Peary, Robert Edwin

Robert Edwin (1856-), an American Arctic explorer. He was born at Cresson, Pennsylvania, May 6, 1856. He was graduated at Bowdoin College, and subsequently became a civil engineer in the United States navy. He was connected with the survey for the Nicaragua Canal in 1884-5. In 1886 he became interested in the exploration of the Arctic regions. To date he has visited the Arctic regions thirteen times. In 1895 he brought home to New York three large Greenland meteorites. He has surveyed the northern coast of Greenland with accuracy, and has done much to establish the geography of the polar regions. Peary set his heart on nothing less than reaching the north pole. He sailed from New York July 16, 1905, in a stout polar steamship, the Roosevelt. The outfit was furnished by the Peary Arctic Club. The Roosevelt proved to be a magnificent ice fighter and sea boat. It was furnished with a complete outfit of sledges and provisions suitable for Arctic work. Dogs and Eskimos were secured in Greenland. The Roosevelt wintered north of Greenland. Peary, with a select party, succeeded in reaching 87 deg. 6' north latitude, a point within 201 miles of the north pole. This was, at the time, the farthest north attained by man. The sledging party ran short of food. It was necessary to kill eight dogs, but, aside from hunger, the entire party returned without accident or death. His crowning adventure came in 1909.

In 1908 Peary returned to Etah, Greenland, in the Roosevelt. The Arctic Club had faith in him, and his outfit was as complete as money and experience could provide. The white men of the crew were a picked lot and they had with them the most daring and skillful Eskimo hunters in Greenland. September seventh the ship was put into winter quarters in a port of Grant Island on the shore of the Arctic Ocean. By the end of September the stout ship was frozen in to remain till spring. Camp was established on the land and supplies were transported by sledge farther west to the point of the island nearest the north pole. Five months were spent waiting for the ice to reach its best. Part of the time was put in to advantage in converting game into pemmican. On one hunting trip Peary and two Eskimos with their dog train returned at the end of seven days with fifteen musk oxen, a polar bear, and a deer. On another trip he brought in five musk oxen. Others secured in all some forty deer.

Commencing February 17th, the party began to leave the ship for "Crane City," the point of departure from Grant Land. Peary himself brought up the rear, leaving the Roosevelt February 22, 1909. The party that assembled at the rendezvous consisted of seven white men, fifty-nine Eskimos, 140 dogs, and twenty-three sledges. On the last day of February and the first day of March, the party traveled by divisions. In all, seven white men, seventeen Eskimos, 133 dogs, and nineteen sledges, all in a blinding storm, left the land and took up the line of march for the coveted goal. The first day the ice was so precipitous that two sledges were smashed and the team went back to Crane City for reserve sledges. The first day Peary's squad, the last of the line, made ten miles. By a day is meant merely a period of Arctic night twenty-four hours in duration.

The party, it should be understood, struck boldly over the ice fields in as direct a line as possible for the north. Snows, drifts, high winds, darkness, and a temperature of fifty degrees below zero are discomforts; but the men were clad in fur to the tip of the nose. They had frozen pemmican to eat, oil to make hot tea, and fur bags to sleep in. They fed the dogs and themselves well. They built snow igloos for shelter. They were prepared for Arctic life and knew how to make the best of discomfort, dizzy brains, and blinded eyes. But travel on a sea of ice is one constant terror for fear of open water. Sometimes, when the wind blows, the whole Arctic ice field seems to move, and more than once an observation showed that the ice had drifted the party farther backward than they had been able to travel forward. Leads, rifts, and cracks in the ice, are apt to form anywhere at any time. A rift split the camp in two one night and nearly put an end to the expedition. Sometimes a vast opening in the ice required a detour; sometimes a rift had to be ferried on a cake of ice; sometimes there was nothing to do but sit down and wait for a rift to close again or freeze over. But on Peary went, the ice grinding and gnawing and swaying as though about to engulf the party.

Peary had planned the trip well. He cut down the party, sending back four different detachments until at the last, accompanied by his faithful colored attendant, Henson, the only other citizen of the United States to reach the pole, with four picked Eskimos and forty picked dogs, he drew in his belt another hole and literally made a five-day dash for the pole. In these days he made twenty-five, twenty, twenty, twenty-five, and forty miles respectively. On the last day, fear, hunger and fatigue left him. The dogs scrambled along as though they wanted to see the north pole. The Eskimos were determined and loyal. The sky hung dark, dense, and lifeless; the horizon was black and the ice was ghostly, but at forty miles and noon, for they had started at midnight, the sky brightened and the clouds broke enough for an observation. The latitude was 89 deg.. 57'. The north pole had been reached.

Peary spent thirty hours in taking photographs, planting flags in the ice, traveling about a bit, and studying the dark horizon with his telescope. Through a hole in the ice five miles from the pole he let down his plummet to a depth of 1,500 fathoms without bottom. In winding up, the wire broke and he threw the reel away. During the thirty hours, the lowest temperature was 33 deg. below, and the highest 12 deg. below. April 7th, the sky being cloudless, the party packed up and started,--we cannot say south, for at the pole all directions are south,--but started home. With better knowledge of the ice fields and a lighter load and home ahead of them they frequently accomplished two days' outward journey in one, taking a noon snack in one of the old snow igloos and sleeping in the next one. Traces of the returning parties were found along the route. The return was delayed by open leads and the party encountered real danger, but April 23d, sixteen days from the pole, the dogs scrambled up the glacier-fringed shore of Grant Land, their tails still in curl, and the Eskimos shouted and danced as though they had lost their senses. Ooath, the lad of the party, sat down on his sledge with an Eskimo, "Well, the devil is asleep or having trouble with his wife, or we never should have come back so easily."

Peary learned to his sorrow that M. Marvin, one of the white men, had been lost in a lead on the return. This was the only disaster to mar the success of the expedition. The explorers now gathered their effects into the Roosevelt. July 18th the staunch ship fought her way out of the ice pack back to the Greenland town of Etah again. Here the Eskimos were enriched with walrus meat and blubber, currants, sugar, ship's biscuits, guns, rifles, ammunition, knives, hatchets, and traps. To each of the four who went with Peary to the pole he gave a boat and a tent, making them nabobs for the rest of their lives. September 5th the Roosevelt reached the coast of Labrador, and September 6th the message was floated to the Peary Arctic Club: "Stars and Stripes nailed to the north pole."

See Arctic Regions; Meteorites

As far as a witness to Peary reaching the pole is concerned, if he needed one, he had the best one living--Henson--a faithful colored man whose truthfulness had been attested in twenty-three years of manly and intelligent effort with his chief. Besides this, he was a man fully competent to at least record observations, and it is believed that he could have made them himself.--Rear Admiral Colby M. Chester, U. S. N.