In camp and on the trail, the divisions were functionally independent. They had separate igloos, which they constructed in about an hour from blocks of hard snow. The men slept fully clothed atop animal skins laid on snow and used food tins for pillows. “After two or three hours of sleep, a man usually wakes up cold, and he must then get up and beat his feet together and slap himself to start the circulation,” Henson noted.17 The men suffered worst at the coldest camps. “Each of us would sleep or doze for a few minutes and then awaken chilled with the cold,” expedition surgeon John Goodsell wrote about one minus 59°F night. “Had we not heeded the warning chill our feet and legs would have frosted, and then we probably would have felt the fatal drowsiness that is so frequently claimed to be the first symptom of freezing.”18
Each division cooked over an alcohol stove in its own igloo. “There is no variation in the bill of fare—pemmican and biscuits and tea make up a menu as unvarying as that of a boarding house,” Henson added.19 Breakfast and supper consisted of a half pound of cold pemmican and eight hardtack biscuits plus tea made with condensed milk. Lunch was three biscuits and tea. To lighten the load by carrying less fuel, there was no warm hoosh for Peary’s divisions, unlike for Shackleton’s polar parties. Only the tea was hot, and the men savored it. “There is nothing like hot tea,” Borup later recalled. “It will warm you down to your very cold toes.”20
Everyone on Peary’s polar push received the same daily ration regardless of race or status. Consumed at this spartan rate, supplies remained sufficient. Peary planned exactly: “A total of 2 lbs. 41/2 oz. of solids per man, per day,” he wrote. “On this ration a man can work hard and keep in good condition in the lowest temperatures for a very long time.”21 On this trip, the men never had to resort to killing, cooking, and eating their dogs, though the Inuits occasionally supplemented their rations with worn-out dogs that could no longer pull in harness.
During the six days that the parties waited on the south side of the Big Lead, the temperature slowly dropped and the wind calmed. “It was dark, ominous, and deep,” Goodsell said of this lead. “The opposite side, which we judged to be nearly a mile away, could be seen faintly through the rising vapor and falling frost mist.”22 Much as happened during Peary’s return across the Big Lead in 1906, a thin skin of new ice formed over the lead as the surface became colder and stiller. By March 8, Peary thought the new ice was perhaps thick enough to cross. He remembered the anxious crossing in 1906, however, when the men spread wide to distribute their weight and shuffled breathlessly over the translucent surface. This time, going north, the sledges would be heavier and more numerous than on the return trip in 1906.
Even more troubling for Peary, the parties led by Borup and Marvin had not yet returned from Cape Columbia with the much-needed fuel. Peary waited two more days for the ice to thicken and the fuel to arrive, shifting the focus of his frustration from the open lead to Borup and Marvin. “God Damn Kid to Hell,” Peary wrote in his diary, apparently about Borup, using only initials to encode his words but underlining them twice for emphasis. “When the party arrives we shall have a storm,” Peary added without encoding.23
Borup and Marvin were as anxious as Peary about their delayed arrival. They knew the commander’s wrath. Halted three days by a different lead, Borup wrote, “Besides knowing the success or failure of the Expedition might depend on our catching the others, we also thoroughly comprehended that, if we did not get out, we could never explain it, and at home there would always be the question of someone having lost his nerve.”24
When Borup and Marvin still had not arrived by March 11, Peary pushed on without them, despite the lack of fuel. He would not wait any longer. Peary thought that open leads might be delaying them, which was in fact the case, but began to fear that they might never arrive. “Even if they did not come,” he vowed, “I shall not turn back here.” Such was the extent of Peary’s desperation that, while nervously waiting for Borup and Marvin, he contemplated the prospect of melting ice for water and making tea by burning pieces of the wooden sledges. “By the time the wood of the sledges was exhausted,” he reasoned, “it would have become warm enough for us to suck ice or snow to assuage our thirst, and get along with pemmican and raw dog without tea.”25 Proceeding without sufficient fuel after weighing such extreme options showed Peary’s iron determination to proceed at all costs. He would not give up 45 miles from shore. “The delay had become unendurable, and I decided to take the chance of Marvin’s overtaking us with the oil and alcohol,” Peary wrote. He left a note behind. “Can wait no longer. We are short of fuel. Push on with all possible speed to overtake us,” it said. “Do not camp here. Cross the lead.”26
