Peary’s January 16 letter to the Peary Arctic Club coincided with his public announcement, made on the occasion of his receipt of the American Geographical Society’s gold medal, that he would contend for the pole. “Nansen has wrested from the Stars and Stripes the record of highest north which it had held for a dozen years and placed the Norwegian flag far in advance,” Peary told his wealthy, nationalistic audience. “The Pole is certain to be reached soon; it is only a question of time and money and not so very much of the latter; and unless we are alert we shall be left in the rear.”
Peary proposed what he called a “common-sense” plan for reaching the pole. Use a strong ship “to force a way” north along the west coast of Greenland during the first summer, collecting Inuit (or Eskimo, as he called them) families along the way. Choose a winter base as far north as possible, with forward supply depots laid from there to the northernmost point of land. Then, in the spring, “with picked dogs, the lightest possible equipment, and two of the best of the Eskimos, the dash for the Pole would be attempted.” If ice conditions prevented them from reaching the pole one year, they would try again the next. He estimated the expedition’s cost at $150,000.24
Peary closed with his pitch to society members and their guests. “There is not a man or woman here to-night whose heart would not thrill with patriotism to see the realization of this project and know that it was American money, intelligence, energy and endurance that had scaled the apex of the earth and lighted it with the American flag,” he said. “And no man could . . . obtain a more royal and imperishable monument than to have his name written forever across the mysterious rocks and ice which form the setting for the spinning axis of the globe—the North Pole.”25 Peary would name the capes, bays, islands, and glaciers that he found for his donors. It was a Gilded Age offer and received a Gilded Age response. Peary got his money, with Jesup in the lead and publisher Herbert Bridgman, financier Henry Cannon, railroad baron James J. Hill, and banker Henry Parish close behind. Many others contributed. British publishing magnate Alfred Harmsworth donated Windward, the steam yacht that had carried Nansen home. It headed north on July 4, 1898. The United States had declared war with Spain eleven weeks earlier, but Peary did not offer to relinquish his leave from active duty. At age forty-two, he feared this might be his last chance to bag the pole.
WITH THIS PLAN AND its execution, Peary had returned to his original approach of using a small party and native techniques to succeed where large expeditions with modern technology had failed. Over the years, his expeditions had grown ever larger with the addition of more men, paying passengers, and his wife, but in 1898 he took only two others, Henson and a doctor, Thomas Dedrick. Once the ship dropped them off, Peary would rely on Inuit support. Leaving behind his again-pregnant wife also afforded Peary freedom to pursue his relationship with Allakasingwah, who at fifteen would soon be also pregnant with a child by him.
Personal motives aside, by this time Peary sincerely believed that small and simple were best for polar exploration. “Where three men will get along in safety and comfort, six would merely exist on half rations,” he now observed. “The two-man party is the ideal one; both Nansen and myself have proved this.”26 As for technology, he later added, “Sooner or later—and usually sooner—any machine will fall down in polar work, and when it does so it is simply a mass of old junk which neither man nor dog can eat.”27 Peary used dogs for transport, igloos for lodging, animal skins for clothing, and Inuits as dog-drivers, hunters, and tailors. “The traveler who goes upon the ice-cap without fur clothing does so either from ignorance or because he is reckless,” he wrote.28 Like Inuits, Peary slept in his clothes and traveled without sleeping bags or tents.
