To the Edges of the Earth
Page 17
Thereafter, Peary increasingly depicted polar exploration as a savage, almost primeval experience that tested an explorer’s manhood. In his 1904 presidential address to the International Geographical Congress, for example, Peary portrayed Arctic exploration as “man’s work” and assured his audience that the attainment of the pole by him or anyone “would move the man and the geographer in every one of you.”9 So there could be no mistaking his meaning, at a dinner for the mostly male foreign delegates to that congress, Peary added about his race to the pole, “If I win, you will . . . be proud because we are of one blood—the man blood.”10 Peary expanded on this theme in his Hampton’s Magazine account of his 1908–09 expedition: “One may know a man better after six months with him beyond the Arctic Circle than after a lifetime of acquaintance in cities,” he wrote. “There is something—I know not what to call it—in those frozen spaces, that brings a man face to face with himself and with his companions; if he is a man, the man comes out.”11 Peary, like Roosevelt, feared that modern consumer culture was emasculating Western society and saw exploration as a cure.
In line with this theme, except for the state-of-the-art ship designed to take his party north, Peary eschewed modern technology in his quest for the pole and repeatedly declared that no one could get there without relying on the “barbarian” and “uncivilized” ways of the Inuit people and their dogs.12 Stressing the masculinity of Arctic life, he noted, “Among the Eskimos the woman is as much a part of a man’s property as his dog.”13 Peary even cast his one concession to technology, the Roosevelt, in sexually suggestive terms by describing it as “black, slow, heavy, almost as solid as a rock” and observing that it “bored and twisted through the ice.”14 When wealthy white “ladies” came on board from a passing yacht, he wrote that “the dainty dresses of our guests further accentuated the blackness, the strength, and the not overcleanly condition of our ship.”15 And when Inuit women joined the expedition as part of the families carried from their homes in Greenland’s Smith Sound region to the Roosevelt’s winter anchorage on Ellesmere Island’s northern coast, they were assigned domestic roles cooking, cleaning, sewing, and caring for their families while their husbands served as hunters and sledge drivers. “The life is a dog’s life,” Peary said of polar exploration, “but the work is a man’s work.”16
In his narratives of the expedition, when Peary wrote about Jo and their daughter, Marie, it was in strictly domestic terms. The fragrant pillow of soft Maine pine needles that Marie gave him for the voyage became a much-noted source of comfort and he depicted Jo as that “brave, noble little woman” who bore the brunt of his Arctic work.17 Jo’s last trip north was in 1900, when she went with the relief ship for Peary’s 1898–1902 expedition only to spend the winter icebound in Smith Sound with Peary’s Inuit mistress, Allakasingwah, and her son with Peary, Anaukak, while Peary wintered at Fort Conger. Jo bore the brunt of that Arctic discovery with resignation and dignity.
Peary had a second son with Allakasingwah on his 1905–06 expedition. Henson fathered a son during the same expedition. “The presence of women,” Peary had said, was “an absolute necessity to keep men contented,” and he predicted that by joining “the hardiness of the mothers with the intelligence of the fathers,” the descendants of Inuit women and white men “would surely reach the Pole if their fathers had not succeeded in doing it.”18 As it turned out, two of Peary’s Inuit grandsons, Peter and Talilanguaq, reached the North Pole by dogsled in 1971 along with one of Henson’s Inuit grandsons, Avatak, in a team led by Italian adventurer Guido Monzino, who repeated many of the Duke of the Abruzzi’s feats. Despite the general knowledge of Peary’s Inuit relations among those on his expeditions, word of them stayed out of the press and never reached his chief benefactor, Morris Jesup, a devout Presbyterian who would have been outraged. A nominal Protestant, Peary opposed converting the Inuits to Christianity or otherwise “civilizing” them. He gave rifles, knives, and utensils to them in return for services and taught them basic principles of health and sanitation. “But there I think their civilization should stop,” Peary wrote. Anything more “would only soften and corrupt them.”19
