Bluff depot had become the focus of the men’s hopes and pivot to their survival. They reached it on February 23 without any measure for error. “It was the most cheerful sight our eyes have ever seen, for we had only a few biscuits left,” Shackleton noted. Just weeks earlier, teams from winter quarters had stocked it with all the foods they could imagine. “There were Carlsbad plums, eggs, cakes, plum puddings, gingerbread and crystallized fruit,” Shackleton reported with childlike glee. “I am writing in my bag with biscuits beside me, and chocolates and jam.”69
With food no longer a worry, concern now focused on reaching open water before the ship sailed. No one on the Nimrod or at winter quarters could know if the southern party would return, however, and by this point most of them feared that it would not. Rather than risk having the ship iced in for the winter, Shackleton had authorized it to steam north for New Zealand as early as March 1 and leave a small rescue party behind for the winter at Cape Royds. Yet until the sea ice became firm, Shackleton could not get beyond Hut Point on foot. His party had to get that far and hope the Nimrod would rescue it there.
Resting only for one night and with time of an essence, the men set off again on the morning of February 24. A day later, however, a fierce blizzard kept the party in camp for a day, and Marshall’s dysentery returned with full force. Despite Marshall’s condition, the men arose as soon as the blizzard ended and were marching by 4 A.M. on February 26. They continued with only three brief stops until 11 P.M. and were back at it again by six the next morning. “Marshall suffered greatly, but stuck to the march. He never complains,” Shackleton wrote on the 27th.70
After these two days netted some 30 miles, Shackleton decided to leave Marshall in camp with Adams and dash ahead with Wild over the 33 more miles to Hut Point, desperately seeking rescue for all before the ship departed. Leaving without sleep soon after the party set up camp at 4 P.M. on the 27th, Shackleton and Wild carried food for one meal, which they finished early the next day. Finding the sea ice out south of Hut Point, they left their sledge and scrambled 7 miles over a hilly, snow-covered shore route to arrive at the old hut late on February 28.
“Weary footsore & famished, those hills seemed miles high instead of the actual 1,000 feet,” Wild later recalled.71
They found the hut empty, with a note stating that all the others were safe on the ship, which would shelter at the ice tongue between Hut Point and Cape Royds until February 26. The note said nothing about how long the ship would remain beyond that date. “If the ship was gone,” Shackleton wrote, “our plight, and that of the two men left out on the Barrier, was a very serious one.”72 By now, all on board the Nimrod thought that the southern party was lost, with the captain openly speaking of its members as dead.
Shackleton and Wild became desperate to save themselves and the two remaining on the ice shelf. With the sea ice out, they could not reach the ice tongue except by a long overland route. Instead, they tried to set an outbuilding ablaze to signal their presence at Hut Point to anyone at the ice tongue or Cape Royds. Exhausted from marching 50-odd miles in thirty-eight hours without sleep, they could not get the asbestos-laden shed to burn, so rested until the next morning, March 1, when they tried again with some success.
Departing from the ice tongue that same morning to land a small relief party at Cape Royds before heading north with the others, a ship’s officer aboard the Nimrod spied activity at Hut Point and began shouting. It could only be the southern party. “We all tumbled out, and rushed forward to the foc’sl head,” Forbes Mackay recalled. “We all danced about and cheered and waved our arms, and then fell to punching each other.”73 The ship turned south at full speed. Seeing its masts appear overwhelmed Shackleton and Wild. “No happier sight ever met the eyes of man,” Wild wrote, “and about an hour later we were being greeted by our comrades, the most optimistic of whom had given us up as dead.”74
Less than three hours later, after what he called “a good feed of bacon and fried bread” but no further sleep, Shackleton led three men back onto the ice shelf to rescue Marshall and Adams.75 Tested by their own sledging ordeal, Mawson and Mackay joined the rescue effort. Shackleton ordered Wild to remain behind in case of an accident. The party returned on March 4 with Marshall and Adams.
