REAR ADMIRAL PEARY, U.S.N., SCIENTIST AND ARCTIC EXPLORER
By Lieutenant Commander Fitzhugh Green, U. S. Navy
Lieutenant Commander Fitzhugh Green is well qualified to write a sketch of Admiral Peary's life. Lieutenant Commander Green has always been a hunting and camping enthusiast. Study of arctic literature and a close friendship with Admiral Peary eventually led him to join the Crocker Land Expedition. He spent over three years with the Smith Sound Eskimos in North Greenland and Ellsemere Land. In 1914, Green and Macmillan established a new record to the Northwest on the Polar Sea. The author of this article has enjoyed the friendship of Amundsen, Shackleton, Stefansson, Evans, Rasmussen, and others in our generation who have with untiring zeal helped blaze the long white trail to the Ends of the Earth.
Editor.
Robert E. Peary was born in Cresson, Pa., May 6, 1856. He passed his boyhood in Maine and graduated from Bowdoin College in 1877, He entered the Coast and Geodetic Survey from which he joined the navy as a civil engineer in 1881. By 1885, though only a lieutenant, he was engineer-in-chief of the Nicaraguan survey. He invented a new type of lock-gates for the proposed canal and otherwise distinguished himself from the common run of youthful pioneers.
His Danish friend Maigaard literally broke the ice for the second period of Peary's life. He persuaded the young officer to accompany him to Disco Bay, Greenland, for an ice-cap reconnaissance in 1886. Instantly and deeply was Peary bitten by the exploring bug. And nothing could have demonstrated his personality and temperament better than that he threw all precedent and centuries of experience to the winds: he determined to strike out on a new unbeaten path to the Pole.
Since Hakluyt's day men had tried to penetrate the Polar regions by water routes. There were three main gateways:
- North around Scandinavia past Spitzbergen.
- Through Baffin Bay up the Greenland coast.
- By Alaska into Behring Sea.
Early Europeans used the first route because it enabled them to cling to their continent. As the second, by Greenland, meant crossing the North Atlantic it did not become popular until in the last generation when both British and American expeditions raced it neck and neck. The third one, of which the take-off is Point Barrow, Alaska, never has been conquered even to a mild degree. Such tragedies as DeLong's voyage in the Jeannette, our own naval enterprise, serve only to emphasize the desperate nature of tackling an untried arctic route.
But this is what Peary did. Nor was it simply a case of laying his ship on a different course, or threading his way through another sound or channel as other courageous explorers have. His plan was infinitely more daring. He chose the Greenland ice-cap.
Greenland is a great pear-shaped continent nearly 1,500 miles long, and something like 900 miles broad across its upper bulge. It is the classic example of the glacial age. Except for its rocky fringes and the southern tip, it is buried in ice. Depth of this frosting is conjectural. Along the coast 2,000 foot cliffs are literally dwarfed by the ice dome rearing back of them more than 9,000 feet into the sky.
To seek the Pole by the Greenland ice-cap could be compared to hunting a wild elephant by crawling up its back until close enough to shoot it behind the ear. A wild elephant's back is a tame comparison to that blizzard-tortured desolation Peary chose as his way north.
For practically ten years he fought a losing battle. True, he learned the technique of arctic travel from the natives; how to drive dogs; how to build snow igloos; how to exist on blubber and raw meat; how to wear skin clothes; how to hunt without firearms; how to sleep sitting up without a sleeping bag; how to burrow into a drift when taken unaware by a howling blizzard. He brought back three ponderous meteorites, one of them weighing ninety tons, the largest known to man. He collected a large quantity of information of scientific value as well as of popular interest. But so far as his ambition to reach the Pole was concerned he had failed.
Not until 1898 did he abandon the ice-cap. Old-timers said, "I told you so," when he admitted the Pole could not be reached that way. Also, they pointed out the foolish enthusiasm of youth and inexperience. Indeed, the injustice of the criticism Peary suffered at this critical stage of his life would have broken a weaker character.
He was forty now. He had battered away at a problem the geographical world declared could not be solved by the means he chose. That he had determined the insularity of Greenland was largely ignored. That he had made several ice-cap trips of over 1,300 miles, driving his own sledges and with no help save that of his tenderfoot companions, was not advertised. Yet Nansen, his contemporary, had secured a place of exalted fame from one summer's crossing of the narrow southern tip of Greenland. Nansen had food and Lapps and no back trail to figure on. Peary did five times the distance on little more than raw walrus meat and blubber. Eskimos helped him up the first glacier, then deserted him in terror at the prospect of travelling the great unknown interior.
