10.Raymond Priestley, “Diaries of the British Antarctic Expedition,” January 1–8, 1908, MS 298/1/1, SPRI.
11.Ernest Shackleton, The Heart of the Antarctic: The Story of the British Antarctic Expedition, 1907–1909 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1909), 1:40.
12.Fred Jacka and Eleanore Jacka, eds., Mawson’s Antarctic Diaries, January 10, 1908 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988), 5. Mawson gave the room’s dimensions as “24 ft x 6 ft”; David gave them as “about 15 ft by 8 ft by 8 ft”; but of the two, only Mawson was assigned to live in it. Compare with Edgeworth David, “With Shackleton,” Sydney Morning Herald, March 21, 1908.
13.Shackleton, Heart of the Antarctic, 1:39.
14.Edgeworth David, “With Shackleton,” Sydney Morning Herald, March 23, 1908.
15.Jacka and Jacka, Mawson’s Antarctic Diaries, January 1, 1908.
16.Shackleton, Heart of the Antarctic, 1:41–42.
17.“With the Nimrod,” Sydney Morning Herald, February 5, 1908 (excerpts from Shackleton’s diary for the voyage).
18.Edgeworth David, “With Shackleton,” Sydney Morning Herald, March 23, 1908.
19.Eric Marshall, Diary of the British Antarctic Expedition, January 9, 1908, MS 1456/8 D, SPRI.
20.Jacka and Jacka, Mawson’s Antarctic Diaries, January 2–9 and 10, 1908, 4–5.
21.Marshall, Diary, January 9, 1908.
22.Arthur E. Harbord, Diary of the British Antarctic Expedition, January 8, 1908, quoted in Riffenburgh, Shackleton’s Forgotten Expedition, 145.
23.“The Nimrod’s Return,” Maitland Weekly Mercury (New South Wales), March 14, 1908 (printing a report from Shackleton).
24.Edgeworth David, “With Shackleton,” Sydney Morning Herald, March 24, 1908. David also wrote that Buckley “loves adventure”.
25.“Letter from Professor David,” Scone Advocate (New South Wales), February 4, 1908.
26.“With the Nimrod,” Sydney Morning Herald, February 5, 1908. The reporter went on to ask Cara David if she would have liked to accompany her husband on the expedition as she had for his expedition to Funafuti. “Yes,” she replied, “but I could not leave the children.”
27.Edgeworth David, “With Shackleton,” Sydney Morning Herald, March 23, 1908 and April 2, 1908.
28.“Professor David,” Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser, February 5, 1908.
29.“With the Nimrod,” Sydney Morning Herald, February 5, 1908.
30.Shackleton, Heart of the Antarctic, 1:63; Edgeworth David, “With Shackleton,” Sydney Morning Herald, March 25, 1908. In these passages, Shackleton estimated the width of the iceberg belt at 80 miles while David put it at 100 miles. Mawson placed it at 100 miles [Jacka and Jacka, Mawson’s Antarctic Diaries, January 16, 1908, 5].
31.Edgeworth David, “With Shackleton,” Sydney Morning Herald, March 25, 1908.
32.Shackleton, Heart of the Antarctic, 1:69.
33.Ibid., 1:69; Edgeworth David, “With Shackleton,” Sydney Morning Herald, March 26, 1908.
34.Edgeworth David, “With Shackleton,” Sydney Morning Herald, March 27, 1908; Ernest Shackleton to Emily Shackleton, January 26, 1908, MS 1537/2/16/3 D, SPRI. One historian noted that this letter went on to say, “I felt each mile that I went to the West was a horror to me,” but the bottom portion of the page where this sentence would logically appear is torn from the manuscript in the archives. In his private diary at the time and later in public, Eric Marshall chastised Shackleton for not doing more to keep his word to Scott about establishing his base at or near King Edward VII Land—writing in his diary, for example, that Shackleton “hasn’t got the guts of a louse, in spite of what he may say to the world on his return.” [Marshall, Diary, January 24, 1908, SPRI]. No other member of the expedition expressed this view, however, and various historians who have reviewed the episode side with Shackleton.
35.Shackleton, Heart of the Antarctic, 1:170.
36.Ibid., 1:174.
37.Ibid., 1:174.
38.T. W. Edgeworth David, “The Ascent of Mount Erebus,” in Aurora Australis, ed. E. H. Shackleton (Cape Royds: The Penguins, 1908), [11].
39.Ibid., [12–13].
40.Ibid., [15].
41.Ibid., [24–28].
42.Ibid., [31].
43.Marshall, Diary, March 10–11, 1908, SPRI.
44.[Ernest Shackleton], “Erebus,” in Aurora Australis, [95].
45.Ǽneas Mackintosh, Diary of the British Antarctic Expedition, February 1, 1908, quoted in Riffenburgh, Shackleton’s Forgotten Expedition, 159.
