to Greenland’s unknown northeastern corner, returning in time to join the ship in late summer for the voyage home.

  Lecturing widely about this plan, Peary secured support from various East Coast scientific and geographical societies. He also tapped some of the wealthy young men who wanted to join the expedition and others who simply asked to ride up and back on the ship without wintering. Money for the expedition also came from selling advance rights for the story to publishers, which was a common practice by explorers at the time. Earlier in the century, the American explorer of Greenland Elisha Kent Kane received up to $80,000 for his book, and the Anglo-American explorer of the Congo Henry Morton Stanley made $200,000 on his. Even Nansen, Peary explained in an 1891 letter to his mother, earned $10,000 for his account of an expedition that Peary viewed as borrowing from and forestalling his own work. “Fame, money, and revenge goad me forward till sometimes I can hardly sleep lest something happen to interfere with my plans,” he wrote to her. At the very least, he expected that a published account of his expedition would net considerably more than his $2,700 annual salary.9

  This 1891–92 expedition came off much as planned except that a wayward tiller broke Peary’s leg on the outbound voyage, limiting his movement for much of the autumn. Seven members of the expedition wintered near Smith Sound in a hut made of planks and boxes; nine more went along for the round-trip voyage on a grimy commercial seal-hunting ship; and two—Peary and the young Norwegian skier Eivind Astrup—made the 1,200-mile trek with dogsleds over the ice sheet to an Arctic Ocean fjord that Peary named Independence Bay. An Inuit community gathered around the hut, supplying the dogs, food, clothing, and labor needed by the explorers in return for knives, tools, and useful supplies. Three members of this expedition had lasting ties to Peary. Two became his most trusted and devoted supporters—Peary’s new wife, Josephine, or “Jo,” who came along as the first non-native woman on an Arctic expedition, and the valet from his Nicaragua days, Matthew Henson, who went as his “body-servant” and became the first African-American to play a major role in polar exploration. The other, the expedition’s able but independent-minded physician, Frederick Cook, would become Peary’s later-life nemesis.

  It was from a high cliff above Independence Bay after a punishing thirty-three-day journey with Astrup that Peary said he saw the northern coast, with more distant land beyond, which would establish Greenland as an island with an archipelago to its north. The claim to have determined the insularity of Greenland and to have found further islands north of it, although later disproved—and maybe doubted at the time by its maker—made Peary famous and his expedition a success.10 Honors flowed his way.

  “Civil Engineer R. E. Peary of the U.S. Navy has shown us what can be done in the way of traveling in the interior of Greenland by an energetic and persevering explorer,” the 1875–76 Nares Expedition’s famed sledge-team leader Albert Markham, by then an admiral, reported to the 1895 International Geographical Congress held in London.11 This was the sort of acclaim in the highest circles of culture and refinement that Peary craved. A claim of discovery in the uttermost parts of the earth is only as good as its maker, however. Coming from a U.S. Navy officer (even though as a civil engineer Peary was not a line officer), American geographic societies uniformly accepted it. European institutions were less sure, especially after Astrup failed to back it fully, with some reviving the doubts Nansen had raised about the distance Peary had claimed to travel across the Greenland ice sheet five years earlier.

  HAVING TASTED THE FRUITS of Arctic success, Peary was determined to go back as soon as possible to follow up on his discoveries and confirm them. When he and Astrup had first reached the cliff above Independence Bay in 1891, they had nearly exhausted their supplies. They could not go farther. Now Peary wanted to return to Independence Bay and explore the land north of it, which he claimed might offer an “Imperial Highway” to the pole.

  Returning from his first North Greenland expedition in September 1892, Peary had little time to organize and fund a second voyage if he wanted to depart early enough in 1893 for his wintering party to settle in by autumn for what he planned as essentially a repeat of the previous expedition with an extended trek beyond Independence Bay. He made no mention of seeking the pole aside from suggesting that the best route to it might start with his chosen course.

  “My stay north will be no longer than it was before, & am not after the North Pole nor planning any work that is not entirely simple, safe & non-sensational,” Peary assured his anxious mother. “I believe little Mother that it will be but a short time before you have a son more famous than Stanley.”12

  To proceed, he needed to secure leave from the navy and quickly raise money for the trip because, unlike major polar expeditions from other countries, Peary’s efforts never received government funding beyond his naval appointment. His leave from the navy was granted after one of Peary’s new, well-connected supporters intervened directly with the secretary of the navy. Money was more uncertain, but here too his newfound fame opened both doors and checkbooks. Exploration was then the rage; exotic hunting trips were popular among the rich; and wilderness adventure was seen as a cure for the weaknesses of modern urbanized industrial civilization that were perceived as sapping the strength of the American character.