Peary’s attitude toward the Inuit reflected his time and place. In line with the romantic attachment that many late nineteenth-century Americans displayed for the waning frontier and its dwindling native population, Peary believed that the Inuit, through evolution, were ideally fitted to their natural environment. “Everyone will agree with me,” he wrote on the eve of his 1898 expedition, “that there are no human beings on the face of the globe better adapted to form the rank and file of an Arctic party than that little tribe, the most northerly people of the world, whose fathers and grandfathers lived in that very region.” Yet note the stress on “rank and file.” In line with the so-called scientific racism of the day, which envisioned a progressive evolution of peoples and cultures with Western Europeans on top, Peary depicted Inuits as “children” and their ways as “primitive.” They lived near the coasts, he noted, fearing the interior and the sea ice. But due to his regular visits, Peary believed, they had come to trust him like a generous father and would follow him across the sea ice to the pole. “It is interesting to note the childish delight with which they listened, as I told them how they were each to have a ‘shake-her-up’ (Winchester) rifle, and were to hunt musk oxen and bear, drive dogs, and eat biscuit and pemmican with me in the distant legendary Oomingmuk Nunami (Musk Ox Land) of their forefathers,” Peary wrote about the coming polar trek.29
With the pole as his goal, Peary hoped to sail 250 or more miles north of his previous bases near Smith Sound to establish winter quarters at Greely’s old Fort Conger, which had been left undisturbed for two decades, or even farther north to where the Nares Expedition had wintered in 1875–76. This would put him and his supplies less than 600 miles from the pole, or about the same distance as he had twice traversed from his old bases to Independence Bay. Since Inuits rarely live north of Smith Sound, Peary had planned to pick up some families there and take them to his winter quarters. As Greely had learned to his peril, however, the ice does not clear every year beyond Smith Sound, and, due to a machinists’ strike in England, Harmsworth had not delivered on his offer to refit the Windward with powerful engines. It was a sturdy ship, but could not break ice. The combination of poor ice conditions and an underpowered ship forced Peary to stop just north of Smith Sound at Cape D’Urville on Ellesmere Island. Confronted with the same ice conditions in the Fram, a ship designed to drift in rather than cut through ice, Sverdrup made his winter quarters in the Smith Sound region as well. Although at the time neither knew of the other’s location, their proximity would not prove a happy coincidence for Peary, who already feared that Sverdrup wanted to beat him to the pole.
Brooding about his inability to make it as far north as planned, Peary established his winter quarters at Cape D’Urville with his ship, sixty dogs, and a house made of packing boxes. In late August, Peary, Henson, Dedrick, and their Inuit supporters began hunting game and charting the coastline. A chance meeting with Sverdrup in October heightened Peary’s baseless concerns about the Norwegian’s designs on the pole and added new worries that he might also want to occupy Fort Conger as a forward base. Although no record of it exists in the writings of Peary or Sverdrup, Henson later recalled a second meeting between the two in December, after which he depicts Peary as becoming obsessed with getting to Fort Conger before Sverdrup. “I can’t possibly afford to lose my one chance of a northern base to a competitor,” Peary reportedly cried.30
Whatever the cause, with a waxing quarter moon on December 20, 1898, Peary began a reckless attempt to move his supplies 250 miles north to Fort Conger. Illness had already cut the number of his dogs in half. Departing on the winter solstice meant that the sun would not return for two months and the cold would most likely get worse—Peary reported that the daily mean low temperature during the trip was minus 52°F and the lowest reading was minus 66°F.31 Nevertheless, Peary set out with Henson, Dedrick, four Inuit sledge drivers, and the remaining thirty dogs over a largely unknown route along the rough coastal ice foot on what polar explorer and historian Wally Herbert later described as “the most ill-conceived and badly planned journey [Peary] ever made.”32
Peary expected the trip to take about ten days, but it extended into a seventeen-day ordeal. Even the known first half of the route, over which Peary’s men had blazed the trail and prepared shelte
rs, proved surprisingly difficult due to strong winds and heavy snow. Running four days late by this point, Peary pushed on toward Fort Conger expecting a similar route ahead. In fact, it grew much worse as the ice foot deteriorated and the moonlight waned. “Just south of Cape Defosse we ate the last of our biscuit,” Peary wrote of the three-quarters point on the trek, “just north of it the last of our beans.”33 The biting wind became so numbing by the next day that, to save them, Peary left two Inuit drivers and nine dogs buried in a snowdrift. “The moon had left us entirely now, and the ice-foot was utterly impracticable,” he noted a day later. “In complete darkness and over a chaos of broken and heaved-up ice, we stumbled and fell and groped for eighteen hours.”34 They killed a dog for food and left nine more behind with a broken sledge.