The second period of Peary's northern work began in 1898 when he based on the opposite side of Smith Sound. By this time he had won the confidence of the natives. He realized the value of their dogs and meat. Greely, Kane, Hayes, and all the British expeditions up this coast had deprecated the Eskimo's value as an adjunct to arctic work, Peary cleverly recognized that no white man can pretend to lead his natural life in high latitudes. He trained himself and his men to be Eskimos. He went into their igloos and became one of them. He learned to eat their food, to wear their skin clothes, to perform the innumerable little tricks of keeping warm and dry that may mean the difference between life and death when caught in a sudden crushing snow-filled gale. When he crossed the Ellsemere Land he took enough families with him to provide hunters, seamstresses, and dog drivers.
It must be recalled that the upper left-hand (western) corner of Greenland converges with the land opposite. Arctic currents drag a jam of ice through this narrow passage. Open water is almost unknown. For this reason expeditions have usually disembarked in the Smith Sound region about 78° north latitude, and made the rest of their way by sledge. Greely, Kane, Nares, and one or two others have happened to find open years which permitted them to base further north than Peary's earlier attempts. But their terrible loss of life and suffering offset any advantage they gained in the beginning.
Now began a new kind of work for Peary. On the ice-cap, despite its frightful wind and cold, smooth going was the rule. Coastal sledging means one unending struggle over the mountainous ice-jams that are formed by tide and current. On the icecap Peary had simply to grit his teeth and plug away. So long as he "didn't starve or freeze, and held his course, all he had to do was to keep on lifting one foot after the other in order to reach his destination. Along the Ellsemere coast ten minutes of travelling on the level was a luxury that was stimulating. The average day consisted of a kind of exaggerated football game. Five hundred pound sledge load was the ball. Each driver carried, drove, pushed, and pulled his own. The opposing line was a serrated ridge of huge sharp ice fragments from ten to fifty feet high. And when by sheer strength and ice-axe this line was' passed, there was always another just beyond. The enemy's tactics varied by cunningly placed lanes of open water, the most dangerous trap in the north.
It was a hard school, and Peary was a pupil for another ten years. It is interesting that this corresponds to the time he spent settling ice-cap delusion. But he was learning every day of it. His troubles came so fast that his publisher never gave him room to list them. On the Greenland coast he had only crushed his ankle on shipboard, lost a year's cache of stores on the ice-cap. and the like. On the Ellsemere coast he froze off every toe except a fraction of each large one. At Cape Sabine his Eskimos died like flies from a kind of dysentery. Only a few years ago the writer found the bodies of two of them wedged down between the boulders. Clothing had not even been removed from the mummified remains. Peary's white companions even pronounced him insane for the seemingly super-human campaigns he planned.
One misfortune after another assailed him at home. He was told that he would receive no more leave from the Navy Department. What this meant can be appreciated only in the light of the ten years' struggle he had already endured for the sake of his ambition. His finances, never plentiful, ceased to exist. Only by dint of lecturing and writing to a degree nearly as exhausting as his travels over northern trails was he able to accumulate the pitifully scanty store of supplies and equipment he carried on these earlier expeditions.
These were the blackest years of his life. Earlier he had been able to exploit the novelty of his schemes as a means to further successive expeditions. The meteorites, the crossings of Greenland, and the like were stepping-stones to that notoriety so profitable to the lecturer and writer. Now the novelty had worn off. In despair he wrote to a friend:
"I seem to have reached the end of the lane. What I gained in Greenland I am losing in Ellsemere Land. Soon they will call me a fake, say I am just hoarding what I can mint from the public's credulity. Yet, would it profit me to confess that all my savings, all of my wife's savings, all I can beg, borrow, or steal, have gone into the quite inadequate equipment I have gathered for the next attempt?"
Such indomitableness is worthy of the best traditions of the navy.
It is difficult to realize the abysmal discouragements that sprang up on every hand. Members of earlier expeditions, broken by the inhuman toil of arctic sledging and embittered by the petty quarrels isolation breeds, lost no opportunity to backbite and discredit the man who they jealously realized was a better man than they. He dared to go again. Eskimos behaved with childish petulance when he returned without the promised gifts his anemic capital sometimes couldn't buy. And constant worry prevented his training like an athlete for the physical strain of his long exhausting trips. Instead, his naturally rugged constitution was sapped of its reserve endurance. Inanition was the logical result; and on practically all his later sledging Peary was a victim of what northern travelers call "starvation bloat." Formerly this distemper was erroneously thought to be scurvy. It is painful swelling of limbs consequent upon overwork and under feeding. Peary himself has described his sensations when suffering from it as the combination of "elephantiasis and toothache"! No more agonizing climax to his troubles could be conceived.
