February 13, 2021 • 58 mins
No explorer tried harder or over a longer time to claim the North Pole than Robert Edwin Peary, a tough Mainer who suffered setbacks that would have permanently discouraged others—he even lost most of his toes to frostbite and still wouldn’t give up his dream. But he wouldn’t have been able to do it without Matthew Henson, his African-American right-hand man on seven grueling expeditions. In this episode, we’ll meet Peary and Henson, two adventurers with completely different backgrounds and temperaments who formed one of the most enduring and successful partnerships in the history of exploration. But there were also disappointments, betrayals, and a lot of drama. We’ll tag along as they make their first stabs at the Big Nail—the North Pole itself.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
The Quest for the North Pole is a production of
I Heart Radio and Mental Floss. It's summer in the
northernmost reaches of Greenland. The temperature hovers around freezing. American
explorer Robert E. Peary and his assistant Matthew Henson are
(00:23):
on a back breaking journey by dog sled across the
ice cap from Independence Bay, a large fjord on Greenland's
northeastern corner, to their base camp at Bowden Bay on
the west coast. They're nearly out of food, and they're
desperately searching for a herd of muskoks to stave off
their depths by starvation. The animals they're stalking way up
(00:46):
to eight hundred pounds and are built like battering rams,
with a coat of shaggy hair and sharp curved horns.
Muskoks are powerful and unpredictable, and their peers and Hanson's
last hope for revival. All day, they look for snags
of the oxen's hair on rough rocks and scan the
(01:06):
snow for tracks. Finally, they locate hoofprints and follow them
across a valley. Anticipating fresh meat. They spot a herd
of eight adult oxen and their calves about a hundred
and fifty feet ahead of them, munching on tufts of
grass on a wind swept slope. According to his biographer
(01:26):
Bradley Robinson, Henson stops his dogs and sled and let's
us lead dog out of its trace. It sprints towards
the herd. The panicked musk ox form a circle around
their calves. The adults face outward from the circle, ready
to fight. Perry and Henson aim and fire, but they
are so weak with hunger that their actions feel like
(01:48):
they're in slow motion. Most of the bullets hit their targets,
and the oxen dropped to the ground in heaps. But
one big animal is just grazed by the shot. It
turned towards Peary, who has no ammunition left. The ox charges.
Robinson writes that Perry scrambles up the snow covered slope,
(02:11):
shouting at Henson to fire. His legs feel like rubber,
his boots slip on the icy ground, and he expects
at any moment to feel the animal's horns in his back.
Out of the corner of his eye, Pier sees Henson
raised his gun over the ragged sound of his breathing.
He hears a thud in the snow behind him. Henson
(02:32):
has saved his life. This isn't the first time that
Pierry has come within inches of death and his quest
to reach the North Pole, and it won't be the
last time that Henson's skill and quick thinking prevent disaster.
On one of their expeditions, Peary wanted to be the
first person at the North Pole, and he wanted to
live to tell the world. Henson would help make it happen.
(02:57):
In this episode, will examine the unique relationship between Robert
Peary and Matthew Henson, two adventurers with completely different backgrounds
and temperaments. They built one of the most enduring and
successful partnerships in the history of exploration, but there were
also disappointments, betrayals, and a lot of drama. Will tag
along as they make their first stabs at the Big Nail,
(03:19):
the North Pole itself From Mental Floss and I Heart Radio,
This is the Quest for the North Pole. I'm your host,
Cat Long, Science editor at Mental Floss and this is
Episode five. Meet Pierry and Henson. The Canadian historian Pierre
(03:52):
Burton rights no other explorer in Arctic history was ever
a single minded in the pursuit of his goal as
Robert Edwin Perry. No other as paranoid, and his suspicion
and even hatred of those he considered rivals and interlopers.
No other as ruthless, as arrogant, as insensitive, or as
self serving. Of all the bizarre and eccentric human creatures
(04:15):
who sought the Arctic grail, Perry is the least lovable.
Pretty strong words. Yet these unpleasant qualities might have been
the keys to perry success. His relentless ambition drove him
on when others might have faltered. His hunger for fame
would not let him give up, even after he lost
eight toes to frostbite. His todying to his superiors, as
(04:39):
Burton puts it, resulted in them funding his expensive trips
to the Arctic, even aside from his quest for the
North Pole. He must be given his due as one
of the greatest explorers of the period, Burton rights, but
it was the poll that obsessed him. Unlike earlier expeditions
like nonsense that hope to answer scientific quest, Jens Peary
(05:01):
was not really concerned about useful discoveries or charting the unknown.
He had little training in natural history, unless you count
his taxidermy business. After he graduated from college. He kept
meteorological records, as every previous explorer had done, but he
was merely collecting data, not interpreting the results to solve
the hypothesis. His prime purpose was to conquer the North
(05:25):
Pole before anybody else. As Burton writes, even the conquest
of the poll was not in Peery's view and end
in itself, but only a means to an end. Perry
hungered for fame and fortune. He made no bones about that.
The pole he knew would give him both. Very knew himself.
He discussed his own drives and personality, especially with his mother.
(05:49):
That's Edward J. Larson, historian and author of most recently
To the Edges of the Earth, The Race for the
Three Polls, and the Climax of the Age of Exploration.
You're basically raised by his mother in Maine, and they
were devoted to each other, and he would pour out
his soul to his mother in letters. You can really
(06:10):
see a man who he is totally driven by a
sense of a hunger for fame and acceptance. Maybe that
reflects his lack of a father growing up. He said
in one letter to his mother shortly after he moved
to Washington, and at that time he had been trained
(06:30):
as an engineer and he was working for the U. S.
Coast and Geodetic Survey. He wrote, I don't want to
live and die without accomplishing anything, or without being known
beyond a narrow circle of friends. Perry had moved to Washington,
d c. In eight seventy nine after graduating from Bowden
(06:51):
College with a degree in Civil engineering. He worked for
the Coast and Geodetic Survey for two years, then joined
the U. S. Navy's Civil Engineer Corps and was assigned
to Survey Territory in Nicaragua for a potential site to
build a canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The
expedition into the tropical forests of Central America gave Peery
(07:13):
a taste of the world beyond his Yankee upbringing. He
also began to view daring adventure as his ticket to fame.
After reading about the little known interior of Greenland, he
formulated a plan for traversing its ice sheet, the largest
in the northern Hemisphere. Despite having zero experience in cold
weather exploration, ignorance never stopped Perry once he had a
(07:37):
goal in mind, and unlike many of the British Admiralties
expeditions earlier in the nineteenth century, Peery actually learned from
his experiences and adapted his plans as needed. In eighteen
eighty six, Peery embarked on his first trip to the
Polar regions. He hitched a ride on a whaler going north,
and once he arrived near Disco Island on Greenland's west coast,
(07:59):
he hired a Dane named Christian may Guard as his
sole companion for the trek. He tried to hire native helpers,
but they refused to go with him. Perry estimated the
provisions and equipment he would need, bundled it on sledges,
and then set off. He claimed he ascended to seven thousand,
five hundred feet in elevation and marched about one miles
(08:20):
into the interior before a shortage of food forced him
and may Guard to turn around. We have only Perry's
word for the distance he traveled, though we don't know
how many how far he didn't make it because he
didn't take a long proper instruments for calculating a longitude.
Quick refresher here if you're traveling west or east. You
(08:40):
measure the distance you travel in degrees of longitude. Calculating
it requires special instruments like a chronometer. Perry had brought one,
but claimed it had the usefulness shaken out of it.
After Perry had climbed a glacier, he claimed the hundred miles,
but for gold Manson, who was the greatest gusplorer at
the time, said that's ridiculous. He didn't make it that far.
(09:03):
Proving his achievements once he returned home was a running
issue with Perry. More on that later. As we mentioned
in our third episode, Nonsen had traversed the Greenland ice
sheet from east to west after Perry had returned to
the US, so he was a novice explorer. Perry was
already extremely competitive. Once he heard about nonsense achievement, Perry
(09:27):
altered his plans for his next trip to Greenland. He
decided to attempt a crossing on a longer, more northern
route from west to east that would be more difficult
than nonsense route. When he got back, he wrote to
his mother, my last trip has brought my name before
the world. Remember mother, I must have theme. He underling
(09:50):
the word must I must have theme and cannot reconcile
myself two years of commonplace drudgery and the name late
in life, and I see an opportunity to gain it now.
And then he later wrote, as he was building towards
his later expeditions, because he kept going back, he wrote,
same money and Revenge, Goldney forward until sometimes I can
(10:15):
hardly sleep lest something happened to interfere with my plans.
Now Here is a driven man in this case with Perry,
it was not only a personal goal, but it was
also a public goal that gave his life meaning and
(10:36):
gaining meaning for his life. And you can see this
in Teddy Roosevelt going down the River of down in
South America. By accomplishing this, it gave Perry's meaning to
his life, and his life was not work living to
him without meaning. Before Perry embarked on his next trip north,
he would meet the person who would go further than
(10:58):
anyone toward making Pierre's dreams of reality. Matthew Alexander Henson
grew up about as far away from the North Pole
as can be imagined. He was born in eighteen sixty
six in Nanjimoy, Maryland, a village in Charles County, on
the eastern shore of the Potomac River, about forty miles
south of Washington, d c. The Civil War had ended
(11:20):
just the year before, but southern Maryland remained sympathetic to
the Confederacy. To illustrate that fact, John Wilkes Booth had
fled through Charles County after assassinating Abraham Lincoln because he
knew he'd find like minded Marylander as to help him escape.
This feels like a good place to say that while
(11:41):
we know some things about Henson's early life, other details
even some pretty big events very widely. Even Henson published
two versions of his own childhood, Here's what we know
for sure and where we tried to fill the gaps.
According to two biographies published in nineteen fifty four and
nineteen sixty three, Henson's parents were free born black sharecroppers
(12:03):
on a large farm near Nanjimoy. Henson's mother died when
he was young, and he was raised by a cruel stepmother.
When he was about ten years old, he ran away
to Washington, where he worked for a woman in her
cafe for a year, and then walked to Baltimore, where
he signed up as a cabin boy on a ship
called the Katy Hinds, commanded by Captain Childs. He sailed
(12:24):
all around the world before coming back to Washington when
he was about eighteen. In Henson's own book about Reaching
the North Pole, published in nineteen twelve, he says he
moved with his family from Nanjimoy to Washington, d C.
His mother died when he was seven, and he went
to live with an uncle, who sent him to a
prestigious high school for black students for more than six years.
(12:47):
Then Henson signed up on a vessel and sailed to
ports around the world. In all three books, Captain Child's
emerges as a kindly father figure to Henson. I wanted
to know more about Filds, his ship, and his travels.
I dug deeper into newspaper archives, scholarly databases, and even
ancestry dot Com, but couldn't find any evidence of an
(13:10):
ocean going vessel called the Katie Hines. This was really
perplexing because US merchant ships were registered with government agencies
and their voyages were often reported in newspapers. So I
brought in our fact checker, Austin Thompson, who looked in
other sources, including the annual list of the merchant vessels
of the United States, and there was no Katie Hines.
