True North Read online

  In a shrewd gesture, Peary’s request to President Roosevelt—relayed through Jesup, a personal friend—to name the ship after him was accepted. Christened by Josephine with a bottle of champagne frozen in a block of ice, Roosevelt was launched on March 23, 1905, before five thousand onlookers lining the shore, the largest gathering in Bucksport history. The new ship plunged into the water for the first time, then rose and shook herself as the spectators cheered. With her momentum, the vessel slid across the narrow channel and, rather ignobly, became stuck in the mud on the far side. A few days later, after Roosevelt was towed to Portland, Maine, installation of the machinery was started, and in two months she was completely fitted out.

  Roosevelt, like Nansen’s polar ship, was designed to rise above the pressure of the ice pack to avoid damage to her hull. At 614 tons, she was slightly larger than an oceangoing tug. Her wooden hull—up to thirty inches thick, braced inside with struts and sheathed on the outside with steel—was built to be strong as well as flexible. She was narrow but somewhat stubby for easier maneuvering in ice-jammed seas: 166 feet long at the waterline, 35 feet abeam, with a draft of only 16 feet so as to get close in to shore. Her bow was sharply raked for ramming the ice. The propeller blades were detachable, and the rudder could be lifted and swung up onto the deck to prevent damage, should the ship become stuck in solid ice. With oversized propellers and shaft, and an unusually powerful engine fed by multiple boilers, Roosevelt was more battering ram than sailing ship, making her the world’s first icebreaker. Fitted with masts, she carried small fore and aft sails to take advantage of favoring winds and conserve coal, also as a contingency in the event of irreparable damage to the propulsion system. Powerful deck equipment—windlass, steam capstan, and winch—was installed to provide the muscle for freeing the ship from trouble, including hauling her off the bottom when aground. Quarters for the crew and expedition members were located on deck; space below was reserved for the storage of coal and supplies.

  As with everything on the ship, Peary had given considerable thought to the design of his sea cabin. Extra roomy and with an adjoining private bathroom, it was paneled in yellow pine painted white and had a wide built-in bunk, writing desk, office chair, bookcases that contained Arctic titles along with novels and magazines, wicker chair, and chest of drawers. On the wall were etchings of Morris Jesup and President Roosevelt, the latter autographed. Various flags were displayed: a silk U.S. flag made by Josephine, which Peary had carried with him to the Far North several times; the flag of his college fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon; the flag of the Navy League; and the peace flag of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Above the headboard of his bed was a picture of Josephine; atop the dresser sat a framed picture of the cottage on his beloved Eagle Island. On his bunk was a fragrant pillow made by his now eleven-year-old daughter, Marie, containing pine needles from the island. Also in his cabin was a player piano, which would become a “pleasant companion,” and two hundred rolls of mechanical music from classical to ragtime.*

  After a well-publicized day cruise for wealthy backers that raised more money, Roosevelt left her anchorage off Manhattan’s West Thirty-fourth Street on July 16, 1905, and steamed down the Hudson River. Peary stood amidships like a proud admiral, “bowing to the plaudits that came from all sides”—the tooting whistles of passing ships in the half-mile-wide river and, once Roosevelt entered New York Bay, volleys of cannon fire from forts and sailing clubs lining the shore. At his side were Josephine, their toddler son, Robert E. Peary Jr., their daughter, Marie, and several members of the Peary Arctic Club, including Herbert Bridgman.

  Peary had recently been asked by a reporter whether he expected to find land at the North Pole, as some experts believed. “It would not surprise me at all to find it there,” Peary said. “Either a polar continent or a collection of islands. However. . . . I do not expect to find an open sea as some scientists have predicted.”

  When it was time, a tug came alongside Roosevelt to take the family members and visitors ashore. Before departing, Bridgman led a brief and moving farewell ceremony, during which he publicly assured Peary that he had the full membership and resources of the club behind him in his patriotic cause.

  “I am going now in God’s name,” said Peary.

