Robert Edwin Peary

Explorer

• Born: May 6, 1856
• Birthplace: Cresson, Pennsylvania
• Died: February 20, 1920
• Place of death: Washington, D.C.

American explorer

After several unsuccessful attempts, Peary became the first white person, along with explorer Matthew A. Henson, an African American, to reach the geographic North Pole.

Areas of achievement Exploration and colonization, cartography, geography

Early Life

Robert Edwin Peary (PEER-ree) was born in Cresson, Pennsylvania, a backwoods farm community. His New England forebears were Frenchmen (Peary is an American modification of the Gallic Pierre) who had made barrel staves for their livelihood. His father died when he was three and his mother, Mary Peary, was forced to raise her only child on meager resources.

Peary’s mother was extremely possessive and forced her son to dress in girlish clothes. He was nicknamed Bertie and he was regarded as a sissy by his peers. He would spend the remainder of his life attempting to compensate for his tortured early years.

Peary studied civil engineering at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and resolved to outdo his rivals. He became active in sports, drama, and debate. Symbolically, he dressed up as Sir Lancelot at his college fraternity masquerade party. For graduation exercises, he composed an epic poem in which he imagined himself to be Sir Roland.

Life’s Work

Peary received a degree in civil engineering in 1877 from Bowdoin College. After his graduation, he served as a draftsman for the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey. While in that position, he applied for and received a commission in the Civil Engineer Corps of the U.S. Navy in 1881.

In 1886, Peary borrowed five hundred dollars from his mother, took a summer leave of absence from the Navy, gathered a crew, and embarked on what would be the first of eight expeditions to the Arctic. Peary, along with a Danish skiing companion, made a one-hundred-mile journey over the inland ice from the southwest coast of Greenland. The purpose of his first expedition was to acquire some fame by discovering what existed on north Greenland’s ice cap: Was Greenland an island continent, or did it, as some geographers believed, thrust its ice cap right up to the North Pole? This expedition accomplished little. However, Peary quickly learned what he needed to do in the future, and when his leave of absence expired, he returned to duty in Nicaragua with an obsession to return to the Arctic and to continue his quest for fame.

Peary’s second expedition was delayed until 1891. In 1888, he returned to his Navy job on the Nicaraguan canal route for what would be a two-year tour. That same year, Peary married Josephine Diebitsch, the daughter of a professor at the Smithsonian Institution. She was a tall, spirited woman whose appearance closely resembled his mother’s. Peary’s mother moved in with the newlyweds. This uncomfortable arrangement lasted a year. Josephine soon realized that her husband was really married to his Arctic adventures; to solve her dilemma, she accompanied him on his second expedition. By this point, Peary had become skillful in getting what he needed to continue his explorations. He pulled strings and used his gifted oratorical skills and enormous self-confidence to obtain ten thousand dollars from financial backers and an eighteen-month leave of absence from the Navy.

The stern, blue-eyed Peary sported a reddish-blond mustache; despite his serious nature, his overall appearance resembled that of the walrus-like Ben Turpin, the silent-screen comedian. His face was already wrinkled from his time in Nicaragua and from exposure to Arctic blizzards and sun. His six-foot, sturdy physique with broad shoulders and narrow hips, his finely tuned body, which had already passed its thirty-fifth birthday, was ready for the mental and physical challenges ahead.

For his second trip to the Arctic, which began in 1891, his strategy was to take with him a party of six “campaigners,” including Frederick Cook (a doctor), and a seventh person, his wife, Josephine. Josephine attracted much attention from the newspapers: She would be the first white woman to winter at such a high altitude in Greenland. Once in position, Peary planned to conduct a “white march” over the great ice of northeast Greenland and to claim for the United States a highway to the North.

On June 6, 1891, the Kite sailed from Brooklyn, destined for the northwest coast of Greenland. Cook, nicknamed the Sigmund Freud of the Arctic, proved to be a helpful passenger; his obsession to reach the North Pole went back to his own deprived childhood, during which he won prizes in geography and worked in his free time to help support his poor family. To pay for medical school, he had worked nights as a door-to-door milkman.