46.Shackleton, Heart of the Antarctic, 1:159.
47.See, for example, Douglas Mawson to Margery Fisher, [1956?], Mawson Papers, 5.1.54 (48 DM), South Australian Museum.
48.[Raymond E. Priestley], “Trials of a Messman,” in Aurora Australis, [51].
49.Philip Brocklehurst, Interview, December 16, 1955, MS 1456/64 D, SPRI.
50.Marshall, Diary, March 16, 1908, SPRI.
51.Depicting the spirit at winter quarters as “very good,” Brocklehurst gave full credit to Shackleton, whom he described as “very tactful and very genial.” Brocklehurst also praised Shackleton for picking suitable people and treating them equally. The only signs of trouble during the winter, Brocklehurst noted, were the incidents with Mackay, who he said “was very strong physically, but he was also very unreliable mentally.” Brocklehurst, Interview, December 16, 1955, SPRI.
52.Shackleton, Heart of the Antarctic, 1:232–33.
53.Ibid., 1:221–22.
54.Ibid., 1:231–32.
55.Ibid., 1:239–40.
56.Jameson Adams, Interview, October 5, 1955, MS 1436/63 D, SPRI.
57.Shackleton, Heart of the Antarctic, 1:238–39.
58.Ibid., 1:140.
Chapter 7: The Savage North
1.“Peary Off to Join His Ship at Sydney,” New York Times, July 9, 1908.
2.With respect to his 1908–09 expedition, for example, Peary used this term in Robert E. Peary, “The Discovery of the North Pole,” Hampton’s Magazine, June 1910, 780.
3.Robert E. Peary, The North Pole: Its Discovery in 1909 Under the Auspices of the Peary Arctic Club (New York: Greenwood Press, 1910), 20.
4.Ibid., xi.
5.Compare Robert E. Peary to George Borup, June 14, 1908, Robert E. Peary Papers, Letters and Telegrams Sent 1908, P/1/box 11, National Archives (hereafter cited as Peary Papers), with Robert E. Peary to George Borup, June 16, 1908, Peary Papers: “I have $40,000 of the needed $50,000 now assured. I must ask you to draw your own inference from this as to whether the expedition is likely to start or not.”
6.Peary, North Pole, 108. Along this line, Peary wrote, “The gradual breaking in of the new men is one of the purposes of the short [sledge] trips in the fall. They have to become inured to such minor discomforts as frosted toes, and ears, and noses, as well as losing their dogs.” [Peary, “Discovery,” March 1910, 507.]
7.Matthew A. Henson, A Negro Explorer at the North Pole (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1912), 17, 64.
8.Robert E. Peary, “Moving on the North Pole,” McClure’s Magazine, March 1899, 418.
9.Robert E. Peary, “Address of the President of the Congress,” Report of the Eighth International Geographical Congress (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1905), 79.
10.Robert E. Peary, “Peary’s Plans for 1905–06,” National Geographic Magazine 15 (1904): 425.
11.Peary, “Discovery,” January 1910, 16. This series of articles, the first full-length account appearing under Peary’s name after his return from the pole, was ghostwritten by a female writer, Elsa Barker, who had previously penned a highly gendered poem comparing Peary’s quest for the North Pole with King Arthur’s quest for the Holy Grail, in which the pole was depicted as a virgin that needed to be conquered by violence. [Elsa Barker, “Frozen Grail,” New York Times, July 7, 1908.]
12.See, for example, Peary, North Pole, 48, 62.
13.Ibid., 60.
14.Ibid., 35, 100.
15.Peary, “Discovery,” January 1910,
21.
16.Peary, North Pole, 41.
17.Ibid., 29–31, for example.
18.Robert Peary, quoted in Wally Herbert, The Noose of Laurels: Robert E. Peary and the Race to the North Pole (New York: Atheneum, 1989), 15; Pierre Berton, The Arctic Grail: The Quest for the North West Passage and the North Pole, 1818–1909 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1988), 527.
19.Peary, “Discovery,” February 1910, 161, 173.
20.Peary, North Pole, 32.
21.Ibid., 44.
22.Henson, A Negro Explorer, 30.
23.Peary, “Discovery,” January 1910, 24; Peary, “Discovery,” February 1910, 169.
24.Rudolph Franke, Erkebbusse eines Deutschen im hoben Norden (Hamburg: Janssen, 1914), 71, as translated into English in Robert M. Bryce, Cook & Peary: The Polar Controversy, Resolved (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1997), 328. Bryce’s book is the most complete and definitive account of Cook’s polar expedition.
25.Ibid., 127 (also reprinted with correction of transcription errors in Bryce, Cook & Peary, 329).
26.Henson, A Negro Explorer, 26.