A SEMINOMADIC PEOPLE, THE Smith Sound Inuits lived along a 200-mile stretch of Greenland’s west coast running from Cape York in the south, at about 76° north latitude, to Etah in the north, at over 78° north latitude. The Roosevelt had smooth sailing from Sydney to Cape York—“a pleasant summer cruise,” Peary called it—arriving on August 1 to find only four or five families encamped there.20 Peary picked up those he wanted and sailed on looking for others. At the time, the region’s native population stood at about two hundred thirty, and Peary hoped to transport nearly a quarter of them to his winter anchorage near Cape Sheridan, some 350 miles beyond Etah. From past experience, Peary knew each of these Inuits personally and knew which ones he wanted for the expedition: the best hunters and sledge handlers with their families. “I had studied their individual characters,” Peary explained, “until I knew just which ones to select for a quick, courageous dash, and just which dogged, unswerving ones would, if necessary, walk straight through hell for the object I had placed before them.”21
Peary also sought about two hundred fifty of their best dogs, and bartered for them even from the Inuits that he did not take along, inevitably giving items of little cost to him but great value to them. Henson did much of the bartering. “I should be ashamed to take such an advantage of them,” he wrote in self-justification, “but if I should stop to consider the freight-rates to this part of the world, no doubt a hatchet or a knife is worth just what it can be traded for.”22 “On the whole, these people are much like children, and should be treated as such,” Peary noted. Yet he also acknowledged, “These Eskimos are one of the most important tools in all my programme of Arctic work.”23
At the Roosevelt’s next stop, Peary and Henson transferred to the Eric to scour the region for more recruits while the Roosevelt went to Etah, where the two ships would meet before the Eric returned south. Although as far north as Shackleton’s Cape Royds winter quarters was south, due to the peculiarities of currents and climate the coastline here is green in summer. With temperatures that can exceed 40°F in July and August, flowers bloom, grasses grow, and land mammals from reindeer and musk oxen to foxes and hare abound in a bright, treeless oasis that turns forebodingly dark, cold, and snowy by November. At every settlement, Peary picked up more Inuit families and dogs. He reached Etah on August 11, where he found that those aboard the Roosevelt had disturbing news about Cook.
Looking and acting much like a half-starved inmate of Bedlam, Cook’s sole white companion, Rudolph Franke, had approached the ship shortly after it arrived at Etah. Having spent five months alone in Cook’s deteriorating hut near Etah and wearing tattered, lice-infested fur clothes, Franke came begging for food but was turned away by the ship’s steward. At the urging of Goodsell, the expedition’s doctor, Captain Bartlett intervened a day later to bring Franke aboard, feed him, and hear his story.
After a winter together in their packing-crate hut, Franke explained, he set off for the pole with Cook, nine Inuits, over a hundred dogs, and eleven heavily loaded sledges in February 1908. Cook planned to go west over Ellesmere Island to Nansen Sound, then turn north to the pole, perhaps traversing the never-explored Crocker Land that Peary had reported sighting on his last expedition. After five days, however, Cook ordered Franke to return to the hut with two of the Inuits and guard the goods and supplies while he proceeded west. “I stood as if I had been struck by lightning,” Franke later wrote. “I was crushed.”24 He never understood the reason, though over the winter Cook had traded for valuable blue fox skins and narwhal tusks that perhaps needed guarding. Some also speculate that Cook may not have wanted a credible witness along if he anticipated claiming the pole regardless of whether he reached it.
Franke remained at the hut in growing desperation until May, when more of Cook’s Inuits returned to Etah with a long letter from Cook dated March 17
. The party had gotten as far as Cape Hubbard on the Arctic coast, the letter stated. “To the present we have seen nothing of Crocker Land, and I am taking a strait [sic] course to the pole,” Cook wrote. “I hope to succeed.” To conserve food, Cook would proceed with only two Inuits, Ahwelah and Etukishuk, and their dogs. If he did not return by the end of May, the letter directed Franke to go south with the furs and tusks to North Star Bay and hitch a ride home with the whalers that stop there in June. “These must be our money on the return trip,” Cook said of the furs and tusks.25 When Cook did not appear in May, Franke departed for North Star Bay as directed, but bad weather and a leg injury slowed his progress so much that the whalers had sailed before he arrived. Leaving word of his plight at the village of Oomanui, Franke returned to Etah, resigned to enduring another winter. Then he spied the Roosevelt. Half crazed, he clambered aboard to a decidedly mixed welcome.
