Peary blamed the failure of his last expedition on having his base so far south that he needed to sledge 400 miles just to reach the Arctic coast. In 1899, he had lost his toes sledging from that base to Fort Conger, which itself was still over 60 miles from the coast. Now he was determined to sail past it, winter on a well-provisioned ship at the northern end of Ellesmere Island, and sledge north over the sea ice in early spring with multiple parties shuttling supplies in support of one final push to the pole. He would require a strong ship capable of forcing its way through ice to the Arctic coast, and that meant more money than ever before. All that Peary could offer donors was the “imperishable monument,” as he once put it, of having their names placed “forever” on newly discovered geographical features, much as he had given the name Cape Morris K. Jesup to the northernmost point of Greenland during his last expedition.6 But an expedition over the sea ice from a known point of land, as this one promised to be, would not offer many naming opportunities. So Peary relied more on the type of nationalistic appeal that moved Roosevelt. His was an American adventure to prove the country’s manhood and establish the young nation’s place in the world alongside the likes of such old-world powers as Britain, France, and Germany.
Roosevelt lent Peary additional assistance by urging his wealthy friends to back the project and by giving it public credence. A vigorous, visionary, and well-born public servant in an era known for weak and corrupt politicians, the president was one of the most popular and trusted persons in the nation and enjoyed a strong following among the sort of Gilded Age, adventure-seeking philanthropists inclined to support Peary. New York’s American Museum of Natural History stood as a temple to the Rooseveltian spirit that knew no limits for the individual or the country, and Morris Jesup, its president and chief benefactor, had been brought into Peary’s orbit in part by Roosevelt.
After receiving a letter from Roosevelt, Jesup had formed the Peary Arctic Club in 1898 to support the explorer’s last expedition and in 1904 took the added step of incorporating and expanding it with the principal goal of supplying Peary with a suitable ship for his next expedition.7 In the end, Jesup and his friend George Crocker, heir to a West Coast railroad fortune, supplied most of the funds for Peary’s ship, which was launched in March 1905. Only about twice the size of a New York harbor tug, with curved sides, thick hull, flared prow, and oversized shaft and propellers, this ship was designed both to cut through the ice pack and to rise above it when trapped. More than any Arctic ship since the Fram, it was built for its mission.
Peary’s determination to try again for the pole at age forty-nine, and his nationalistic calls for the United States to claim its destiny in the Arctic and elsewhere, captured the spirit of the age—or at least the spirit that the likes of Jesup, Crocker, and Roosevelt had willed upon the age. Jesup had given millions to promote Horatio Alger–type opportunities for immigrants and the poor in America. Peary’s humble origins, manifest courage, and fierce determination appealed to him.
Roosevelt felt much the same way. “I am simply unable to make myself take the attitude of respect toward the very wealthy men which such an enormous multitude of people evidently feel,” Roosevelt wrote privately following a visit with Peary. “I am delighted to show any courtesy to Pierpont Morgan or Andrew Carnegie or James J. Hill; but as for regarding any of them as, for instance, I regard [the Cambridge classicist J. B.] Bury or Peary, the Arctic explorer, . . . why I could not force myself to do it even if I wanted to.” Roosevelt went on to note, “The very luxurious, grossly material life of the average multimillionaire whom I know, does not appeal to me in the least,” adding, “I should selfishly prefer my old-time ranch on the Little Missouri to anything in Newport.”8 Peary was his man, and for his champion, Peary named his ship. Portraits of Jesup and Roosevelt hung over the player piano in Peary’s cabin on board what some reporters hailed as the strongest ship afloat.
DURING THIS PERIOD OF full-time preparation for his 1905–06 expedition, a confident, calculating Peary took center stage at the International Geographical Congress. There, he received a gold medal from the Paris Geographical Society “in recognition of his many and valuable contributions to the world’s knowledge of Arctic regions.”9 He also secured passage of a resolution that, while recognizing “the importance of forthwith completing the systematic exploration of [both] polar areas,” all but reserved the Arctic to American explorers and urged “that the expeditions now being prepared will be so supported as to secure early and complete success.”10 No one could miss its meaning: the North Pole was Peary’s preserve.