The Kite was in the process of ramming its way through the ice of Baffin Bay when Peary broke his lower right leg by striking it against the iron tiller. Cook quickly set the leg in splints, and Josephine relieved Peary’s pain with morphine and whiskey. Peary would later praise Cook as a helpful and tireless worker who was patient and cool under pressure.

On July 30, 1891, the party landed on the foot of the cliffs in Inglefield Gulf, immediately north of Thule, the Greenland military base of the United States. With his right leg strapped to a plank, Peary continued to demonstrate leadership as he carried a tent ashore and supervised the construction of a prefabricated, two-room cabin named Red Cliff House. As the party settled in for the long polar night, the Etah Eskimos flocked from hundreds of miles away to see the first white woman to come to their country.

Peary soon began to recover from his broken leg. Josephine recorded in her journal that, within three months, he had discarded his crutches and had begun running footraces with Cook to build up his leg. The Eskimos watched as Peary took snow baths in subzero temperatures. To demonstrate his endurance to the Eskimos, he wore a hooded parka and caribou socks and slept in the open all night without a sleeping bag.

Peary realized that, to endure in the Arctic, he would have to adopt the survival techniques of the Eskimos. He learned from the Eskimos that expeditions required dog teams, sleighs, fatty meat for nourishment, and light fur garments. However, he treated the Eskimos, who would continually come to his aid, as subhumans. He rejected the hospitality of their igloos and refused to learn their language, in contrast to Cook and Matthew A. Henson (1866-1955), his exploring partner and, some claim, the first nonindigenous person to reach the North Pole just before Peary in 1909.

During May of 1892, Peary set out eastward, on his white march across the ice cap of north Greenland. Initially, the Eskimos and Cook accompanied him. Cook had gone ahead as a forward scout. When the two men rendezvoused, Peary ordered Cook to return to look after Josephine. The Eskimos feared that the evil spirit Tormarsuk presided in the interior, and they departed with Cook.

Peary and Eivind Astrup, a Norwegian ski champion, proceeded. In sixty-five days, the two men completed the unbelievable distance of six hundred miles over unknown terrain. On July 4, Peary named an easterly inlet Independence Bay, planted two U.S. flags, and held a small celebration with the Norwegian skier. After they had rested, they turned around to retrace the six hundred miles back.

The trip would bring Peary fame; yet he had made costly cartographic errors that would eventually cause the death of a Danish scientist who attempted to confirm Peary’s discoveries. From Navy Cliff, Peary had believed that he had seen the Arctic Ocean, but he had actually been one hundred miles from the coast. Independence Bay had not been a bay but rather a deep fjord, and his conclusion that Peary Channel marked the northern boundary of the Greenland mainland was erroneous. In 1915, the U.S. government withdrew Peary’s maps of Greenland, and Peary’s reckless, unscientific behavior became legend.

After the journey, Peary raised twenty thousand dollars on the lecture circuit. Cook resigned from Peary’s organization when Peary refused to allow him to publish ethnological findings on the Eskimos. No one in the group was allowed to publish anything, except in a book bearing Peary’s name as author.

Peary’s next expedition included a pregnant Josephine, a nurse, an artist, eight burros, and a flock of carrier pigeons. On September 12, 1893, Josephine gave birth to the first white child to be born at that latitude. The Pearys’ nine-pound daughter was named Marie Ahnighito. Her middle name came from the Eskimo woman who had chewed bird skins to make diapers for the blue-eyed child, nicknamed the Snow Baby.

The birth of the child was the only happy event of this expedition, as discontent broke out among the crew. Peary’s drive and relentless nature began to cause problems. Astrup had a nervous breakdown and committed suicide on a glacier. Most of the remainder of the crew could no longer tolerate Peary, and they took the next supply ship back to the United States, as did Josephine, her child, and her nurse.

On future expeditions, Eskimos would lose their lives for Peary; Peary himself lost eight of his toes to frostbite. Now nearly completely disabled, he simply stuffed his boots with tin-can lids to protect his stumps. Nothing short of death itself would stop Peary’s single-minded quest.

