It is ten years since the genocide began in the heat of Rwanda. The generals are muttering about sending more troops to Iraq, just for a while, just to settle things down in Falluja. I feel sometimes that we are traveling in a pasty gray winter of the soul.

The University of Connecticut won the NCAA tournament last night. The abbreviation of their name- U Conn- is pronounced like Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. Accordingly, their nickname is The Huskies.

So I take a cooler approach today. The Spring was a distant memory when the telegrams began to arrive in New York from Indian Harbor.

INDIAN HARBOR, Via Cape Ray, N. F., Sept. 6 — To Associated Press, New York:
Stars and Stripes nailed to the pole. PEARY

The wonders of distant communication were still new then.

The New York Times was impressed enough to print the path of the telegram: ” This message was received at the New York Yacht club in West Forty-fourth Street and had passed through the Indian Harbor Labrador wirelesss office, and was sent from there by wireless telegraph to Cape ray to Porlux Basques by the Newfoundland Government land lines; thence Canso, Nova Scotia, by cable, and New York from there over the lines of the Commercial Cable Company.”

Peary had been trying for twenty-three years. In the end it took an indomitable African American and four Eskimos to get him there. But hey, The North Pole was an elusive goal.

The magnetic pole is over a deep trench in the arctic ocean, and the ice above it shifts and buckles and breaks and the wind howls. The quest was an international race with teams from Britain, Norway and America racing there in the whiteness.

Peary had started his adventuring elsewhere. He had taken an appointment as a Navy Civil Engineer, and made two difficult transits of the steaming jungles of Nicaragua to survey potential routes for the trans-Isthmian canal.

It was there that he met an African-American named Matthew Henson, who became his career associate, and by act of Congress, his partner in eternity, though they were poles apart. Henson was said to be a nice guy.

For Peary, the expedition of 1908-09 was to be his last try. He was fifty-two, my age, and I will testify that I sometimes have serious reservations about walking down to the Post Office sometimes. Peary had left bits of himself in the Arctic, toes frozen into muklucks.

The Commander was a hard case and not a pleasant man at all. He had a wife and children in America, who he did not see very often, and fathered two children with Eskimo women while on travel.

In addition to being a hard case, Peary was an engineer, all right. In order to set up his route, he transported an Eskimo community on the Roosevelt with over 200 Huskies up into the Arctic Ocean, allowing it to be frozen in.

Then they put everyone to work in factory-like production, working through the Arctic night, to produce fur clothing, dog harnesses, hand crafted sledges, tin fuel cans and stoves. He set up base camps with a support team of two dozen men with nineteen of supplies hauled by 130 Huskies. The expedition pushed on over ice pressure-ridges, crossing leads and rubbery new ice, building igloo camps. At just over a hundred miles from the Pole, Peary and Henson left the last support team.

They were accompanied by the four best Eskimos on the team- Oatah, Egingwah, Seegloo, and Ookeah- and the most fearless dogs.  Henson set a pace that exhausted the team. They fed the weaker ones dogs to the others. They say that the last dash to the Pole had Henson in the lead, with the four Eskimos shepherding Peary in a sledge.

The frostbite that had taken his toes made it difficult to walk. Henson was far ahead when his compass began to act strangely. He waited for Peary and the others to catch up. They made camp and took sextant observations in the morning that seemed to confirm they made it. Peary’s journal did not have the cocky tone of his later telegrams. “A dense lifeless pall of gray, chalky white….” is what he wrote in his diary. It was quite different from the cheery brevity of the telegrams. They were 400 miles from the nearest land, and if a gale came up, they could be crushed or drowned.

So their pace going away from the Pole was as hard as it was gong north. They fed the weaker dogs to the stronger ones. When they arrived back on the Roosevelt Henson collapsed in his bunk.  Peary’s diary records the a recurring nightmare. For weeks after the return, just as he was drifting off to sleep, he found himself drowning in the Arctic Ocean. Of course, nothing is easy. They had to get Roosevelt out of the ice and sail back south.

It was five months before they finally arrived at Indian Harbor to send the telegrams of triumph. When he got there he found that an old comrade named Dr. Fredrick A. Cook was claiming he had been to the Pole the year before. Cook was a charming mountebank, poles apart from driven Peary. He may have been delusional, but he held onto his claim until two Eskimos who were with him revealed his  photographic evidence was faked.

Cook also lied about conquering the highest mountain in North American, Denali, which we also know as Mount McKinley. His credibility in shreds, Cook wound up serving seven years in Leavenworth prison for fraud involving a bogus oil claim. Sic transit gloria. But Cook was so charming a rascal that he got a Presidential pardon in 1940, the year he died. A Congressional vote in 1911 declared Peary the victor in the Polar Race. But then as now, a majority vote of the world’s most expensive deliberative body hardly constitutes the truth.

There was no physical evidence, of course. The controversy continues today. But it seems that he really did make it. In 2003, a math student presented a master thesis proving Peary made it based on calculation of the pall of ray chalky white and the focal length of the camera Peary had with him.

The National Geographic Society also retraced the journey based on the journals, and said he at least had made it within five miles of the Pole, and might even have been dragged across it in the sledge. Matthew Henson would go on to live a long life, which Peary did not. The made him a Rear Admiral, and he died in 1920. Living well is often the best revenge. Times changed, and late in his life he was made a member of the exclusive Explorer’s Club. The Post Office issued a stamp with his portrait on it in commemoration of the great achievement.

In 1988, Henson was disinterred from his simple grave in New York City and his coffin was moved to a place of honor in Arlington National Cemetery. He is now resting beside Robert Peary, poles apart even though he is only a few feet away. Which is a bit ironic. I told you the Admiral was a hard old bird. When evidence from the diaries began to get out in the controversy with Dr. Cook, it became known that Henson had reached the Pole before him. Peary never spoke to the man again.

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra