Ernest Hemingway once said about his writings, “If the book is good, is about something you know, and is truly written, and reading it over you see that this is so, you can let the boys yip.” Then the noise of yipping “will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow, and you are in your own cabin that you have built and paid for with your work.”
Every few years since April 1909 when Commander Robert E. Peary of the U. S. Navy became “the first . . . human being who . . . ever led a party of his fellow-creatures to a Pole of the Earth,”[*] someone has come forth in public print to doubt or deny that he so.
Since all such writings have necessarily been based on fragmentary data taken out of context and shaped to make their authors’ points, while ignoring facts which fail to fit that shape, they have attracted little mention and, with rare exceptions, have not been considered worthy of response. The latest effort of this kind is an article entitled “Peary and the North Pole—the Lingering Doubt” published in the June 1970 issue of the Naval Institute Proceedings.
The nature of the Proceedings—i.e., as a “forum”—and the fact that the majority of its readers are naval officers with a natural and special, understandable pride in the Discoverer of the North Pole require that, if there is any “lingering doubt,” it be put to rest.
On the first day of March 1909, when Peary departed Cape Columbia at the northern tip of Ellesmere Island for his final attack on the Pole, he had been vigorously active in Arctic exploration for 23 years. He was without question more experienced, knowledgeable, and proficient in the demanding and esoteric skills of Arctic travel and navigation than any man then living or any man since.
By the imaginative application of his engineering knowledge to the proven Eskimo techniques of travel and survival in the Arctic, by earning the confidence and respect of those Eskimos, and by virtue of his own iron determination and physical stamina, he had been able in those 23 years, in eight separate expeditions lasting a total of 12 full years, to sledge some nine or ten thousand miles across the ice caps and frozen seas of the far North. In the course of those expeditions, he had, among other accomplishments, mapped hundreds of miles of previously uncharted coasts. He had determined for the first time, by exploring its northern shore, that Greenland is an island. He had twice crossed the 6,000-foot-high Greenland ice cap using dog sleds for the first time on that high desert. He had established a record for the Western Hemisphere by sledging out across the Arctic Ocean in 1902 to 84° 17’ North Latitude, and established a new “farthest north” for mankind by approaching to within 174 nautical miles of the North Pole in 1906. He had also discovered and returned to the United States in the 300-ton, wooden SS Hope a 34-ton iron meteorite, the largest ever recovered by man. The extraction of the meteorite from its bed of 10,000 years and the return voyage in the Hope, whose compass was made useless by her cargo, has been called “one of the ablest, most resourceful and courageous affairs of its kind in the annals of arctic exploration.”
And Peary had come to the Arctic originally a trained and experienced civil engineer whose most recent assignment had been the direction of detailed surveys for an inter-ocean, sea-level canal through Nicaragua.
As a result of his distinguished accomplishments, Peary, in March 1909, was the holder of seven gold medals awarded by the major geographic societies of the world.
He had been granted leave by the U. S. Navy for this final expedition because he was considered by his government to be the best man in the field.
The President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, came down to the ship, which bore his name, to see Peary off. His parting words were “I believe in you, Peary, and I believe in your success if it is within the possibility of man.”
Thus Peary had already received, before the Roosevelt ever left her Brooklyn berth that summer of 1908, all the recognition, all the honors for his Arctic work that any man could hope for. This climactic assault on the Pole was in response to a deeply personal challenge at the core of the man himself. He felt very strongly, as he had written earlier, that “The true explorer does his work not for any hopes of reward or honor, but because the thing he has set himself to do is a part of his being . . . .”
The thing Robert Peary had set himself to do was the discovery of the North Pole of the Earth.
Now nearing 53 years of age and with only a part of the small toe remaining on each foot (he kept those as samples, he said) as a result of freezing and amputation years before, Peary applied to this final effort all the hard-won knowledge, all the special skills of nearly a quarter century of single-minded concentration and of 12 years and 10,000 miles on the ice. His plan was as precise and detailed as an operations order for a major engagement with a human enemy, and, to execute that plan, he had assembled the best men, the best dogs, the best sledges, the best equipment and supplies it was in his power to provide.
His force consisted of 24 men, 133 dogs and 19 sledges. They were divided into six units, each led and navigated by an expedition member supported by three Eskimos driving teams of six to eight dogs harnessed fan-wise. Most sledges carried 650-pound loads. Each man on the outbound trip was allowed each day a pound of pemmican, a pound of biscuit, four ounces of condensed milk, half an ounce of compressed tea, and six ounces of fuel for the alcohol stove carried by each party. Each dog received a pound of dog pemmican per day. Each returning unit was allotted only half the outgoing food and fuel ration because of the relative ease of travel over the broken return trail.