  PEARY ESTIMATED THAT HE required $80,000 for chartering a ship and buying suppli
es and equipment. To raise money rapidly, he turned to the lyceum circuit, which then dominated popular entertainment in America. He delivered 165 lectures in 103 days—two per day in some venues—under the auspices of James Pond’s Lyceum Theater Lecture Bureau, which at the time also managed national tours by Henry Morton Stanley, Mark Twain, and Booker T. Washington.

  Over the course of the winter, Peary visited most of the nation’s large cities and many smaller ones, regaling audiences with tales of the Arctic from a stage set to look like an Inuit village. He wore his hooded deer- and sealskin coats, dogskin britches, and Inuit-made boots. “With various combinations of this outfit, I could keep perfectly warm and yet not get into a perspiration,” Peary noted.13 On cue, Henson would come onstage driving a sledge pulled by the five dogs that had survived the expedition. “They would wait very patiently until the time for Mr. Peary to finish,” Pond later recalled, “but if he happened to speak a little longer than the usual time, the dogs would set up a howl so that he would have to finish.” Those dogs and Peary’s projected stereoscopic images of Greenland proved the greatest draws. “Of all the tours I ever had the pleasure of managing, none met with greater success on a short notice than this one,” Pond wrote of Peary. “If he succeeds in reaching the Pole, then he will be the biggest attraction in the world.”14

  Funds for the expedition came together quickly enough for an on-time departure in July 1893, with the final amount raised by charging admission for the public to view the ship before it sailed. It carried an even larger wintering party than before—eighteen in all. Thousands of applications poured in from people wanting to participate, but some familiar faces returned. Having published a popular account of the previous expedition in time for the advance to help pay for the next one, Jo was back, six months pregnant with the Pearys’ first child, who was subsequently hailed as the first “white baby” born in the high Arctic. Henson and Astrup returned as well, but Cook bowed out after Peary refused his request to publish ethnographic material on the Inuit collected during the prior trip. All the men had signed contracts agreeing not to publish before Peary, and he waited to write up his own account until after the second North Greenland expedition. Peary made no exceptions.

  ON THIS EXPEDITION, HOWEVER, nothing went as well as on the prior one. The wintering party built a spacious hut not far from the previous expedition’s base, and again drew Inuits alongside, but a freak wave destroyed its fuel supplies and two whaleboats. Then fierce spring blizzards, which killed dogs and disabled men, forced Peary to turn back from his trek across the ice sheet after barely going a quarter of the way to Independence Bay. With dwindling supplies and unfulfilled purpose, the strong-willed leader allowed most of the party to return with the ship as planned but stayed on himself with two volunteers—Henson and Hugh Lee—to try again for Independence Bay the next year. Peary all but forced his wife to go. To salvage what he could of the summer, Peary bribed Inuits encamped at his base to reveal the location of three nearby iron meteorites that for generations had supplied local natives with hardened metal for tools. Found to be among the largest of such meteorites, at about 300 pounds, 5,500 pounds, and 34 tons respectively, they gave Peary something of inestimable value to sponsors back home.

  Despite finding the second year bleak and lonely without his wife, Peary persevered and, beginning on April 1, with Henson, Lee, and forty-three dogs, again attempted crossing the ice sheet. Failing to locate the food caches left the year before, the party pushed on with insufficient supplies as far as Independence Bay but could go no farther and made no new discoveries. Forced to eat their dogs, they returned to the base after nearly three months, with one emaciated dog trailing warily behind. For companionship over the year, Peary took a young Inuit, Allakasingwah, whom he described at the time as “just beginning to develop into a woman.”15 Without revealing their relationship, Peary published a seductively posed, full-page nude photograph of her lying on coastal rocks, captioned “Mother of the Seals (An Eskimo Legend),” in his book on the Greenland expeditions.16

  When Peary returned to the United States in 1895 after his second failed summer, he took with him the two smaller iron meteorites and loaned them to New York’s American Museum of Natural History with the understanding that the museum could later buy them. It was not much to show for two years of grueling work. Without a new geographical discovery or even returning sled dogs, Peary’s ensuing lyceum talks generated less popular interest than before, but lecture agent James Pond insightfully noted, “Peary is a nineteenth-century hero, and will continue to push on because he cannot stop.”17 Pond viewed supporting Peary as an investment in the future.

