Peary left Manhattan on 16 July 1905 aboard the Roosevelt, a specially constructed, 1,000-horsepower, prototype icebreaker. Its captain was Bob Bartlett, an irascible but competent Arctic hand, who had commanded Peary’s ship on the 1898–1902 expedition. Below decks were 12 crew and a scientist named Ross Marvin, who were later joined by 200 dogs and 50 Inuit men, women and children. Barging through the floes, the Roosevelt navigated Robeson Channel and reached its winter resting place, Cape Sheridan, on 5 September. Cape Sheridan was some two miles north of Nares’s 1875 anchorage, but it was not the spot from which Peary intended to depart for the Pole; that was Point Moss, one of the northernmost headlands of Ellesmere Island. Throughout the winter the expedition prepared itself for the epic journey: the Inuit men hunted whenever possible, and their wives made the boots, leggings and furs that would be needed on the ice. In February 1906 Peary ordered the first parties to move out. Throughout that month the sledge parties shuttled to and fro, from Cape Sheridan to Point Moss and from Point Moss out onto the frozen Arctic Sea. The advance teams led by Henson smashed a route through the hummocks and ridges, and the support teams came in their wake, laying down caches of food at 50-mile intervals. When Peary himself reached Point Moss on 5 March to bring up the rear of the column, there were no less than 28 men and 120 dogs moving through the polar twilight towards the North Pole.
They reached their first major obstacle on 26 March, 124 miles from Point Moss. Here, where the continental shelf dropped into deeper waters, the pack was split by a stretch of open water that Peary called the ‘Big Lead’. For seven infuriating days they waited by the Big Lead until the temperature fell, a film of ice materialized, and they were able to continue for the Pole. Three days later, however, they were pinned down for another week by a blizzard so fierce that it was sometimes impossible to stand upright. By now the support teams had all turned back for Cape Sheridan, leaving Peary and Henson accompanied by six Inuit. It was obvious that the supplies they carried could not last the two months Peary estimated it would take to reach the Pole, but if they could not snatch the ultimate prize they could at least claim a furthest north. On 13 April Peary abandoned everything but essentials and raced north with his men. A week later they stood at 87° 06’ N, having bettered the Italian record by 36 miles. Exhausted though they were, they did not stop to rest but turned immediately for home. ‘As I looked at the drawn faces of my comrades,’ Peary wrote, ‘I felt I had cut the margin as narrow as could reasonably be expected.’
The drift had by now carried them so far to the east, and their supplies were so low, that Peary decided not to follow his outward path but to cut down the 50th meridian to Greenland, on whose game-rich coast they could recuperate before proceeding to Cape Sheridan. The return journey showed just how finely Peary had cut his margin. They reached the Big Lead and scrambled over a series of ice blocks that had conveniently drifted together to form a bridge. But two days later they met a second Big Lead, half a mile across. This time there was no bridge; nor, with summer approaching, was it likely that the water would freeze; their one hope was that the drift might bring the two sides together. But as they camped on the northern shore, roasting their dogs over fires made of redundant sledges, the lead showed no signs of closing; if anything it opened wider. Finally, by a stroke of fortune, the temperature fell far enough for a skin of ice to form. Under normal circumstances Peary would have waited for it to thicken, but he had no time to spare. The chance was there. He took it.
As he described it, the crossing was hair-raising. ‘Once started we could not stop, we could not lift our snowshoes. It was a matter of constantly and smoothly gliding one past the other with utmost care and evenness of pressure, and from every man as he slid a snowshoe forward, undulations went out in every direction through the thin film incrusting the black water. The sledge was preceded and followed by a broad swell. It was the first and only time in my Arctic work that I felt doubtful as to the outcome, but when near the middle of the lead the toe of my rear [boot] as I slid forward from it broke through twice in succession I thought to myself, “this is the finish,” and when a little while later there was a cry from someone in the line, the words sprang from me of themselves: “God help him, which one is it?” but I dared not take my eyes from the steady, even gliding of my snowshoes, and the fascination at the glossy swell at the toes of them.’ They crossed safely to the other side, but when they looked back they realized how close they had come to disaster. Behind them the Big Lead slowly began to open.