27.Peary explained his purposes in a letter to his wife: “I have landed supplies here, & leave two men ostensibly on behalf of Cook. As a matter of fact, I have established here the sub-base which last time I established at Victoria Head.” [Robert E. Peary to Josephine D. Peary, August 17, 1908, Josephine D. Peary Papers, Family Correspondence, P/4/box 4, National Archives.]
28.“Fear Explorer Cook Is Lost in Arctic,” New York Times, October 5, 1908.
29.In his final account of his expedition, Peary added, “A single party, comprising either a small or a large number of men and dogs, could not possibly drag (in gradually lessening quantities) all the way to the Pole and back (some nine hundred odd miles) as much food and liquid fuel as the men and the dogs of that party would consume during the journey.” [Peary, North Pole, 206.] This passage does not appear in the earlier magazine version of his account.
30.For example, even the pro-Peary New York Times ran a feature article on Cook. “Here the imagination wanders in doubt,” the sympathetic piece said of Cook’s fate. “If Dr. Cook reached the Pole did he succeed in returning to the north Greenland coast?” “A Lost Artic Explorer and His Chance of Rescue,” The New York Times Sunday Magazine, November 8, 1908.
31.Ross Marvin to L. C. Bement, August 15, 1908, in Bruce Henderson, True North: Peary, Cook, and the Race to the Pole (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 210.
32.“Letters to Peary Contradict Osbon,” New York Times, November 16, 1908. Peary also urged the club to bill Bradley for the wages of the two seamen Peary left behind at Etah, calling them “a proper charge against Mr. Bradley” since they were ostensibly left to protect Cook’s relinquished supplies and aid Cook should he return. [Robert E. Peary to Herbert L. Bridgman, August 17, 1908, Letters and Telegrams Sent 1908, P/1/box 11, Peary Papers.] “Out of consideration of her difficult position,” as he put it, Peary did not want the costs to fall on Cook’s wife, however. [Robert E. Peary to Herbert L. Bridgman, May 12, 1908, Letters and Telegrams Sent 1908, Peary Papers.]
33.“The Denmark Greenland Expedition,” Times (London), August 17, 1908 (“The coast line took a much more easterly direction than was expected”); “The Erichsen Greenland Expedition,” Times (London), August 7, 1908 (“Their provisions being exhausted, the explorers became so weak that they were unable to return to the station”).
34.“Give Me My Father’s Bones!” World Magazine, January 6, 1907, 3.
35.“Why Arctic Explorer Peary’s Neglected Eskimo Boy Wants to Shoot Him,” San Francisco Examiner, May 9, 1909.
36.Josephine D. Peary to Robert E. Peary, July 16, 1909, Family Correspondence, P/8/box 1, Peary Papers.
37.Prior to leaving Etah, Peary wrote to his wife, “The Cook circumstances have given me a good deal of extra work and trouble; but have worked out satisfactorily.” He closed the letter with an affectionate reference that captured their marital alliance: “We have been great chums dear.” [Robert to Josephine Peary, August 17, 1908, Peary Papers.]
38.Peary, North Pole, 92.
39.Peary, “Discovery,” February 1910, 340.
40.Ibid., 346.
41.Peary, North Pole, 125. Peary put the number of persons on the ship at sixty-nine. [Ibid., 88.] With twenty non-Inuits on board (after two were left at Etah to guard supplies), this would put the number of Inuits at forty-nine. Henson put the number at thirty-nine. [Henson, A Negro Explorer, 49.]
42.My discussion with Robert M. Bryce, author of Cook & Peary and an expert on Peary archival material, confirmed that Peary did not talk about God or religion except in nominal terms anywhere in his archived letters, though Bryce did note Peary’s belief in signs and omens. I found nominal references to God in Peary’s letters to key supporters who believed in God, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Morris K. Jesup. For example, Robert E. Peary to Theodore Roosevelt, 1908 telegram, Letters and Telegrams Sent 1908, Peary Papers (“Thank you and God bless you, Peary”).
43.Peary, “Discovery,” March 1910, 504.
44.Ibid., 514.
45.Peary, North Pole, 146–48.
46.Ibid., 157, 165.
47.Henson, A Negro Explorer, 50.
48.Ibid., 75.
49.Peary, “Discovery,” April 1910, 662.
50.Henson, A Negro Explorer, 44.
51.Peary, North Pole, 170–71.
52.Henson, A Negro Explorer, 30.
53.Peary, “Discovery,” May 1910, 773.
54.Henson, A Negro Explorer, 53.
55.Peary, North Pole, 214. Peary wrote that one of his “essentials of success” was “to have an intelligent and willing body of civilized assistants to lead the various divisions of Eskimos—men whose authority the Eskimos will accept when delegated by the leader.” [Ibid., 202.]
56.Henson, A Negro Explorer, 67, 73–74.