(13:33):
But in several old articles in Maryland newspapers, I did
find that A. W. S. Child's was appointed captain of
a police sloop with that name in eighty eight, about
the same year that Henson says he signed up as
a cabin boy. This Katie Hines patrolled Maryland's waterways for
illegal oyster dreasures. Austin found an article that definitively plays
(13:56):
Childs and the Katie Hines in Maryland in one and
the Baltimore Sun reported that W. S. Child captain of
one of the state's oyster police boats, died in eighteen
eighty three in his home near Nanjimoy, Maryland. That matches
the year of Childs's death in the Henson biographies. Could
this be Henson's captain Child's We think so, but we
(14:20):
may never know for sure. So it's not easy to
know exactly where and how Henson spent his youth. But
whether Henson sailed around the world or just the Chesapeake Bay,
all biographical accounts suggest that he returned to Washington at
age eighteen or nineteen. He gets a job as a
clerk at b. H Stein Meticine Sun, a well known
(14:41):
men's furrier and hat shop located three blocks east of
the White House. Working in retail will become a turning
point in his life. In eighteen eighty seven, Robert Peary
entered the store to buy his son helmet for his
second trip to Nicaragua. Here's James Edward Mills, a freelance
journal list, independent producer, and faculty assistant at the Nelson
(15:03):
Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin. He's
also the author of the adventure Gap Changing the Face
of the Outdoors. Key and Hanson struck up a conversation,
and I'm not sure exactly how it went, but the
upshot of it was that Hanson joined Perry ostensibly as
(15:23):
his assistant. And um, It's difficult to know exactly what
the nature of their overall relationship was, but Hanson basically
was his right hand man from that point on. Henson
joined Perry on all of his expeditions, which, after their
trip to Nicaragua, would abandon warm climates for the farthest
(15:44):
reaches of the Arctic. You know, I think that he
might have taken a polar exploration to escape the Jim
Crow South. This is the one place in the world
where he could be judged by the continent of his character,
not the color of his skin. And I think that
there's a lot to be sent for that. Between eighteen
eighty one and Pierry and Henson embarked on four expeditions
(16:07):
to Greenland and northeastern Canada to explore the territory and
scout out a possible route even further north. On these arduous,
lengthy journeys, they developed a unique working relationship. Peary was
the expedition leader, navigator, financier, and planner, while Henson was
the project manager, carpenter, mechanic and translator. Peary was the
(16:30):
visionary and Henson made the vision a reality. Before any expedition,
Peery first had to obtain funding for the enormous expenses
they would incur, which included borrowing or buying a ship,
strengthening the vessel for Arctic conditions, hiring the crew, buying
provisions and equipment, buying items to trade with the new
(16:50):
wheat for their services, and a ridiculous number of miscellaneous
costs like books, tents, clothing, maps, tools, guns and edition,
scientific instruments, spare parts and much more. The disaster of
the Greely Expedition, a U. S. Army foray to the
Arctic that resulted in death by starvation, was still fresh
(17:13):
in people's minds, so Perry's early expeditions to Greenland were
mostly self funded. He had secured book deals, lecture tours,
and newspaper exclusives to offset the huge costs of the journeys.
But when Perry made the North Pole his soul focus,
he was able to gather a group of donors to
pay for his adventures, the Peri Arctic Club. The group
(17:35):
comprised the wealthy industrialists and philanthropists of New York's Gilded Age.
They enjoyed big game, hunting and other manly pursuits championed
by Theodore Roosevelt and his doctrine of the strenuous Life.
Roosevelt said it was the highest form of success, which
comes not to the man who desires mere easy peace,
(17:56):
but to the man who does not shrink from danger,
from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who, out of
these wins the splendid ultimate triumph. Many of them are
major business people in New York, but there is also
a whole set of them who are worrying that, um,
(18:21):
all these technological advances are weakening white males and they're
losing their manliness, and so Peery becomes this example of
you know, this outdoor, strong, successful man. That's Susan Kaplan,
(18:44):
director of the Pierry McMillan Arctic Museum at Boden College,
an author of Pery's Arctic Quest, untold stories from Robert E.
Peery's North Pole expeditions that sort of feeds into the
whole North Pole narrator to as well, and so Peery's backers,
(19:04):
many of them are very focused on him as the
symbol of you know, strong, tough masculinity. That is so interesting.
That's probably why he and Peeddy Roosevelt were such good friends. Yep.
It's not simply that he's the strong masculine man, but
(19:25):
he's a white Western strong masculine man. Becomes very important.
The club members had money to spare and a desire
to have their names enshrined on the Arctic map. Perry's
biggest supporter was banker Morris K. Jessup, one of the
founders of the American Museum of Natural History. He formed
(19:46):
the club in with the Chase National Bank, president Henry W.
Cannon and journalist Herbert L. Bridgeman. The Period Arctic Club
convinced Perry's employer, the U. S. Navy, to give him
a five year leave of a since so he could
pursue his Arctic ambitions. The club also raised funds to
send a supply ship to Perier's party for each year
(20:07):
he pursued the poll. Bridgeman organized the relief missions and
was the only one of the club's leaders who took
part in one of Perry's adventures. Finally, club members committed
to contributing a set sum each year to support Peri's goals.
For their sustained generosity, Perry told them, the names of
those who made the work possible will be kept through
(20:30):
the coming centuries, floating forever above the forgotten and submerged
debris of our time and day. In other words, they
could bank on an Arctic cape, mountain bay, or glacier
being named after them, much like donors today get their
names on a museum gallery or a library building. The
Peri Arctic Club helped Perry borrow a ship from Alfred Harmsworth,
(20:52):
the British publisher of the Daily Mail. The Windward was
the same vessel on which Frederick Jackson brought Fritcheff Nonsen
and Hilmar Johansson back to Norway after their attempt at
the North Pole in The ship would be their main
transport for only the first leg of their journeys. However,
once they anchored the ship in a safe location to
(21:13):
act as a base camp, Pierry and Henson traveled by
dogsled and that's where Henson's talents came into play. Here's
James Edward Mills again. I think what's really remarkable about
Henson is that he doesn't get a lot of credit
and certainly hadn't got a lot of credit for his
contributions to that expedition, mainly because of his rights as
(21:34):
an African American. He was, I guess, by design, made
a play second fiddle to the white explorers in this party,
despite the fact that Henson was the master craftsman and
built all the sleds and helped to design the polar
suits working with the Native Inuits. On their first expeditions together,
(21:57):
Pierry and Henson visited the new Wheaek commune at Eta
and hired many of the people to drive the dog sleds.
Henson intimated that he was interested in learning the skill,
and he must have seen what he would be in for.
The Greenland sled dogs were powerful, furry, and ferocious. They
retained their wolf like instincts and seemed only barely domesticated,
(22:20):
more wild animal than family pet. The dominant dog, called
the King Dog, led the team of eight animals, each
with its own trace connected to the sled. The traces
spread into a fan shape as the dogs ran at
top speed, egged on by the new wheat driver's whip
and verbal commands. It took weeks for Henson to learn
(22:41):
the right way of shouting commands that the dogs would
respect and to crack the whip at the King Dog's ear.
He had to get comfortable with the sled itself, which
was often loaded with heavy gear. Many times he wiped
out and ended up in a snow bank as his
new wheat teachers laughed hysterically, But after more eks of practice,
Henson finally got the hang of it. By their nineteen
(23:04):
o eight nineteen o nine North Pole expedition, Perry said
Henson can handle a sledge better and is probably a
better dog driver than any other man living except some
of the best of the Eskimo hunters themselves. A quick
note about the term Eskimo, since this isn't the last
time we'll hear it. It's a complicated word. It was
(23:24):
used by colonizers to describe Native people, not one that
Native people used to describe themselves. Many consider it offensive,
while some Native people still choose to use it. The
Inuit Circumpolar Council Charter of nineteen eighty defines the indigenous
peoples of the Inuite Homeland, which includes Alaska, Canada, Greenland,
(23:45):
and Russia as Inuit in inuktitute word, meaning the people.
Groups within the Inuit Homeland have more specific names for themselves,
such as the Inuite of northwestern Greenland. Henson showed that
he was eager to adopt other inw wheat waves. The
in New Wheat taught him how to hunt walrus, build
igloos and stone huts, and stay warm by sleeping in
(24:07):
furs and packing the soles of his sealskin boots with
moss for installation. Henson also achieved fluency in Innuctitut, or
possibly the related and New Wheat language Inuktun, which went
far toward establishing trust and a respectful relationship with them. Peery,
like other explorers, learned a few important words and left
(24:28):
it at that. Henson also performed a million other miscellaneous
tasks for the expedition team, from building and repairing sledges,
to butchering meat, to patching clothes, to negotiating with the
in New Wheat families. Here's James Edward Mills. You obviously
you have the ability to communicate across cultural boundaries. At
(24:52):
the same time, I think that he had the humility
to learn their language, He had the vulnerability to be
taught how to do these critical and important things, you know.
And I think that that there's probably a certain amount
of camaraderie that comes with this, because I can imagine
that especially at the time, you know, when you have
(25:14):
this still incredibly colonial attitude towards relationships with people of
color and other parts of the world, as you know,
the dominant white culture of Europe and North America. Instead
of telling the in New way to make clothes and sledges,
Henson was more likely to have said, can you teach
(25:36):
me how to do it? And I think that it
is indeed that relationship between people of color and native
people around the world you know, there's a certain sense
of a fellowship, and I think that that probably translated
itself in Henson's relationships with the Inuit from until nineteen
(25:58):
o nine, periods Old Focused became the North Pole. He'll
forge a sea root as far as the ice will
let him sail. He'll rely on the in New Week
communities in northwestern Greenland for supplies, dogs, and manpower, and
most of all will depend on Henson's expertise and Arctic
survival to reach his goal. We'll be right back. In December.
(26:39):
After leaving their ship windward on the western edge of
Kane Basin in the Canadian Arctic, Peery and a small
team are racing north along the coast of Ellesmere Island.
They're aiming for an abandoned fort, where Peery hopes to
cut off a Norwegian rival, Auto spare Drop, the same
man who captain Nonsense Ship from on its incredible journey
(26:59):
across the Siberian Sea. Ever paranoid that someone else will
reach the North Pole first and steal his shot at glory,
Pierry is convinced that's fair Drop, and tends to use
the fort as a base camp for his own dash
to ninety degrees north. The only way to reach the fort,
which is two and fifty miles north of the ship.
(27:20):
As the snow goose flies is on dog sled over glaciers, mountains,
and ice flows in the dead of polar winter. Henson
tries to talk as leader out of this dangerous idea,
but Perry will not be dissuaded. Now, Peery Henson, the
expedition surgeon, and four and new wheat guides push on
(27:41):
through the twenty four hour darkness and temperatures around minus
sixty degrees fahrenheit. They barely stopped to eat rest, and
they grow exhausted and disoriented. At any moment, a person
or sledge could disappear through the ice to their death.