They were 113 miles from Greenland, and ahead of them was what Peary described as such ‘a hell of shattered ice as I have never seen before and hope never to see again’. Reduced to one sledge and dog team, they heaved and hauled their way through the wilderness. Then, very much to their surprise, on 9 July they met a group of four humans. They were one of Peary’s support parties that had turned back at the Big Lead; they had lost their way in a storm and were now cooking their last dogs over a fire made from their last sledges, before resigning themselves to death on an eastward-drifting pack that would eventually tip them into the Atlantic. Peary barely paused to hear their story before adding them to his team and driving the whole lot over the ice until they reached Greenland, from where they made the relatively easy passage to Cape Sheridan.
Whether Peary actually attained his furthest north is open to question. Experts have discovered a remarkable series of inconsistencies in his account, starting from 13 April when he made his dash for the record. Until then he had made six or seven miles per day. But over the next two days he claimed to have covered 60 miles, and from then until the 21st it was an average of 19 miles per day. How had he suddenly been able to go so fast, over bad ice (on one of his 30-mile days he encountered 11 leads) and in conditions no better than before? And when he reached his purported north he offered no calculations, and gave no proof to support his assertion. Had there been a trained navigator with him the story might have been different. But there was no such back-up. Indeed, he had specifically told Bartlett – who he had earlier promised could be part of the polar team – that he could not come with him. The return journey, too, is mysterious. How could Peary have travelled so far north and yet still have been able to catch up with a support team that had been walking south from the Big Lead since 26 March? The suspicion is that from 13 April to 9 June much of Peary’s account is a fabrication.
If Peary did lie about his journey it might explain his subsequent actions. Instead of returning to the States that summer, he spent a second winter at Cape Sheridan and embarked the following spring on a prolonged survey of Ellesmere Island’s northern coast. Having failed to achieve anything certain on the ice, he felt obliged to provide tangible proof of his presence on land. Outstripping (just) the efforts of the Nares and Greely expeditions, he reached a western cape that he named Colgate after one of his most influential sponsors. He recorded it with unseemly glee: ‘What I saw before me in all its splendid, sunlit savageness was mine, mine by the right of discovery, to be credited to me, and associated with my name, generations after I ceased to be.’ If he had already gone further north than any other human, why the desperate self-justification? And why, having reached Cape Colgate – which he undoubtedly did – did he feel the need to embellish his account? On 26 June 1907 he described a mountainous land to the north, whose summits he described with yearning. He called it Crocker Land after another of his sponsors. No such land existed, or ever has, as was revealed in 1914 when an expedition went specifically to find it. Peary may have been fooled by Arctic refraction; more likely Crocker Land was part of the wishful thinking that was beginning to epitomize his expeditions.
On returning to the Roosevelt, Peary found that it had been badly damaged by the ice: the rudder was broken, two of its four propellers had snapped and its hull was pocked with holes, some of them below the waterline. When the ship left Cape Sheridan in late summer 1906 it was, in Bartlett’s words, ‘a complete wreck’. Bartlett would have liked to steam dir
ectly south while his hasty repairs still held. But Peary had promised he would return the Inuit to their homes. As Bartlett said,’ [He] had given his word and he never broke it, so the thing was done. It is no wonder these people loved and respected Peary. No other man in the past or present can or will get these people to do what he did.’ However, no amount of admiration could disguise the ruinous state of the Roosevelt. Bereft of fuel, the crew burned the very beams of their ship, then went ashore to dynamite the frozen deposits of coal left by past expeditions, before finally stoking their furnace with seal and walrus blubber. Battered by floes, impeded by gales, leaking constantly, its makeshift rudder long since lost, the Roosevelt was unworkable by the time it reached ice-free waters. Only by heroic seamanship did Bartlett finally bring it to safety. At Cape Breton Island, in St Peter’s Canal, the Roosevelt charged into a mudbank, over a fence and into a field, where a hysterical milkmaid ran in horror, followed by her cows. In Bartlett’s words, the ship and its crew were ‘ready for the insane asylum or the dump heap’.