Franke’s situation scarcely improved when Peary and Henson arrived on the Eric. They had learned some of the story at Oomanui but not the full account. “At Etah,” Henson wrote about Franke, “we were met by the most hopelessly dirty, unkempt, filth-littered human being any of us had ever seen, or could ever imagine; a white man with long matted hair and beard, who could speak very little English and that only between cries, whimperings, and whines.”26 Peary interrogated Franke regarding Cook and only let him return on the Eric in exchange for Cook’s supplies, furs, and tusks. Peary then unloaded more supplies so that, along with Cook’s, Etah could serve as a supply base should he lose the Roosevelt.27 He left two crewmen from the Roosevelt to guard the supplies and deal with Cook should he return. Although Peary posted a sign on Cook’s storehouse stating that Cook was dead and the contents belonged to him, he sent a message back with the Eric assuring Cook’s wife that her husband was most likely holed up on some island “where game is plentiful.”28 Of course, Peary never thought that Cook could actually reach the pole with two Inuits and a few dogs, but he did worry about what Cook might later claim.29 A wealthy sportsman, Harry Whitney, who had traveled with the Eric to hunt Arctic animals, also decided to winter near Etah and try for more Arctic game. He rebuilt Cook’s hut as his lodgings and was entrusted by Franke with letters for Cook.
THESE DEVELOPMENTS CREATED PROBLEMS for Peary. The Eric would carry back the last news from his expedition to reach the public for nearly a year, and now Cook would dominate the headlines.30 The fate of an explorer lost in the Arctic and maybe heading for the pole created more compelling copy than a story about Peary’s uneventful cruise to Etah. Cook’s letter to Franke was sensational in itself, but worse still, Franke would be in New York to expand on it, tell of his own ordeal, and put Peary’s actions in a bad light. “I imagine the affair will create newspaper talk when Erik returns,” Ross Marvin predicted in a letter from Etah.31 Peary knew it would and sent his own batch of letters home to his wife, Jo, and his supporters, telling his side of the story and urging them to dispute any claims made by Cook or on Cook’s behalf. They had their hands full when Franke told his story to Bradley Osbon, secretary of the Arctic Club, the pro-Cook rival to the Peary Arctic Club, and a former reporter for the pro-Cook New York Herald. According to Franke, not only had Peary coerced him to relinquish Cook’s supplies, but he had sent the furs and tusks south on the Eric.
Osbon promptly denounced Peary for stealing Cook’s property and charged that the furs and tusks had been distributed as gifts to Peary’s wife and supporters. President Roosevelt allegedly received a narwhal tusk. Jo responded by giving out copies of letters that Peary had wrung out of Franke, consenting to the arrangement. “Please Mr. Peary, let me now go home with your other vessel,” one of them pitifully concluded. She also released a letter from Peary denying any intention of sending back the furs and tusks, but going on to state that “the skins were wet, mildewed and rotting, and the horns broken.” For their part in the matter, members of the Peary Arctic Club denied any knowledge of furs or tusks on the Eric and, to add injury to insult, billed John Bradley, the casino mogul, $100 for bringing back Franke, even though the transfer of Cook’s supplies had supposedly covered the cost.32 Cook’s wife sent $50 to the club to repay a cash advance that Peary had given Franke to cover travel expenses. Caught in the tug-of-war among newspapers over the two explorers, Peary’s reputation suffered.