  TWO MONTHS LATER, Roosevelt butted her way into the frozen Arctic Sea and anchored off Cape Sheridan, on the north coast of Ellesmere Island. In spite of boiler troubles for much of the trip that robbed her of half her engine power, the stalwart ship had accomplished her mission, fighting through usually impenetrable ice-clogged channels to deliver Peary to a site 300 miles farther north than any of his previous winter encampments. Come spring, the expedition would begin approximately 450 miles from the Pole.

  Preparations for the long Arctic night began immediately. Eskimos had been brought aboard at various stops up the coast of Greenland, and hunters were sent out to augment winter food supplies with fresh meat. They returned with quantities of musk oxen, caribou, and hare.

  While men worked at bringing supplies from the holds on deck, others went ashore to build a large boxlike structure in which emergency supplies would be kept in case the ship caught fire and had to be abandoned or was otherwise suddenly lost, forcing them to survive on land until rescued.

  A week later, the catastrophe for which they were preparing nearly occurred. An ice floe came into sight pivoting around the cape, moving in their direction. Broken off from mountainous glaciers, floes spend their existence drifting in the northern seas. They are more or less level on the surface, but underwater they range in thickness from twenty to a hundred feet.

  The huge floe broke through the thin sea ice and pushed aside smaller floes in its path, and kept advancing until one massive corner of it, rising higher than the ship’s rail, plowed into the starboard side. It was the “crucial moment,” according to Peary. “For a minute or so, which seemed an age, the pressure was terrific. The Roosevelt’s ribs and interior bracing cracked like the discharge of musketry; the deck amidships bulged up several inches . . . and the masts and rigging shook as in a violent gale.” All hands knew if the hull split open, they would have precious little time to abandon ship.

  Then, with a “mighty tremor,” Roosevelt broke free from the pressure of the ice and slowly rose upward until her propeller was out of the water. It was exactly what her hull had been designed to do in such a situation, yet it was extraordinary to witness. A portion of the floe rode under the ship, broke off against the weight, and dispersed its energy against smaller floes until beaching on the nearby shore. Roosevelt was intact, but stranded high and dry on the ice. She would not float again until summer.

  After that, things settled into a comfortable routine. Food was plentiful and well prepared in the galley, the quarters stayed warm and dry, and the crew had time to read and play cards. Some men were engrossed in accounts of earlier Arctic expeditions, borrowed from the ship’s library, and spoke among themselves about how appreciative they were not to have to endure the same hardships others had faced in northern latitudes.

  Peary had arrived north on a brand-new ship and with a new strategy as well. He was giving up on his long-espoused theory that the only way to reach the Pole was with a small party, which required fewer supplies and therefore involved less complicated logistics than a large party. His new plan called for thirty men and more than a hundred dogs to be divided into supply parties that relayed food and fuel from one depot to the next, pressing ever northward and in support of his own party. Confident that his plan would succeed, he had already proudly dubbed it the “Peary System.” In fact, the multiple-party relay system had been tried out half a century earlier by the English explorer Francis Leopard M’Clintock, although with men rather than dogs pulling heavily laden sledges.

  In mid-February, as the polar night gave way to increased hours of daylight, the advance party left Roosevelt, followed by the other teams sent out at intervals.
In just twenty miles, they crossed the eighty-third parallel, and soon afterward they left solid land and started over the frozen sea ice, setting up well-marked caches every fifty miles.

  Peary was exuberant to be launching the expedition a month earlier than his last one, and so much farther north, for already he was only sixty miles shy of the highest latitude he had ever attained. From here, he estimated, they could make it to the Pole and back in one hundred days, averaging ten miles per day.

  “The battle is on at last,” Peary wrote in his diary on March 2. “We are straightened out on the ice of the Polar Sea heading direct for our goal.”