Chapter 8: Poles Apart
1.Ernest Shackleton, Diary of the Southern Journey, October 29, 1908, MS 1456/10 D, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK (hereafter cited as SPRI). Written when the southern party departed, this diary entry expressly refers only to the geographic pole but logically applied to both. The version of this diary entry that Shackleton published deleted these words.
2.E. H. Shackleton, The Heart of the Antarctic: Being the Story of the British Antarctic Expedition, 1907–1909 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1909), 2:73.
3.Ibid., 2:74.
4.In his authoritative book about the Nimrod Expedition, polar historian Beau Riffenburgh characterizes David’s behavior as passive-aggressive. [Beau Riffenburgh, Shackleton’s Forgotten Expedition: The Voyage of the Nimrod (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 237.]
5.T. W. Edgeworth David, “Professor David’s Narrative,” in Shackleton, Heart of the Antarctic, 2:80.
6.Ibid., 2:83, 85.
7.Fred Jacka and Eleanore Jacka, eds., Mawson’s Antarctic Diaries, October 5–6, 1908 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988), 9.
8.Ibid., October 8, 20, 29 and November 23, 1908, 9, 12, 15, 24, 25.
9.David, “Professor David’s Narrative,” 2:127.
10.Jacka and Jacka, Mawson’s Antarctic Diaries, October 29 and November 24, 1908, 16, 25.
11.Ibid., October 29, 1908, 16.
12.Ibid., November 22 and 30, 1908, 24, 27.
13.Ibid., November 3, 1908 and January 6, 1909, 17, 36.
14.Joy Pitman, ed., The Diary of A. Forbes Mackay, 1908–09, January 12, 1909 (Jaffrey, NH: Erebus & Terror Press, 2015), 8.
15.Jacka and Jacka, Mawson’s Antarctic Diaries, January 6, 1909, 37.
16.Pitman, Diary of Mackay, December 4, 1908, 3.
17.David, “Professor David’s Narrative,” 2:135, 142.
18.“The Gentle Professor,” Evening News (Sydney), April 17, 1909.
19.Pitman, Diary of Mackay, December 10–11, 1908, 4.
20.Ibid., December 14, 1908, 4.
21.Ernest Shackleton to Emily Shackleton, October 29,
1908, MS 1537/2/18/7 D, SPRI.
22.Shackleton, Diary, October 29, 1908, MS 1456/10 D, SPRI.
23.Shackleton, Heart of the Antarctic, 1:289, 294.
24.Ibid., 1:278, 281.
25.Ibid., 1:289–90.
26.Ibid., 1:270.
27.Frank Wild, “Memoirs,” typescript, Frank Wild Papers, MLMSS 2198, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, 78.
28.Shackleton, Heart of the Antarctic, 1:285.
29.Ibid., 1:286.
30.Frank Wild, Diary of the Southern Journey, November 21, 1908, MS 944/1 D, SPRI, reprinted in Leif Mills, Frank Wild (Whitby, UK: Caedmon of Whitby, 1999), 78.
31.Ibid.
32.Eric Marshall, Diary of the British Antarctic Expedition, November 7, 1908, MS 1456/8 D, SPRI.
33.Shackleton, Heart of the Antarctic, 1:282.
34.Ernest Shackleton, “Full Narrative,” Daily Mail (London), March 24, 1909.
35.Wild, Diary, November 3, 1908, 73.
36.Shackleton, Heart of the Antarctic, 1:291–92.
37.Marshall, Diary, December 14, 1908. Some readings of this passage decipher the last word as “panicking.” Compare Riffenburgh, Shackleton’s Forgotten Expedition, 223 (“pausing”) with Roland Huntford, Shackleton (New York: Atheneum, 1986), 263 (“panicking”). The typed transcript at the SPRI archives clearly states “pausing.”
38.Ibid., December 2, 1908.
39.Shackleton, Heart of the Antarctic, 1:303.
40.Wild, Diary, December 3, 1908, 82.
41.Marshall, Diary, December 3, 1908.
42.E. S. Marshall, “An Antarctic Episode,” Medical Press and Circular, December 8, 1943, 359.
43.Shackleton, Heart of the Antarctic, 1:299.
44.Ibid., 1:310.
45.E. H. Shackleton, “Some Results of the British Antarctic Expedition, 1907–9,” Geographical Journal 34 (1909): 489.
46.Shackleton, Heart of the Antarctic, 2:13–14.
47.Shackleton, “Full Narrative,” Daily Mail (London), March 24, 1909.
48.Shackleton, Heart of the Antarctic, 2:4.
49.Wild, “Memoirs,” 83.
50.Wild, Diary, December 6–7, 1908, 84–85.
51.Wild, “Memoirs,” 83–84.
52.Wild, Diary, December 12, 1908, 88.
53.Wild, “Memoirs,” 84.
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