Peary’s plan called for the six units to be grouped into two parties, a pioneer party and a main party. The pioneer party was a single unit of four men with the best dogs and lightly loaded sledges. Its duty was to reconnoiter and break trail a day’s march ahead. As men and dogs became tired as a result of the heavy extra work, they were to be replaced by fresh ones from the main party.
As food and fuel were consumed, one party at a time would turn over all supplies not required for the homeward trip and return to land. Returning parties were instructed to be scrupulous in following the outgoing trail and to knit it together by their passage wherever the shifting ice had caused a break.
Peary’s objective was to arrive at a point within 150 nautical miles of the Pole with a final, picked unit, relatively fresh, well provisioned and well equipped. After the Pole had been reached, that unit would then have a beaten trail to follow and ready-built igloos for shelter all the way back to land.
An essential part of the plan was to spend only that time at the Pole itself which was required to take the necessary observations and rest both men and dogs. The long, close look he had taken into the face of death by starvation on the north shore of the Big Lead three years before remained branded on his memory. It was not enough that he reach the Pole. He must also get back to land before the spring breakup made the ice impassable.
Navigation would be by dead reckoning confirmed by solar observations required about every five marches. Five marches usually averaged out to about one degree of latitude or 60 nautical miles. Peary and his assistants were sufficiently experienced in travel over the sea ice so that the mean of their estimated positions was nearly always very close to that obtained by the confirming observations.
At temperatures running from 20 to 60 below, in high winds and blowing snow, with the glare of the sun on the unrelieved white of the ice pack so intense that the observer’s eyes are bloodshot and painful for hours after a sight, with the necessity to build a snow-block wind-shelter, warm up a mercury artificial horizon and lie flat on one’s belly on the ice to do so, one does not undertake unnecessary observations.
Peary had no qualms about navigation. He had been navigating in the Arctic for almost a quarter-century with unqualified and unquestioned success and would simply continue to do so.
On that first day of March when Peary crawled out of his igloo at Cape Columbia, stood up in the whistling east wind and looked northward into the gray haze of the Polar Sea, he had behind him six months of preparation since he and Bartlett had forced the Roosevelt to her winter quarters at Cape Sheridan the previous September.
During the long autumn twilight they had hunted caribou, reindeer, musk-ox, bear, walrus, seal and narwhal for meat to see them through the winter and for skins for clothing. During the months-long night of Arctic winter the Eskimo women had made clothing for the polar parties. Supplies had been sledged during moonlight from Cape Sheridan to Cape Columbia. The new men had been trained in igloo building and dog driving, and all equipment had been worked over and was in optimum condition.
Peary himself had refined his logistics. He had filled pages with mathematical calculations of pounds of supplies required relative to miles of distance travelled. He experimented with the new alcohol stove he had designed specifically for this expedition, and he had worked over once more the whole vital problem of obtaining maximum effectiveness with minimum weight and bulk of equipment and supplies.
On the last day of February, Captain Bob Bartlett and young George Borup had set out with their respective divisions to break the beginning of the long poleward trail.
As Peary prepared to leave the land, the pioneer party was already on the ice.
Peary watched as division after division of his little Arctic army pulled out of the huddle of sledges and igloos on the shore and disappeared immediately into wind-driven haze to the northward. It was a twilight world without color, of only black, white, and various shades of gray.
The dog teams were shifting fans of black blobs ahead of the long, low sledges; the men vertical black blobs moving behind the high upstanders of each sledge. It was also a world with no noise except the basso howl of the freezing east wind which tore away every decibel of sound at its instant of creation and swept it downwind into oblivion.
The very weather which Peary found suitable for the launching of this most difficult of all possible journeys is a testimonial to his professionalism. The wind can be conservatively estimated at 50 knots; the temperature was in the minus fifties. The expedition’s medicinal brandy was continually frozen into slush. Kerosene turned white and viscid. Even the alcohol for the stoves had to be warmed before it would vaporize enough to light.
One by one the sledges negotiated the precipitous interface between the glacial ice of the land and the sea ice of the Arctic Ocean. But once on the sea ice there was a belt several miles wide of inevitably rough going. There the ebb and flow of the tides and the alternation of offshore and onshore winds had crushed ice into fragments of all sizes and shapes. These broken chunks of ice were piled into towering pressure ridges parallel to the shore and thus, unfortunately, lay directly across the path of the northbound sledges.
Despite the passage of lighter sledges before him and the liberal use of pick axes to break the trail, Peary’s party had to use its own axes freely to cross this “tidal crack” and gain the relatively easy going of the older floes to seaward.
So rugged was this icy jungle that several sledges, made brittle by the cold, were smashed beyond repair and several others required careful, extensive, and often bare-handed, work before going on.
Peary camped that first night in a ready-made igloo of Bartlett’s pioneer party ten miles to seaward, arriving just as the 12-hour twilight of the Arctic spring faded into full darkness. Later, he could write matter-of-factly about that day,
“I felt that if we encountered nothing worse than this in the first hundred miles from the land we should have no serious cause for complaint.”
