To the Edges of the Earth

by Edward J. Larson

  It was not until April 1 that seawater in the lead became suitably still to skim over with ice just thick enough so that, as Peary judged it, “a man ‘walking wide’ as a polar bear does, could cross it.” A day later, he wrote, “Across the ‘Hudson River’ at last, thank God, after a loss of seven days of fine weather.”29 He crossed gingerly by relaying light loads in multiple trips. From here, Peary hoped, it would be a dash north with Henson, six Inuits, five sledges, and some thirty-five dogs.30

  Regarding the teams that Peary sent back, critics charge that, with little chance now of setting a new farthest-north record and virtually none of reaching the pole, he did not want any witnesses along who could credibly challenge whatever claims he might make. Certainly, his own writings at this point reveal an obsession with setting a record rather than reaching the pole and complain that, but for the seven-day delay at the Big Lead, “We would have been beyond Abruzzi’s highest now.” After a few good days going north beyond the Big Lead, he added, “On this date Nansen reached his highest, and but for the accursed lead, I should have been ahead of him.”31 As it was, Peary remained roughly 100 miles south of the Italian mark and only slightly less shy of the Norwegian one.

  From here on, Peary’s account becomes increasingly sketchy. Whatever he accomplished, however, he did so the Peary way, without support parties or relief from the rear. Even as he pushed himself and his men north from the Big Lead, Peary knew that, to use his own words, there was a “certainty of eating dog again before I got back to land.”32 To Roosevelt, such heroic pursuit of a worthy goal embodied American ideals.

  HENSON’S PARTY LEFT THE Big Lead on April 2 to cut the trail, with Peary and his team following a day later. Snow squalls and biting winds blew initially from the north, the direction of travel, frostbiting Peary’s face, then shifted to the west and gained force. “It was going that would seriously discourage an ordinary traveler, but my little brown children of the ice cheerfully tooled their sledges through it,” Peary boasted about his Inuit sledge drivers, all of whom were fully grown and at least some of whom had traveled with him before.33

  On April 5, Peary’s party caught up to Henson’s party in camp, with Henson complaining that the weather was “too thick to travel” and his men, according to Peary, “belly aching about being so far away.” Peary blamed Henson: “He has fallen down badly on his job,” Peary wrote in his diary. But the weather worsened, and both parties hunkered down until the gale spent itself. As days passed in what Peary later called his “storm camp,” he mulled over his prospects for glory upon his return “and then, I run against the blank wall,” he wrote, “unless I win here, all these things will fall through. Success is what will give them existence.” This second multiple-day delay frustrated Peary more than the first because now he saw even his farthest north slipping away. “The wind continued its infernal howling past the igloo,” Peary wrote on the third day in camp. “It seemed as if we had been here a month.” He tried to go outside two days later, “partly for exercise, partly because I could no longer keep quiet,” but could barely stand against the wind. “No party could travel in this gale.”34

  It was not until April 12 that the weather cleared enough for Peary to calculate his position. What he found surprised him. During the seven days in camp, while nothing seemed to have moved, winds and currents had carried the igloos en masse with the surrounding ice over 60 miles eastward. They now stood due north of the ship at slightly over 85° north latitude, or about 90 miles south of the Italian record. Here Peary faced a choice for himself and his men. He could try to push north on limited supplies or return south to his ship and safety.

  Peary’s harshest critics say that he turned south, and everything else he wrote about the journey was rank fiction. Comparing Peary’s published account with what survives in a transcript of his sledging diary, and factoring in his fanatic determination, Wally Herbert concludes that Peary headed north for the record but probably exaggerated how far he went.35 Having reviewed the same records, I side with Herbert but concede that, unless more evidence emerges, no one now can know for sure.