  When Peary broke camp, his longtime companion Matthew Henson, on his sixth Arctic expedition with Peary, was already ahead leading the pioneer party of three sledges, hacking out a trail through the icy hummocks that laced the frozen landscape. The pioneer party had to select the best route and render it passable for the other sledges. For that reason, they had the pick of the dogs and carried the lightest loads. This was the toughest and most dangerous job; the pioneer party could be cut off by the shifting ice from the supply line or even a safe route back.

  After the pioneer party came the main body, split into five subdivisions, not including Peary’s, each led by an American.* As they advanced along the trail, one party would drop out at intervals of fifty miles—after depositing supplies and marking its cache—then head back over its trail and pick up supplies that had been brought forward by a subdivision behind them, relaying those provisions north to the next team. Peary’s plan called for him, at the opportune moment, to slingshot past the others with his own party for a dash to the Pole. On his return, he was to follow the same trail back, subsisting on the supplies that had been cached along the way.

  For two weeks, they marched up and over broken ice, zigzagging where necessary to avoid open waters. Then, on March 25, midway between 84 and 85 degrees north, they came to a standstill at what they named the Big Lead, a body of open water too large to be bypassed. Several subdivisions caught up with one another, and together they waited for a way to cross. After an agonizing week, the lead closed with new ice, and the sledges dashed across.

  They soon faced a gale that made travel impossible. When it abated after six days, Peary determined their latitude to be 85 degrees, 12 minutes, and found they had drifted on the ice pack more than seventy miles to the east. Henson again went out to lead the way, while two Eskimos with empty sledges were sent back to bring forward supplies. The Eskimos returned in twenty-four hours to report new impassable leads to the south; they were cut off from the caches that had been established, and from the support parties behind them. The Peary System had collapsed.

  The remaining sledges were now nearly empty of supplies, and there were no caches ahead. Peary dumped all the equipment that was not necessary and followed on Henson’s trail to the north, realizing that his chance for the Pole was gone but desperate to come home with at least a new farthest-north record.

  On the second day, Peary met up with Henson. Between them, they had seven Eskimos and six sledges. The combined party went north. As the dogs gave out, they were killed and fed to the other dogs, and the sledges abandoned.

  After being stymied on April 20 by what Peary described as a “perfect mesh of open leads” that appeared to make further progress impossible, he reported they somehow made a “forced march . . . between these leads,” then slept a few hours. Upon awakening, he took an observation shortly before noontime.

  Celestial observations require visibility to measure the sun’s progress in the sky. By measuring the angle of the horizon to the sun as it rises to high noon, a capable navigator can determine the number of degrees, minutes, and seconds of latitude at local noon. No such determination is possible when the sun is not visible, as is often the case in polar regions.

  Peary was the only one in the party who could use a sextant to fix a position. Henson, although he had spent his formative years at sea, did not know navigation or the mathematics required to make computations, only “knot and splice seamanship.” The Eskimos had no reliable way of marking position; for them, it usually came down to how many days they marched or being within sight of familiar land. Henson often assisted Peary by writing down the numbers he read off, which could be difficult for the person working the sextant with numbed fingers.

  Following his observation, Peary calculated their position at 86 degrees, 6 minutes, north—by thirty-three miles a new farthest-north record. “We had at last beaten the record, for which I thanked God,” Peary wrote in his journal, “though I felt that the mere beating of the record was but an empty bauble compared with the splendid jewel on which I had set my heart for years.”*

  Looking at the “thin and pinched” faces and shrunken bodies of his companions and the “sagging jaws and lusterless eyes” of the sledge dogs, and fearing that the ice pack might have opened up leads behind them, Peary felt he had “cut the margin as narrow as could reasonably be expected.” He ordered their return march to the south.

  Henson, who usually took his orders from Peary with little or no comment, could not believe it, inasmuch as Peary had just told him they were less than two hundred miles from the Pole. “We can make it! Somehow, we can make it.”