From now until the final return to land, it was Peary’s plan and Peary’s judgment against the unpredictable hostility of the Polar Sea.
And that impersonal hostility was evidenced as early as the second day when a quarter-mile-wide lead of open water created by the sustained force of the rare east wind stopped all northward progress. But in the night the lead closed. Peary held Arctic reveille in the camp by pounding on the ice floor of his own igloo with a hatchet and got his men up and gear across.
Once out on the sea ice, Robert Peary had closed with the enemy and the combat was mortal. Always his strategy remained the same—the pioneering party breaking trail ahead, returning divisions on half rations keeping the trail open back to land and taking back with them the worst dogs, sledges and equipment, an observation every five marches to confirm the dead reckoning position. But the tactics were varied to meet each new situation as it arose.
As sledges gave way under the heavy loads and hard going they were either repaired with materials brought along for the purpose or cannibalized and combined.
When fuel was lost owing to the splitting and leaking of containers, a party was dispatched back to Cape Columbia to bring up fresh supplies.
When an Eskimo became nervous and unreliable under the stresses of the terrible journey, or a foot or a heel became dangerously frosted, the man was sent back to land. Always the best men, dogs, and gear were left on the ice to push northward, to spin out the fragile thread of trampled snow which would reach to the Pole and back.
But during the night of the third of March the wind suddenly reversed direction and the temperature soared from the minus fifties to only nine below, which to Peary “seemed almost oppressively warm.”
The effect of this dramatic break in the weather was to open up leads of black and frigid water all around the polar parties.
By nightfall of the fourth, the main party caught up with Captain Bartlett’s pioneers camped on the shores of a great river. What came to be known as the Big Lead was a barrier of open water about a quarter-mile wide and extending east and west as far as the eye could see. Above it hung an ominous black cloud born of the evaporating sea water recondensed by the frigid air and mixed and roiled by the wind.
For six almost unbearable days, in weather ideal for traveling, with dogs and men in fine shape and ready to go, Peary and his people were forced to sit on the edge of the lead consuming their invaluable supplies while they waited for the right combination of winds and currents to grind it closed. Despite the races and wrestling matches designed to keep their spirits up, some of the Eskimos lost their nerve, feigned illness, and were sent back. The only (literally) bright moments in that intolerable time of waiting were contained in those few hours around noon on the fifth of March when the sun lay like a giant yellow football on the horizon to the south. It was the first time any of those men now daring to challenge the Arctic’s secret heart had seen it since sunset on October first.
On the morning of the eleventh, the lead closed and the journey to the Pole resumed.
On the 14th, Doctor Goodsell started back for land with one sledge, two Eskimos, and a dozen dogs.
On the 15th, MacMillan headed home, earlier than planned because of his frosted heel, with two Eskimos, two sledges and 14 dogs.
On the 20th, Borup, also with a frosted heel, turned back from well across the 85th parallel with three Eskimos, one sledge, and 16 dogs.
At this point, subtracting the planned returnees and the two nervous Eskimos who had been sent back with their dogs and sledges from the Big Lead, the main party consisted of 12 men, 10 sledges and 80 dogs. With the higher latitudes and the advancing season there was continuous daylight. Peary changed his tactics slightly to take advantage of the altered situation.
The main party, consisting of Peary’s and Marvin’s divisions, remained in camp about 12 hours after the departure of the advance party which was made up of Bartlett’s and Henson’s divisions. The advance party made its march, built its igloos, and turned in. When the main party had covered that same march, the advance party resumed the journey while the main party turned into the freshly vacated igloos for needed rest. This kept the parties closer together, reduced the chances of separation by an opening lead and kept the commander in better touch with all his men.
On the 22nd, Marvin took a series of solar observations which placed the party at 85 degrees, 48 minutes North Latitude or 252 nautical miles south of the Pole.
An illustration of the accuracy of dead reckoning navigation by such experienced Arctic travelers as Peary, Bartlett, and Marvin is the fact that when Borup had turned back on the 20th, each man had recorded his estimate of the latitude of that point. Peary’s estimate was 85° 20’, Bartlett’s 85° 30’, and Marvin’s 85° 25’. Working backward from Marvin’s measurements of the 22nd, they determined that the actual latitude of Borup’s departure had been 85° 23’, just two miles off the mean estimate.
It was Peary’s policy that Marvin take the observations to his farthest north and then Bartlett to his, thus both saving Peary’s eyes for the final critical sights and getting a triple check for accuracy.
On the 25th, Marvin made his final observation before heading south the following morning. The observed latitude was 86° 38’, 202 nautical miles south of the Pole.