In a further blow to Peary’s reputation, while the Roosevelt was still in Etah, word reached Copenhagen, and from there the public, that Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen, the leader of a Danish expedition, and his three-man sledge party had died in northeast Greenland. The expedition had sought to map the last uncharted portion of the island’s coastline, from the northernmost point accessible by ship on its east coast to the westernmost point on its north coast attained by Peary in his 1898–1902 expedition. In 1892, during a prior expedition, Peary had crossed Greenland from the west, claimed to reach its northeast corner at a place he called Independence Bay, and asserted that from a high cliff above the bay he had seen the coastline turning west, which established Greenland as an island. This discovery was Peary’s first claim to fame as an explorer. Records retrieved from Mylius-Erichsen’s party suggested that the coastline turned east here, not west, and whatever Peary had claimed to see did not exist. Greenland extended north, and any attempt to round its northeastern corner would take far longer than expected under Peary’s reports. Whether or not Peary’s faulty claim contributed to the loss of Mylius-Erichsen’s party, which perished after exhausting its supplies, the error raised questions about Peary’s work and undercut his assertion that he had proved the insularity of Greenland. Even if the finer points were lost on the general public, geographers took note.33
The public, however, could readily follow the growing scandal surrounding Minik (or Mene), the youngest of the six Inuits that Peary had brought to New York ten years earlier at the request of researchers at the American Museum of Natural History. “Lieut. Peary asked if some of us wouldn’t like to go back with him,” Minik said in a 1907 full-page article in Joseph Pulitzer’s muckraking New York World, the nation’s bestselling newspaper. “They promised us nice warm homes in the sunshine land.” Minik’s father accepted Peary’s offer and took his son, then seven or eight years old. Studied like laboratory animals and housed in the museum’s basement, all six Inuits contracted tuberculosis, four died, and one returned home. An orphan, Minik remained behind as the ward of an increasingly disgruntled and later disgraced museum employee. To assuage Minik’s grief over his father’s death, the museum had staged a faux funeral of the father, using a coffin without a corpse. By 1906, Minik had learned the truth. Researchers had dissected his father’s body and preserved the bones in a museum collection that included other Inuit remains supplied by Peary. “Just because I am a poor Esquimau boy why can’t I bury my father in a grave the way he would want to be buried?” Minik plaintively asked in the article. Peary, it noted, “was notified of the death of his four Esquimau protégés, but he paid no attention to it.”34
When museum officials refused to relinquish the bones, the story fed on itself. More articles appeared, especially after Peary rejected a request from Minik to return him to Greenland on the Roosevelt in 1908. Apparently, Peary feared that Minik’s story might turn other Inuits against him. “I have lost hope. I lost it when Peary refused to take me with him on this last trip,” Minik lamented in a feature article in William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner, the flagship daily in one of the world’s largest media empires. “I would shoot Mr. Peary and the Museum director, only I want them to see how much more just a savage Eskimo is than their enlightened white selves.” The article was illustrated by a quarter-page drawing of Minik recoiling from the skeleton of his father in a museum exhibit with the caption “What would Mr. Peary do if he was walking through the museum and suddenly came face to face with the skeleton of his father staring at him from a glass case?”35
Jo Peary now sought to be rid of Minik, even if it meant returning him to Greenland. “I am enclos
ing some [newspaper] clippings just to give you an idea of things and hope you will take Mene over your knee & lick him until he begs for mercy,” she wrote in growing frustration to her husband in the Arctic.36
Long a national hero but always ruthless in pursuit of his goals, Peary had been in the limelight for two decades and his popularity suffered from overexposure. Cook, in contrast, had been a bit player in enough expeditions to be a credible contender in any polar race but remained little known to the general public. By 1908, some Americans were openly pulling for the plucky upstart Cook to beat the establishment-backed Peary to the pole.
WITH THE PROBLEM OF Cook dealt with as much as possible and the Eric soon to sail south with Franke aboard, the Roosevelt steamed north on August 18 into the Nares Strait.37 From south to north beginning at Etah, the 310-mile-long Nares Strait includes Smith Sound, Kane Basin, Kennedy Channel, Hall Basin, and Robeson Channel before opening out into the Arctic Ocean’s Lincoln Sea, where Peary was headed. Frozen over in winter, the strait is clogged in summer with glacial-fringe and Arctic pack ice driven south on strong currents and flood tides. Particular bottlenecks form at the channels, which narrow to little more than 10 miles across and where surging tides can raise the sea level 12 feet or more. “Looking across the channel, there seems to be no water—nothing but uneven and tortured ice,” Peary noted at one point on the voyage. Only five ships had previously made it through Nares Strait. The Roosevelt was the most recent, in 1906, but it was heavily battered during the passage. “When the tide is at the ebb, the ship follows the narrow crack of water between the shore and the moving pack,” Peary explained; “then, when the flood tide begins to rush violently southward, the ship must hurry to shelter in some niche of the shore ice, or behind some point of rock, to save herself from destruction, or being driven south again.”38