Peary’s first serious attempt to reach the North Pole began during the four-year expedition starting in 1898. Henson, who was African American, had mastered the skills of Arctic exploration and was the only member from the original crew. The 1898-1902 mission failed to get to the North Pole, but Peary was able in 1902 to travel to eighty-four degrees, seventeen minutes north. On his seventh mission, in 1905-1906, Peary reached eighty-seven degrees, six minutes north, only 174 nautical miles from the North Pole, before having to retreat.

In 1908, Peary, though disabled, aging, and weather-beaten, knew that he had the physical and mental resources for one final attempt to reach the North Pole. It would be his eighth and final trip. Several millionaires in the Peary Arctic Club pledged $350,000 for the final outing and The New York Times paid $4,000 in advance for the exclusive story. The National Geographic Society of Washington and the American Museum of Natural History in New York bestowed their prestige on him. The Navy once again released him with pay after President Theodore Roosevelt personally intervened.

In 1905, at a cost of $100,000, Peary had built, according to his own design, a schooner-rigged steamship named the Roosevelt. He took six men with him, the most loyal being Henson, who had nursed Peary and had saved his life on numerous occasions. A remarkable man, he had mastered everything for the mission, including the language of the Eskimos, who worshiped him as the Maktok Kabloonna (black white man). Both Peary and Cook, who was involved in a rival expedition, believed that the best companion for such an outing was a nonwhite person, since whites, ultimately, could not seem to get along.

The flag-decorated Roosevelt got under way from New York Harbor on the steamy afternoon of July 6, 1908. At Oyster Bay, Long Island, President Roosevelt came aboard and shook hands with every member of the crew. At Sydney, Nova Scotia, Peary’s wife Josephine, fourteen-year-old Marie, and five-year-old Robert, Jr., once again bade farewell to Peary. At Anoatok, on the northwest coast of Greenland, the Eskimos reported to Peary that Cook had already passed westward on his march to the Big Nail.

Peary ordered Captain Robert Bartlett to begin ramming the Roosevelt through the ice packs and to head toward Cape Sheridan, the proposed wintering berth, which was 350 miles away. On September 5, the Roosevelt had reached its goal of eighty-two degrees, thirty minutes latitude a record north for a ship under its own steam.

Cape Sheridan became home base. Ninety miles northwest lay Cape Columbia, which Peary decided would be the ideal jumping-off spot. Four hundred and thirteen miles of Arctic Ocean ice separated Cape Columbia from Peary’s goal, the North Pole, the Big Nail, ninety degrees north latitude.

Peary was ready for the final chance to realize the greatest dream of his life. On the appointed Sunday morning, twenty-four men, 133 dogs, and nineteen sleighs departed. The expedition was broken up into five detachments: Each one would break trail, build igloos, and deposit supplies in rotation. Peary would follow the group from the rear as each exhausted team rotated back toward land.

On April 1, Bartlett took a navigational fix and determined a reading of eighty-seven degrees, forty-seven minutes north latitude. He took no longitudinal reading, which made his determination dubious, but Peary was convinced that he was 133 nautical miles on a direct beeline to the North Pole. Peary then surprised and disappointed Bartlett and ordered him home. The only qualified nautically trained witness who might verify the North Pole sighting finally departed.

Peary continued on with Henson, four Eskimos, five sleighs, and forty dogs. On April 6, 1909, at ten in the morning, after a labor of twenty years, Peary became the first white man to reach the North Pole. (Henson also reached the Pole, possibly before Peary.) Once there, Peary draped himself in the American flag. Henson later recalled in his memoirs that his fifty-three-year-old commander was a deadweight “cripple,” a mere shadow of the civil engineer in Nicaragua. One of the Eskimos remarked, “There is nothing here. Just ice!”