A flood of friendship turned the tide. Peary's magnificent tenacity had finally won him the attention and interest of a group of influential New Yorkers. When the Navy Department flatly refused to even consider further leave to prosecute more northern work, Mr. Charles Moore personally convinced President McKinley that the public would hold our government gravely culpable for cramping the energies of the one man who might redeem American geographical prestige so marred by recent arctic fiascoes. When burden of debt was about to place both Peary and his wife in legal toils Mr. Morris K. Jesup and a score of others reached down into their own pockets and produced. When the ordinary run of vessels fit for ice work still fell short of the strength required to face the polar pack, the Roosevelt was built. Peary's own designs were used.
The third period of Peary's life was now on. In the first he had made his ice-cap struggle. In the second he had crawled up and down the Ellsemere coast. He now launched his startling scheme to force a ship to the- very shores of the Polar Sea. By basing there and with the help of dogs and Eskimos he might well hope to make the 500-mile dash to the pole and get back before spring leads cut him off. Only his intimate knowledge of ice and current conditions north of Cape Sabine made this plan in the least way possible. It was a long known fact that the very passage Peary selected was the most ice-choked hole north of the arctic circle. He had observed year after year that under certain combinations of wind and tide acting over limited combinations of shoal and deep, the ice jam suffered itself to be ripped and split until slender black leads of open water strung here and there between the Polar Sea and Smith Sound. Peary determined to gamble on the position of these leads. If the ship were caught she might suffer the fate of the Proteus which sank in eighteen minutes after being nipped. If he succeeded in getting through, safe return was even less likely.
He got through and he got back. He began to break records. In 1902 he made a new American record with 84° 17' north. In 1906 the world's record was smashed when he reached 87° 06' north. On April 6, 1909, he reached the Pole.
This was a many-sided triumph. Obstacles at home had been overcome. Ice navigation had been set a new standard by the Roosevelt's performance. But beyond a shadow of a doubt the greatest factor in Peary's success was the remarkable sledging technique he had developed in twenty-five years of practice.
He worked on the unit basis. Logistics of his units were as perfect as mathematical reason could make them. A unit comprised one man, one sledge, and one team of dogs. This unit was independent and self-supporting for fifty days. The sledge carried about 650 pounds to start with. Of this 500 pounds of dog pemmican gave each animal one pound per day. Fifty pounds of hard biscuit and fifty pounds of man pemmican gave the driver a pound of each a day. A few gallons of kerosene, a tiny stove, tinned milk, tea, and some extra footgear and mittens completed the outfit.
A snow igloo will hold four men comfortably. A gallon of tea at night and another in the morning will keep four men going. Four men can just about handle one 600-pound mass over a seventy-foot ice pressure-ridge. One white man can keep three Eskimos busy, amused, fed, cheered, and loyal. Thus four men, one white and three brown, was the size of party Peary chose to group his helpers in.
Dogs and men have one characteristic in common, both easily and gladly follow where another has gone. This quality is an instinctive physical and mental laziness. For men or dogs to break their own trail is toil. It means concentration every moment to avoid pitfalls and rough spots. It means picking footholds. It means a kind of subconscious grief and jealousy over the ease with which those behind must come.
So members of each party of four took their turns at trail breaking. And when the whole party had been exhausted by a week or so of battering down ice walls, cutting ice roads, and plowing heavy snow, it stood aside and let the next party, fresh and eager, take the van.
This plan made it possible to line the trail with food. The advance patrol wore out physically before it had used all its supplies. It cached what it had, turned, and sped back light, leaving its extras for those to come. In this way physical energy of men and dogs was conserved. Land advance in the recent war was made by the same system of trail breaking and replacements that was used on the Polar Sea.
It is not difficult then to understand how Peary placed himself with fresh dogs, picked men, and adequate supplies within easy striking distance of the Pole. Conversely, it is not conceivable that a single unsupported sledge party could make the entire trip out and back as Cook claimed to have done. Peary's strongest trail breaking party collapsed at one quarter of the distance to be covered. Six groups were thus expended in blazing the way.
Peary has been scored for the un-seagoing nature of his work. This and lack of affiliation with naval men necessitated by his long absences no doubt account for present professional disregard of his achievements. Even the Navy Department indicated grave doubt as to the ultimate value of his oceanic and other scientific investigations. And there existed an undeniable feeling that every year he spent north took him that much further away from nautical skill of any sort or degree.