For all his claims to a new furthest north, and for all the horrors and excitement of the expedition, Peary was once again a failure. His backers were disappointed and the public was indifferent. He had hoped to make at least $100,000 dollars from his published journal, but so scant was popular interest that he was unable even to pay off his $5,000 advance. The President was more understanding and granted him another three years’ leave in which to finish the job. This time, however, the money was harder to find. What guarantee did people have that Peary would be any more successful than he had been before? In fact, was the Pole even worth finding? Gradually, though, the funds trickled in. The Peary Club stumped up tens of thousands of dollars and, by emphasizing not only the patriotic but the commercial advantages of being associated with his quest, Peary was able to raise still more in sponsorship deals. By July 1908, with the Roosevelt repaired and strengthened, Peary sailed once more for Smith Sound.
It was his strongest, most powerful expedition yet (as well as Henson, Bartlett, Marvin and most of the crew from his last trip, he also took three Americans chosen specifically for their fitness) but it was underpinned by a sense of desperation. Peary was in his fifties, and after two decades in the Arctic even his granite physique was beginning to show the strain. Whatever happened, this would be his last voyage to the north. There was also another source of worry: Peary had a rival. His name was Dr Frederick Cook, and he was already on his way to the Pole.
Cook was one of the up-and-coming stars of American exploration. Having served with Peary on his 1891–2 expedition, he had since led several expeditions of his own to Greenland, had taken part in the 1898–9 Belgica expedition to Antarctica, and in 1906 had climbed Mount McKinley, North America’s highest peak. Charming, easygoing and unflappable, he was liked by all. The Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, who had been with him on the Belgica, described him as ‘a man of unfaltering courage, unfailing hope, endless cheerfulness and unwearied kindness’. In July 1907 he went to Greenland with a wealthy sponsor named John Bradley, ostensibly for a few weeks’ game hunting. But at the end of the summer Bradley returned alone. Cook had decided to stay for an attempt at the Pole.
To Peary, who considered the Pole his own private domain, this was an unforgivable breach of etiquette. As he told the press before his departure, Cook’s plan ‘for the admitted purpose of forestalling me [is] one of which no man possessing a sense of honour would be guilty’. His indignation, however, meant nothing. Cook was out there and, unless Peary moved fast, might indeed forestall him. Luckily, Peary could move very fast. Pausing briefly at Etah to annexe Cook’s stash of game trophies, he pushed on to Cape Sheridan, which he reached on 5 September 1908. The supplies were unloaded, the crates being formed into houses that could hold his crew, 69 Inuit and 246 dogs for the winter. For more than a quarter of a mile the coast was strewn with box-huts, piles of coal and crate upon crate of provisions. It was, for the Arctic, a small city.
The plan was the same as last time, except that the sledge parties would depart from Cape Columbia, marginally further north than Point Moss, where during the winter they constructed a second city of boxes. By 1 March 1909 Peary was on the ice, and the trailblazers led by Henson and Bartlett were smashing a route for the 19 sledges, 24 men and 133 dogs that followed behind. They met the Big Lead, waited a week for it to close, then pressed on, Peary calling urgently for more fuel from his support teams. The fuel (vital for melting water) was delivered by Marvin, ‘men and dogs steaming like a squadron of battleships’, who accompanied them for a short distance before turning back.* By 28 March Peary had reached his (supposed) furthest north and was ploughing through unknown territory. ‘I had believed that the thing could be done and that my destiny was to do it,’ he exulted. On 31 March they were at 87° 47’ N. This was Bartlett’s calculation. On 1 April Peary sent Bartlett home. Despite having promised once again that he could go to the Pole, Peary decided that he was too junior and had put in too little Arctic time to be worthy of the honour. Or so he said. Maybe it was an excuse to be rid of a man who knew how to take readings with a sextant. On 6 April 1909 Peary was at the Pole. From a series of 13 separate observations he calculated that they were at 89° 57’ N. He therefore continued north until he was certain that he had passed 90° N, raised the Stars and Stripes and formally took possession of the Pole and the surrounding region in the name of the President of the United States. ‘The prize of 3 centuries, my dream and ambition for 23 years,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Mine at last! I cannot bring myself to realize it.’