  According to his account, Peary sent Henson’s party north on April 12, with his own team following on the 14th. “We started after abandoning everything we did not absolutely need, and I bent every energy to setting a record pace,” Peary reported. The first day, he claimed 30 miles and writes that his drivers put it at 40. Passing Henson’s party around noon, he claimed 30 miles again the next day, with Henson struggling to keep pace. If correct, both distances were over five times the daily average of his prior travel days on this expedition and would have left Peary only about 30 miles short of a record farthest north. After another good day of perhaps 20 miles—Peary only gives a mileage rate for this day, not the total mileage or hours traveled—violent winds and driving snow forced the combined party to lay over on April 17. “While here,” Peary wrote, “six worn-out dogs were killed and fed to the others.”36 The delay offered another point where Peary might have turned back. His drivers urged him to do so, but if his published claims are believed, Peary decided he was too close to give up. Yet the mileage estimates in his diary are less for each of the three prior days than in his published account, and if the lower figures are correct, he still had some 30 miles to go for the record rather than the implied 10.

  According to both his diary and his published account, Peary resumed his trek north after the storm subsided on April 18. Here the former becomes truly muddled and the latter largely vacuous beyond the assertion that, at about noon on April 21, after three and a half more days of sledging, “When my observations were taken and rapidly figured, they showed that we had reached 87°6' north latitude.” Peary had beaten the Italian mark by over half a degree—some 35 miles—or so he said. After hoisting his flags on the nearest hummock and taking a group photo, Peary, Henson, and their combined party hastily headed south, reaching their last camp by the day’s end.

  Peary’s claim raises questions. Although the critical page for April 21 is missing from the diary transcript, the prior page suggests that the party was trapped “in a perfect mesh of leads” about 10 miles short of the record on April 20. The published account mentions these leads but asserts that the party hurried between them on “a forced march.”37 In either event, it strains credibility to think that he made it beyond 87° north latitude by noon on the 21st and then back to his last camp in one day—a distance of perhaps 60 miles or more. Maybe Peary padded his claim to make himself the first to reach within 3 degrees of the pole. Yet it was the record alone that allowed him to return home with enough acclaim to loosen his sponsors’ purse strings for one last grasp at the ultimate prize.

  ALREADY PHYSICALLY SPENT, THE men faced a hellish return trip. They had sprinted over the last stretch north with the barest essentials and had even less left for the long march back. Fierce headwinds now came from the southwest. A full-scale gale struck as they approached their former storm camp, driving them inside the old, now-snow-filled igloos where they had endured days of anxious waiting on the way north. A prisoner’s return, it must have seemed. One by one, their weakest dogs were cooked over fires built from the broken-up sticks of their empty sledges.

  Finding the Big Lead up to 2 miles wide, they were forced to lay over on its north side for two or more days before a portion skimmed over with a film of new ice just thick enough for them to glide across, widely spaced and wearing snowshoes to distribute their weight. One firm footfall would have doomed them to the frigid ocean’s depths. Even as it was, a toe would break through here or there, causing a shriek. Peary now called it the River Styx rather than the Hudson.

  “It was the first and only time in all my Arctic work that I felt doubtful as to the outcome,” he wrote. Making matters worse, both sides of the Big Lead were marked by zones of wrenched, upheaved, and shattered ice requiring a pickax to break through. Peary termed it a “frozen Hades.”38

  Once across the Big Lead, the Inuits hoped the Roosevelt lay dead
ahead, but Peary knew that the ice pack’s eastward drift would make it Greenland’s desolate Arctic coast. There, much to everyone’s surprise, Peary’s group met one of the supporting parties, utterly lost, wandering in the wrong direction, and with its members near death. Peary added them to his band, which now numbered twelve. Once on shore, the men foraged for Arctic hare, which they ate raw, before finally felling a small herd of musk oxen and feasting for two days. Then they faced the long slog over coastal shore ice to the ship.

  After three months on the Arctic ice, the men staggered onto the Roosevelt during the final week of May. The other support parties were already present or accounted for, with no one lost. Only forty-one out of some one hundred twenty dogs survived.39 Regardless of any padding of the record, it was an epic journey.

  Yet Peary was not satisfied. In his address to the 1904 Geographical Congress, he had noted that a portion of Ellesmere Island’s northwest coast had never been explored. Now he set out to map this 65-mile-long stretch by sledging west with a small party of Inuits around the island’s northern shore to the farthest point that earlier explorers had reached from the opposite direction.