  Both men could see to the north a stretch of clear ice with no leads or obstructions as far as the horizon—perhaps extending even to the Pole? Peary pointed out to Henson that the ice pack was continuing to drift steadily to the east; he had determined their longitude to be 50 degrees west, which put them due north of the coast of Greenland. If they continued northward, they would also keep drifting to the east where they would end up “God only knows.”

  Peary’s eyes narrowed and his lips quivered below his ice-encrusted mustache. “I give the command to retreat, and I’m breaking my own heart.”

  They headed south at once, breaking new trail the entire way. Their desperate march for land stretched into weeks. Peary walked for as long as he could until, weak from hunger and exhaustion and his feet paining him greatly, he climbed into a sledge to ride, something polar explorers rarely did unless injured.

  At one point, stuck on a drifting floe and with only the thinnest ice providing an escape route over a lead, they stripped themselves of extra gear and carefully walked and slid along in their snowshoes—feet apart to better distribute their weight—until reaching stronger ice. Midway, trying to lighten his load, Peary discarded one of his parkas on the ice. Henson, following behind, picked it up. When they were safely across, Henson returned the parka to Peary with a grin. “They tell me it’s cold in these parts.”

  Near starvation, they began eating the dogs, roasting them over fires made of broken-up sledges. (When asked upon his return about the palatability of dog meat, Peary said, “One who can eat hog meat or craves the delicacy of Limburger cheese can have nothing to say against dog. To be sure, the hind leg of an overworked dog is a little tough and rank sometimes.”)

  When there were but two canines left, a musk ox herd appeared as if dropped from heaven in their path. They killed seven, feasted, and found the strength to locate Roosevelt near Repulse harbor.

  Although some of the supply parties were still out on the ice pack, they all eventually found their way back to the ship. Not a single man was lost, and of the 121 dogs that began the trip, 41 returned.

  Notwithstanding his claim to have gone farther north than anyone in history, Peary was dismayed by his failure to reach the Pole. The conditions for travel that season had been deplorable; the ice had started disintegrating and melting too early in the year, and continuous storms had forced delays and cost them valuable time. Nothing short will suffice, the Navy Department had warned him of his effort to reach the Pole; and miserably short he had fallen. “To think that I have failed once more,” a melancholy Peary wrote in his journal, “that I shall never have the chance to win again.”

  After returning
to Roosevelt and allowing himself and the others to recuperate, Peary, knowing it would be weeks before the ship could break free of the ice pack, set out with a sledge party, traveling west along the northern shore of Ellesmere Island, a region known as Grant Land. When he reached the cape at the end of Ellesmere, on June 24, he named it Colgate, after his wealthy supporter and Peary Arctic Club member James Colgate. In so doing, Peary disregarded the prior claim of Sverdrup, who had dubbed the region Lands-Lokk (Land’s End) four years earlier. Peary crossed Nansen’s Sound—without renaming it—to Axel Heiberg Island, which Sverdrup had named for one of his own supporters; claiming “to have found no other explorer’s cairn, Peary renamed it Jesup Land. Three days later, he climbed the 1,600-foot headland Sverdrup called Svartevoeg, and named it Cape Thomas Hubbard. From that vantage point, Peary later claimed, he had seen through his field glass a landmass nearly one hundred miles to the northwest in the frozen Arctic Ocean. Upon his return home, Peary would name this “distant land . . . above the ice horizon” Crocker Land, after his banker benefactor who had been instrumental in financing previous expeditions. In this flurry of honoring his principal backers by naming—even renaming—geographical discoveries after them, was Peary thinking about his past adventures? or perhaps a future one?

  When Roosevelt finally left for home, the season was late for traveling through the heavy Arctic ice, and the return voyage proceeded through nonstop storm activity. Any other ship would most likely have been stuck for the winter, if not sunk. But Roosevelt limped along, entering New York harbor on Christmas Day 1906, with her ironsides punctured like a tin can, her massive propeller sheared, rudder shredded, sternpost torn away, and emergency pumps going constantly. Naval officers who visited her in dry dock could not believe a ship in her condition had made it home.