True North Read online

  As the men recuperated, Peary audaciously announced that because of his lack of progress exploring the ice cap, he would be staying over another year to try again the following spring. Since there were not enough supplies for the entire group to stay that long, he decreed that he would remain behind with two volunteers, and everyone else would go home on the ship when it arrived in midsummer.

  Determined to do something constructive with his time in the region, Peary organized surveying parties to make maps and charts of the Bowdoin Bay area. He also questioned the Eskimos about the location of a possible meteorite, first reported by British explorer John Ross in 1818. The natives called it Iron Mountain, and had long used pieces of what they considered a gift from the skies to make the blades of knives, harpoon heads, and other tools, found to be much stronger than those traditionally made of animal bones.

  The Eskimos were reluctant to reveal the location of Iron Mountain because it had been considered valuable—their only source of metal until white traders arrived—and sacred since the time of their great-grandfathers. One finally agreed when Peary offered him a gun in return. They set off across Melville Bay, but the native soon had a change of heart. Peary went through a number of guides with varying degrees of willingness before reaching a site with some bluish rock showing above the snow at the neck of an isolated peninsula not far from Cape York.

  Digging several feet into the snow, Peary uncovered part of the meteorite known by the natives as Woman, because of its original curvaceous shape. A smaller meteorite, Dog, was not more than two hundred feet away. Before departing, Peary erected a cairn and deposited a record of his visit. The largest of the three meteorites, a massive projectile called Tent, was located on an island six miles away.

  As if cursed for disturbing a holy ground, the two-week trip back was an ordeal they nearly didn’t survive. They fought inclement weather, difficult terrain, food poisoning, snowblindness, and hunger.

  Falcon appeared in Bowdoin Bay on August 20. By then, dissension was rife among expedition members, with criticism directed at the Pearys for dining privately on better food than the rest were served, and at Peary individually for attempting to win all the glory for himself. The line for volunteers to stay behind for another year was not long.

  One person, however, was quite determined to stay. Josephine was initially unswayed by the reasons presented to her against her decision to remain with her husband. However, her engineer brother, Emil Diebitsch, who arrived on Falcon, and Peary himself, finally joined to convince her that it was not in the best interests of her infant daughter to remain through another hard winter.

  Falcon steamed for home on August 26. For as long as the ship remained in view, Peary looked for Josephine’s white handkerchief fluttering in sad farewell. “So ends with the vanishing ship,” Peary wrote in his diary a few days later, “the ill-omened first half of my expedition and begins the second.”

  Peary was left in the company of his faithful companion, Henson, and the youngest member of the expedition, Hugh Lee, who was enticed to stay—according to Lee’s diary—by Peary’s promise of a federal appointment at home.*

  In addition to his feelings of abject failure, Peary experienced loneliness. It was at first crushing, and he found the room he had shared with his wife “cold and cheerless” without her. He slept several nights on the bench in the dining room.

  As fall deepened and the daylight waned, Peary fought depression. Only with immense effort was he able to drag himself outside and undertake hunting excursions to restock the supply of meat for winter.

  His thoughts inevitably returned to the ice cap, and he began to plan his course of exploration come spring. He directed the men to check and mark with tall poles the two caches that had already been established—the first one 26 miles away, and the farthest one 128 miles out, where, before turning around in April, he had left all the supplies not needed for the trip back. But Henson and Lee returned four days later, having not found the first cache, and without even looking for the second one because of a rising blizzard.

  Fearing that if they waited the caches would be buried by snow and never found in the spring, Peary went with Henson on a last-ditch search. It was futile, however: no markers were to be seen in the unending whiteness. All the supplies that had been carefully put aside for the exploring party were unaccounted for.

  Without the cached supplies, Peary knew, the only way he would be able to travel any distance in the spring would be to live off the land, a prospect he did not relish, given the uncertainty of game in the interior. The winter took on a nightmarish quality for Peary; through the dark months that followed, he suffered from depression, sleeplessness, and premonitions of failure, even death.

  As spring approached and the equipment was readied for another assault on the ice cap, Peary wrote Josephine. Although the letter began, “It is the eve of our departure for the great ice, and I sit down to write to you what I know I shall later hand you myself,” it was a missive intended to be read after his death. He told her the whereabouts of his journals, provided a list of unpaid debts to the Eskimos who had assisted him, and even the location of his keys left at Anniversary Lodge. “Should I not return,” he wrote, the structure was to be dismantled, taken back on the ship, and opened to public exhibition—as he had the ship when in need of money—to help support her. He signed off, “Good-by my darling.”

  Peary left another letter, shorter and more formal, explaining his plans for the upcoming venture, from which he hoped to return on or before September 1. “My movements after reaching Independence Bay and killing and caching as many musk-oxen as possible will depend entirely upon circumstances. It is unnecessary to enumerate possibilities, as once I have put a hundred miles of the Great Ice between me and the Lodge no human help could find or avail us in the event of a catastrophe.”

  With such a dreary mind-set, Peary left on April 1, 1895, with Henson, Lee, six Eskimos, and forty-two dogs pulling six sledges. The natives initially agreed to remain with the party on the ice cap, but changed their minds and turned back in unison when the supply cache left 128 miles out was not found after another careful search.