As he started north again on the morning of the 26th, Peary was already farther north than any man, except for Bartlett and Henson, who were breaking trail ahead, and he himself in 1906, had ever been before.
Early on the 28th, he sledged past his own best mark of 87° 06’ where sheer elemental survival had forced him to turn back in bitter frustration three years before.
That same day all three divisions were stopped by yet another lead. Then, after they had camped, they barely escaped separation or drowning when the very floe on which they had built their igloos split and spun away in the current of the lead. It was not until the morning of the 30th that they could resume their stubborn marching to the north.
On the first day of April, the tough and aggressive Bartlett, scheduled to start back that day, left camp early to walk five or six miles northward in hopes of crossing the 88th parallel, a feat never before accomplished by any man. But the observation of the sun he took as it crossed the meridian on his return showed that, thanks to the north wind which had been steadily forcing the ice southward, he had been short by some six or seven nautical miles. The camp was at 87° 47’, 133 miles south of the Pole.
After his observations, Bartlett started back with the last supporting party of two Eskimos, one sledge, and 18 dogs.
Peary had now succeeded as planned in getting well inside the 150-mile radius of the Pole with the best men, dogs, sledges, and equipment remaining of the large party which had set out from Cape Columbia 31 days before.
The main or polar party now consisted of two divisions, Peary with Egingwah and Seegloo, Henson with Ooqueah, five sledges, and 40 dogs.
This was the time for which Robert Peary had trained himself since that day in May of 1886 when, an amateur explorer of 30, he had first clambered up onto the great ice cap of Greenland at the head of Pakitsok Fjord.
It was for this time that he had given up anything approaching the normal, comfortable life of home and family lived by other men. It was because he had been working toward this time that his wife had borne their first child far up on the barren rim of the Arctic desert, farther north than any Caucasian child had ever been born before. Because he had been aiming for this time he had never seen his second daughter, who had lived only seven months. Because of his total dedication to his Arctic work, he had learned nine months after the fact of the death of his mother to whom he had been devoted all his life.
With absolute determination and unflinching, unquestioned integrity, he had worked and planned for more than 40 years to reach this point in time and space. And now, 53 years old, but straight and wiry and slim, he paced on his ruined feet in the lee of a pressure ridge, reassessed his assets, and laid his plans for the final dash to the Pole.
His assets consisted of five good men, 40 vigorous and hardy dogs, five specially designed and constructed sledges, and his own long experience and iron will. Three of the four Eskimos were veterans of previous expeditions and the fourth a rugged and eager youngster. All four possessed an instinctive knowledge of dogs, ice, and Arctic travel accumulated over all the generations since their ancestors had struggled up onto the Greenland coast from somewhere to the westward several thousand years before.
The fifth man was Matthew Henson, a black American who had been Peary’s personal servant and able assistant for more than 20 years. Husky, vigorous, and a veteran of every Peary expedition since the canal surveys of Nicaragua in the late Eighties, Matt was, with the exception of Peary himself, the best and most experienced non-Eskimo dog-handler and sledge traveler in the entire starting party. Henson was selected for the final assault on the Pole because of his proven proficiency, because of his unquestioned loyalty, and because, unlike Bob Bartlett who, as a Newfoundlander, was a British subject, he was an American citizen. Peary was a proudly patriotic man who intended that the discovery of the North Pole would be fully and solely credited to the United States of America.
A further consideration in Peary’s selection of Henson was that, as capable as Matt was in other respects, he had almost no knowledge of navigation. Thus, while he could lend invaluable support as an assistant, he was not capable of independent operations as the leader of his own party.
An indication of Peary’s regard for Matt Henson is the fact that later, when Matt violated the terms of the contract which he and all expedition members had with Peary not to write, lecture or use expedition pictures without his specific approval—in order to protect this important source of financing—Peary not only overlooked the violation but also wrote the foreword to Matt’s book, A Negro Explorer at the North Pole. Then, without telling Henson, he gave the publisher five hundred dollars to use in advertising it.
It was a little after midnight on the second of April, clear and sunlit and 25 degrees below zero, “a fine marching morning” when Robert Peary, who up until now had been bringing up the rear to save himself and to keep things moving, stepped out in the lead.
The experience which had made him a master at steering a straight course, even on the featureless Arctic desert of the ice cap, stood him in good stead on the frozen sea.
Carefully, but almost automatically, he checked the direction of the sun and needle of his pocket compass which, here, pointed slightly west of south toward the north magnetic pole in the vicinity of Prince of Wales Island. Then, searching the horizon ahead, he lined in a distinctive pinnacle of ice in the direction of true north as an aiming point and headed for it at a steady pace, leaving Matt and the Eskimos to harness up the dog teams and follow as soon as they could.
