To the Edges of the Earth

by Edward J. Larson

  In late April 1901, Peary and his party finally headed south to Etah. Among the last letters that he wrote from Fort Conger was a long one to his wife, grieving that he had to stay away from her and his “babies” for too long without much to show for it. “A great slice out of our lives,” he lamented, “and for what, a little fame.”50 Then, from Inuits that he met on his way south, Peary learned that his wife, Jo, and daughter, Marie, had arrived during the prior summer on the Windward’s relief voyage and been trapped by the ice in Smith Sound through the winter. These Inuits brought him letters from Jo informing him that a second daughter—born after his departure—had died soon after birth. “Oh, my husband, I wanted you, how much you will never know,” at that time of our loss, Jo wrote. “Part of me is in the little grave.”51 Had he known, Peary could have been with her over the winter. She had spent it instead with Allakasingwah and her son, Anaukak, who was born about when the Pearys’ second daughter died, and whose blue eyes and red hair proclaimed his parentage. Deeply hurt but never lacking courage, Jo still wrote in her latest-dated letter, “Come home and let Marie and me love you.”52

  After a layover at Cape D’Urville, perhaps to steel himself for the reunion, Peary returned to his family at Smith Sound on May 6, his forty-fifth birthday, determined not to yield to any entreaties that he go home. He had one more year of paid leave and, despite everything, wanted to make another push for the pole. Having received no word from the Windward, the Arctic Club had sent a second relief ship, the Erik, north in 1901 with news that Peary’s mother had died. The ship carried Peary’s former expedition physician, Frederick Cook, who had recently returned from serving as the doctor aboard the first vessel to winter in the Antarctic. Along with First Mate Roald Amundsen, Cook was credited with saving its crew from scurvy. Even after Cook conducted a physical examination of Peary and found him unfit to continue due to deep-seated anemia, signs of scurvy, loss of leg muscle (perhaps simply a gibe about his riding on sledges), and the amputation of eight toes, Peary refused to leave. “You are through as a traveler on foot on ice,” Cook recalled telling him, to no avail.53 After yet another winter, with the aid of Henson and the local Inuits, Peary would try again for the pole. So Jo, Marie, Cook, and both ships sailed south that summer of 1901 while Peary and Henson stayed behind with some Inuits at a camp across Smith Sound from Etah, waiting for another spring—for another shot at glory. Dedrick remained as well, but in Etah, since Peary now refused his medical services even when illness broke out among the Inuits at his camp, killing seven.

  UNLIKE THE PRIOR YEAR, Peary’s 1902 trek was a full-throttle effort much like the one in 1900 except that it focused squarely on reaching the pole. Again Peary took a full party north to Fort Conger, and then a smaller one on to the Arctic Ocean. Upon reaching it, he turned northwest to follow the Ellesmere Island coast past Nares’s old winter anchorage to Cape Hecla at 82°54' north latitude. From there, after already covering 400 miles in a month, his party headed onto the pack. “As the sledges plunged down from the ice-foot,” Peary wrote, “the dogs wallowed belly deep in the snow, and we began our struggle due northward.”54 It was the same route that Markham’s 1876 sledge party had taken, but this time using dogs. In reality, however, Peary had as little chance of success as Markham had, because both of their expeditions were outfitted for their polar sledge parties to follow the ice foot along coasts rather than to cross open-ocean sea ice. Markham had hoped for islands north of Ellesmere; Peary for ones north of Greenland. Neither existed. It was over 400 miles of oceanic ice pack to the pole. Peary’s only hopes now were that the pack was more stable north of Ellesmere than Greenland and that his party was tackling it over a month earlier than in 1900. Although this year Peary knew what to expect, that made little difference because he had to work with the same or similar men, supplies, and equipment.

  On April 6, 1902, Peary, Henson, and four Inuits started across the sea ice. “Through the irregularities of this we struggled,” Peary wrote of April 7, “now treading down snow round a sledge to dig it out of a hole into which it had sunk, now lifting the sledges bodily over a barrier of blocks; veering right and left; doubling in our track; roadmaking with snowshoe and pickaxe.”55 When they were able to travel, they covered about 5 miles per day compared with Peary’s experience of 10 to 15 miles a day on glaciated or ice-covered land. On some days, storms kept them from moving at all.