Finally, Peary wrote, “At midnight on January 6, we were stumbling through the dilapidated door of Fort Conger,” after which he felt “a suspicious ‘wooden’ feeling in the right foot.” On inspection, he found that both feet were frozen. “It was evident that I should lose parts or all of several toes, and be confined for some weeks.”35 The sledding season for 1899 was shot.
TWO OR THREE TOES from each foot came off with Peary’s rabbitskin boot linings, Henson recalled.36 Other reports have Dedrick cutting off all or part of seven toes with crude tools at some time over the next few days. Although Peary must have felt excruciating pain as his feet thawed and the stumps healed, every report has him bearing it like a Stoic, and one has him writing in Latin on the wall above his sickbed Seneca’s famous motto “I shall find a way or make one.”37 More dogs died at Fort Conger from eating meat left over from Greely’s expedition. Once some daylight returned in late February, Henson, Dedrick, the two remaining Inuits, and twelve surviving dogs carried Peary back to the ship on a sledge. Henson later recalled lashing Peary to the sledge in a sitting position and lifting him into the igloo each night.38
Another operation on Peary’s feet followed in March, when Dedrick removed all that remained of his toes except the two little ones, from which the distal phalanges were later removed. “Just leave me enough to stand on when I get to the Pole,” Peary reportedly told the doctor.39 After Peary could walk again, it was always with a shuffle, and accounts of his future expeditions leave it unclear whether he walked alongside his sledge or rode on it. Yet when an officer from the Fram visited him at his ship in March 1899, it was made very clear that Peary intended “to push northward, in spite of everything.”40 The still cabin-bound explorer waved off his visitor’s condolences with the admonition “You must take your chances up here, you know.”41 That was Peary: driven and indomitable, sullen when crossed, and intensely private, with a proud Yankee exterior, coldly calculating mind, and stern Stoic soul.
Peary accomplished little that year, however. He returned to Fort Conger for the remains of Greely’s records and sent them south with the relief ship in August—a feather in the cap for the Peary Arctic Club, he boasted—but his one attempt to push farther north stumbled on the rough ice when he attempted to cross from Ellesmere Island to Greenland. “Crippled as I was,” Peary wrote, “and a mere dead weight on the sledge, I felt that the road was impracticable.”42
Otherwise, he devoted his efforts and those of his men to preparing for another winter and a push for the pole in 1900. News of his plight and the expedition’s limited achievements reached the world with the relief ship. So did a long letter from Peary to his wife making light of his lost toes—“when I come back I shall be able to wear a size shorter shoe”—and asserting about his effort to reach the pole, “There is something beyond me, something outside of me, which impels me irresistibly to the work.”43 The relief ship brought Peary news that his wife had borne him another daughter. By the end of August, the Windward sailed south ahead of the relief ship, leaving Peary and his men at the Smith Sound Inuit settlement of Etah for the winter.
GIVEN HIS PHYSICAL CONDITION and his starting point at Etah, Peary led a remarkable sledge journey during the 1900 season, even though it did not end anywhere near the pole. With Henson, Dedrick, and a large party of Inuits, he first went 300 miles north to Fort Conger, near the Arctic Ocean. Then, with Henson and a small party, Peary crossed the ice to Greenland and followed its coast northeast along the route taken two decades earlier by Greely’s northern party, James Lockwood and David Brainard. At the time, Peary believed that this route would lead to an archipelago north of Greenland, which he thought he had seen from the cliff above Independence Bay eight years earlier.