  Peary and his two companions pushed on. After five hundred miles, they were done—having exhausted themselves and their supplies and being left with only nine dogs. They had made it to McCormick Bay, and the rocky crest Peary had previously named Navy Cliff, but not a foot farther. There were to be no new discoveries this year, and at that point, the challenge became simply to survive. They avoided starvation by eating their famished dogs; a single canine remained when they reached Anniversary Lodge the last week of June.

  IN PHILADELPHIA, desperate measures were also afoot.

  Josephine urgently sought to find the money to hire a ship and crew to go north that summer to bring back her husband and the others. The funds raised by Peary for the expedition had been long spent, and then some. With expenditures the preceding year exceeding estimates, the cost of sending Falcon north had been met by the sale of Mary Peary’s Maine home.

  Prior to Josephine’s departure the preceding summer, Peary had told his wife that if she was unable to raise the money to send a ship for him, he would sledge to southern Greenland and take one of the ships that regularly went to Denmark.

  Now the prospect of his not coming directly home was beyond her imagination, and she had no idea what kind of physical shape he was in after another winter. She was haunted by the specter of him at some of his lowest moments—when he had been a helpless invalid with a broken leg and when he had returned exhausted from the ice cap. Suppose, she now worried, he was not capable of making a long sledge journey to a southern harbor? In her mind, the only solution was for her to find a way to hire another ship to fetch him.

  This time it would not be Falcon. After disembarking Josephine, her baby, and the other passengers in Philadelphia the preceding fall, Falcon had set sail fo
r St. John’s. She never made it. After possibly striking an iceberg off Newfoundland, she went down quickly in a stormy sea with all hands.

  Estimating the cost of hiring a ship and crew at $12,000, Josephine set about contacting numerous prominent men, asking for contributions. She made no reference to any rescue of her husband and his men, but more loftily to the Greenland Scientific Expedition of 1895.

  One individual who gave her an audience was Morris K. Jesup, an eminent New York financier and philanthropist who was a founder of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and president of the American Museum of Natural History, which he had endowed with more than $100,000. In his midsixties, he had graying, slicked-back hair and a bushy beard with mutton chops that went beyond his collar. His most striking feature was his intense gaze from deep-set, penetrating eyes.

  Josephine explained the work being done by her husband exploring northern Greenland, and his hopes for remaining an extra year. A ship sent to retrieve him the coming summer could take academic researchers northward, she explained, for the purpose of observing and collecting data.

  Jesup wanted to know at what cost, and she told him. Their meeting was cordial, and Jesup seemed genuinely interested, but Josephine came away without a bank draft—only with a remarkable vow from the millionaire.

  Continuing her solicitations, she received contributions from numerous organizations, some of which would send members on the voyage: the American Geographical Society ($1,000), the Geographical Club of Philadelphia ($760), the American Museum of Natural History ($1,000), Bowdoin College ($1,000), and the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences ($1,000). In addition, the National Geographical Society organized a lecture for Josephine, which netted $400.

  While a substantial amount had been collected, it was not enough, in spite of Josephine’s effort. Morris Jesup, who believed in helping people who helped themselves, now made good on his promise to her. He generously made up the difference. A familiar vessel, Kite, and her crew were hired and dispatched to northern Greenland.

  After much deliberation, Josephine had decided against going north on Kite. The past year had not healed the hurt she had felt when her husband chose staying in Greenland over coming home with her and their baby. And what if he again spurned home? For three weeks, she worked on a pained and heartfelt letter to her husband to be personally delivered by the Kite captain.

  “When you told me your plan a year ago . . . I felt as if you had put a knife into my heart and left it there for the purpose of giving it a turn from time to time,” Josephine wrote. “I have reviewed our married life very carefully, my husband, and think I am resigned to the place which you gave me an hour after we were married.” Even at such a romantic moment, he had been blunt, telling her she would be number two in his life after his mother. “How it did hurt,” she went on, “has continued to hurt and will hurt until the end.” She now felt third, she explained, after her mother-in-law and “ ‘fame’ [in] the first place.”

  “My Bert, my life,” she now pleaded, “if you have not been successful won’t you be content to put fame in the background and live for me a little . . . ?”

  AS JOSEPHINE fervently hoped, her husband returned on Kite. He brought with him two meteorites lashed down in the ship’s hold—Woman, weighing 5,500 pounds, and Dog, 1,000 pounds. Retrieving them had been an engineering feat—the meteorites were moved upon iron rollers over a plank tramway and floated on an ice floe out to the ship, where they were swung onboard with tackles and winches. Bringing home the meteorites was his only real achievement of the trip; tangible trophies in lieu of glorious tales of exploring new territories. Privately, Peary considered it grossly insufficient.

  On the voyage back, Peary was dispirited and uncommunicative. When the ship stopped at St. John’s, several newspaper reporters, including one from the New York Times, boarded. They tried unsuccessfully to interview Peary, who remained in seclusion. They talked to other passengers, such as L. L. Dyche, a professor of vertebrate zoology at Kansas State University, who had gone on the trip to conduct research. Dyche unflinchingly described Peary’s most recent expedition as “a dismal failure” and predicted it would be his last.