  After a week of start-and-stop travel the party reached the so-called Big Lead, or “Grand Canal,” as Peary named it, where sea ice more or less attached to the coast grinds against the deep-water ice pack that circulates with the currents, winds, and tides.56 The intersection often creates a wide, dark channel of frigid open water that can close rapidly should the two sides move together. Peary found it open, and sent back two more Inuits while waiting for it to close. When the Big Lead finally began narrowing on April 14 and the party dashed across it on moving fragments of ice, the far side proved worse for sledging than the near. A series of steep, parallel pressure ridges led to a sea of heavy, snow-covered old floes drifting slowly eastward amid a network of cracks, ditches, and open-water leads. “Frequently we were obliged to wait for the pieces to crush close enough together to let us pass from one to the others,” Peary wrote.57 Fog and storms delayed them further, reducing their net northward progress to a crawl.

  “The game is off,” Peary wrote in his diary for April 21. “My dream of sixteen years is ended.” The party had reached a seemingly endless region of virtually impassable icy rubble and deep snow. “I have made the best fight,” Peary added. “But I cannot accomplish the impossible.”58 Having reached 84°17' north latitude, they had covered less than 100 miles in fifteen days. It produced a new farthest north for the polar sector above North America, but fell 2 degrees of latitude short of marks set north of Europe by Nansen in 1895 and the Italians in 1900. Peary considered it a failure and headed for home.

  “I think of 4 years ago when in spite of the set back of not getting my ship farther north, I looked full of life & hope & anticipation at this same shore mellow in the August sunlight, and dreamed of what I should accomplish,” he wrote in a late May diary entry. “Now a maimed old man, unsuccessful after the most arduous work, away from wife and child, Mother dead, one baby dead. Has the game been worth the candle? And yet I could not have done otherwise than stick to it.”59

  The Windward arrived at Smith Sound in August 1902, to retrieve Peary. His wife and daughter were aboard to comfort him. They thought he would retire now, perhaps to the property he owned on Eagle Island, Maine.

  By the end of the voyage, however, Peary’s own resolve had revived him. “In spite of the amount of work which has been done in the north polar regions during the past few years, the work is not complete,” he proclaimed in a lecture to the National Geographic Society upon his return to New York. “And the head of the Smith Sound ‘gateway to the pole’ is the central point from which to close this work . . . and the point from which the pole itself can and will be reached.”60

  The results of the Duke of the Abruzzi’s expedition, which Peary learned of on his return, emboldened him. No earlier expedition had traveled so far as the duke’s over the polar ice pack on foot, skis, or sledges—even Nansen had set his record by starting his trek from an icebound ship that, when he left it, was already farther north than anyone had ever been before. If a party of sailors and officers with no prior polar experience could travel nearly 300 miles north across the Arctic ice pack, then someone would surely reach the pole, and do so soon. Peary blamed his own failure on having started so far south due to an underpowered ship.

  “The man who has the proper party, the proper equipment, and the proper experience, and can start fresh from the northern coast of [Ellesmere Island’s] Grinnell Land with the earliest return of light in February,” Peary told the Geographic Society, “will hold within his grasp the last great geographical prize that the earth has to offer, a prize that will rank with the prize which Columbus won;
and will win for himself and his countrymen a fame that will last as long as human life exists.” Of all the world’s explorers, only Peary fit this description. He had already asked Jesup and the Peary Arctic Club to back him for one more grab at the brass ring. If anyone missed his meaning, Peary closed his lecture with a patriotic flourish aimed at Nansen, Sverdrup, the Duke of the Abruzzi, and other European challengers in what he now openly called a “race”: “It should and must be won by American dollars, American energy, and American ability.”61 Peary was that American.

  Two years earlier, drawing on the opinions of those who knew him best, a New York Times article on Peary reported, “Though his maimed feet form a decided handicap . . . he has shown such extraordinary energy and resolution in past journeys that he will overcome physical disabilities in the present instance, and make his way to the pole, even if he has to be hauled there on a sledge and at the last by the hands of his Eskimo servitors.”62 Toughened by adversity and driven by ambition, at forty-six Peary had not fundamentally changed from the fatherless child who wanted fame above all. And after six further years of struggles and setbacks, he would only be harder and more resolute by age fifty-two, when early in 1909 he set off on his final dash toward his elusive goal. In their efforts to reach a pole, if the Duke of the Abruzzi made manifest the aristocracy of adventure, then Peary personified its audacity. Others would show its allure.

  Chapter 3

  The Allure of Adventure, Circa 1909

  AUSTRALIA HAD NEVER EXPERIENCED anything quite like the smooth-talking, high-energy, adventure-seeking Ernest Shackleton as he barnstormed across the island continent’s southern coast during December 1907, raising funds and stirring interest on his way toward his planned 1909 march on the South Pole. He had started in London with a royal send-off by the king and carried the queen’s flag to hoist at the pole, but Australia lay directly on his route south, and, short of money, he made the most of it. In a popular idiom from the era, the Anglo-Irish Shackleton “could sell ice to the Eskimos.” He found a fertile market in Australia.

  During the second half of the nineteenth century, Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide had expanded from obscure British outposts to brash commercial centers through mining. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the six Anglo-Australian colonies had federated into an independent dominion within the British Empire. With new mineral discoveries slowing, Australians were beginning to look offshore for further growth. Antarctica might provide that opportunity, Shackleton offered. Surely, it promised the prestige of discovery and the possibility of adventure. These arguments had been made before in Australia, most notably by the Australian Antarctic Exploring Committee, a group of Melbourne-based scientists interested in establishing research stations on the southern continent, but few Australians had listened. Due to his infectious intensity, Shackleton evoked a different response.

  “Probably the Sydney Town Hall has never seen a bigger lantern lecture than delivered by Lieutenant Shackleton last night,” the Sydney Morning Herald reported on December 7. “The lecturer’s style throughout was discursive, colloquial, and breezy, departing entirely from the formal stereotyped lines which render dull so many discourses of the kind.”1 He began by speaking in modest yet self-assured terms about his experiences on a 1901–04 British National Antarctic expedition when he joined its young captain, Robert Scott, on a death-defying march toward the South Pole that, while setting a new farthest-south record, fell far short of its goal.

  After relating the story of his past Antarctic exploits and disarming the audience with what one journalist described as his “happy way of relieving his more serious remarks with amusing anecdote,” Shackleton turned to his future plans.2 An overflow crowd some four thousand strong alternately laughed and cheered as Shackleton described his team—“the leader was after all only one unit in the game,” he modestly observed3—and his equipment, including an Arrol-Johnston automobile supplied by a sponsor and modified to drive on ice.

  While plainly declaring his intention to reach the pole, he never bragged or boasted. He simply vowed to do his best and left his rapt listeners to conclude that his best would be good enough.4 “Those who had the pleasure of hearing and seeing Lieutenant Shackleton were soon convinced that if anyone could get to the Pole he would do so,” the Morning Herald wrote.5 Various newspaper reports spoke of his manifest humility, quiet humor, and sterling worth. One bestowed the apparent double compliment that Shackleton “sounded like an Irishman, but he is really a Yorkshire man.”6 In fact, Shackleton was the former by birth and the latter by blood, and the English (wherever they then lived) cared more about blood. Several of these early articles from Australia observed what later biographers would stress: “He was a born leader of men.”7