“Only two great prizes now wait the present-day explorer—the north pole and the south pole,” Peary declared in his presidential address to the congress. He went on to explain why, of these two, the North Pole should come first. “There is no higher, purer field of international rivalry than the struggle for the north pole,” Peary stated. “Uninfluenced by prospects of gain, by dreams of colonization, by land lust, or politics, the centuries’ long struggle of the best and bravest . . . has made this field of effort classic, almost sacred.” Hailing the Duke of the Abruzzi for the Italians’ recent farthest north, Peary maintained that their results “eliminated Franz Josef Land from further consideration as a polar base,” leaving only his so-called American route to the pole as an option.11
Peary’s address went on to survey the state of exploration at the dawn of the twentieth century. Climbers were beginning to ascend the Himalayas—“the roof of the world,” Peary called it—but “the culminating peak of Asia remains to be won.” He placed this third, behind only attaining the two poles, in his list of “geographical feats of primary magnitude yet to be accomplished.” Otherwise, Asia and Africa were well known to Western geographers, Peary opined. Lhasa, “the mystery and secret of Central Asia,” is occupied by an English military expedition and “a mystery no longer,” he declared with imperialistic conceit. “In Africa, once ‘the Dark Continent,’ the work of large exploration is at an end, and has been succeeded by the work of division and colonization.” The Americas were fully explored, he added, save only that “the culminating point of North America remains yet untrodden by human foot.”12 By rounding Ellesmere Island’s northern coast, Peary had this feat in mind for his next expedition. Turning to Antarctica, which he depicted as the world’s only unexplored area other than the Arctic, Peary praised the six national expeditions then out to or recently back from the region and saw them as precursors to reaching the South Pole. Either ignorant of or insensitive to modern developments in the field, Peary’s address equated geography with exploration and reduced exploration to discovery. His own expeditions fit this mode.
At least two of the busy congress’s other presentations held special interest for Peary. In one, an oceanographer used evidence from tides and currents to hypothesize that undiscovered land lay northwest of Ellesmere Island.13 He was wrong, but the idea intrigued Peary. In another, Peary’s former expedition physician and future rival, Frederick Cook, gave a comparative view of the Arctic and Antarctic based on his travels in both regions. “The fascination of the north-polar dash will increase rather than diminish, and with it will grow a similar enthusiasm to reach the South Pole,” he predicted.14 An affable self-promoter with a penchant for adventure, Cook clearly had not renounced his interest in these endeavors.
In a second lecture, Cook related his 1903 attempt to make the first ascent of North America’s highest mountain, Denali, which he called by the then-popular (if not yet official) name Mount McKinley. Describing the difficult entry through rain-soaked brush, the steep climb, and Arctic conditions on the 20,000-foot mountain, he concluded, “The prospective conqueror of America’s culminating peak will be amply rewarded, but he must be prepared to withstand the tortures of the [mosquito-infested] torrids, the discomforts of the north-pole seeker, and the hardships of the Matterhorn ascents multiplied many times.”15 Cook’s four-person party had made it only to the top of a spur about 11,000 feet high before bei
ng blocked by a sheer cliff, but, addicted to the rewards of fame and glory that would flow to whoever first summited what he called “the top of the continent,” Cook would try again in 1906 and claim success.16 The poles held similar appeal for him.
By this point, Peary surely recognized Cook as a competitor for fame and glory as an American explorer. Indeed, Cook gave a third paper at the geographical congress—the only presenter to give so many—on his role in the first expedition to winter in the Antarctic.17 He was a relentless author of popular articles and books about his own exploits, and a frequent public lecturer too.