  Peary came home, by his own admission, not himself “physically or mentally,” feeling that his “Arctic efforts were ended” and that his “life-work had been a failure.” For the first time, Josephine saw her husband “completely crushed.”

  Notwithstanding their parting of ways, Cook was sorry to hear of his former commander’s woes. “Peary’s failure is sad news,” he wrote to a colleague from the 1891–92 expedition. “He has fought hard and against tremendous odds to accomplish something. He deserves sympathy.” Pragmatically, Cook was also concerned that Peary’s lack of progress could result in less support for future American explorations and “throw another shadow on Polar work.”

  When reporters caught up with him in Maine, at his mother’s new residence, which she shared with a cousin, Peary showed the world the image of defeat. “I shall never see the North Pole unless someone brings it here,” he said. “In my judgment, such work requires a far younger man than I.” He had turned forty on his last expedition—“too old,” Peary told the reporters, “to snowshoe twenty-five to thirty miles a day for weeks, and to carry a heavy load.

  “I am done with it.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “POLAR SUMMER RESORT”

  IN THE SUMMER of 1894, Cook again went north. Although he gave well-received public lectures (“EXTRA! Interesting Lecture, Dr. Cook, Arctic and Antarctic Explorer, Young Eskimo Man and Woman in Full Costume, Team of Eskimo dogs, sledges. Price 75 cents”) and colorful interviews to newspapers (“Cook’s Expedition: The Great Explorer Proposes to Visit the South Pole”), during which he explained in detail his plan for an exploring party of a dozen “intelligent, educated” volunteers to penetrate the mysteries of the South Pole, he was unsuccessful in raising the $50,000 he estimated was needed to mount an Antarctic expedition. More than one departure date was announced only to be canceled for lack of funds.

  Cook considered the choice of staying home that summer or organizing another short excursion to Greenland. Opting for the latter, he placed advertisements in several publications and signed up some fifty well-to-do passengers paying $500 each. Shortly before the June 1894 departure, one newspaper reported, “Polar Summer Resort: Dr. Cook’s Fashionable Arctic Exploration Party.”

  The junket to the land of the icebergs would be aboard a comfortable decade-old Atlantic steamer belonging to the Red Cross Line. At 1,158 tons and 220 feet in length, Miranda was the largest ship ever to set out for Arctic waters.

  The passenger manifest suggested a wide range of personalities and backgrounds—professors and students from Yale, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania; the former mayor of Cleveland; the ex-prosecuting attorney of St. Louis; the author of The Ice Age of North America; several physicians; a dentist; a taxidermist; a minister; a photographer; the U.S. solicitor of patents; and the thirteen-year-old son of a U.S. Supreme Court justice.

  Two special guests accompanied Cook on the trip—the Eskimo children Clara and Willie, who were returning home, much to the regret of the former, according to Cook, for she had “taken very kindly to the ways of civilization.”

  Miranda, known as a hard-luck ship for running aground a few times and being involved in a pair of at-sea collisions, departed New York on July 7. Even that event did not go well. As the lines were cast off, the captain signaled the engineers below deck to back slowly. Instead, the ship lurched forward into the pier with a sickening thud. Although no damage was done, the incident served as an “ill omen” to the passengers. A few crewmen shared similar concerns when rats were seen scurrying ashore after the crash. Although a landsman beginning a long cruise might consider that a positive development, old salts take a different view of rats deserting a ship.

  T
he next ten days passed uneventfully.

  July 16 dawned bright and clear, and the first icebergs appeared. Excited passengers spent the day watching bergs of various shapes and sizes glide by in magnificent procession. The next morning a dense fog rolled in.

  Cook, concerned that Miranda had not slowed down enough, went to the bridge to speak to the captain about the danger of icebergs. While the captain explained how capable he was at avoiding icebergs, even in fog, Cook only had to look out to see the icy obstacles passing perilously close.

  Shortly after eight o’clock that morning, the ship ran into an iceberg that appeared suddenly out of the mist, towering above the ship. There was a frightful wrenching sound as the ship pitched up violently, then came crashing down. Passengers and crewmen alike were sent sprawling to the deck.

  Miranda’s bow had pieced the iceberg, and was stuck fast. Fortunately, the ice did not project below the water in front of the berg’s steep face, so the blow to the hull was received above the waterline. The starboard side had damage, and some of the deck railing had been ripped away.

  Backing astern freed the ship. After all compartments were checked for integrity, Miranda put in to the nearest harbor on the Labrador coast for emergency repairs. Once there, the captain decided to seek more permanent repairs at St. John’s, Newfoundland—four hundred miles to the south.

  Repairs were completed in St. John’s by July 29, and Miranda again steamed northward. Following several stops along the Labrador coast—Clara and Willie were returned to their family at Rigolet—the ship turned northeast for Greenland. Cook requested that the captain set a double watch for icebergs, which was done without protest.

  On August 3, the snowy mountains of southern Greenland rose into view about thirty miles away. They had hoped to make the nearest port after landfall but were kept from doing so by a long stretch of unbroken ice.