  Shackleton delivered a similar talk in Melbourne and a shorter one in Adelaide over the course of a whirlwind week. “My main object is if possible the attainment of the Pole,” he observed in Adelaide, “but there is a wide need for scientific research independent of that.”8 And he stressed the value of all this science for Australia: meteorological studies could explain hemispheric weather patterns, magnetic research would aid navigation in the Southern Ocean, and geological exploration might find gold. “Financially, this trip might be very easily justified,” Shackleton assured his listeners in Melbourne. “The whole cost might be saved in the next few years by a correction in the variation of the magnetic pole.”9 Without government support from Britain, he had sailed on promises from private backers that had been only partly fulfilled due to a bank panic, Shackleton said. Now he needed £5,000 more to meet expenses, and asked the Australians to help. “[I myself] saw some 60 millionaires [in Britain], and impressed on them not only the value of the expedition, but the need to maintain national prestige, and they had turned a deaf ear,” Shackleton explained to sympathetic Australians. “[I look] to this active growing country to help in a work that would go down in posterity as one of value to the world.”10

  Shackleton knew how to stir a crowd and play on passions. He repeatedly charged that other countries were plotting to reach the South Pole first and claimed that no other British effort was afoot, even though by then he knew that his former expedition leader, Scott, was planning one with the Royal Geographical Society’s full support. At every turn he waved the Union Jack that the queen had given him to plant at the pole. “The Commonwealth was part of the backbone of the Empire,” Shackleton proclaimed, and Australians would surely express their “enthusiasm for the glory of the Empire.”11 He was sailing for the empire, he now declared, not merely for England.

  In line with his imperialistic tone, Shackleton invited Australia’s leading geologist, University of Sydney professor T. W. Edgeworth David, and one of David’s former students, University of Adelaide lecturer Douglas Mawson, to join the expedition’s science staff. None proved more indispensable to the expedition’s success than David and Mawson. Such was the allure of polar exploration that nearly five hundred persons had applied to go, despite the prospect of small wages, a hazardous journey, bitter cold, and long months of complete darkness.12 In picking the fifty-year-old David, Shackleton noted, “I understand he is a man well capable of ‘roughing it.’”13 In recommending the twenty-five-year-old Mawson, David described him as “a most indefatigable person.”14

  Drawn to adventure, both David and Mawson had joined multiple trips to the Australian bush and one expedition each to the South Pacific. And each jumped at Shackleton’s offer, which David, an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London and holder of many other honors, called “one of the greatest compliments” of his life.15 For his part, while in Australia, Shackleton gave as his own motive, “The fact of having been in the Antarctic Circle once always makes one want to go again.”16 Australians should appreciate this attitude, he noted. “If people had always gone for commercial good, Australia would never have been discovered, for that result was due to the spirit of adventure.”17 This spirit now drew David and Mawson from secure univers
ity posts to experiences that far surpassed their greatest hopes and worst fears, and made them national heroes.

  David in turn seconded Shackleton’s plea for funds in public letters that promised mineral wealth to a nation built on it, with a notable portion of this wealth attributable to David’s prior geological fieldwork. “He quite believed there were goldfields in the Antarctic,” one newspaper assured readers about David, and was certain “that miners would risk the rigours of the Antarctic” to work them.18 Funds flowed in, first from individuals and then from the government, with the opposition leader supporting the request with the words: “If Professor David says he wants it, that ends it.”19

  By the time Shackleton left Australia in December 1907, he had collected enough money not only to proceed but also to expand his operations. His small ship, the Nimrod, headed for Antarctica’s little-known Ross Sea coast, some 3,000 miles south-southeast of Sydney, which was the closest any ship could sail to the South Pole. Fourteen men would winter with Shackleton in a small hut on that coast in 1908 and venture forth from there in the spring, half of them headed to a pole. By then, it would be 1909.

  ONLY A DECADE EARLIER, virtually no one knew anything about this sector of Antarctica except what James Clark Ross’s 1839–42 expedition had discovered. During the late 1770s, blocked from reaching it by floating ice that he thought extended indefinitely southward, British explorer James Cook had looked in vain for the large landmass supposed by some to exist at the bottom of the earth. Yet by the 1820s, in their relentless search for new sources of supply after depleting old ones, whalers from Europe and America began encountering bits of land in Antarctic waters below South America, half a continent away from the Ross Sea. The whaling activity coupled with growing use of the deep southern sea-lanes of the so-called Roaring Forties and Furious Fifties led France, Britain, and the United States to dispatch navy expeditions to Antarctic waters in the late 1830s.