They rested at the Pole for 24 hours, then began the journey home at 4.00 p.m. on 7 April. On the 9th they were at the camp where they had parted company with Bartlett, having covered the intervening distance of 133 miles in just 56 hours. By 23 April they were at Cape Columbia. Four days later they were safely aboard the Roosevelt. ‘My life work is accomplished,’ Peary exulted. ‘The thing which it was intended from the beginning that I should do, the thing which I believed could be done, and that I could do, I have done ... This work is the finish, the cap and climax of nearly four hundred years of effort, loss of life, and expenditure of fortunes by the civilized nations of the world, and it has been accomplished in a way that is thoroughly American. I am content.’
His contentment did not last long. In mid-August, when the Roosevelt reached Etah, he heard an unwelcome piece of news. Dr Frederick Cook had beaten him to the North Pole. Departing from Etah early in 1908, Cook had travelled via Axel Heiberg Island, west of Ellesmere Island, and then had sledged north with a few Inuit until he reached the Pole on 21 April 1908. Above Ellesmere Island he had seen a body of land (as Peary had done on his last expedition) and had spent the rest of 1908 trying to find it before returning to Axel Heiberg Island; thence, having survived a winter in stoneage conditions, he had made his way the following spring to Etah, from where he had travelled overland to the Greenland port of Upernavik. He had an American witness to prove that he had been to Axel Heiberg Island, and that he had made the journey from Etah to Upernavik, and although he had no witnesses to show that he had been to the Pole during the spring of 1908 he had certainly been somewhere. And why should that somewhere not be the Pole? In the absence of proof (proof being taken as the presence of white men) his claim was as valid as Peary’s.
Peary, whose polar career had been spent in defiance of competitors, had, to use one of his favourite words, been forestalled. He had been forestalled not by a day or a week but by almost 12 months. And he had been forestalled not by a recognized polar giant, such as Roald Amundsen, Robert Scott or Ernest Shackleton, to whom he had often been compared, but by a relative newcomer. Cook was the name on everyone’s lips. From New York to Copenhagen, he was feted as a hero. People mobbed him to grab a button, a cuff or a hat. He was awarded gold medals and was congratulated by learned societies throughout the world.
Immediately, Peary and his supporters launched a counterattack. Where were Cook’s journals? Where wer
e his calculations, his observations, and the instruments with which he had made them? Where was his proof? Cook fumbled and stuttered. His journals were with the authorities in Copenhagen. No, they were with a friend in America. No, only some were with the friend. In fact he, Cook, had all the papers but he needed a few months to make them ready for scrutiny. But he had also left valuable records and instruments at Etah, so perhaps he should be allowed a few more months in which to retrieve them. Actually, when he thought about it, all his papers were under guard in an iron-bound chest to prevent them being stolen by his detractors. When the records were eventually presented for inspection they consisted of 77 typed pages and no diary. ‘No schoolboy could make such calculations,’ fumed one explorer. ‘It is a most childish attempt at cheating.’ But his real diary was on its way, said Cook; his wife was bringing it in secret. The neatly handwritten diary duly arrived and was branded as a manufacture from beginning to end. When Cook produced photographs of his polar journey it was discovered that they were cropped versions of ones he had taken six years previously in Greenland. To cap it all, evidence emerged to prove that Cook had lied about his 1906 ascent of Mount McKinley: he had got nowhere near the summit, but had photographed himself standing on a much lower hill that had the same outline. Cook fled to South America. On his return to America he became an oil-field salesman and was jailed for fraud (though he was later pardoned when the ‘fraudulent’ oil field struck rich).
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