Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  The Arctic was not letting them escape so easily. From this moment it attacked them with an almost personal ferocity. On 10 May Cagni’s readings revealed that the drift had carried them to a longitude almost 60 miles west of Prince Rudolf Island. It was an irritating setback, but not a life-threatening one: all they had to do was change course to the east. Still, it meant adding an unwelcome few days to their journey. As if it had read his mind, the drift increased its speed. On 12 May, having walked a good 40 miles to the east, Cagni’s readings put them some 12 miles west of their position on the 10th. Even so, he estimated that they would be at Teplitz Bay within two weeks, and they had food for another 23 days on three-quarter rations. Moroeover, he had good reason to suspect the thaw might be late that year, which would give them extra leeway. The Arctic promptly began to thaw early. They struggled on through wet snow, their path obstructed ever more frequently by open leads, but making good mileage nonetheless – until they checked their position. On 18 May they were even further west than they had been nine days previously. Redoubling their efforts, the Italians made two degrees east by the 29th. In response, the ice began to melt faster. On 30 May it took them 12 hours to travel 1,000 yards. Then the drift pushed them back again. ‘In seven days of severe toil we have not advanced three feet to the east!’ Cagni wrote on 7 June. ‘What will become of us?’

  They reduced their rations, eked out their fuel, started eating the dogs, and changed direction so that instead of heading east to Teplitz Bay they would be travelling south towards Cape Flora on the tip of the archipelago. The Arctic responded immediately. Previously the going east had been difficult, whereas the ice to the south had always been smooth. Now the ice to the south was broken while that to the east was good. ‘It seems as though it were done on purpose,’ Cagni despaired. Battling eastwards, they were greeted at 2.00 p.m. on 9 June by their first glimpse of land in almost three months. They recognized it as Cape Mill, a headland they had spied during the journey north. There was no mistaking it: Cagni had even made a sketch of it from the deck of the Stella Polare. By dint of supreme effort they were at last within striking distance of Franz Josef Land. It took them an hour to find a hummock from which to take their bearings relative to Cape Mill, but no sooner had they reached its summit than the Arctic gave them another surprise: Cape Mill was no longer there. As far as the horizon there was nothing but a jumble of ice.

  How or why Cape Mill had disappeared was something that Cagni could not explain. It had not been a hallucination; neither had it been a trick of refraction, a phenomenon common in the Arctic whereby distant objects seem much nearer than they actually are. No, they had seen it very clearly and in too fine a definition to be mistaken. Possibly the pack had drifted west, but surely not with such velocity as to place Cape Mill beyond sight in the space of 60 minutes. To this day there is no explanation of what happened to Cape Mill. That night they lay mystified and despondent in their tent, unable to sleep. Then, at 10.30 the following morning, Cape Mill rematerialized just 20 miles away. Cagni did not question how this could be. He simply ordered his men to run for Franz Josef Land. And run they did, for three whole days, while the Arctic teased them with banks of fog. Sometimes they could see where they were going, sometimes they were in a bank of white vapour. Cape Mill and other features flickered in and out of sight, according to Cagni, like slides in a magic lantern.

  On 13 June they reached the tortoise-shaped hump of Harley Island, just off Cape Mill, but did not stop. They reached Ommaney Island on 14 June, then continued over the ice to Prince Rudolf Island, which was now only 30 miles to the north. They had two sledges and 12 dogs. If they rationed still further the supplies on the sledges, and ate the dogs, they could maybe last another two weeks. Once again they ran. The Arctic did its best to thwart them. It presented hummocks so hard that their ice-axes snapped. It shifted in random fashion, so that they never knew on reaching a floe whether it might suddenly drift into the ocean. One minute they could see their goal, the next it was hidden by fog. When the fog cleared it was replaced by snowstorms. The final torment came on 20 June. Encamped on a 60-foot-diameter floe, they were being carried slowly east towards Prince Rudolf Island when the current changed and dragged them west. Cagni had had enough. The wind was still blowing from the north-east and land was almost within touching distance. Raising the sails of the battered kayaks that he was still hauling on the sledges, he planted them on the floe. They caught the wind and, very slowly, the floe moved towards Prince Rudolf Island. Cagni and his team anticipated a safe landing, but the Arctic was ahead of them. The current changed direction, hurling them at the shore so fast that they had just enough time to jump off and run for their lives before the floe crumpled behind them. After three days climbing the ridges and mountains of Prince Rudolf Island they finally reached Teplitz Bay.