After nearly three weeks of constant travel, they burst through
(28:02):
the front door of Fort Conger at Lady Franklin Bay
on Ellesmere Island. The shelter was built by the American
Army officer Adolphus Greeley and his crew during the expedition,
which eventually ended in disaster when relief ships failed to
rescue them. Now the party finds the notorious hut, just
(28:23):
as Greeley had left it with biscuits on the table,
overturned cups and piles of supplies and papers strewn about.
Henson lights a fire the inwhite ten to the dogs,
and Peery notices a worrisome wooden feeling in his feet.
Henson removes the leader's outer boots and sees that Peery's
(28:44):
legs are like marble up to his knees, a sure
sign of severe frostbite. As Henson takes off the under shoes,
several of Pierri's frozen toes pop off at the joints.
Pier He stares at his feet. Finally, he says, a
(29:05):
few toes aren't much to give to achieve the poll.
It wasn't just his cavalier attitude towards his toes that
made Peery different from his polar peers. Though he was
a naval officer, Peery's plan for the execution of his
expeditions was completely different from the British naval methods of old.
(29:27):
He took cues from Nonsen and adopted a new wheat
ways that put his own mark on polar travel. Here's
susan kaplan. Early on in his career, you know, he
went to the Arctic having built what he thought for instance,
was the ideal fledge. And once he was up there,
(29:48):
he started to look and realized that the inu Wheet
had these technologies, from fledges to the kind difer clothing
they were wearing, to the implements they were using for
hunting and processing skins that were really effective and ingenious.
(30:16):
And he had the openness of mind to recognize that
there were technologies that they had developed that were ahead
of anything that any Western culture had come up with.
And so from that perspective he really respected them at
(30:36):
the Inuhuit, and in employing them, he also realized that
they had hunting skills and travel skills that the men
he was taking north with him just simply did not have.
And so what he conceived of were teams of Westerners
(31:01):
and a new Wheat who would work together. And they
all arrived in the Arctic, you know, months before he
was going to try to get to the North Pole,
and he sent these people out in teams hunting and
doing title readings. And that was both because they needed
(31:27):
meat and because he had promised scientific results from his expeditions,
but it was also a way to get people from
completely different cultures who had no common language to figure
out how to work together. Like nonsense, Pierie opted to
(31:48):
pull light sledges with minimal supplies instead of hauling every
item he would need with him from the US. He
obtained supplies from a new wheat villages like Itta on
the northwestern coast of Greenland, or from existing camps from
previous expeditions like Fort Conger. Peery read books and journals
by previous explorers and decided the British method of multiple
(32:09):
ships and large crews was a recipe for failure. Instead,
he concluded that a mode of exploration based as closely
as possible on in new wheat techniques had the greatest
chance for success. Perhaps his biggest divergence from the old
way was hiring and integrating in new wheat families into
the expedition's plan, something that only Charles Francis Hall, whom
(32:32):
we met in our previous episode, had done before, and
on a much smaller scale. Peerry hired entire families to
perform certain tasks, knowing that the men would be reluctant
to leave their wives and children behind. Women prepared furs
and sewed them into clothing for the explorers, while men
served as dog drivers hunters and guides. Peery paid them
(32:55):
with trade goods and supplies forging loyalties so that quote
unquote new Heat wouldn't work with any other explorers, which
was also a way to ensure that his quote unquote
right to claim the poll wasn't infringed. Here's ed Larson Perry,
especially coming from Maine, was probably more open to this
(33:17):
view that in their place, at their time and in
their own ways. Um, these peoples had learned to navigate
and live in a way that if we use and
exploit we can succeed. Think of the early America, the
Westerners going through asking for Native American help, adopting Native
(33:39):
American ways, the early for trappers, Lewis and Clark, whoever
you want to talk about, and you know that was
just different, because how did you know? You America and Britain.
Just to use an analogy, boats competed for Pacific Northwest.
The British sailed there with people like Vancouver. The Americans
went across the mountains with Native American guy, and Verry
(34:01):
sort of fits in that American traditions. So what he
did is he tried to figure out, all right, these
people are already to live up there. How did they live?
They're already able to travel up there, and so he
built on this. And that's what I'm getting at the
question of what sort of a leader he was willing
(34:21):
to build an organization which was very different than virtually
all the other explorers. He developed the team of local
Innoit people, and he used their methods. Matthew Henson played
a unique role in building the organization and negotiating with
the in New Heat. He may have been the one
(34:42):
person able to persuade the New Heat to travel so
far from their homes and hunting grounds. As James Edward
Mills notes, he convinced them to go with them. You know,
it's actually this is the place that they've never gone before.
They had to have been something to that. So again
drawing a lot of conclusions here, I don't know first act,
but I would imagine that, you know, his sensibility to
(35:04):
bridge the cultural gas as a thoughtful and respectful person
of color was tootal to give the success of the
Terry expinitions. At the same time, the New Wheat never
really got the whole point of Perry's quests, but they
understood the poll to be a tangible thing as Burton
writes its name suggested a perpendicular object projecting from the ice.
(35:27):
They called it the Big Nail, after a useful trade
article with which they could identify. By availing himself of
the in new white skills and endurance, Parry was able
to develop a system that would get him to the
poll with the least amount of extraneous labor. The system
involved sending out small advanced parties along the intended route
(35:47):
from the base camp to the pole. Each party would
hall supplies to a designated point and build an igloo.
Successive parties would use some of the supplies and shelter
at these spots, then deposit their own caches of applies
at points farther along the route. Each of the advanced
parties would return to base camp, leaving Parry and his
(36:07):
hand picked comrades to push on through the final leg
of the journey to the pole without the need to
lug tents or food on their sledges. Each party would
travel extremely lightly, Unlike past explorers, Perry's lean margin for
error meant that a delay caused by a storm or
bad ice would ripple through the system. The carefully allotted
(36:30):
food caches could run out as parties waited to cross
open water, or one party could eat more than its share,
leaving too little for the subsequent teams. Despite all the planning,
they were still at the mercy of nature. After deciding
that conquering the North Pole was his ticket to fame,
Perry's next and most ambitious expeditions took place between eight
(36:52):
and nineteen o six. The first ended up being a
four year or deal that started with his frost bitten
toes and slid down hill from there. Perry's will was
tested constantly by physical injury, emotional turmoil, and the belief
that other explorers from Norway and Italy were gaining on him.
Here's susan kaplan. He's not the only one who has
(37:15):
their sights on the North Pole. Nations were vying to
get to the North Pole for national prestige, and as
I mentioned, because if there was land there, what resources
were on that land? So Peery is not driven to
(37:37):
go to the North Pole in total isolation. Um, you know,
there are a number of other people sort of sniffing
around and trying to figure out how to get there.
As he planned for departure in the summer of Pierry
learned that otto, spare Drop was again sailing the from
Antarctic waters, this time somewhere around Kane Basin, the same
(38:00):
a locale that Peery anticipated as his jumping off point
for a dash to the poll sphair Drop actually had
no interest in being the first man at the pole.
He was in the region to map unknown lands and
gather scientific data. But Peery, consumed by a desire for fame,
didn't believe that Spairedrop was not planning to sabotage his plans.
(38:21):
He used the alleged threat to squeeze more money out
of the Periarctic Club. In July, Pierry Henson and the
rest of the crew departed New York on the windward.
They sped up the Canadian coastline as far as Kane Basin,
where Perry ran into spare drops party. In October, Pierry
(38:42):
called the Norwegians the introduction of a disturbing factor in
the appropriation by another of my plan and field of work.
Spheedrop was amused by the encounter and noted how Perry
tried to hide the patches on his trousers. After a
few minutes of chit chat. Sphairedrop later wrote I took
Peery down to the sledge and watched him disappearing at
(39:03):
an even pace, driven by his Eskimo driver. As I
was turning around to go back to the tent, I
caught sight of my crew member Faussheim, driving like mad
along the ice. My heart felt quite warm with patriotism.
Now that Peery knew he had competition, or thought he did,
he accelerated his plan. Since fair Drop was around Kane Basin,
(39:27):
just south of Fort Conger, Peerrie assumed fair Drop intended
to appropriate the old hut for shelter and supplies. Peery
was determined to get there first. After the ill fated
race north from the Windward by dogs led, Peerrie's party
reached Fort Conger on January sixth, eighteen ninety nine. As
they thawed out in front of a fire, Peery realized
(39:49):
his feet or frost bitten off went his toes with
the under shoes. The surgeon was forced to fully amputate
seven Perry later lost another. One, of course, Sperdrov never
showed up. By March, the party had carried Peyrie on
a sledge back to the Windward. Over the next year
and a half, Peerrie traveled hundreds of miles across the
(40:11):
northern limits of Greenland and Canada's Ellesmere Island, employing and
testing his staging system and scouting a possible route to
the pole. In spring nineteen hundred, he and Henson located
the northernmost point in Greenland, which Peerrie named after his
chief backer, Morris K. Jessup. He went forth across the
treacherous sea for several miles, but concluded that this route
(40:34):
was too difficult. Meanwhile, the Windward returned to New York,
picked up Perie's wife Josephine, and their young daughter Marie,
and returned to Ita. The whole winter. Pearrie's family stayed
less than two hundred miles from where he was spending
the winter at Fort Conger, but neither of them knew
it Worse, Josephine met an in New Wheat woman in
(40:55):
Ita named Ala Cassina, with whom Pearrie had had a child.
Josephine was a formidable adventurer herself, and had even given
birth to Marie in the Arctic on Perrie's expedition, but
the awkward situation in Ita shook her. She wrote to
her husband, you will have been surprised, perhaps annoyed when
(41:16):
you hear I came up on a ship. But believe me,
had I known how things were with you, I should
not have come. At Fort Conger, the mood was deteriorating.
Members of the party were getting on each other's nerves.
The surgeon was jealous of Henson, and Perry tried to
smooth things over by unfairly chastising his right hand man.
(41:37):
A reliefship brought the news that Peary's mother had died.
Josephine was mad at period for carrying on with ale Cassina.
Then Frederick Cook, a doctor who had served on one
of Peari's early expeditions, arrived and the news was not good.
He recommended returning to New York at once. Peery ignored him,
but that's not the last we'll hear of Cook. At
(42:01):
long last, in March two, Peery, Henson, and the Inuit
guides made a serious stab at the Pole. Having lived
in the region for the past three years, Pierry may
have felt confident in his chances, but it was a
struggle from start to finish. The party was already worn
(42:21):
out from the previous season's traveling, and they were forced
to detour around hummocks in open water, adding distance to
their journey. Sometimes they had to chop through barriers of
solid ice to make a path for the dogs. Then
they came to a treacherous expanse of open water between
ice flows, called a lead. This particular lead marked the
(42:42):
edge of the continental shelf and butted up against the
shifting ice of the deep Arctic Ocean. The ice was
constantly coming together and pulling apart without warning. Now Perry
found it wide open, and there was nothing to do
but wait for the floes to join again, for the
temperature to drop some ice could form so they could
cross it. Frustrated, Perry dubbed it the Big Lead, the
(43:06):
Hudson River, and the Grand Canal. As they waited, they
consumed their provisions. On April one, Pierry realized their journey
to the Pole would be impossible, and he was still
three hundred and ninety five statute miles from their destination.