While somehow maintaining his medical practice in Brooklyn, Cook had followed up on his role in Peary’s 1891–93 North Greenland expedition by leading or guiding a series of “expeditions” to the Arctic, mostly involving paying guests, sightseeing, and big-game hunting, as well as by his stint as physician on the Belgian Antarctic Expedition of 1897–99. In 1906, Cook would claim the first ascent of Denali and be elected to succeed Arctic pioneer Adolphus Greely as president of New York’s elite Explorers Club. It was possibly only Peary’s looming 1905–06 assault on the North Pole that kept Cook from looking in that direction rather than to a Pole of Altitude for his next feat, but if so, it put further pressure on Peary to succeed this time or face an American challenger for the pole with almost as much renown, nearly as good connections, and at least as much audacity as himself.
ON THE OUTBOUND LEG of its maiden voyage, the Roosevelt lived up to its advance billing. It departed New York on July 16, 1905, with Henson, expedition physician Louie Wolf, a newly graduated Cornell engineering student named Ross Marvin, and a crew of thirteen Newfoundland sailors plus a few New Englanders under the command of Captain Robert Bartlett, a British citizen of Newfoundland. In three weeks, with brief stops in Maine and Nova Scotia, the ship had steamed to the northernmost Inuit villages on Greenland’s west coast. There, Peary rounded up “my Eskimos,” as he called them, with their dogs.18 He had over forty Inuits, many in family groups, and some two hundred sled dogs aboard within three days, and on August 16 steamed north into the surging channel ice of Smith Sound and beyond.19
“Deep and heavy as the ship was,” Peary wrote, “she rose on the opposing ice with no pronounced shock, no matter how viciously she was driven at it, and either split it with the impact, or wedged it aside by sheer weight.” The Roosevelt had more trouble with heavy old floes, but managed to dodge and weave through Nares Strait to Robeson Channel above Fort Conger before a swirl of current, “which at times runs like a mill-race in this deep channel,” Peary noted, drove the ship sideways into fast, firm shore ice, twisting the rudder and damaging the steering gear.20
After five days spent on makeshift repairs, the ship returned to the “battle,” as Peary called it. “The Roosevelt fought like a gladiator, turning, twisting, straining with all her force, smashing her full weight against the heavy flows whenever she could get room for a rush,” he wrote of this part of the voyage. “‘Give it to ’um, Teddy, give it to ’um!’” the captain muttered to his ship. Twice it was driven ashore by ice floes and grounded till high tide before crawling around Cape Union and steaming “with thick black smoke pouring from her stack” into the Arctic Ocean’s Lincoln Sea.21
Maneuvering along the coast, by September 5 the Roosevelt had pushed 2 miles beyond the Nares Expedition’s 1875 anchorage. At this most northerly point never before attained by a ship under its own power, Peary moored for the winter beside the shore ice below Cape Sheridan. “By a hard-fought struggle we had successfully negotiated the narrow, ice-encumbered waters which form the American gateway and route to the Pole,” he crowed, “and substantiated my prophecy to the [Peary Arctic] Club, that with a suitable ship, the attainment of a base on the north shore of Grant Land was feasible almost every year.”22
FOLLOWING A WINTER AT Cape Sheridan, where the Inuits lived in igloos on shore and the Americans stayed on board with the ship’s crew, Peary began his poleward march in mid-February with Henson, Bartlett, Marvin, Wolf, two members of the ship’s crew, twenty-one Inuit dogsled drivers, some one hundred twenty dogs, and twenty sledges. Eighty dogs had died since September from tainted whale meat, but the number of Inuits rose with the birth of a baby girl in January. Following the well-established “Peary style,” or way of living off the land, hunting teams composed mostly of Inuit men had added over seventy musk oxen and nearly thirty caribou to the larder during the winter months.23 Unlike most polar expeditions of the era, and in sharp contrast to those conducted by Nansen, Scott, Nares, or even Shackleton, no scientific records were kept or research done during this period of midwinter darkness.
Once they set out, the explorers traveled northwest for three days along the coast to Cape Hecla, where they established a supply base. Then they divided into seven small parties, each with two or three sledges, a non-Inuit leader, and three Inuit drivers. While he readily acknowledged the key contributions made by Inuits to his expeditions, and often singled out individuals for praise, Peary never promoted any Inuit to a leadership position or mastered the ability to talk in their language.24 For any long or complex conversation, Henson served as a translator.