No view could be more unjust. Few naval officers have had to face afloat the gauntlet of perils and difficulties Peary ran on every voyage north. His personnel consisted of scientific assistants wholly unversed in sea matters, and a motley crew of 'down-east' fishermen. Better classes of deck-hands and engine-room force would not sail away for an indefinite period on the meager wages Peary was forced to pay.
He had but one real aid, Bob Bartlett, who acted as a kind of executive officer so far as the ship was concerned. The two of them took the Roosevelt through thousands of miles of uncharted, unlighted, ice-filled seas. When the rudder was bitten off in an ice-jam they beached her and rigged a new one. When fuel ran out they dragged into a Labrador fiord and cut driftwood.
To illustrate his seamanship and his engineering ability, take one meteorite he brought back which weighed over ninety tons. The mass was well back in the hills. There was no dock to handle it from shore to ship. Time was painfully limited by constant, snow storms, gales, and ice. Yet Peary wrestled the huge lump down, got it aboard his little vessel, and turned it over to the 100-ton crane in the New York navy yard without a hint that he was doing more than his normal duty. Compare this absurd equipment with that used at the gun factory in handling a sixteen-inch gun or a weight similar to that of the meteorite, and some idea of the feat may be formed.
One remarkable aspect of Peary was his extraordinary veracity. A queer implication, no doubt. But in going back over records of other explorers it is almost impossible to find one that did not consciously or unconsciously exaggerate. It is so easy to create a false impression among those at home who are not familiar with arctic work. It is so safe and simple to fill in one's tale with details that make it vivid and alluring, yet which are no more true than the narrative of a novelist who knows his atmosphere and manufactures his episodes to fit. Peary never succumbed to this temptation. When he had gone his sledging limit he took the best sight he could, made the best notes his weary brain would permit, built the highest cairn his exhausted muscles could manage, and came home. This statement has been proved literally thousands of times. To the popular mind it means little; the popular mind loves to be duped. By the naval officer's standard there is no middle ground between truth and untruth. But to the world of science there is a middle ground, and it is by far the widest area of all research and information. Peary was the single explorer in the history of the north who entirely avoided it.
This same sense of truth and justice may have accounted for his ability to handle the varied elements of his subordinates. Eskimos are childlike. They are brave, devoted, trustworthy, and honest one moment; the next they may be just the opposite. Superstition can turn their courage to terror in an instant. Pique alone is sufficient to bring about desertion. Honor among most primitive races is a matter of convenience. To keep the services of such people through all the years he did, was a monument to Peary's tact and diplomacy.
Then there were his scientific assistants. The north can poison a white man's mind. Arctic neurasthenia is a common malady among Danish in South Greenland. Few expeditions have escaped insanity in some form or other. When the leader portions out skins and food and fuel he may be measuring the life span of his men. Fuel and food can be allotted with geometrical nicety. Skins and Eskimo assistants, routes, weather, and the like cannot. The white driver fights a blizzard, freezes, starves, thirsts, and sometimes dies, all the while cursing his leader for the fractional partiality he seemed to have shown in assigning garments or the course of this particular trip. Peary's command used to return hating him in a way that murder couldn't gratify. Every arctic leader has had the same experience. When the antidote of normal life neutralizes the poison, this bitterness is gradually dissolved. But by that time all are separated and again engaged at home in their individual pursuits. While north, when friendly spirit is the one human bond, only the strongest character can rise above the terrible mental depression and irritableness which isolation and physical suffering bring. Peary could; he had the incentive. But those with him year after year could not. Only by magnificent patience and forbearance was he able to hold his authority over them with sufficient strength to utilize their aid to the end.
As navy men we cannot but admire such supreme qualities of command. To be sure aboard ship we have our uniforms and constant touch with Washington, routine, drill, and discipline to remind us of the authority vested in our superior officer. But even with all this there must be something more. There must originate in our leaders a spirit of professional cohesion which will permeate the entire ship's company and imbue them with a unity of purpose and ideal. This spirit must be strong enough to rise above discomfort, monotony of task, and every form of temperamental incompatibility. It is the priceless virtue which every officer spends his life in learning to master and to use. Yet, alas, how few are truly successful.
Arctic work magnifies the leader's difficulties a thousand times. Peary, for instance, had two masters and three groups of subordinates. He was answerable to the Navy Department and to his scientific backers; he had to direct and use successfully, first, a tribe of Eskimos; second, an always unruly crew; third, his special aids who were almost. 100 per cent tenderfeet on every trip he took. His methods under the circumstances warrant the study of every one of us. His success deserves our most genuine pride. And the heroic tenacity of purpose that finally won him the goal of his life's endeavor, that took his life in the end, must be justly added where it belongs—to our capital of traditional service valor.