Peary’s gamble paid off. Traveling as a single group, the five divisions chalked up three successive marches of at least 12 miles per day, despite a succession of frozen leads and zones of rough ice. The temperature dropped steadily from minus 40°F at the outset to minus 59°F at the end. Peary called it “Distinctly crisp,” but there was less wind and more sun than before.27
On the evening of March 13, an advance sledge from Borup’s division sped into camp with news that the resupply parties were a day behind and moving fast with full loads of fuel. “That night I slept like a child without care,” Peary wrote.28 He had crossed the 84th parallel and stood roughly 385 miles from the pole. Rushing ahead alone across the sea ice in minus 50°F weather for 60 miles with no supplies, the Inuit driver of the advance sledge, Sigloo, earned a place on Peary’s final polar party. Borup hailed Sigloo’s dash as “one of the finest displays of nerve I have ever known.”29
WITH THE BIG LEAD behind him and the prospect of ample supplies, Peary took this opportunity to reorganize the expedition. He sent Goodsell back to the ship with two Inuits and one sledge. “I was disappointed to go back,” the surgeon wrote, “but I knew it was part of the Commander’s plan.”30 Dogsleds could not carry enough food for a party to reach the pole; only by using support parties that fell back in stages could some succeed. At this point, Peary also sent Henson ahead with three Inuits and three sledges to pioneer the route, relieving Bartlett’s party from this demanding role. Henson had the most experience at sledging of any division leader, and Peary viewed him as completely loyal if somewhat lacking in resourcefulness. Henson started on March 14, while Peary and the others remained in camp awaiting the resupply parties, which arrived that evening.
MacMillan now admitted to Peary that he had a severely frostbitten heel. It had happened three days earlier but MacMillan had not realized it until a day later, and by the 14th the heel was badly festered. Peary had no choice but to send him back to the ship, along with two Inuits and two sledges, only one day after Goodsell left. MacMillan was heartbroken over his early departure, as were Marvin and Borup. The three young college graduates—Yale, Bowdoin, and Cornell—had bonded during their shared ordeal, often gathering to sing their college songs. “It’s been a Marathon race and a damn long one,” Marvin commented at the time. “How we hated to see him go off limping,” Borup wrote about MacMillan.31 Peary, in contrast, remained characteristically reserved. “It was a disappointment to me to lose MacMillan so early,” he conceded, “but his disability did not affect the main proposition. I had ample personnel, as well as provisions, sledges, and dogs; and the men, like the equipment, were interchangeable.”32 Considering himself indispensable to the enterprise, Peary never applied such a crude calculation of worth to himself.
The heaviest work now fell on Henson, who by his own admission had a devil of a time with it. Soon his pioneer party encountered soft, deep snow, which the sledges plowed through to the depth of their crossbars. “The dogs became demons; at one time, sullen and stubborn; then wildly excited and savage,” Henson reported. After struggling through snow-filled fissures, the dogs finally refused to pull against the added strain even when whipped. “To break them of this stubbornness, and to prevent further trouble, I took the leader or king dog of one team and, in the presence of the rest of the pack
, I clubbed him severely,” Henson wrote.33 The Inuit drivers used a different approach on recalcitrant dogs, Borup explained. “They get on top of a lazy dog, get a back hammer lock, and proceed to chew his ear.”34 Though he later regretted his brutality, Henson claimed that his method worked.
After plowing through the deep snow, Henson’s pioneer party hit jagged, rough ice mixed with steep pressure ridges. The men used pickaxes to get through the former and lifted and lowered their heavily loaded sledges bodily over the latter. Henson remembered this day as the hardest march of the trip. “Two of the sledges had split their entire length and had to be repaired,” Henson noted, “and the going had been such that we could not cover any distance.”35 The second day was scarcely better, and the third featured the deafening roar of moving ice and an open lead that the party crossed on broken floes hardly large enough to support a sledge. After this, it encountered such rough rubble ice that Henson halted his division at midday to rebuild two sledges from the wrecks of three. Then Peary appeared with a scold and a scowl.