They had reached eighty four degrees seventeen minutes north on
(43:27):
the windward for their homeward journey, Josephine Pierry gave them
more bad news. Two years earlier, Italian naval officer Umberto
Cagney had led a dash for the pole from Francios
off Land while facing incredible hardships. Can Ye turned back
after reaching eighty six degrees thirty four minutes north, a
new farthest north that beat Nonsen and Johansson's record by
(43:50):
twenty nautical miles and Pierry's turnaround point by a hundred
and fifty eight nautical miles. And to twist the knife
a little deeper, Perry's a led did arch nemesis Auto.
Sphare Drop had also spent four years in the Arctic
between eight and nineteen o two and had more to
show for it. He located and mapped three massive islands
(44:11):
to the west of Ellesmere, now called the sphare Drop Islands,
and mapped more than one thousand square miles of territory
in the Canadian hier Arctic. Not only did Pierry not
reach the poll, he didn't even set a farthest north record.
He lost eight toes. His marriage was shaky, and his mother,
(44:31):
his closest confidante, was no longer there to provide moral support.
His personal and professional life was at a crossroads, but
one person continued to believe in his mission, Henson had
assisted him at every turn, and with his help Pierry
had a chance to try again. Let's take a break here,
we'll be right back. Robert Peary once wrote that no
(45:08):
one should ever expect anything of the Arctic except the worst.
The four year odyssey that he and Henson spent in
the Arctic was a test of their endurance insanity. But
on their second attempt at the North Pole, which followed
the same route that they had mapped out on their
previous voyage, they would experience some of the worst moments
in all their fifteen years together. On this expedition, beginning
(45:31):
in nine five, Peary would finally get his own ship.
He raised one and twenty thousand dollars about two point
seven million into days dollars from the Peri Arctic Club
and mortgaged his own house to pay for the design
and construction of the Roosevelt, named for one of his
biggest supporters, President Theodore Roosevelt, It had a rounded, flexible
(45:53):
hull inspired by nonsense from a system of horizontal trusses
within the hall strengthened it against the horse of ice,
while its bow could drive through ice that blocked its way.
Following his four year expedition, Pierry realized that his usual
bare bones crew would not have enough manpower to complete
the relay stages in his system. He would hire a
(46:15):
larger expedition team, which of course included Henson, and divide
them into three groups. The first would break the trail
for the dog sleds and build igloos along the route.
The second would like cach as of supplies at those stages,
and the third would be the polar party, the men
who would actually go to the North Pole. Perry would
continue to enlist in New Wheat families and their dogs
(46:38):
in his scheme. The Roosevelt left New York Harbor on
July and sailed up the Canadian coast, passing landmarks that
were by now extremely familiar to Pierry and Henson. By
mid August, they were at Eta to pick up about
forty of their in New Wheat colleagues, including Utah, the
(46:58):
community's lead hunter, two hundred dogs, and several tons of
Walverus meat, which were frozen and hung in the Roosevelt's rigging.
Then the ship's captain, Bob Bartlett, drove full steam ahead
north into the pack ice. They overwintered at Cape Sheridan,
where Sir George Strong NAAR's and the Alert had hunkered
down about thirty years earlier and prepared for their dash
(47:19):
the following spring. In February nineteen o six, Parry gathered
his crew and sent the advanced parties to stockpile supplies
at Point Moss, a spot on the northern coast of
Ellesmere Island, from which Peary would leave the security of
land and travel over the ice for more than four
hundred miles to the Pole. From Point Moss, Henson, Utah
(47:41):
and the advance parties went ahead to break the trail
for the sledges and to build igloos along the route
at fifty mile intervals. Peerry led the final party. Headwinds
thwarted their progress through fractured ice fields. The parties encountered hummocks,
rotten floes, and open leads that slowed their trial boll
and cause Perry mounting frustration. While the dog teams rested
(48:04):
at each of their pre built camps, Perry fumed about
falling behind his planned pace. On March, Pierry, Henson and
their teams came upon the big lead, and once again
they just had to wait until they could cross it
with the sleds. Unlike Nonsen and earlier explorers, Perry never
took any boats or kayaks with him over the sea ice.
(48:28):
They were delayed for a week before a thin film
of ice formed on the big lead, just enough to
support the weight of the sledges. They continued their dash
for three days before Perry admitted to himself that the
delay had again cost him the pole. There was no
way they could now attempt the next three D and
sixties statue miles to the pole with their dwindling food,
(48:50):
but he could not return home and face the peri
Arctic Club empty handed. To do so would cost him
another chance to try for the pole. While a ferocious
store kept them inside their igloo for several days, Perry
dwelled on Nonsen and Kanye's farthest north records. The least
he could do would be to try and set one himself. Peery,
(49:11):
Penson and the New Wheat threw all excess weight off
their sledges and drove like crazy. They were truly in
a race against time, because for every day they spent
going north, they consumed more food and had less food
for their return journey. Finally, Pierry took a navigational reading
and discovered they were at eighty seven degrees six minutes north.
(49:33):
A new record, or was it. Burton writes that Peery
claimed he traveled one and thirties statute miles between April
fourteen when he left their igloo and April one when
he took the reading. That breaks down to an average
speed of nineteen miles a day without any obstacles in
the form of hummocks or open water. In contrast, the
(49:57):
average speed he traveled between Point Moss in the Big
Lead when he was still attempting to run for the poll,
it was about seven miles per day. And the only
proof of their alleged record was Perry's word, since only
he could make the navigational calculations. As Ed Larson explains,
this was totally on purpose. There was one I think
(50:18):
indirect advantage for Perry in all this, and that is
he could feel and in a way was superior to
these people. It was it was superior amendment that only
he could calculate where they were. Only he could take
and it wasn't very good at longitude, but only only
he could take a latitude and he could plot the course,
(50:40):
and he didn't have to worry, as Scott and Shackleton
and the others did, about somebody he took along, and
he didn't have to worry about anybody trying to challenge
his power. Wherever they were, they didn't stop to celebrate.
Terry had already pushed them to the limit. He later wrote,
(51:01):
as I looked at the drawn faces of my comrades,
at the skeleton figures of my few remaining dogs, at
my nearly empty sledges, and remembered the drifting ice over
which we had come, and the unknown quantity of the
big lead between us and the nearest land, I felt
that I had cut the margin as narrow as could
reasonably be expected. Now they were in a race against death.
(51:26):
On their retreat, the wind that had blown at their
backs on the way north blasted them in the face.
Tiny snow particles felt like red hot needles on their
exposed skin. Each day became a mad dash from one
former camp to the next, where they had shelter but
no fresh supplies of food. Perry wrote, at the end
(51:46):
of every march, we stumbled into our old eggloes, utterly exhausted,
with eyes aflame from the wind and driving snow, but
thanking God that we did not have to put ourselves
to the additional effort of building egglooes. Eventually they came
upon the big lead, stretching clear to the horizon in
either direction. While they waited to cross it, they killed
(52:08):
and ate most of their dogs and broke up the
sleds for fuel. On their northward journey, Perry had dubbed
the channel the Hudson River. Now as we lay in
this dismal camp, Perry later wrote, watching the distant southern ice,
beyond which lay the world, all that was near and dear,
and perhaps life itself, while on our side was only
(52:29):
the wide stretching ice and possibility of a lingering death.
There was but one appropriate name for its black waters,
the sticks. Finally, a crust of ice two miles wide
covered the lead, a short distance from their camp, possibly
thick enough to support a man in snowshoes. There was
only one way to find out. The lightest and most
(52:52):
experience in new wheat guide went first, leading the dogs
in their one remaining sledge behind him. Each man on
snow shoes followed at fifty or sixty foot intervals. To
avoid breaking the ice. We crossed in silence, each man
busy with his thoughts and intent upon his snowshoes. Frankly,
(53:12):
I do not care for more similar experiences, Perry wrote.
Once started, we could not stop, We could not lift
our snowshoes. It was a matter of constantly and smoothly
gliding one past the other with utmost care and evenness
of pressure. And from every man as he slid a
snowshoe forward, undulations went out in every direction through the
(53:35):
thin film incrusting the black water. The sledge was preceded
and followed by a broad swell. It was the first
and only time in all my Arctic work that I
felt doubtful as to the outcome. Halfway across the ice,
Perry's boot broke through, and he thought it was the end,
he wrote, But I dared not take my eyes from
(53:58):
the steady, even glide ing of my snowshoes, and the
fascination of the glassy swell at the toes of them.
After a period in which they must have felt time stopped,
the whole party made it to the firm ice on
the southern edge of the lead. Perry remembered, when we
stood up from unfastening our snowshoes, and looked back for
(54:20):
a moment before turning our faces southward. A narrow black
ribbon cut the frail bridge on which we had crossed
into the lead was widening again, and we had just
made it. They finally returned to the Roosevelt on May six,
and despite their struggle to get there, Parry had one
(54:42):
more trek in him. He and a small team marched
westward along the northern coast of Ellesmere Island, setting what
he believed was the farthest west record, just as a
backup for his farthest north. The Roosevelt and its crew
returned to New York on December six. Again, they had survived,
(55:03):
but Pierry had to face his own crushing disappointment, and
he received a cool reception from the public when it
learned he had failed to reach the poll, but his
influential fan club rewarded him for his feats. The National
Geographic Society honored Perry with its Hubbard Medal at a
fancy gala, and Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech at the
ceremony presenting the award. Peary was there to receive it
(55:27):
on December, having left the Roosevelt and returned to New
York before the ship steamed into the harbor. None of
the members of his expedition team, least of all Henson
and the new Wheat, who were actually at Perry's farthest
north with him, received any recognition. According to Ed Larson,
Perry was probably fine with that. He did have this
(55:48):
singular vision that he had to achieve it, where many
of the other polar explorers didn't mind sharing glory. I
mean certainly Shackleton didn't. That was Coren Toshackle his nature.
Nor did uh Jnson, who was considered the greatest explorer
of the age. They didn't have that same problem. They
figured there was plenty to go around and they would
(56:10):
get the most of it. The metal and accolades were nice,
but Perry must have asked himself how much longer he
could continue his quest for the North Pole. In his
two serious efforts to conquer it, the brute realities of
the polar environment had held him back. He didn't know
whether the peri Arctic Club would remain hopeful of his
(56:30):
dream for glory. At the end of Robert Perry was
fifty years old. Matthew Henson was forty. Both were well
over retirement age for Arctic explorers, but despite their age
and there are many setbacks, they still had one more
try in them. The Quest for the North Pole is
(57:09):
hosted by Me cat Long. This episode was researched and
written by Me, with fact checking by Austin Thompson. The
executive producers are Aaron McCarthy and Tyler Clang. The supervising
producer is Dylan Fagan. The show is edited by Dylan Fagan.