This effort took Peary and his party on a demanding, month-long, 250-mile passage across the rough sea ice to Greenland and then along the steep, slippery ice foot of Greenland’s Arctic coast, simply to reach the point where Lockwood and Brainard had turned back. From there, Lockwood and Brainard had thought they could see Greenland’s northernmost point in the distance and named it Cape Washington. By this point, after sending others back to Fort Conger, Peary was traveling with only Henson, one trusted Inuit, Ahngmalokto, three sledges, and sixteen dogs—his ideal sledging party. They pushed on along the unknown coast, still hoping for the pole.
Upon rounding Cape Washington a day later, Peary was happy to see the coastline still turning northeast. “I knew now that Cape Washington was not the northern point of Greenland,” he wrote. “It would have been a great disappointment to me, after coming so far, to find that another’s eyes had forestalled mine in looking first upon the coveted northern point.”44 Three days later, Peary reached this most northerly point and named it Cape Morris K. Jesup for his chief benefactor. At 83°37' north latitude, Peary believed it was the world’s northernmost land, though a small offshore islet was later found to extend beyond it. Still, at 440 miles from the pole, it was not as far north as Peary had hoped. Neither Greenland nor any islands that Peary had supposed to lie farther north offered a highway to the pole. The trip would take sledging over sea ice of the type that had bedeviled Markham, Nansen, and all other prior explorers trying to cross it.
PEARY SURELY KNEW THAT, due to the lateness in the season, his dwindling supplies, and the condition of the ice, his party could not reach the pole. Yet he had never attempted to cross oceanic pack ice and he wanted to try. It did not go well. Leaving from the cape on May 13, nearly three months after his first teams had left Etah, Peary with his two companions headed north over the pack. The next two days’ marches, he wrote, “were made in thick fog, through which we groped our way northward, over broken ice and across gigantic, wave-like drifts of hard snow.”45 The ensuing day brought a “frightful” mix of old floes, steep pressure ridges, open-water leads, and finally a large floe bounded by water. “A reconnaissance from the summit of a pinnacle of the flow,” Peary wrote, “showed that we were on the edge of the disintegrated pack”—reason enough to turn back after having gone under 25 miles.46 If this was the route to the pole, it would be tougher than anything Peary had ever faced. Although Peary did not know it, the Duke of the Abruzzi’s polar party was struggling back over the deteriorating pack at exactly the same time as his own small group and having even more trouble.
Once regaining the land, rather than head back west, Peary led his party east for three days along the coast as it turned southward. He hoped to reach the mouth of Independence Bay and thereby close the circle on his Greenland discoveries. His party did not make it that far, but on the last day Peary claimed to see from the north a mountain that he had first seen from the south on his 1895 trek to Independence Bay. Apparently, this was enough to close the circle, for at that point the party headed back the way it had come to Fort Conger, arriving nineteen days later.47 Explorers and geographers have hailed this 800-mile trek as one of Peary’s most worthwhile journeys.48
Having reached Fort Conger on June 10, 1900, Peary settled in with his entire expeditionary party for what became the least productive year of his time in the Arctic. On his orders, the Inuits that he had led there had demolished Greely’s single large building and used the wood to build three separate
huts. Living off the land, with abundant game to eat and furs to repair or replace their clothing and equipment, everyone stayed through the summer and following winter, with Peary having a private hut.
The next spring, Peary’s only attempt to attain his stated goal of getting to the pole was a feeble march 40 miles north with Henson and Ahngmalokto that did not even reach the Arctic coast. I “do all I can without being rash,” Peary wrote to his wife before departing on this dispirited trek. “I have no rose colored hopes. Am going about the job in a very prosaic manner.”49 Perhaps his memories of the frightful pack ice from the year before had knocked the poetry out of him—but what is an explorer without poetry? At some point over that difficult year, relations broke down between Peary and Dedrick, apparently over matters of loyalty, respect, and a doctor’s place in the expedition’s hierarchy. They never reconciled, and their former cordial relations soured into a deep distrust and animosity that neither man ever fully explained.
To the Edges of the Earth Page 5