The wind, which had been blowing hard from the north, forcing the ice southward and reducing the rate of advance of the sledges proportionately, had died down. The ice was now stationary or possibly rebounding slowly northward. The going was the best since leaving land, over large, flat, old floes rimmed by high but easily negotiable pressure ridges. The dogs were fresh and loping in their traces so that the men were forced to ride or run. They covered 25 miles in ten hours that day while the sun and the waxing moon circled opposite horizons, a disk of gold and a disk of silver never setting in this forbidding land where no human foot had ever trod.
On the third day, they had to chop their way through pressure ridges and were delayed by a narrow lead, but made good another 20 miles while the ice ground and groaned around them but had no movement they could see.
They turned out of their igloos again before midnight of the third, eager to take advantage of the almost ideal conditions, and did not camp again until nearly to the 89th parallel—only a little more than 60 miles from their goal.
Again they stopped for only a few hours of absolutely necessary rest and sleep and were off again late in the evening of the fourth, putting more miles behind them and closing in inexorably on the Pole itself. But, although for the last two hours of the march they made exceptionally good time on the smooth, new ice of a freshly frozen north-south lead, the wind that day backed around to the eastward and increased in force. With the temperature at a minus 35, it cut savagely at every square centimeter of exposed skin, burning and cracking the faces of the men so that the pain kept them for awhile from their exhausted sleep at the march’s end.
When they camped at the end of their march on the fifth of April, Peary took a latitude sight which put him at 89° 25’ north, or 35 nautical miles south of the Pole.
They were on the trail again before midnight of that same day, pressing forward with a kind of triumphant excitement over the granular surfaces of old ice floes dotted with clear, blue frozen pools of the previous summer’s melting, and with the temperature up to a comfortable minus 15.
After an estimated 15 miles in six hours, Peary called a halt for hot tea and lunch, then led off for another 15 miles in another six hours. Joyfully he exploited to its fullest the ideal weather (also being enjoyed by Bartlett as he drew away to the south), the superb traveling conditions, the soaring morale of his men, the ability of his smaller party to travel far faster than the larger ones of the journey’s earlier stages.
At 10 a.m. on 6 April, they again made camp. Peary knew he was very close and that he would now need observations which would yield both latitude and longitude. While the igloos were being completed, he took out from under his parka the 6 X 4-foot silk American flag handmade for him by his wife 15 years before and carried by him on every sledge journey thereafter. Silently he secured it to a staff and planted it solidly in the pinnacle of a pressure ridge behind his igloo. There it drooped for a while in the windless calm, then spread itself on a passing breeze—a gallant, heartening flash of color in the drab desert of ice and sky.
To Henson and the Eskimos it was apparent that this was an important camp.
Well before 2 o’clock, the men built a low, semicircular snow shield opening toward the sun for the all-important latitude observation at local apparent noon.
When the shelter was finished, Henson heated a pan of mercury; Peary filled the trough with it, stretched out on his stomach on the ice, and put the sextant to his eye with his right hand. With his left he carefully moved the arm of the instrument until the image of the low sun descended to the surface of the shining mercury. Then, shifting his fingers to the delicate adjusting screw of the vernier, he rotated the wrist which held the sextant so that the sun appeared to swing in a shallow arc. With the vernier screw he adjusted the sun’s image until, at the bottom of its arc, it barely touched the artificial horizon. Then he marked the time, read the altitude and recorded it in the notebook ready for the purpose under his right hand.
At the bottom of the small page of pencilled notations, divisions, additions, and subtractions by which at the center of a hostile wilderness man magically determines his position, the numbers Peary circled with a line wavering with cold, were 89° 57’—for all practical purposes the Pole.
But, after the double march and the strain of the observation which half-blinded him and burned his snow-tired eyes, Peary could think only of the rest he had to have. He was, as he later wrote, “actually too exhausted to realize my life’s purpose had been achieved.” He turned in and slept for four hours.
He knew it was important now to get another observation at six o’clock with the circling sun a quarter of the way or 90 degrees farther around the ice horizon. But when he crawled out of his igloo he found the sky overcast and the sun obscured.
So, since according to his noon latitude sight, his position was along a line which passed three miles south of the Pole, and allowing a generous ten miles for errors in his observations, he hitched a double team of well-fed dogs to a light sledge and, with Egingwah and Seegloo, drove ten miles farther on. There he took another elevation of the sun at midnight, which reading put him beyond the Pole. At some point on that ten-mile journey he probably passed very close to that precise, dimensionless, and invisible mathematical point which is the most northerly spot on earth.
But Peary was not satisfied. Deep within himself was the knowledge that he had sacrificed a major part of his life, expended the energy which would have sustained him into comfortable old age in order to place himself where he now was. Assuredly he would not leave until he was as certain as it was possible to be that he had truly accomplished his “life’s purpose.”