For transcripts, a glossary, and to learn more about this episode,
visit Mental flaws dot com slash podcast. The Quest for
(57:33):
the North Pole is a production of I Heart Radio
and Mental Flaws. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
check out the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcast. For more podcasts for my
(57:59):
heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
The Quest for the North Pole is a production of
I Heart Radio and Mental Floss. It's summer in the
northernmost reaches of Greenland. The temperature hovers around freezing. American
explorer Robert E. Peary and his assistant Matthew Henson are
(00:23):
on a back breaking journey by dog sled across the
ice cap from Independence Bay, a large fjord on Greenland's
northeastern corner, to their base camp at Bowden Bay on
the west coast. They're nearly out of food, and they're
desperately searching for a herd of muskoks to stave off
their depths by starvation. The animals they're stalking way up
(00:46):
to eight hundred pounds and are built like battering rams,
with a coat of shaggy hair and sharp curved horns.
Muskoks are powerful and unpredictable, and their peers and Hanson's
last hope for revival. All day, they look for snags
of the oxen's hair on rough rocks and scan the
(01:06):
snow for tracks. Finally, they locate hoofprints and follow them
across a valley. Anticipating fresh meat. They spot a herd
of eight adult oxen and their calves about a hundred
and fifty feet ahead of them, munching on tufts of
grass on a wind swept slope. According to his biographer
(01:26):
Bradley Robinson, Henson stops his dogs and sled and let's
us lead dog out of its trace. It sprints towards
the herd. The panicked musk ox form a circle around
their calves. The adults face outward from the circle, ready
to fight. Perry and Henson aim and fire, but they
are so weak with hunger that their actions feel like
(01:48):
they're in slow motion. Most of the bullets hit their targets,
and the oxen dropped to the ground in heaps. But
one big animal is just grazed by the shot. It
turned towards Peary, who has no ammunition left. The ox charges.
Robinson writes that Perry scrambles up the snow covered slope,
(02:11):
shouting at Henson to fire. His legs feel like rubber,
his boots slip on the icy ground, and he expects
at any moment to feel the animal's horns in his back.
Out of the corner of his eye, Pier sees Henson
raised his gun over the ragged sound of his breathing.
He hears a thud in the snow behind him. Henson
(02:32):
has saved his life. This isn't the first time that
Pierry has come within inches of death and his quest
to reach the North Pole, and it won't be the
last time that Henson's skill and quick thinking prevent disaster.
On one of their expeditions, Peary wanted to be the
first person at the North Pole, and he wanted to
live to tell the world. Henson would help make it happen.
(02:57):
In this episode, will examine the unique relationship between Robert
Peary and Matthew Henson, two adventurers with completely different backgrounds
and temperaments. They built one of the most enduring and
successful partnerships in the history of exploration, but there were
also disappointments, betrayals, and a lot of drama. Will tag
along as they make their first stabs at the Big Nail,
(03:19):
the North Pole itself From Mental Floss and I Heart Radio,
This is the Quest for the North Pole. I'm your host,
Cat Long, Science editor at Mental Floss and this is
Episode five. Meet Pierry and Henson. The Canadian historian Pierre
(03:52):
Burton rights no other explorer in Arctic history was ever
a single minded in the pursuit of his goal as
Robert Edwin Perry. No other as paranoid, and his suspicion
and even hatred of those he considered rivals and interlopers.
No other as ruthless, as arrogant, as insensitive, or as
self serving. Of all the bizarre and eccentric human creatures
(04:15):
who sought the Arctic grail, Perry is the least lovable.
Pretty strong words. Yet these unpleasant qualities might have been
the keys to perry success. His relentless ambition drove him
on when others might have faltered. His hunger for fame
would not let him give up, even after he lost
eight toes to frostbite. His todying to his superiors, as
(04:39):
Burton puts it, resulted in them funding his expensive trips
to the Arctic, even aside from his quest for the
North Pole. He must be given his due as one
of the greatest explorers of the period, Burton rights, but
it was the poll that obsessed him. Unlike earlier expeditions
like nonsense that hope to answer scientific quest, Jens Peary
(05:01):
was not really concerned about useful discoveries or charting the unknown.
He had little training in natural history, unless you count
his taxidermy business. After he graduated from college. He kept
meteorological records, as every previous explorer had done, but he
was merely collecting data, not interpreting the results to solve
the hypothesis. His prime purpose was to conquer the North
(05:25):
Pole before anybody else. As Burton writes, even the conquest
of the poll was not in Peery's view and end
in itself, but only a means to an end. Perry
hungered for fame and fortune. He made no bones about that.
The pole he knew would give him both. Very knew himself.
He discussed his own drives and personality, especially with his mother.
(05:49):
That's Edward J. Larson, historian and author of most recently
To the Edges of the Earth, The Race for the
Three Polls, and the Climax of the Age of Exploration.
You're basically raised by his mother in Maine, and they
were devoted to each other, and he would pour out
his soul to his mother in letters. You can really
(06:10):
see a man who he is totally driven by a
sense of a hunger for fame and acceptance. Maybe that
reflects his lack of a father growing up. He said
in one letter to his mother shortly after he moved
to Washington, and at that time he had been trained
(06:30):
as an engineer and he was working for the U. S.
Coast and Geodetic Survey. He wrote, I don't want to
live and die without accomplishing anything, or without being known
beyond a narrow circle of friends. Perry had moved to Washington,
d c. In eight seventy nine after graduating from Bowden
(06:51):
College with a degree in Civil engineering. He worked for
the Coast and Geodetic Survey for two years, then joined
the U. S. Navy's Civil Engineer Corps and was assigned
to Survey Territory in Nicaragua for a potential site to
build a canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The
expedition into the tropical forests of Central America gave Peery
(07:13):
a taste of the world beyond his Yankee upbringing. He
also began to view daring adventure as his ticket to fame.
After reading about the little known interior of Greenland, he
formulated a plan for traversing its ice sheet, the largest
in the northern Hemisphere. Despite having zero experience in cold
weather exploration, ignorance never stopped Perry once he had a
(07:37):
goal in mind, and unlike many of the British Admiralties
expeditions earlier in the nineteenth century, Peery actually learned from
his experiences and adapted his plans as needed. In eighteen
eighty six, Peery embarked on his first trip to the
Polar regions. He hitched a ride on a whaler going north,
and once he arrived near Disco Island on Greenland's west coast,
(07:59):
he hired a Dane named Christian may Guard as his
sole companion for the trek. He tried to hire native helpers,
but they refused to go with him. Perry estimated the
provisions and equipment he would need, bundled it on sledges,
and then set off. He claimed he ascended to seven thousand,
five hundred feet in elevation and marched about one miles
(08:20):
into the interior before a shortage of food forced him
and may Guard to turn around. We have only Perry's
word for the distance he traveled, though we don't know
how many how far he didn't make it because he
didn't take a long proper instruments for calculating a longitude.
Quick refresher here if you're traveling west or east. You
(08:40):
measure the distance you travel in degrees of longitude. Calculating
it requires special instruments like a chronometer. Perry had brought one,
but claimed it had the usefulness shaken out of it.
After Perry had climbed a glacier, he claimed the hundred miles,
but for gold Manson, who was the greatest gusplorer at
the time, said that's ridiculous. He didn't make it that far.
(09:03):
Proving his achievements once he returned home was a running
issue with Perry. More on that later. As we mentioned
in our third episode, Nonsen had traversed the Greenland ice
sheet from east to west after Perry had returned to
the US, so he was a novice explorer. Perry was
already extremely competitive. Once he heard about nonsense achievement, Perry
(09:27):
altered his plans for his next trip to Greenland. He
decided to attempt a crossing on a longer, more northern
route from west to east that would be more difficult
than nonsense route. When he got back, he wrote to
his mother, my last trip has brought my name before
the world. Remember mother, I must have theme. He underling
(09:50):
the word must I must have theme and cannot reconcile
myself two years of commonplace drudgery and the name late
in life, and I see an opportunity to gain it now.
And then he later wrote, as he was building towards
his later expeditions, because he kept going back, he wrote,
same money and Revenge, Goldney forward until sometimes I can
(10:15):
hardly sleep lest something happened to interfere with my plans.
Now Here is a driven man in this case with Perry,
it was not only a personal goal, but it was
also a public goal that gave his life meaning and
(10:36):
gaining meaning for his life. And you can see this
in Teddy Roosevelt going down the River of down in
South America. By accomplishing this, it gave Perry's meaning to
his life, and his life was not work living to
him without meaning. Before Perry embarked on his next trip north,
he would meet the person who would go further than
(10:58):
anyone toward making Pierre's dreams of reality. Matthew Alexander Henson
grew up about as far away from the North Pole
as can be imagined. He was born in eighteen sixty
six in Nanjimoy, Maryland, a village in Charles County, on
the eastern shore of the Potomac River, about forty miles
south of Washington, d c. The Civil War had ended
(11:20):
just the year before, but southern Maryland remained sympathetic to
the Confederacy. To illustrate that fact, John Wilkes Booth had
fled through Charles County after assassinating Abraham Lincoln because he
knew he'd find like minded Marylander as to help him escape.
This feels like a good place to say that while
(11:41):
we know some things about Henson's early life, other details
even some pretty big events very widely. Even Henson published
two versions of his own childhood, Here's what we know
for sure and where we tried to fill the gaps.
According to two biographies published in nineteen fifty four and
nineteen sixty three, Henson's parents were free born black sharecroppers
(12:03):
on a large farm near Nanjimoy. Henson's mother died when
he was young, and he was raised by a cruel stepmother.
When he was about ten years old, he ran away
to Washington, where he worked for a woman in her
cafe for a year, and then walked to Baltimore, where
he signed up as a cabin boy on a ship
called the Katy Hinds, commanded by Captain Childs. He sailed
(12:24):
all around the world before coming back to Washington when
he was about eighteen. In Henson's own book about Reaching
the North Pole, published in nineteen twelve, he says he
moved with his family from Nanjimoy to Washington, d C.
His mother died when he was seven, and he went
to live with an uncle, who sent him to a
prestigious high school for black students for more than six years.
(12:47):
Then Henson signed up on a vessel and sailed to
ports around the world. In all three books, Captain Child's
emerges as a kindly father figure to Henson. I wanted
to know more about Filds, his ship, and his travels.
I dug deeper into newspaper archives, scholarly databases, and even
ancestry dot Com, but couldn't find any evidence of an
(13:10):
ocean going vessel called the Katie Hines. This was really
perplexing because US merchant ships were registered with government agencies
and their voyages were often reported in newspapers. So I
brought in our fact checker, Austin Thompson, who looked in
other sources, including the annual list of the merchant vessels
of the United States, and there was no Katie Hines.