Peary charged the pioneer party with staying ahead of the rest and gave it a full day’s head start, yet, following the same route, the other parties caught up in two. They too had plowed through heavy snow, crossed rough ice, and ferried over leads with only the rough outline of a broken trail to follow. At one dramatic moment, when dogs in one team slipped into the water between cakes of floating ice, Borup stopped the sledge from following them down with his one arm while hauling them up to the surface with his other. “You had to fight for every yard-gain here as you’d do on the football field,” the exuberant former collegiate athlete observed.36 Borup’s spirit and strength impressed Peary.
In contrast to his praise for Borup, Peary disparaged “Henson’s 3 short marches,” as he referred to them in his diary, and published a scathing account of them in his narrative.37 “I knew, from past experience, that yesterday’s movement of the ice and the formation of leads all about us would take all the spirit out of Henson’s party until the main party should overtake them again,” he wrote in that published narrative.38 For Peary, success in the Arctic was all about spirit—human spirit. Henson’s short marches confirmed Peary’s view of Henson as a loyal follower but not an inspired leader. Following these three marches, Peary relieved Henson of command over the pioneer party. It must have humiliated Henson.
The next day, March 17, Peary put Marvin in charge of the pioneer party with directions to pick up the pace even if it meant marching for more hours each day. Bartlett, Borup, and Henson followed on the 18th, using pickaxes on the broken, upturned floes. As usual, Peary brought up the rear. “Marvin gave us a good march of not less than seventeen miles, at first over very rough ice, then over larger and more level flows,” Peary reported approvingly.39 This left him near 85° north latitude. At the end of that twelve-hour march, the fourth after Goodsell and MacMillan left, Peary gave the order for the remaining three support parties to fall back at five-march intervals. Borup would return first with three Inuits after one more daylong march; Marvin next, with two Inuits, five daily marches later; and Bartlett last, with two Inuits, at the end of another five.
An engineer by training, Peary planned in such a fashion that, assuming a pace of 14 miles per march, this schedule had each successive division falling back with each degree of latitude gained, leaving 3º, or about 200 miles, for the final polar party. “At the end of each five-march period I would send back the poorest dogs, the least effective Eskimos, and the worst damaged sledges,” Peary explained.40 Henson would go with him to the pole along with four Inuit sledge drivers and a total of five sledges.
At this point in the narrative, Peary’s critics typically begin noting that the plan of advance left Peary with the only division leader incapable of using a sextant to verify Peary’s measurement of the party’s latitude should they reach the pole. In short, no one else in the polar party could credibly prove or disprove whatever Peary might claim. Peary repeatedly hailed Henson as the best sledge driver of the lot, however, which offered a plausible reason for keeping him. With the pole almost within reach, Borup, Marvin, and Bartlett desperately wanted to go all the way. Peary knew their disappointment at turning back short of the pole, but held firm. “He wasn’t heartless; he was just businesslike,” Bartlett explained. “He was always that way.”41
MARCH 20 BROUGHT A revised regimen. Borup headed back. “I would have given my immortal soul to go on,” he wrote. “I never felt so bad in my life.”42 Bartlett resumed leadership of the pioneer party, with Henson’s division slightly behind. Peary and Marvin started twelve hours later with their divisions traveling together. The continuous daylight allowed the four divisions to travel at any hour, with the first pair marching for twelve before making camp and the other pair doing the same. “When the main party had covered the march made by the advance party and arrived at their igloos,” Peary explained, “the advance party broke out and started on while the main party occupied their igloos and turned in for sleep.”43 It offered a comfortable routine, at least for Peary, who enjoyed a prepared trail and ready-made igloo.
Each division now had three men—one leader and two Inuit drivers—whereas most divisions previously had four. Food remained the same for every man, but tea increased with each three-man party now sharing what four men received before. “Three men in an igloo were also more comfortable than four,” Peary noted, “and the smaller igloos just about balanced in time and energy the lesser number of men that were left to build them.”44 Peary’s division had two sledges; two of the others had three.