  Still bruised and footsore from his northern journey, Peary departed on June 2 for a trek that covered more than 200 miles over fifty-eight days. Traveling in summer, the party faced wet snow, thick fog, broken ice, streaming meltwater, and knee-deep slush. “My clothes are now literally rotting from the constant wet,” Peary complained partway through the ordeal. “I have got used to the disagreeableness of the wet, but not yet to the stench.”40 At some places, the route became virtually impassable. Forced by open water and shattered shore ice to cross a steep ice foot, for example, Peary wrote of the sledges being “pushed, dragged, hauled, hoisted and lowered by all of us, and sometimes unloaded and backed over the roughest places.”41

  For Peary, however, the trek offered a chance to chart newfound land and name its features for his sponsors. “Mine,” he wrote upon reaching the previously unexplored stretch, “mine by right of discovery, to be credited to me, and associated with my name, generations after I have ceased to be.”42 His greatest boast came at the journey’s farthest point when he claimed to spy an unknown island in the northwest. He named it Crocker Land after George Crocker, who had given more money to the expedition than anyone else. Much like the islands that Peary claimed to see north of Greenland during his 1891–92 expedition, Crocker Land proved to be an illusion or a fabrication. Peary never mentions the sighting in his sledging diary, even though, in his later published account, he places it second only to his farthest north among the expedition’s main results.43 Once back in the United States, the finding and naming helped to prime the pump for funding his next expedition.

  As Peary neared Cape Sheridan in late July, following his western journey, he learned that the Roosevelt had slipped its moorage three weeks earlier and floated south beyond Cape Union, where it had been pinched between the moving pack and the ice foot’s vertical face, ripping a blade off the propeller and wrecking the rudder and stern post. Captain Bartlett later told the story somewhat differently, but all accounts agreed that ice had crushed the ship in early July, ruining the propulsion and steering, with Bartlett adding that it punched a hole in the hull the size of a small child.44 The ship would have sunk then and there but for being held aloft by ice on both sides.

  After makeshift repairs but still leaking in the stern and lacking full steam propulsion and proper steering, the Roosevelt began inching its way south, using its sails when possible. Twice it was trapped in ice for days, raising the prospect of another Arctic winter. Repeatedly it halted for repairs or caulking. With a jury-rigged rudder, it often ran aground or into the ice foot. Bartlett feared that the ship would sink at any moment, but he kept it afloat through frequent gales.45

  Its pumps running nonstop, the Roosevelt slowly worked its way south, dropping off the Inuits as it passed their villages, and then steamed sluggishly for New York, where it arrived on Christmas Eve, 1906, after over five months at sea and a few more groundings. Sailors who saw it in dry dock marveled that it had made it back at all. Perhaps no other ship could have survived. Yet throughout the anxious passage, Peary spoke of taking it back to the Arctic within a year.

  “I should have thought he wouldn’t have wanted ever to see that place again,” Bartlett commented.46

  THE ROOSEVELT REACHED ITS first port with a telegraph on November 2, and news of the expedition quickly spread. At first the press did not know what to make of Peary’s farthest north—once again it fell short of the pole—but President Roosevelt declared it heroic, and that became the story. Echoing the accepted view, Henson later blamed the shortfall on the ice pack “disintegrating much too early that year to suit,” and stressed the prospect of winning out in a normal year.47 On November 24, upon reaching the first port with rail connections, Peary dashed ahead for New York, leaving Bartlett, Henson, and the crew to bring in the ship over the next four weeks.