(13:33):
But in several old articles in Maryland newspapers, I did
find that A. W. S. Child's was appointed captain of
a police sloop with that name in eighty eight, about
the same year that Henson says he signed up as
a cabin boy. This Katie Hines patrolled Maryland's waterways for
illegal oyster dreasures. Austin found an article that definitively plays
(13:56):
Childs and the Katie Hines in Maryland in one and
the Baltimore Sun reported that W. S. Child captain of
one of the state's oyster police boats, died in eighteen
eighty three in his home near Nanjimoy, Maryland. That matches
the year of Childs's death in the Henson biographies. Could
this be Henson's captain Child's We think so, but we
(14:20):
may never know for sure. So it's not easy to
know exactly where and how Henson spent his youth. But
whether Henson sailed around the world or just the Chesapeake Bay,
all biographical accounts suggest that he returned to Washington at
age eighteen or nineteen. He gets a job as a
clerk at b. H Stein Meticine Sun, a well known
(14:41):
men's furrier and hat shop located three blocks east of
the White House. Working in retail will become a turning
point in his life. In eighteen eighty seven, Robert Peary
entered the store to buy his son helmet for his
second trip to Nicaragua. Here's James Edward Mills, a freelance
journal list, independent producer, and faculty assistant at the Nelson
(15:03):
Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin. He's
also the author of the adventure Gap Changing the Face
of the Outdoors. Key and Hanson struck up a conversation,
and I'm not sure exactly how it went, but the
upshot of it was that Hanson joined Perry ostensibly as
(15:23):
his assistant. And um, It's difficult to know exactly what
the nature of their overall relationship was, but Hanson basically
was his right hand man from that point on. Henson
joined Perry on all of his expeditions, which, after their
trip to Nicaragua, would abandon warm climates for the farthest
(15:44):
reaches of the Arctic. You know, I think that he
might have taken a polar exploration to escape the Jim
Crow South. This is the one place in the world
where he could be judged by the continent of his character,
not the color of his skin. And I think that
there's a lot to be sent for that. Between eighteen
eighty one and Pierry and Henson embarked on four expeditions
(16:07):
to Greenland and northeastern Canada to explore the territory and
scout out a possible route even further north. On these arduous,
lengthy journeys, they developed a unique working relationship. Peary was
the expedition leader, navigator, financier, and planner, while Henson was
the project manager, carpenter, mechanic and translator. Peary was the
(16:30):
visionary and Henson made the vision a reality. Before any expedition,
Peery first had to obtain funding for the enormous expenses
they would incur, which included borrowing or buying a ship,
strengthening the vessel for Arctic conditions, hiring the crew, buying
provisions and equipment, buying items to trade with the new
(16:50):
wheat for their services, and a ridiculous number of miscellaneous
costs like books, tents, clothing, maps, tools, guns and edition,
scientific instruments, spare parts and much more. The disaster of
the Greely Expedition, a U. S. Army foray to the
Arctic that resulted in death by starvation, was still fresh
(17:13):
in people's minds, so Perry's early expeditions to Greenland were
mostly self funded. He had secured book deals, lecture tours,
and newspaper exclusives to offset the huge costs of the journeys.
But when Perry made the North Pole his soul focus,
he was able to gather a group of donors to
pay for his adventures, the Peri Arctic Club. The group
(17:35):
comprised the wealthy industrialists and philanthropists of New York's Gilded Age.
They enjoyed big game, hunting and other manly pursuits championed
by Theodore Roosevelt and his doctrine of the strenuous Life.
Roosevelt said it was the highest form of success, which
comes not to the man who desires mere easy peace,
(17:56):
but to the man who does not shrink from danger,
from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who, out of
these wins the splendid ultimate triumph. Many of them are
major business people in New York, but there is also
a whole set of them who are worrying that, um,
(18:21):
all these technological advances are weakening white males and they're
losing their manliness, and so Peery becomes this example of
you know, this outdoor, strong, successful man. That's Susan Kaplan,
(18:44):
director of the Pierry McMillan Arctic Museum at Boden College,
an author of Pery's Arctic Quest, untold stories from Robert E.
Peery's North Pole expeditions that sort of feeds into the
whole North Pole narrator to as well, and so Peery's backers,
(19:04):
many of them are very focused on him as the
symbol of you know, strong, tough masculinity. That is so interesting.
That's probably why he and Peeddy Roosevelt were such good friends. Yep.
It's not simply that he's the strong masculine man, but
(19:25):
he's a white Western strong masculine man. Becomes very important.
The club members had money to spare and a desire
to have their names enshrined on the Arctic map. Perry's
biggest supporter was banker Morris K. Jessup, one of the
founders of the American Museum of Natural History. He formed
(19:46):
the club in with the Chase National Bank, president Henry W.
Cannon and journalist Herbert L. Bridgeman. The Period Arctic Club
convinced Perry's employer, the U. S. Navy, to give him
a five year leave of a since so he could
pursue his Arctic ambitions. The club also raised funds to
send a supply ship to Perier's party for each year
(20:07):
he pursued the poll. Bridgeman organized the relief missions and
was the only one of the club's leaders who took
part in one of Perry's adventures. Finally, club members committed
to contributing a set sum each year to support Peri's goals.
For their sustained generosity, Perry told them, the names of
those who made the work possible will be kept through
(20:30):
the coming centuries, floating forever above the forgotten and submerged
debris of our time and day. In other words, they
could bank on an Arctic cape, mountain bay, or glacier
being named after them, much like donors today get their
names on a museum gallery or a library building. The
Peri Arctic Club helped Perry borrow a ship from Alfred Harmsworth,
(20:52):
the British publisher of the Daily Mail. The Windward was
the same vessel on which Frederick Jackson brought Fritcheff Nonsen
and Hilmar Johansson back to Norway after their attempt at
the North Pole in The ship would be their main
transport for only the first leg of their journeys. However,
once they anchored the ship in a safe location to
(21:13):
act as a base camp, Pierry and Henson traveled by
dogsled and that's where Henson's talents came into play. Here's
James Edward Mills again. I think what's really remarkable about
Henson is that he doesn't get a lot of credit
and certainly hadn't got a lot of credit for his
contributions to that expedition, mainly because of his rights as
(21:34):
an African American. He was, I guess, by design, made
a play second fiddle to the white explorers in this party,
despite the fact that Henson was the master craftsman and
built all the sleds and helped to design the polar
suits working with the Native Inuits. On their first expeditions together,
(21:57):
Pierry and Henson visited the new Wheaek commune at Eta
and hired many of the people to drive the dog sleds.
Henson intimated that he was interested in learning the skill,
and he must have seen what he would be in for.
The Greenland sled dogs were powerful, furry, and ferocious. They
retained their wolf like instincts and seemed only barely domesticated,
(22:20):
more wild animal than family pet. The dominant dog, called
the King Dog, led the team of eight animals, each
with its own trace connected to the sled. The traces
spread into a fan shape as the dogs ran at
top speed, egged on by the new wheat driver's whip
and verbal commands. It took weeks for Henson to learn
(22:41):
the right way of shouting commands that the dogs would
respect and to crack the whip at the King Dog's ear.
He had to get comfortable with the sled itself, which
was often loaded with heavy gear. Many times he wiped
out and ended up in a snow bank as his
new wheat teachers laughed hysterically, But after more eks of practice,
Henson finally got the hang of it. By their nineteen
(23:04):
o eight nineteen o nine North Pole expedition, Perry said
Henson can handle a sledge better and is probably a
better dog driver than any other man living except some
of the best of the Eskimo hunters themselves. A quick
note about the term Eskimo, since this isn't the last
time we'll hear it. It's a complicated word. It was
(23:24):
used by colonizers to describe Native people, not one that
Native people used to describe themselves. Many consider it offensive,
while some Native people still choose to use it. The
Inuit Circumpolar Council Charter of nineteen eighty defines the indigenous
peoples of the Inuite Homeland, which includes Alaska, Canada, Greenland,
(23:45):
and Russia as Inuit in inuktitute word, meaning the people.
Groups within the Inuit Homeland have more specific names for themselves,
such as the Inuite of northwestern Greenland. Henson showed that
he was eager to adopt other inw wheat waves. The
in New Wheat taught him how to hunt walrus, build
igloos and stone huts, and stay warm by sleeping in
(24:07):
furs and packing the soles of his sealskin boots with
moss for installation. Henson also achieved fluency in Innuctitut, or
possibly the related and New Wheat language Inuktun, which went
far toward establishing trust and a respectful relationship with them. Peery,
like other explorers, learned a few important words and left
(24:28):
it at that. Henson also performed a million other miscellaneous
tasks for the expedition team, from building and repairing sledges,
to butchering meat, to patching clothes, to negotiating with the
in New Wheat families. Here's James Edward Mills. You obviously
you have the ability to communicate across cultural boundaries. At
(24:52):
the same time, I think that he had the humility
to learn their language, He had the vulnerability to be
taught how to do these critical and important things, you know.
And I think that that there's probably a certain amount
of camaraderie that comes with this, because I can imagine
that especially at the time, you know, when you have
(25:14):
this still incredibly colonial attitude towards relationships with people of
color and other parts of the world, as you know,
the dominant white culture of Europe and North America. Instead
of telling the in New way to make clothes and sledges,
Henson was more likely to have said, can you teach
(25:36):
me how to do it? And I think that it
is indeed that relationship between people of color and native
people around the world you know, there's a certain sense
of a fellowship, and I think that that probably translated
itself in Henson's relationships with the Inuit from until nineteen
(25:58):
o nine, periods Old Focused became the North Pole. He'll
forge a sea root as far as the ice will
let him sail. He'll rely on the in New Week
communities in northwestern Greenland for supplies, dogs, and manpower, and
most of all will depend on Henson's expertise and Arctic
survival to reach his goal. We'll be right back. In December.
(26:39):
After leaving their ship windward on the western edge of
Kane Basin in the Canadian Arctic, Peery and a small
team are racing north along the coast of Ellesmere Island.
They're aiming for an abandoned fort, where Peery hopes to
cut off a Norwegian rival, Auto spare Drop, the same
man who captain Nonsense Ship from on its incredible journey
(26:59):
across the Siberian Sea. Ever paranoid that someone else will
reach the North Pole first and steal his shot at glory,
Pierry is convinced that's fair Drop, and tends to use
the fort as a base camp for his own dash
to ninety degrees north. The only way to reach the fort,
which is two and fifty miles north of the ship.
(27:20):
As the snow goose flies is on dog sled over glaciers, mountains,
and ice flows in the dead of polar winter. Henson
tries to talk as leader out of this dangerous idea,
but Perry will not be dissuaded. Now, Peery Henson, the
expedition surgeon, and four and new wheat guides push on
(27:41):
through the twenty four hour darkness and temperatures around minus
sixty degrees fahrenheit. They barely stopped to eat rest, and
they grow exhausted and disoriented. At any moment, a person
or sledge could disappear through the ice to their death.
After nearly three weeks of constant travel, they burst through
(28:02):
the front door of Fort Conger at Lady Franklin Bay
on Ellesmere Island. The shelter was built by the American
Army officer Adolphus Greeley and his crew during the expedition,
which eventually ended in disaster when relief ships failed to
rescue them. Now the party finds the notorious hut, just
(28:23):
as Greeley had left it with biscuits on the table,
overturned cups and piles of supplies and papers strewn about.