“By the narrowest margin,” Marshall wrote, “we accomplished a journey of 1,613 miles (more than half of which was pioneer work) in 126 days.”76
With sea ice forming across the Ross Sea, the Nimrod departed that very day for New Zealand, leaving behind everything not already packed and on board.
SCARCELY A MONTH AFTER Shackleton reached the Nimrod, Peary made his U-turn and headed back to the Roosevelt. With enough food to eat, plenty of dogs to pull, a well-cut trail with existing shelters, and sufficient time, because the ship could not depart until the ice broke out in July, Peary had many advantages over Shackleton. The American’s worst fears were open leads and prolonged bad weather of the type that had stymied his 1906 effort. Those were chance occurrences. He had planned for everything one could anticipate in polar exploration. The result was a dash that met his own high expectations.
Peary claimed to cover the 150-odd miles from the pole to the camp where his last support party turned back in just three days. “No explorer, before or since, has claimed to cover these sorts of distances across polar pack ice over the same number of consecutive days,” Wally Herbert later wrote.77 They justifiably contributed to the doubts about Peary’s claims, especially since later explorers had better equipment. Yet Peary would need to travel at record speeds on the return trip if he had gone all the way to the pole and back to the ship in the given time since he left Bartlett’s farthest-north camp on April 2.
Fueling his critics, the first two of these three days are blank in his diary, which resumed on April 9, shortly before the polar party reached the old camp. “From here to the Pole and back has been a glorious sprint, with a savage finish,” he wrote at this point. Yet in his diary, he only described that savage finish of minus 20°F temperatures, gale-force winds, dogs on the gallop, and “ice raftering all under and all around us under pressure of the gale.”78 Even his harshest critics accept the story from here on back.
In his various narrative accounts of his expedition, which built on his sledging diary but added much detail, Peary fleshed out the initial segment of his return trip in part with an explanation of his plan to double-march all the way back. “That is,” he wrote, “to cover one of our outward marches, make tea and eat our luncheon in the igloos at that camp; then cover another march, eat, and sleep a few hours in the igloos of the next outward camp, and go on again.” Over a track smoothed out by multiple outbound and inbound sledge trips, this plan struck Peary as feasible. “We could double our speed,” he projected. “We need waste no time in building igloos.”79 The polar party mostly kept to this schedule except for a few days when exhaustion led Peary to order only a single march.
In the end, he found that his party could cover an average of five outward marches in three returning days. The dogs, he noted, received double rations when they made double marches. “I was able to do this on account of the reserve supply of food which we had in the dogs themselves,” Peary wrote in a terse description of the culling process.80 Of course, any dog culled from the pack received no rations at all.
Matthew Henson, who never doubted that the party had attained the pole, filled out the start of the homeward account somewhat differently. “It was with quivering voice that Commander Peary gave the order to break camp. Already the strain of the hard upward-journey was beginning to tell, and after the first two marches back, he was dead weight,” Henson would write of the expedition. Although Henson here suggested and at other times stated that Peary rode all the way back, this account at least affirmed that Peary continued to direct the party.81 A later account coauthored by Henson has Henson, not Peary, beginning “the task of leading the enfeebled party back,” covering “the distance of three of their outward marches” in his first so
uthward dash, and “feverishly” guiding the march toward land.82 “After Peary finished making his observations [at the pole], he just about collapsed. He couldn’t walk. We had to put him on the sledge,” Henson told journalist Lowell Thomas thirty years after the event. “All his strength had been concentrated on getting to the Pole. Once he got there his strength gave out.”83 Over time and countless retellings, Henson likely embellished his own role in the return journey, especially after Peary publicly disparaged Henson’s ability to lead a return trek. The part about Peary riding back, which Henson consistently maintained and others suggested, seems probable.