  Peary received a hero’s reception in New York. For his first public address, thirty thousand people descended on Jesup’s American Museum of Natural History only to find that the auditorium only sat fifteen hundred. “The crush was tremendous,” one reporter noted. “Women had their clothing torn and men lost their hats” in the surge to greet Peary. “The Stars and Stripes have been placed in the forefront of that international endurance contest known as the race for the north pole,” Peary declared. “Had it been a normal season and not a mild winter I firmly believe I would have brought back the pole.”48

  Four days later, he received the formal congratulations of the Peary Arctic Club and gave much the same address. Jesup introduced Peary both times and, after earlier voicing disappointment at Peary’s failure to reach the pole, now fully endorsed him and his next effort. “We have come so near it that we are not going to give up the quest,” Jesup proclaimed. “I am determined to stick to him.”49

  After New York, Peary rushed on to Washington, where he attended the annual cabinet dinner at the White House and received the National Geographic Society’s highest award, the Hubbard Medal. Roosevelt personally presented the medal to Peary.

  “Civilized people usually live in conditions of life so easy that there is a certain tendency to atrophy of the hardier virtues,” the president said, in words expressing Gilded Age angst over a loss of physical vigor. “And it is a relief to pay signal honor to a man who by his achievements makes it evident that in some of the race at least there has been no loss of hardy virtue.”50

  Peary responded with a Rooseveltian testimonial to the adventurous life. “The true explorer does his work not for any hope of reward or honor, but because the thing he has set himself to do is a part of his being,” Peary said. Applying this standard to his own endeavors, the fifty-year-old explorer observed that reaching the North Pole is “the thing I must do.” And as to its greater value, he added, “Should an American first of all men place the Stars and Stripes at that coveted spot, there is not an American citizen at home or abroad, and there are millions of us, but what would feel a little better and a little prouder of being an American.”51 Roosevelt could not have been more pleased.

  A month later, Peary expanded on this theme in comments to an alumni meeting of his college fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon, of which Roosevelt was also a member. Alluding to Roosevelt’s ongoing program to cut an American-controlled shipping passage through Panama, Peary affirmed, “I believe it is as much the duty of this country to own not only the north, but the south pole, as to build the Panama Canal and control the Pacific.”52

  Yet there was nothing at the North Pole to own or control. Reaching it first had fundamentally the same worth as a first ascent of the Matterhorn or K2: extraordinary human feats, to be sure, but ones that gained value by the meaning that people attached to them. For himself, Peary staked everything on the pole. This was both a strength and a weakness. His detractors and his deifiers agree that Peary was obsessed. They disagree on whether his
obsession was rooted in reaching his goal, serving his country, or glorifying himself. These varying views of Peary mark the difference between seeing him as a fanatic, a patriot, or a mountebank. No one doubts his devotion. “I believe that this is the work that God Almighty intended for me,” Peary wrote to Roosevelt.53

  PEARY CAME BACK FROM his 1905–06 expedition claiming that damage to the Roosevelt was minor and easily repaired. He would be off again for the pole by June, he vowed.54 Bartlett knew better, and with a short window open each summer for navigating north through Smith Sound and beyond, leaving in 1907 proved impossible. Costs mounted too. When Jesup died early in 1908 without providing for the Peary Arctic Club in his will, Peary was thrown back on public appeals for funds. With the president’s blessing, the navy granted Peary another three-year-long paid leave. And eventually enough money came in, much of it in small donations, such that by spring 1908, the expedition was just $4,000 shy of its projected budget.55

  Given his age and physical condition, what would surely be Peary’s final expedition left New York on July 6, 1908. This departure date pushed the earliest possible assault on the pole back to spring 1909. Peary vowed to use much the same methods on this expedition as he had on the last one, though he hoped to have his support parties advance as a unit that would fall back in stages rather than to shuttle supplies separately.56

  By the time of his departure, Peary had the added worry of Frederick Cook. After claiming the first ascent of Denali in 1906, Cook agreed to guide a hunting trip to Greenland’s Smith Sound region aboard a gleaming white, gold-trimmed yacht for casino mogul John Bradley during the summer of 1907. The mogul and his guide had a private understanding that Cook could remain north over the ensuing winter to embark on a trek to the North Pole in 1908 (with support from local Inuits) should conditions warrant. They did. “I find that I now have a good opportunity to try for the North Pole,” Cook wrote in a letter sent back with Bradley in October. “My plan,” Cook reported, “is to cross Ellesmere Land and reach the Polar Sea by Nansen Strait.”57