Significance

En route from his last mission to the Arctic, Peary learned that Cook had claimed to reach the Pole on April 21, 1908, nearly a year before Peary. Later, Cook was so hounded by the press and others that he took to wearing disguises and left the country for a year. When he returned, he spoke in his defense on the lecture circuit. Ultimately, his claims were disregarded, but the controversy was kept alive by the press because the dispute made a good story. Peary’s claims were not scientifically documented. The National Geographic Society did a hasty, perfunctory examination of Peary’s trunk of instruments in the middle of the night in a railway baggage station and agreed that Peary had discovered the North Pole.

In the 1930’s, Gordon Hayes, an English geographer, scrupulously and fairly examined Cook’s and Peary’s claims. He concluded that neither one had got within one hundred miles of the North Pole. Nevertheless, Peary is credited with reaching the North Pole, attaining the fame he so desperately desired. After much lobbying and a congressional hearing, Peary was promoted to rear admiral. He served for a year as chair of the National Committee on Coast Defense by Air during World War I. He retired and received a pension of sixty-five hundred dollars a year. He had achieved his goal, and the United States and the world recognized him for the twenty years of supreme sacrifices he had made.

Shortly after his return from the Arctic, Peary began suffering from anemia. On February 20, 1920, he died from that affliction at the age of sixty-four. He was buried with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C. His casket was draped with the remnants of the American flag with which he had covered himself as he stood atop the world on the North Pole. The National Geographic Society constructed a huge globe of white granite, representing the Earth and inscribed with Peary’s motto, “I shall find a way or make one,” and a legend proclaiming him “discoverer of the North Pole.”

Bibliography

Brendle, Anna. “Profile: African-American North Pole Explorer Matthew Henson.” National Geographic News, January 15, 2003. A brief article on Henson’s career and accomplishments as an Arctic explorer. Announces Henson’s posthumous receipt of the Hubbard Medal, the National Geographic Society’s highest honor, in 2000.

Cook, Frederick A. My Attainment of the Pole. New York: Polar, 1911. Cook’s own descriptions of his expedition. Some claim that it was a hoax and others state that he only got to within one hundred miles of the North Pole.

Diebitsch-Peary, Josephine. My Arctic Journal: A Year Among Ice-Fields and Eskimos. New York: Contemporary, 1893. Peary’s wife gives her account. Includes “The Great White Journey.”

Henderson, Bruce. True North: Peary, Cook, and the Race to the Pole. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005. Recounts the rivalry between Peary and Frederick Cook, who both claimed they were the first to reach the North Pole. Peary is portrayed as an obsessive fame seeker who committed underhanded acts to undermine Cook’s claim.

Henson, Matthew A. A Black Explorer at the North Pole. Foreword by Robert E. Peary. Introduction by Booker T. Washington. 1912. Reprint. New introduction by Susan A. Kaplan. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Henson’s account of the journey. Henson began his life in poverty, attained fame, and worked as a civil servant, retiring on a pension. He was an active and distinguished member of the New York Explorers Club.

Hunt, William R. To Stand at the Pole: The Dr. Cook-Admiral Peary North Pole Controversy. New York: Stein and Day, 1982. Contains a detailed account of the controversy over which person (Cook or Peary) got to the North Pole first. The mystery is not answered. Contains an excellent bibliography.

Peary, Robert E. The North Pole: Its Discovery in 1909 Under the Auspices of the Peary Arctic Club. 1910. New ed. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001. Peary wrote three books the others are Nearest the Pole (1907) and Northward over the “Great Ice” (1898). The North Pole is Peary’s own account of reaching the Pole. Exciting as an account but criticized by others. Includes a foreword by President Theodore Roosevelt.

Rasky, Frank. Explorers of the North: The North Pole or Bust. New York: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1977. Chapters 10 and 11 are devoted to Peary. A human account of the explorer, faults and all. Short, readable, extremely detailed report of the important events. Good starting point.

Rawlins, Dennis. Peary at the North Pole: Fact or Fiction? New York: Luce, 1973. Argues that Peary never made it to the North Pole.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century

1901-1940: July 1, 1901: Canada Claims the Arctic Islands; April 6, 1909: Peary and Henson Reach the North Pole; December 14, 1911: Amundsen Reaches the South Pole.