Henson lights a fire the inwhite ten to the dogs,
and Peery notices a worrisome wooden feeling in his feet.
Henson removes the leader's outer boots and sees that Peery's
(28:44):
legs are like marble up to his knees, a sure
sign of severe frostbite. As Henson takes off the under shoes,
several of Pierri's frozen toes pop off at the joints.
Pier He stares at his feet. Finally, he says, a
(29:05):
few toes aren't much to give to achieve the poll.
It wasn't just his cavalier attitude towards his toes that
made Peery different from his polar peers. Though he was
a naval officer, Peery's plan for the execution of his
expeditions was completely different from the British naval methods of old.
(29:27):
He took cues from Nonsen and adopted a new wheat
ways that put his own mark on polar travel. Here's
susan kaplan. Early on in his career, you know, he
went to the Arctic having built what he thought for instance,
was the ideal fledge. And once he was up there,
(29:48):
he started to look and realized that the inu Wheet
had these technologies, from fledges to the kind difer clothing
they were wearing, to the implements they were using for
hunting and processing skins that were really effective and ingenious.
(30:16):
And he had the openness of mind to recognize that
there were technologies that they had developed that were ahead
of anything that any Western culture had come up with.
And so from that perspective he really respected them at
(30:36):
the Inuhuit, and in employing them, he also realized that
they had hunting skills and travel skills that the men
he was taking north with him just simply did not have.
And so what he conceived of were teams of Westerners
(31:01):
and a new Wheat who would work together. And they
all arrived in the Arctic, you know, months before he
was going to try to get to the North Pole,
and he sent these people out in teams hunting and
doing title readings. And that was both because they needed
(31:27):
meat and because he had promised scientific results from his expeditions,
but it was also a way to get people from
completely different cultures who had no common language to figure
out how to work together. Like nonsense, Pierie opted to
(31:48):
pull light sledges with minimal supplies instead of hauling every
item he would need with him from the US. He
obtained supplies from a new wheat villages like Itta on
the northwestern coast of Greenland, or from existing camps from
previous expeditions like Fort Conger. Peery read books and journals
by previous explorers and decided the British method of multiple
(32:09):
ships and large crews was a recipe for failure. Instead,
he concluded that a mode of exploration based as closely
as possible on in new wheat techniques had the greatest
chance for success. Perhaps his biggest divergence from the old
way was hiring and integrating in new wheat families into
the expedition's plan, something that only Charles Francis Hall, whom
(32:32):
we met in our previous episode, had done before, and
on a much smaller scale. Peerry hired entire families to
perform certain tasks, knowing that the men would be reluctant
to leave their wives and children behind. Women prepared furs
and sewed them into clothing for the explorers, while men
served as dog drivers hunters and guides. Peery paid them
(32:55):
with trade goods and supplies forging loyalties so that quote
unquote new Heat wouldn't work with any other explorers, which
was also a way to ensure that his quote unquote
right to claim the poll wasn't infringed. Here's ed Larson Perry,
especially coming from Maine, was probably more open to this
(33:17):
view that in their place, at their time and in
their own ways. Um, these peoples had learned to navigate
and live in a way that if we use and
exploit we can succeed. Think of the early America, the
Westerners going through asking for Native American help, adopting Native
(33:39):
American ways, the early for trappers, Lewis and Clark, whoever
you want to talk about, and you know that was
just different, because how did you know? You America and Britain.
Just to use an analogy, boats competed for Pacific Northwest.
The British sailed there with people like Vancouver. The Americans
went across the mountains with Native American guy, and Verry
(34:01):
sort of fits in that American traditions. So what he
did is he tried to figure out, all right, these
people are already to live up there. How did they live?
They're already able to travel up there, and so he
built on this. And that's what I'm getting at the
question of what sort of a leader he was willing
(34:21):
to build an organization which was very different than virtually
all the other explorers. He developed the team of local
Innoit people, and he used their methods. Matthew Henson played
a unique role in building the organization and negotiating with
the in New Heat. He may have been the one
(34:42):
person able to persuade the New Heat to travel so
far from their homes and hunting grounds. As James Edward
Mills notes, he convinced them to go with them. You know,
it's actually this is the place that they've never gone before.
They had to have been something to that. So again
drawing a lot of conclusions here, I don't know first act,
but I would imagine that, you know, his sensibility to
(35:04):
bridge the cultural gas as a thoughtful and respectful person
of color was tootal to give the success of the
Terry expinitions. At the same time, the New Wheat never
really got the whole point of Perry's quests, but they
understood the poll to be a tangible thing as Burton
writes its name suggested a perpendicular object projecting from the ice.
(35:27):
They called it the Big Nail, after a useful trade
article with which they could identify. By availing himself of
the in new white skills and endurance, Parry was able
to develop a system that would get him to the
poll with the least amount of extraneous labor. The system
involved sending out small advanced parties along the intended route
(35:47):
from the base camp to the pole. Each party would
hall supplies to a designated point and build an igloo.
Successive parties would use some of the supplies and shelter
at these spots, then deposit their own caches of applies
at points farther along the route. Each of the advanced
parties would return to base camp, leaving Parry and his
(36:07):
hand picked comrades to push on through the final leg
of the journey to the pole without the need to
lug tents or food on their sledges. Each party would
travel extremely lightly, Unlike past explorers, Perry's lean margin for
error meant that a delay caused by a storm or
bad ice would ripple through the system. The carefully allotted
(36:30):
food caches could run out as parties waited to cross
open water, or one party could eat more than its share,
leaving too little for the subsequent teams. Despite all the planning,
they were still at the mercy of nature. After deciding
that conquering the North Pole was his ticket to fame,
Perry's next and most ambitious expeditions took place between eight
(36:52):
and nineteen o six. The first ended up being a
four year or deal that started with his frost bitten
toes and slid down hill from there. Perry's will was
tested constantly by physical injury, emotional turmoil, and the belief
that other explorers from Norway and Italy were gaining on him.
Here's susan kaplan. He's not the only one who has
(37:15):
their sights on the North Pole. Nations were vying to
get to the North Pole for national prestige, and as
I mentioned, because if there was land there, what resources
were on that land? So Peery is not driven to
(37:37):
go to the North Pole in total isolation. Um, you know,
there are a number of other people sort of sniffing
around and trying to figure out how to get there.
As he planned for departure in the summer of Pierry
learned that otto, spare Drop was again sailing the from
Antarctic waters, this time somewhere around Kane Basin, the same
(38:00):
a locale that Peery anticipated as his jumping off point
for a dash to the poll sphair Drop actually had
no interest in being the first man at the pole.
He was in the region to map unknown lands and
gather scientific data. But Peery, consumed by a desire for fame,
didn't believe that Spairedrop was not planning to sabotage his plans.
(38:21):
He used the alleged threat to squeeze more money out
of the Periarctic Club. In July, Pierry Henson and the
rest of the crew departed New York on the windward.
They sped up the Canadian coastline as far as Kane Basin,
where Perry ran into spare drops party. In October, Pierry
(38:42):
called the Norwegians the introduction of a disturbing factor in
the appropriation by another of my plan and field of work.
Spheedrop was amused by the encounter and noted how Perry
tried to hide the patches on his trousers. After a
few minutes of chit chat. Sphairedrop later wrote I took
Peery down to the sledge and watched him disappearing at
(39:03):
an even pace, driven by his Eskimo driver. As I
was turning around to go back to the tent, I
caught sight of my crew member Faussheim, driving like mad
along the ice. My heart felt quite warm with patriotism.
Now that Peery knew he had competition, or thought he did,
he accelerated his plan. Since fair Drop was around Kane Basin,
(39:27):
just south of Fort Conger, Peerrie assumed fair Drop intended
to appropriate the old hut for shelter and supplies. Peery
was determined to get there first. After the ill fated
race north from the Windward by dogs led, Peerrie's party
reached Fort Conger on January sixth, eighteen ninety nine. As
they thawed out in front of a fire, Peery realized
(39:49):
his feet or frost bitten off went his toes with
the under shoes. The surgeon was forced to fully amputate
seven Perry later lost another. One, of course, Sperdrov never
showed up. By March, the party had carried Peyrie on
a sledge back to the Windward. Over the next year
and a half, Peerrie traveled hundreds of miles across the
(40:11):
northern limits of Greenland and Canada's Ellesmere Island, employing and
testing his staging system and scouting a possible route to
the pole. In spring nineteen hundred, he and Henson located
the northernmost point in Greenland, which Peerrie named after his
chief backer, Morris K. Jessup. He went forth across the
treacherous sea for several miles, but concluded that this route
(40:34):
was too difficult. Meanwhile, the Windward returned to New York,
picked up Perie's wife Josephine, and their young daughter Marie,
and returned to Ita. The whole winter. Pearrie's family stayed
less than two hundred miles from where he was spending
the winter at Fort Conger, but neither of them knew
it Worse, Josephine met an in New Wheat woman in
(40:55):
Ita named Ala Cassina, with whom Pearrie had had a child.
Josephine was a formidable adventurer herself, and had even given
birth to Marie in the Arctic on Perrie's expedition, but
the awkward situation in Ita shook her. She wrote to
her husband, you will have been surprised, perhaps annoyed when
(41:16):
you hear I came up on a ship. But believe me,
had I known how things were with you, I should
not have come. At Fort Conger, the mood was deteriorating.
Members of the party were getting on each other's nerves.
The surgeon was jealous of Henson, and Perry tried to
smooth things over by unfairly chastising his right hand man.
(41:37):
A reliefship brought the news that Peary's mother had died.
Josephine was mad at period for carrying on with ale Cassina.
Then Frederick Cook, a doctor who had served on one
of Peari's early expeditions, arrived and the news was not good.
He recommended returning to New York at once. Peery ignored him,
but that's not the last we'll hear of Cook. At
(42:01):
long last, in March two, Peery, Henson, and the Inuit
guides made a serious stab at the Pole. Having lived
in the region for the past three years, Pierry may
have felt confident in his chances, but it was a
struggle from start to finish. The party was already worn
(42:21):
out from the previous season's traveling, and they were forced
to detour around hummocks in open water, adding distance to
their journey. Sometimes they had to chop through barriers of
solid ice to make a path for the dogs. Then
they came to a treacherous expanse of open water between
ice flows, called a lead. This particular lead marked the
(42:42):
edge of the continental shelf and butted up against the
shifting ice of the deep Arctic Ocean. The ice was
constantly coming together and pulling apart without warning. Now Perry
found it wide open, and there was nothing to do
but wait for the floes to join again, for the
temperature to drop some ice could form so they could
cross it. Frustrated, Perry dubbed it the Big Lead, the
(43:06):
Hudson River, and the Grand Canal. As they waited, they
consumed their provisions. On April one, Pierry realized their journey
to the Pole would be impossible, and he was still
three hundred and ninety five statute miles from their destination.