Peary and Henson agreed on one key point. Both depict the party speeding back at a breakneck pace from Bartlett’s farthest north with remarkably few delays. “For the most part we found the trail renewed by our support parties easily recognizable and in most cases in good condition,” Peary reported. The wind typically either came from a northerly direction, which propelled them and the sea ice southward, or calmed to a whisper. Every lead they encountered was narrow or newly iced over, closed quickly, or was readily circumvented or ferried across on ice cakes. “Perhaps we took chances,” Peary wrote, “perhaps not. One thing in our favor: our sledges were much lighter than on the upward journey, and we could now ‘rush’ them across thin ice that would not have held them a moment then.”84 At times, new ice quivered under the weight of the sledges, but only once did a dog team break through and require rescue. “Only calm weather or northerly wind keeps it practicable,” Peary said of the young ice.85
Henson’s accounts were more dramatic but had the same ending. “We crossed lead after lead, sometimes like a bareback rider in the circus, balancing on cake after cake of ice, but good fortune was with us all of the way,” Henson noted. “It was not until land of recognizable character had been lifted [into view on the horizon] that we lost the trail, and with land in sight as an incentive, it was no trouble for us to gain the talus of the shore ice and find the trail again.”86
Peary’s account has the polar party losing the main trail within sight of land but still following the thin path cut by Bob Bartlett’s final support party, which also lost the main trail. Late on April 22, the polar party reached the fringe of freshwater glacial ice near Cape Columbia, their original point of departure. “When the last sledge came to the almost vertical edge of the glacier’s fringe, I thought my Eskimos had gone crazy,” Peary wrote. “They yelled and called and danced until they fell from utter exhaustion.” Ootah, who was with Peary on his purported second traverse at the North Pole, now declared, “The Devil is asleep or having trouble with his wife, or we should never have come back so easily.”87 It was a heavenly moment.
The party rested for two days in the igloos at Cape Columbia before taking the well-worn trail back to the Roosevelt, where they arrived on April 27. “It has been a very comfortable return and we have had full rations,” Peary noted in his diary, “but a little difference in the weather and all would have been changed.” The same entry contained the more stylized assertion “I have now the last great geographical prize, the North Pole, for the credit of the U.S., the Service to which I belong, myself, and my family.” No mention here of Henson or the Inuits. “It has been accomplished with a clean cut, dash, spirit, and I believe thoroughness, characteristically American,” Peary concluded. “I am content.”88
The support parties had more trouble with leads than the polar party, so much so that Bartlett’s final party reached the Roosevelt only three days before Peary, even though it started back from its final camp with a ten-day head start. Goodsell’s division turned back first, with MacMillan’s right behind. They traveled together with some injured members. Despite crossing one thin-ice lead with the Inuits walking on all fours to distribute their weight and Goodsell flipping headlong over a pressure ridge, they made some 200 miles back to the ship in twelve days. Borup’s division went next and had the most problems with open leads. Held up by one and going around others, Borup wrote of crossing one on thin ice “swaying in waves beneath the sledges and ourselves” and the rear of a sledge breaking through another, “drenching everything.”89
Marvin had turned next, on March 25, with two Inuit sledge drivers, Kudlooktoo and Inukitsoq, but only the Inuits returned. They told the story that Marvin went ahead on foot one morning and broke through thin ice, from which Peary concocted a richer account of it happening at the Big Lead with Marvin scouting the way forward while the drivers broke camp and harnessed the dogs. Two decades later, after converting to Christianity, Kudlooktoo confessed to shooting Marvin, allegedly for mistreating Inukitsoq and threatening to leave him behind. After so many years, no attempt was made to prosecute, and not everyone believed the story. For his part, at one point on his return journey, Bartlett fell through young ice with the air temperature at minus 32°F and was saved by his Inuit drivers, who rolled him in a musk-ox robe and carried him to the nearest igloo for warmth.
After reaching the Roosevelt in late April, Peary remained on board until the ship broke free of the ice in July and sailed south through Nares Strait. Stopping at Cape Saumarez to drop off Inuits from the expedition, Peary first heard that Frederick Cook had survived. Although surprising, this news alone did not trouble Peary—but that soon changed.
Mooring at Etah on August 17, Peary learned more from Harry Whitney, the wealthy American hunter who had wintered in Cook’s old hut, and the two members of the Roosevelt’s crew left there to guard supplies. Cook had returned to his hut four months earlier with two Inuits, Ahwelah and Etukishuk, claiming the pole. “Human beings could not be more unkempt,” Whitney recalled. “They were half starved and very thin.”90 Cook had crossed Ellesmere Island with a large band of drivers, dogs, and sledges in February 1908, this much Peary knew, and sent most back from Axel Heiberg Island’s Cape Hubbard. Now Cook claimed to have sledged with the two Inuits and their dogs over the sea ice from Cape Hubbard to the pole during April 1908. On their return trip, after the sea ice carried them too far west, the three men rounded Ellesmere Island on the south, wintered in an underground den at Devon Island, and lived off the land until they could march back to Etah, by this time with one sledge and no dogs. Entrusting Whitney with his records, Cook carried on south toward the Danish outpost of Upernavik, where on August 9, 1909, he boarded a passenger ship bound for Copenhagen.
Certain that Cook could not have made such a journey, Peary took immediate countermeasures. “To us, up there at Etah, such a story was so ridiculous and absurd that we simply laughed at it,” Henson wrote. He knew Cook from two prior expeditions and, like Peary, considered “him not even good for a day’s work.”91 Bartlett called it “utterly impossible.” He knew the perils of polar travel from two prior expeditions and, like Peary, believed Cook could not “have crossed a thousand miles of Polar Sea ice without supporting parties.”92 Peary ordered a team led by Bartlett to obtain testimony from Ahwelah and Etukishuk, who readily recanted. They never ventured onto the Arctic ice pack with Cook, they now said, and their one seaward march from Cape Hubbard ended on the glacial fringe in clear sight of land. Peary also barred Whitney from taking Cook’s records back with him on the Roosevelt.
In what became something of a race to the media if not to the pole, Cook first reached a telegraph station on September 1, five days before Peary. He broadcast his claim around the globe via the New York Herald before Peary could report to his mouthpiece, the New York Times. Defending his priority at the pole, Peary faced an uncertain homecoming.
AS THESE SURPRISING EVENTS were unfolding in the Arctic, the Duke of the Abruzzi started his expedition’s trek home from the eastern Karakoram on July 20. Traveling faster than either American, and with abundant resources for a summertime trek back to Kashmir and beyond, the duke reached Italy before Peary or Cook arrived in the United States. He was at home by September to hear the first public announcement of Peary’s achievement.
“May I congratulate you on the result of your expedition,” the duke wired
Peary. “Am very glad you have succeeded.” Peary may have bested the Italians’ farthest north, but now the duke held the altitude record, and a front-page article in the New York Times printing his telegram noted both points.93
The Italians’ march home began by retracing their route over the Baltoro Glacier to their supply base at Urdukas and from there to Askoley. Rain continued most of the way, with rivers of water eroding the ice and even more stones covering the surface than before, making the path tortuous and tiring. One hundred Balti porters came from Askoley to Urdukas to assist in withdrawing the expedition’s equipment and provide a royal welcome for the mountaineers. “All manner of luxuries were waiting for us” in Urdukas, Filippo De Filippi wrote in the expedition’s official report, “chief among them, to our minds, being a bath of deliciously hot water.”94 Urdukas itself was abloom with flowers, the only bright spot on the initial part of the return journey. The broad valley beyond, when they reached it, was still barren despite the rushing torrent of the river that now ran through it. Monsoon rains and glacial meltwater had transformed the valley almost beyond recognition. Having ascended its dry, sandy floor in late May, on the descent in midsummer the caravan of Italian climbers and Balti porters hugged the valley’s edges and crossed tributary gorges on rope bridges. Local officials turned out to welcome the duke to Askoley, with the last half hour into town “lined with bowing and saluting,” De Filippi reported.95
The season permitted the returning party to cut the long trek from Askoley to the Kashmiri capital of Srinagar in half by using mountain passes open only in late summer. These high passes provided the final challenges for the duke’s expedition because from Srinagar in summer the route into British India was a virtual highway for vacationers escaping the heat.
To the Edges of the Earth Page 28