From Cape Hecla, each party traveled separately, with Henson’s cutting the trail, Peary’s in the rear, and the rest shuttling supplies to ever more forward depots without any intention of going the whole way. A day or more might separate them at times, but the seven parties inevitably bunched up at open-water leads, which irritated Peary because it backed up the entire operation. Accustomed to traveling in one small group, he had never encountered delays of this sort. Hampered by leading from the rear, Peary relied on Henson to set a good pace and keep on the right course. After four expeditions together, Henson understood Peary’s demands but could not always meet them. Conditions on the shifting ice pack proved too difficult.
From a point on land 20 miles west-northwest of Cape Hecla, the evenly spaced parties set off north over the Arctic sea ice beginning on March 1, with later parties using the igloos built and supplies left by earlier ones. No prior expedition had staggered its parties in this supply-train manner as a means to cross moving sea ice—certainly not Peary, who typically traveled in one small group—but support parties were common in mountaineering, and the British would use them in their pursuit of the South Pole. The shifting nature of pack ice limited their effectiveness in the Arctic, however, as movements of the ice could collapse or carry away supply depots and igloos, disrupt trails cut by advance parties, and disorient returning groups. In the end, Peary’s party needed to cut a new track back, and it led them to Greenland rather than to their Ellesmere Island base. In the Antarctic or when mountain climbing, explorers could cache supplies with a realistic hope of recovering them on the return trip. Advance parties could safely depot supplies as well. On shifting sea ice, this was less feasible. There, explorers needed to carry virtually everything they used or consumed, and support parties were using and consuming scarce resources too.
For Peary, the problems began at the outset and grew worse over time. For some reason, Henson’s advance party veered about 10 degrees west of due north from the start, and later parties followed its track, including Peary’s final one. At the time, Peary placed the blame on Henson for having always turned left to get around rough ice and open leads, but polar explorer and historian Wally Herbert later surmised that the fault lay with Peary for using the wrong variance factor to correct compass readings made in a region close to the magnetic pole.25 Whatever the cause, the mistake added miles to an already hopelessly long journey and was not discovered until March 30, when the parties stood full stop at the Big Lead, where the sea ice near shore meets the midocean circulating pack ice. Taking this opportunity to compute the longitude and latitude, Peary found the group some 10 degrees of longitude west of where it should have been and less than 2 degrees of latitude, or about 120 miles, north of where it started. In this direction and at this pace, with nearly one-third of his allotted round-trip tra
vel time now expended, he could not hope to reach the pole, which still lay 370 miles away, and return safely to his ship.
Some of the cause for being so far from the pole was attributable to veering left, but not most of it. At the outset, Peary had hoped to average 10 miles per day to get to the pole and back in the one hundred or so days between the midwinter darkness and the late-spring thaw. From the coast to the Big Lead, he averaged less than 6 miles a day. One cause was the awkward array of parties making the journey, but the terrain also presented significant problems. Everywhere, it seemed, the ice was in motion. In places it was heavily rafted, and the advance trail quickly faulted. While in one camp, Peary wrote, “The floe on which my igloos were built split in two, shattering the igloos, and the ice, evidently under heavy pressure, rumbled and groaned continuously.”26
Temperatures often fell below minus 60°F at night and rarely rose above minus 50°F each day. At least this caused seawater to freeze over rapidly, but detours were still needed around some thin ice, pressure ridges, and open leads. Then, just as the pace began to improve, “bang up against it,” Peary wrote on March 26, “a black eye to all my hopes of speedy success.”27
They had hit the Big Lead or, as Peary now called it, the “Hudson River.” Three parties were already backed up at its bank, including Henson’s advance team, and now Peary joined them, overlooking what he described as “a broad open lead extending east and west across our course, farther than we could see.” He had hoped to find the lead either narrow enough to raft across or temporarily closed, but instead it was as wide as ever. On the second day, he sent back two of the supporting parties, claiming, “I could not afford to feed all these teams and people here during what might be a several days’ wait.”28 Only Henson and his advance team now remained with Peary’s party.
To the Edges of the Earth Page 12