They had reached eighty four degrees seventeen minutes north on
(43:27):
the windward for their homeward journey, Josephine Pierry gave them
more bad news. Two years earlier, Italian naval officer Umberto
Cagney had led a dash for the pole from Francios
off Land while facing incredible hardships. Can Ye turned back
after reaching eighty six degrees thirty four minutes north, a
new farthest north that beat Nonsen and Johansson's record by
(43:50):
twenty nautical miles and Pierry's turnaround point by a hundred
and fifty eight nautical miles. And to twist the knife
a little deeper, Perry's a led did arch nemesis Auto.
Sphare Drop had also spent four years in the Arctic
between eight and nineteen o two and had more to
show for it. He located and mapped three massive islands
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to the west of Ellesmere, now called the sphare Drop Islands,
and mapped more than one thousand square miles of territory
in the Canadian hier Arctic. Not only did Pierry not
reach the poll, he didn't even set a farthest north record.
He lost eight toes. His marriage was shaky, and his mother,
(44:31):
his closest confidante, was no longer there to provide moral support.
His personal and professional life was at a crossroads, but
one person continued to believe in his mission, Henson had
assisted him at every turn, and with his help Pierry
had a chance to try again. Let's take a break here,
we'll be right back. Robert Peary once wrote that no
(45:08):
one should ever expect anything of the Arctic except the worst.
The four year odyssey that he and Henson spent in
the Arctic was a test of their endurance insanity. But
on their second attempt at the North Pole, which followed
the same route that they had mapped out on their
previous voyage, they would experience some of the worst moments
in all their fifteen years together. On this expedition, beginning
(45:31):
in nine five, Peary would finally get his own ship.
He raised one and twenty thousand dollars about two point
seven million into days dollars from the Peri Arctic Club
and mortgaged his own house to pay for the design
and construction of the Roosevelt, named for one of his
biggest supporters, President Theodore Roosevelt, It had a rounded, flexible
(45:53):
hull inspired by nonsense from a system of horizontal trusses
within the hall strengthened it against the horse of ice,
while its bow could drive through ice that blocked its way.
Following his four year expedition, Pierry realized that his usual
bare bones crew would not have enough manpower to complete
the relay stages in his system. He would hire a
(46:15):
larger expedition team, which of course included Henson, and divide
them into three groups. The first would break the trail
for the dog sleds and build igloos along the route.
The second would like cach as of supplies at those stages,
and the third would be the polar party, the men
who would actually go to the North Pole. Perry would
continue to enlist in New Wheat families and their dogs
(46:38):
in his scheme. The Roosevelt left New York Harbor on
July and sailed up the Canadian coast, passing landmarks that
were by now extremely familiar to Pierry and Henson. By
mid August, they were at Eta to pick up about
forty of their in New Wheat colleagues, including Utah, the
(46:58):
community's lead hunter, two hundred dogs, and several tons of
Walverus meat, which were frozen and hung in the Roosevelt's rigging.
Then the ship's captain, Bob Bartlett, drove full steam ahead
north into the pack ice. They overwintered at Cape Sheridan,
where Sir George Strong NAAR's and the Alert had hunkered
down about thirty years earlier and prepared for their dash
(47:19):
the following spring. In February nineteen o six, Parry gathered
his crew and sent the advanced parties to stockpile supplies
at Point Moss, a spot on the northern coast of
Ellesmere Island, from which Peary would leave the security of
land and travel over the ice for more than four
hundred miles to the Pole. From Point Moss, Henson, Utah
(47:41):
and the advance parties went ahead to break the trail
for the sledges and to build igloos along the route
at fifty mile intervals. Peerry led the final party. Headwinds
thwarted their progress through fractured ice fields. The parties encountered hummocks,
rotten floes, and open leads that slowed their trial boll
and cause Perry mounting frustration. While the dog teams rested
(48:04):
at each of their pre built camps, Perry fumed about
falling behind his planned pace. On March, Pierry, Henson and
their teams came upon the big lead, and once again
they just had to wait until they could cross it
with the sleds. Unlike Nonsen and earlier explorers, Perry never
took any boats or kayaks with him over the sea ice.
(48:28):
They were delayed for a week before a thin film
of ice formed on the big lead, just enough to
support the weight of the sledges. They continued their dash
for three days before Perry admitted to himself that the
delay had again cost him the pole. There was no
way they could now attempt the next three D and
sixties statue miles to the pole with their dwindling food,
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but he could not return home and face the peri
Arctic Club empty handed. To do so would cost him
another chance to try for the pole. While a ferocious
store kept them inside their igloo for several days, Perry
dwelled on Nonsen and Kanye's farthest north records. The least
he could do would be to try and set one himself. Peery,
(49:11):
Penson and the New Wheat threw all excess weight off
their sledges and drove like crazy. They were truly in
a race against time, because for every day they spent
going north, they consumed more food and had less food
for their return journey. Finally, Pierry took a navigational reading
and discovered they were at eighty seven degrees six minutes north.
(49:33):
A new record, or was it. Burton writes that Peery
claimed he traveled one and thirties statute miles between April
fourteen when he left their igloo and April one when
he took the reading. That breaks down to an average
speed of nineteen miles a day without any obstacles in
the form of hummocks or open water. In contrast, the
(49:57):
average speed he traveled between Point Moss in the Big
Lead when he was still attempting to run for the poll,
it was about seven miles per day. And the only
proof of their alleged record was Perry's word, since only
he could make the navigational calculations. As Ed Larson explains,
this was totally on purpose. There was one I think
(50:18):
indirect advantage for Perry in all this, and that is
he could feel and in a way was superior to
these people. It was it was superior amendment that only
he could calculate where they were. Only he could take
and it wasn't very good at longitude, but only only
he could take a latitude and he could plot the course,
(50:40):
and he didn't have to worry, as Scott and Shackleton
and the others did, about somebody he took along, and
he didn't have to worry about anybody trying to challenge
his power. Wherever they were, they didn't stop to celebrate.
Terry had already pushed them to the limit. He later wrote,
(51:01):
as I looked at the drawn faces of my comrades,
at the skeleton figures of my few remaining dogs, at
my nearly empty sledges, and remembered the drifting ice over
which we had come, and the unknown quantity of the
big lead between us and the nearest land, I felt
that I had cut the margin as narrow as could
reasonably be expected. Now they were in a race against death.
(51:26):
On their retreat, the wind that had blown at their
backs on the way north blasted them in the face.
Tiny snow particles felt like red hot needles on their
exposed skin. Each day became a mad dash from one
former camp to the next, where they had shelter but
no fresh supplies of food. Perry wrote, at the end
(51:46):
of every march, we stumbled into our old eggloes, utterly exhausted,
with eyes aflame from the wind and driving snow, but
thanking God that we did not have to put ourselves
to the additional effort of building egglooes. Eventually they came
upon the big lead, stretching clear to the horizon in
either direction. While they waited to cross it, they killed
(52:08):
and ate most of their dogs and broke up the
sleds for fuel. On their northward journey, Perry had dubbed
the channel the Hudson River. Now as we lay in
this dismal camp, Perry later wrote, watching the distant southern ice,
beyond which lay the world, all that was near and dear,
and perhaps life itself, while on our side was only
(52:29):
the wide stretching ice and possibility of a lingering death.
There was but one appropriate name for its black waters,
the sticks. Finally, a crust of ice two miles wide
covered the lead, a short distance from their camp, possibly
thick enough to support a man in snowshoes. There was
only one way to find out. The lightest and most
(52:52):
experience in new wheat guide went first, leading the dogs
in their one remaining sledge behind him. Each man on
snow shoes followed at fifty or sixty foot intervals. To
avoid breaking the ice. We crossed in silence, each man
busy with his thoughts and intent upon his snowshoes. Frankly,
(53:12):
I do not care for more similar experiences, Perry wrote.
Once started, we could not stop, We could not lift
our snowshoes. It was a matter of constantly and smoothly
gliding one past the other with utmost care and evenness
of pressure. And from every man as he slid a
snowshoe forward, undulations went out in every direction through the
(53:35):
thin film incrusting the black water. The sledge was preceded
and followed by a broad swell. It was the first
and only time in all my Arctic work that I
felt doubtful as to the outcome. Halfway across the ice,
Perry's boot broke through, and he thought it was the end,
he wrote, But I dared not take my eyes from
(53:58):
the steady, even glide ing of my snowshoes, and the
fascination of the glassy swell at the toes of them.
After a period in which they must have felt time stopped,
the whole party made it to the firm ice on
the southern edge of the lead. Perry remembered, when we
stood up from unfastening our snowshoes, and looked back for
(54:20):
a moment before turning our faces southward. A narrow black
ribbon cut the frail bridge on which we had crossed
into the lead was widening again, and we had just
made it. They finally returned to the Roosevelt on May six,
and despite their struggle to get there, Parry had one
(54:42):
more trek in him. He and a small team marched
westward along the northern coast of Ellesmere Island, setting what
he believed was the farthest west record, just as a
backup for his farthest north. The Roosevelt and its crew
returned to New York on December six. Again, they had survived,
(55:03):
but Pierry had to face his own crushing disappointment, and
he received a cool reception from the public when it
learned he had failed to reach the poll, but his
influential fan club rewarded him for his feats. The National
Geographic Society honored Perry with its Hubbard Medal at a
fancy gala, and Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech at the
ceremony presenting the award. Peary was there to receive it
(55:27):
on December, having left the Roosevelt and returned to New
York before the ship steamed into the harbor. None of
the members of his expedition team, least of all Henson
and the new Wheat, who were actually at Perry's farthest
north with him, received any recognition. According to Ed Larson,
Perry was probably fine with that. He did have this
(55:48):
singular vision that he had to achieve it, where many
of the other polar explorers didn't mind sharing glory. I
mean certainly Shackleton didn't. That was Coren Toshackle his nature.
Nor did uh Jnson, who was considered the greatest explorer
of the age. They didn't have that same problem. They
figured there was plenty to go around and they would
(56:10):
get the most of it. The metal and accolades were nice,
but Perry must have asked himself how much longer he
could continue his quest for the North Pole. In his
two serious efforts to conquer it, the brute realities of
the polar environment had held him back. He didn't know
whether the peri Arctic Club would remain hopeful of his
(56:30):
dream for glory. At the end of Robert Perry was
fifty years old. Matthew Henson was forty. Both were well
over retirement age for Arctic explorers, but despite their age
and there are many setbacks, they still had one more
try in them. The Quest for the North Pole is
(57:09):
hosted by Me cat Long. This episode was researched and
written by Me, with fact checking by Austin Thompson. The
executive producers are Aaron McCarthy and Tyler Clang. The supervising
producer is Dylan Fagan. The show is edited by Dylan Fagan.
For transcripts, a glossary, and to learn more about this episode,
visit Mental flaws dot com slash podcast. The Quest for
(57:33):
the North Pole is a production of I Heart Radio
and Mental Flaws. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
check out the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcast. For more podcasts for my
(57:59):
heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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