With continued fine weather, the remaining four divisions advanced north at an average rate of 14 miles per day through the last northward march of Marvin’s party on the 25th. The surface alternated between rough ice and level floes, with an occasional open lead. “Some heavy going, small old floes, high rafters, & some young ice,” Peary wrote on March 23, a day that he also reported ferrying one trailing sledge across an open lead on a cake of ice.45 Marvin found a latitude of 86°38' north at the final camp before he turned south on March 26, which put Peary and his men past the farthest north of the Duke of the Abruzzi’s team over a calendar month ahead of when the Italians had set their record in 1900. Peary was cautiously optimistic. His men were beating their daily targets, but not by much.
Now there were nine persons left. Bartlett’s three-person division left camp late on the 25th, heading north. Henson’s three-person division departed early on the 26th, following Bartlett. Before joining that procession, Peary and his two drivers remained behind until Marvin’s party started south later that day. While noting Marvin’s sorrow over turning back, Peary depicted him as “filled with exultation that with the exception of Bartlett and myself, he alone of all white men had entered that exclusive region which stretches beyond 86°34' north latitude.”46 If this passage paraphrased Marvin’s last words to Peary, they were strange ones indeed, yet characteristic of his era. Despite their shared ordeal, by these words Marvin dismissed Henson and the Inuits traveling north with Peary to irrelevance in the epic struggle to explore. Only white men counted, and it did not matter if they were Italian, American, or British.
Peary claimed to have offered the following ominous final warning to Marvin: “Be careful of the leads, my boy!” A believer in signs and omens, Peary also later noted, “Soon after Marvin left us on his fatal journey back to land, the sun was obscured and a dull, lead-colored haze spread over all the sky.”47 In his diary, Peary called it “a dense lifeless pall of gray overhead.”48 He later saw it as foretelling his expedition mate’s grim fate. Peary never saw Marvin again.
WITH BARTLETT’S DIVISION LEADING the way and roughly 230 miles remaining to the pole, the next five marches carried the parties over 70 miles farther north, or nearly a third of the way. They crossed a shifting array of surfaces in the teeth of a rising northerly wind and falling temperatures during this stretch. On March 28, the divisions led by Peary and Henson caught up with Bartlett’s division a
t a widening lead. With the advance party already asleep in one igloo, the others built two igloos about a hundred yards away. Awakened by a shout, Peary looked out to see Bartlett’s igloo floating on an ice raft broken from the main floe.
“The break in the ice had occurred within a foot of the fastening of one of my dog teams, the team being saved by just those few inches from being dragged into the water,” Peary reported.49
Then he noticed that the other two igloos were also on a small floe at risk of breaking loose from the main one. Peary rushed the men, dogs, and sledges onto the main floe. Meanwhile, the swirling ice raft bearing the third igloo collided with the main floe, giving Bartlett and his party a chance to escape.
“He had scarcely set foot on the opposite floe when the floe on which he had been previously isolated swung off and rapidly disappeared,” Henson wrote.50 Still blocked by the lead from proceeding north, the men had no choice but to build new igloos and wait.
“That night we slept with our mittens on, ready for anything,” Peary wrote.51
The lead remained open for another day, sometimes becoming so wide that the men could not see across it through the rising mist—“if, indeed, it had a northern shore,” Peary added darkly.52
Their estimated position, calculated at 87°12' north latitude by dead reckoning based on prior marches, put them beyond Peary’s 1906 farthest north, which gave them some satisfaction. The delay also extended the stay for Bartlett, because Peary linked his departure to marches, not days. One day spent in camp on March 29 rested his team for an all-out dash over its last two marches toward reaching the 88th parallel, which had become Bartlett’s personal goal.
The previous three marches had taxed all three parties. Henson had lost one dog to thin ice. Deep, soft snow slowed the sledges at times. Sharp, jagged ice shredded their wooden runners at others. Henson compared the former snows to “granules of sugar, without their saccharine sweetness,” while Peary wrote of the latter ice, it “seemed almost to cut through our sealskin kamiks and hareskin stockings, to pierce our feet.”53 Nevertheless, with Bartlett in the lead, the parties had averaged 13 miles per march, and now he aimed for more.
To the Edges of the Earth Page 22