  Abruzzi was appalled. Cagni and his team were black with cooking smoke and the accumulation of three months’ personal grease. Their clothes were rags, they carried a single cooking pot smeared with dog fat, and the seven remaining dogs were skin and bone. The sledges had been mended and remended. Everything spoke of ruin: these were not the fit men he had sent out. And if their furthest north was good news, it had been bought at an unacceptable price. Although the first support team had returned safely, the second had not. Somewhere, on the journey home, three Italians, their dogs and sledges had vanished. Maybe they had become lost and had strayed on to a distant part of Franz Josef Land. If so, Abruzzi’s search parties had not been able to locate them. Maybe they had fallen through the ice. Or maybe, as had almost happened to Cagni, the drift had carried them so far west that they had starved on the pack. When Cagni heard the news he bowed his head in dismay.

  That August Abruzzi detonated 70 gunpowder and gun-cotton mines in the 17-foot-thick ice that encased his ship, and by September 1900 the Stella Polare was back in Tromsø. He sent telegrams to the King of Italy and to Christiania, the last of which was addressed to Nansen, informing him that his record had been beaten. But Abruzzi took little joy in his achievement. He had lost too many men and had caused too much suffering to feel triumphant. Instead, he raged against the Arctic and wrote with feeling of ‘the day when a small band of men, subduing these inhospitable and repellent lands, shall avenge all the past sacrifices and the lives so sadly lost in this obstinate struggle, which has lasted centuries’. He would not be one of the conquerors. In later years he climbed the Ruwenzori Mountains and forged a new route up K2 in the Himalayas. But he never returned to the Pole.

  THE POLE AT LAST?

  Robert Peary and Frederick Cook (1908–9)

  When he was in his twenties Robert Edwin Peary described himself thus: ‘Tall, erect, broad-shouldered, full-chested, tough, wiry-limbed, clear-eyed, full-mustached, clear-browed complexion, a dead shot, a powerful, tireless swimmer, a first-class rider [and] a skilful boxer and fencer.’ In most cases such a statement would be treated as egotistical bravado. Alarmingly, if anything Peary was being slightly modest. Not only was he as physically fit as he suggested, but he had an iron will to match. There was nothing he did not dare, nothing he could not endure and nothing that he was unwilling to attempt. All these extraordinary attributes, however, were dwarfed by his towering ambition.

  Born in 1856 of New England stock, Peary lost his father at the age of two and spent the rest of his life trying to fill the gap. ‘I do not wish to live and die without accomplishing anything,’ he told his mother, at the age of 24. ‘I must be the peer or superior of those about me to be comfortable.’ He enlisted in the US Navy, but this was too slow and dull for his liking. Exploration seemed a more profitable route to glory and, having read the Arctic journals of men like Elisha Kane, he took leave in 1886 with the aim of becoming the first man to cross Greenland from west to east. He failed, penetrating less than 100 miles into the ice cap, but the setback did not worry him. He could always try again. And if somebody beat him to it – as Nansen did in 1888 – there was always more of Greenland to explo
re, and beyond Greenland one of the greatest prizes within the grasp of humankind: the North Pole. ‘Remember, Mother, I must have fame,’ he wrote, ‘and I cannot reconcile myself to years of commonplace drudgery and a name late in life when I see an opportunity to gain it now and sip the delicious draught while I yet have youth and strength and capacity to enjoy it to the utmost ... I want my fame now.’