He returned to the two igloos, which he had named Camp Morris K. Jesup in honor of his late friend and president of the Peary Arctic Club, and took the needed further observation at 6 a.m. with the sun at right angles to the two preceding sights. This was a critically important measurement, since without it it was possible for him to be far enough away from the Pole that a relocation of his base camp would be necessary. But he found on working out this observation that circumstances had combined to put him about four-and-a-half miles from the Pole. He hitched up once more and traveled an estimated eight miles toward the sun and the Pole, returning to camp for a final observation at noon on the seventh. When this sight worked out to 89° 58’ 37[”] North Latitude, less than a mile-and-a-half from the Pole, Peary was satisfied.
He had now taken, in his own words, “thirteen single, or six and one-half double altitudes of the sun, at two different stations, in three different directions at four different times.” He had conservatively allowed for a ten-mile error in his observations and compensated for it and for his necessarily inexact knowledge of the movement of the ice during the period of his observations, by his two round trips across his calculated position of the Pole.
With the hard work done and the discovery of the Pole assured, there was time for some simple ceremonies appropriate to the time and place. Four other flags were broken out and planted in the snow, the banner of the Navy League, the “World’s Ensign of Liberty and Peace,” and the flags of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. Photographs were taken of flags and men. Henson led the Eskimos in three enthusiastic cheers, their mortal voices puny and anachronistic in the timeless wastes. Everyone shook hands.
As he had done on reaching every major Arctic goal, Peary left a piece of his beloved flag and a written record. This time it was a diagonal strip from corner to corner of the fading and much-traveled colors which was sealed with two notes in a glass jar and deposited between the ice blocks of a pressure ridge. Of the two notes, the most relevant and significant read as follows:
90 N. Lat., North Pole
April 6, 1909
I have today hoisted the national ensign of the United States of America at this place, which my observations indicate to be the North Pole axis of the earth, and have formally taken possession of the entire region, and adjacent, for and in the name of the President of the United States.
I leave this record and United States flag in possession.
/s/ Robert E. Peary
United States Navy
On the afternoon of the seventh, the men tried to get some sleep before starting back to land, but the excitement of what they had accomplished and anxiety about the long trip home kept them tossing wakefully on the sleeping platforms of their igloos. After an hour or so, Peary called all hands and they were off at 4 p.m. on a 35-mile trek to the igloos of their last camp.
Peary had planned on the return trip to make two marches for every one outbound, taking advantage of the beaten trail, the lightened loads, the readybuilt igloos and the homeward bound incentive of men and dogs. It was urgent that they get back to land before the spring break-up sent the sea ice surging and separating along the continental shelf, severing and displacing the trail. At any hour now a gale from any direction except north could open impassable leads between the successful polar party and the barren coast which meant survival itself.
They reached the first camp in good time and got in a full double march the following day. On the ninth, the wind picked up and developed into a full gale at around 20 below. But, fortunately, it was at their backs driving them southward and causing no lateral displacement of the ice over which they traveled. They stopped that night at the camp from which Bartlett had turned back nine days before.
On the tenth, with dogs and men feeling the effects of the forced pace, they covered only one southward march and again slept in the igloos of Bartlett’s returning party. But on the next day, pleasantly surprised at the good going where they had expected to find much open water and at the continued lack of any sign of lateral movement of the ice, they made good another double march.
By traveling 18 hours at a stretch, getting a minimum amount of rest and pushing on once more, and with the help of good luck in the form of newly frozen leads and generally good weather, they had the distinctive land clouds in sight to the southward by the 18th. On the next day they sighted the dark mountains of Grant Land itself and they were back on the glacial fringe with solid, landfast ice at last under foot before midnight of the 22nd.
When the last sledge arrived safely ashore, Peary later wrote “. . . I thought my Eskimos had gone crazy. They yelled and called and danced until they fell from utter exhaustion. As Ootah sank down on his sledge he remarked in Eskimo ‘The devil is asleep or having trouble with his wife or we should never have come back so easily.’ ”
They made the base at Cape Columbia on the 23rd, and all hands were back aboard the Roosevelt at Cape Sheridan by the 26th—all hands except Ross Marvin, who was reported by his Eskimos to have broken through the young ice of a freshly frozen lead and drowned just 45 miles from land and safety on the return journey.
Thus, in March and April of 1909, did Robert Peary of the U. S. Navy become the “first . . . human being who . . . ever led a party of his fellow-creatures to a Pole of the Earth.”
Why, then, some three-score years after the fact, do we read in such a distinguished periodical as the Naval Institute Proceedings about a “lingering doubt?”
Because while Robert Peary was discovering the North Pole, another man was exploiting his own “discovery.” Frederick A. Cook, a warm and likable but unscrupulous man, had discovered that when an explorer went forth courageously into the desolate and less accessible places of the earth for the purpose of adding to man’s knowledge of his planet and to the prestige of his country, the report he made of his achievements on his return was almost certain to be believed.