  WITH NOTHING MUCH LEFT in Greenland to attract an explorer of Peary’s ilk, he fixed on the North Pole as his next goal. Peary had been eyeing that prize for years without committing himself to it. With Nansen’s announcement of a new farthest north in 1896, however, public interest in the pole increased and new entrants joined the race to get there first. With much fanfare, Swedish aeronaut S. A. Andrée tried to fly over the pole in a hot-air balloon in 1896 and again in 1897, but failed in his first attempt and died in his second. The globetrotting American journalist Walter Wellman launched much-publicized polar quests in 1894 and 1898, but never got far. Italy’s dashing Duke of the Abruzzi announced his siege on the pole in 1897. Otto Sverdrup, the captain for Nansen’s polar drift, sailed the Fram to Greenland in 1898 on a research trip that Peary wrongly interpreted as part of a second Norwegian assault on the pole. Swedish geologist Alfred Nathorst led an expedition to Spitzbergen and beyond that same year. And Russia was trying to build an icebreaker capable of plowing its way to 90° north.

  For Peary to join the contest, he would need more paid leave from the navy and hefty financial support from donors. In the meantime, he had an engineering task to complete that could help on both counts: to retrieve the third iron meteorite and place it on display with the others at New York’s donor-rich American Museum of Natural History.

  Because it weighed 34 tons and was located in an isolated spot over one-eighth of a mile inland from the coast, moving the meteorite to a ship for transport to New York required Peary’s skills as a civil engineer as much as his resolve as an explorer. It took two trips. During the summer of 1896, Peary used hydraulic jacks and a trolley to get the stone to the beach, but a furious storm prevented him from getting it on board before the ship had to leave or risk being iced in for the winter. The next summer, he completed the task. Both trips were funded by taking along paying passengers for what Peary described as “a summer outing” to see the Arctic coasts, with hunting stops along the way.18 “The voyage this summer will, in addition to its attractions for scientific investigation, appeal to others, as, for example, sportsmen, artists, and lovers of the novel, grand, and picturesque in nature,” Peary’s promotional brochure promised. “For the sportsman, the Arctic region offers some of the most magnificent game, in the shape of the polar bear and the walrus, the ‘tiger’ and the ‘elephant’ of the North.”19

  Peary used these summer excursions not only to retrieve the meteorite but to gather furs, skins, tusks, and native artifacts for sale to collectors and loan to museums. He also dug up the remains of recently deceased Inuits and transported them to the United States as anthropological specimens. On his 1897 trip, in response to a request from the museum curator Franz Boas, a renowned expert on indigenous cultures, Peary even brought back six living Inuits for ethnographic study. He promised them warm homes in a land of sunshine, but they got basement rooms in the museum. Within a year, four of them had died from disease, their bodies dissected for science and their skeletons encased at the museum. Amazingly, Peary listed two of the four by name in his book on the North Greenland expeditions—“Nooktah, my faithful hunter” and “Kessuh, or the ‘Smiler’”—and asserted about all those so named, “Fortunately for them, with no possessions to excite cupidity, with a land in which no one but themselves could conquer a living, they are likely to be left in peace.
”20 Both were dead and dissected before these words were published. Their only peace came in their demise, but in Inuit culture, eternal peace required a proper burial, which none of them received.

  PEARY’S ACTIONS ON THE two short summer trips served his long-term purposes. After the arrival of the third meteorite, American Museum of Natural History president Morris K. Jesup launched the Peary Arctic Club, which Peary depicted as “an organization of gentlemen prominent in the highest business and social circles of New York” committed to funding his future expeditions.21 Each of the club’s fourteen founding members pledged $4,000 to support Peary’s work, and dozens more contributed lesser amounts. Also in 1897, Peary received gold medals from the New York–based American Geographical Society and the Royal Geographical Society of London, both of which boasted a silk-stocking membership of gentlemen interested in exploration. And of further importance that year, Charles Moore, a socially prominent New Yorker who had served as a presidential elector for William McKinley in 1896, intervened with the new president to secure a five-year paid leave for Peary after the navy had flatly refused to grant one. All these developments, plus the successful return of the third meteorite, made 1897 a very good year for Peary.

  Plunder contributed as much as discovery to raising Peary’s profile with Jesup and his friends. Underscoring this point, the Peary Arctic Club’s constitution listed the group’s principal objectives as “to promote and encourage explorations of the Polar regions, as set forth in Lieutenant R. E. Peary’s letter dated January 16, 1897, and . . . to receive and collect such objects of scientific interest or otherwise as may be obtainable through Lieutenant Peary’s present expedition or other expeditions of a like nature.”22 Indeed, in return for the club’s financial backing, Peary promised that all the collections from future expeditions “would be turned over to the American Museum.”23 Yet, as reflected in this ordering of club objectives, firsts and farthests were still necessary, if for no other reason than to demonstrate Peary’s fitness in an age that valued vigorous manliness, as personified by the rising New York patrician-politician Theodore Roosevelt, a darling of the Natural History Museum crowd, who went west after graduating from Harvard College to toughen himself on the frontier.