Dr. Cook had been Peary’s surgeon on the North Greenland expedition of 1891-92; had, in fact, expertly set Peary’s broken leg on that expedition and Peary considered him a friend and “an honorable man.”
But Cook was neither.
On returning from an expedition to the Antarctic at the turn of the century, he had attempted to pass off as his own work a dictionary of the language of the Patagonian Indians drawn up by another man.
In September of 1906, Cook announced the first successful climb to the top of Mt. McKinley. His claim was proven false, both by the eyewitness testimony of the man who had been with him and by the evidence of the first bona fide expedition to the top which found it totally different from Cook’s pictures and description.
Three years after Peary’s death, Cook was fined $12,000 and sentenced to nearly 15 years in prison for using the mails for the fraudulent promotion of nonexistent oil wells.
But on 11 September 1909, with the Roosevelt still slugging southward through the Davis Strait, Cook telegraphed from the Shetland Islands saying that he had discovered the North Pole on 21 April of the previous year.
Cook’s story was conclusively discredited within a few months. His two Eskimos reported they had never been out of sight of land. Two men testified that Cook had hired them to concoct navigational data showing he had reached the Pole. Simple calculations based on his own account proved, as Peary had long ago determined, that it would have been impossible for his single sledge party to have made the alleged journey because it could not have carried with it sufficient supplies to sustain its men and dogs. And his own “records,” when they were finally submitted for analysis, were found to be completely worthless.
Conversely, the absolute authenticity of Peary’s account was verified in a variety of ways.
A distinguished committee of experts appointed by the National Geographic Society examined his instruments and records and reported that its members were “unanimously of the opinion that Commander Peary reached the North Pole on April 6, 1909.” In retrospect, however, it must be said that the committee, whose members were familiar with the quality of Peary’s work, with his previous, proven accomplishments and his personal integrity, did him an unwitting disservice in failing to conduct as thorough an analysis as the bitterness of the Cook-caused controversy demanded.
The Royal Geographic Society of London also evaluated the evidence and corroborated his discovery of the Pole.
At Peary’s request, two mathematicians of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, Hugh Mitchell and Charles Duvall, conducted separate prolonged and intensive investigations of all the polar data using two independent methods of computation. In a joint report they concluded that, “Peary probably passed within one and six-tenths geographic miles of the North Pole,” and that it was "possible that the march of the forenoon of April 7, 1909 carried [him] within a stone’s throw. . . .”
Years later, in an excellent article entitled “Navigation Near the Pole,” Heber D. Curtis, in the January 1939 edition of the Naval Institute Proceedings, corroborated the findings of Mitchell and Duvall. “Peary’s ‘steering’ and ‘distance,’ wrote Curtis, “were both remarkably good.” Elsewhere in his article Curtis concludes that “There cannot be a shadow of a doubt from Peary’s observations near the Pole that at about 10 a.m. (60th meridian time) on April 6, 1909, he reached his final camp, called Jesup, and that this camp was less than five miles from the true Pole.” As to Peary’s methods and the quality of his work, Curtis denies that there “is any other type of astronomical observation so efficient at the Pole as the method he employed.”
He states further that “From the standpoint of the navigator or the astronomer, and bearing in mind the rather extreme field conditions, it must be admitted that Peary’s observations leave a most favorable impression, as they are adequate in plan and of very high rank as regards technical execution.” Curtis concludes his article with these words: “It seems impossible to plan any procedure more adequate than that actually used by Peary, and it is the measured judgment of this writer that Peary sledged within about three-quarters of a mile of the Earth’s true Pole, and perhaps even actually over that unmarked and quasi-imaginary point on the shifting ice floes of the Polar Sea.”
The validity of Curtis’ analysis and judgment was reconfirmed in 1969 when an expedition using modern instruments and methods established that Peary’s reported position of Cape Morris K. Jesup on the north coast of Greenland, determined by precisely the same observational and measurement techniques as used at the Pole, was accurate to within about one mile.
The Danish explorer and anthropologist Dr. Knud Rasmussen, who had sponsored Cook until he saw the “impudent” nature of the documents he submitted for examination, interviewed the four North Pole Eskimos and reported that they confirmed Peary’s account in every detail.
In his annual message to the Congress in December of 1910, President Taft said: “The unparalleled achievement of Peary in reaching the North Pole April 6, 1909, approved by the critical examination of the most expert scientists, has added to the distinction of our Navy to which he belongs and reflects credit upon his country. His unique success has received generous acknowledgement from scientific bodies and institutions of learning in Europe and America. I recommend fitting recognition by Congress of the great achievements of Robert Edwin Peary.”
Acting on that recommendation, a subcommittee of the Naval Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives examined the evidence. After long, wrangling, often vituperative, frequently disgraceful hearings in which many of Cook’s partisans and Peary’s enemies spoke their minds uninhibitedly and at length, it submitted a majority and minority report to the full committee. Both concluded that Peary had reached the Pole when and as he said.
By a unanimous vote of the Senate and a vote of 154 to 34 in the House, Peary was promoted to the rank of rear admiral in the Civil Engineers Corps and awarded the “Thanks of Congress for his Arctic Explorations resulting in reaching the North Pole.”
But despite all this, Cook’s prior claim, combined with his genial and appealing personality, gave birth to all the “doubts” of the ill-informed and the grinders of axes down the years.
And despite his lifelong record of uncompromising integrity, despite the fact, as reported by Thomas Hubbard in his introduction to Mitchell and Duvall’s analysis, that “Always Peary has reported . . . exactly what he has accomplished. Always he has given the true record, whether it was what he had hoped it might be, or fell short of his hope,” despite the unchallengeable and repeatedly verified character of all his other work in the Arctic, despite all the demonstrably accurate answers repeatedly given to all the questions, periodically someone arises to worry with the printed word the bleached bones of long-dead “doubts.”
Although, as Hubbard states in the same introduction quoted above, “the attainment of the Pole, or of any point of latitude is susceptible of mathematical proof and does not depend on mere assertion,” and although that proof has been repeatedly accomplished, as cited above, they worry the “doubt” as to Peary’s navigation.
Disregarding the testimony of Henson and the North Pole Eskimos, of experienced Arctic travelers, including some unfriendly to Peary, disregarding Peary’s own previous sledging records, disregarding the highly relevant fact that Peary and Bartlett returned from Bartlett’s farthest north under similar conditions and in exactly the same number of marches, they worry the “doubt” as to Peary’s rate of travel.
Disregarding the perfectly valid reasons repeatedly stated by Peary, and restated above for taking Henson rather than Bartlett or someone else on the final dash to the Pole, they worry the “doubt” as to the composition of the polar party.
And common to every doubter is the basic assumption, despite the proud record of a lifetime of consistently scrupulous honesty, that in this one instance at the climax of accomplishment, Peary was a cheat and a liar.
In human and subjective terms it seems to this writer that these murmurs of doubt are, to a large degree, irrelevant, written as they are by an armchair critic from the comfortable perspective of some snug study half a century after the fact and derived solely from other writings, untempered by even the slightest personal familiarity with the conditions and phenomena they seek to analyze.
It is perhaps this basic lack of relevance which has invariably resulted in the first-time failure of every Arctic venture conceived and planned remotely by those without pragmatic knowledge of the problems, regardless of the intelligence or industry of the planners, the generosity of the financing or the advanced technology of the equipment. Recent examples are the expeditions of Bjorn Staib in 1964, Ralph Plaisted in 1967, David Humphreys in 1968, and Hugh Simpson in 1969.
Nor does the Arctic traveler of the 1960s, riding on his snow machines in constant radio communication with his base of support and supply, his food and fuel periodically delivered by air, his navigation checked by a circling plane, help always close at hand, have more than the most superficial relevance to the explorer of our century’s first decade. Peary and his predecessors—far more isolated than the astronauts on the moon, bearing with them all they must have to succeed and totally dependent on nothing but their own guts, brains, and personal knowledge to survive and return—were a different breed of men.
Unfortunately, it is probable that in the years to come there will be those who will continue to disinter the old libels and half-truths with which to patch together a case against Peary.
But, from his semi-circle of Maine pines in Arlington National Cemetery, Rear Admiral Robert E. Peary, U. S. Navy, the Discoverer of the North Pole—his accomplishments verified beyond all reasonable doubt, honored as few men have been honored by his peers and his grateful government, his unassailable position in history, like Hemingway’s cabin, built and paid for with his work—will hear only the coyotes in the snow.
__________
Commander Stafford was commissioned in September of 1941 and served during World War II as CO of a sub-chaser in the Caribbean and Mediterranean and as executive officer of a destroyer escort in the Pacific. After returning to Dartmouth College to complete work for a B.A. (cum laude) in literature, he accepted a commission as lieutenant commander in the regular Navy in December of 1946 and served as executive officer of an Atlantic Fleet destroyer until he was ordered to flight training late in 1948. As a naval aviator, he was operations officer of a patrol squadron assigned to hurricane-tracking during the season and an early warning squadron. In 1956, while stationed at the Bureau of Aeronautics, he received an M.A. in literature at The George Washington University. In May 1957, he was a successful contestant on the TV quiz show, “The $64,000 Question,” in the field of English and American literature. His book about the old Enterprise (CV-6), The Big E, was published by Random House in 1962, and a submarine book, The Far and the Deep, by Putnam in 1967. He is now a civilian Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Navy.
[*] Citation for the award of the Special Gold Medal of the Royal Geographic Society (London) 4 May 1910.