  In 1891–2 he attacked Greenland again, sledging from the east coast of Robeson Channel to a spot he called Independence Bay, which he believed to be the northernmost tip of the island. Beyond, he saw a landmass stretching towards the Pole, to which he gave the name Peary Land. In fact, he had not reached Greenland’s northern tip, and Peary Land, which he described as separated from the mainland by a body of water (Peary Channel), was an extension of Greenland. But the authorities were too amazed by his methods to quibble with his findings. Accompanied by one white companion, using dogs instead of manpower – unlike previous expeditions in the region – he had sledged 1,100 miles in 85 days. In 1888 Nansen had taken 40 days to cover a paltry 235 miles. Peary had broken every record in the book.

  On his return he received the fame for which he yearned. In the course of 103 days he gave 165 lectures at a top rate of $2,000 per appearance. It was not enough to satisfy a man like himself. In 1893 he went in search of greater acclaim. Landing once again in Robeson Channel, he led an expedition into the ice cap, only to be thwarted by conditions so abominable that he had no choice but to retreat. The temperature hovered between – 50 and – 60° F which, with winds of 50 miles per hour, became an effective – 125° F ‘The fates and all hell are against me,’ Peary wrote, ‘but I’ll conquer yet!’

  In 1895 he made another journey to Independence Bay to examine its suitability as a staging post for an attack on the Pole. Taking his black manservant Matthew Henson, and a white volunteer named Hugh Lee, Peary departed on 1 April, from the west coast of Greenland, with 42 dogs and three sledge-loads of provisions. Accompanying them for the first 100 miles were six Inuit, whose sledges carried extra supplies in order to leave the others untouched for the final push. In order to save weight, Peary had trimmed his supplies to a minimum. But he had miscalculated. Five hundred miles into Greenland there were only 11 dogs left alive and the food had dwindled to the point where they had enough for the return journey but insufficient to last them to Independence Bay and back. If they continued they might be able to restock by shooting the game that was normally to be found along the coast. But if there was no game, or if the seals and walruses proved elusive, then they would die. Peary went forward. ‘I felt,’ he later wrote, ‘that in that cool, deliberate moment we took the golden bowl of life, in our hands, and that the bowl had suddenly become very fragile.’

  Leaving Lee to be collected on their return, Peary and Henson dashed for Independence Bay, which they reached in mid-May. On 1 June, after two weeks during which they were too busy hunting to do any surveying, they retraced their steps to the camp where they had left Lee, and then headed for the west coast. Peary drove them at incredible speeds – sometimes covering more than 20 miles a day – steering such a reckless course through the crevasses that Lee was convinced he wanted to kill them all. Indeed, at one point Lee cracked under the strain and begged to be left behind. Peary’s reply was that they either all got home or none of them did. And, true to his word, the three men staggered into base-camp in the last week of June. They were half-starved, half-mad and had just one dog remaining; but they were alive.

  It had been a remarkable journey, an outstanding example of toughness and stamina – and of leadership too, if one ignored Peary’s initial under-provisioning of the expedition. But beyond proving how far a human being could push himself, it had achieved nothing. The map of Greenland was little fuller than it had been, the North Pole was no nearer than before, and a large sum of money had been spent to no great purpose. Moreover, the expedition concluded with an act of supreme cultural vandalism. Steaming down the west coast of Greenland en route for the States, Peary stopped at the Inuit settlement of Etah. Here he took aboard three meteorites which for centuries had been the only available source of iron in the Arctic and which the Inuit believed to have souls. The Inuit had no further use for them, Peary announced; if they needed iron they could buy it from people like himself. These irreplaceable items were ultimately sold to the Smithsonian Institution where, on the discovery that they were no different from any other meteorite, they were consigned to the basement. Peary also took aboard a human cargo: six Inuit, to whom he promised a life of untold luxury with ‘nice warm houses in the sunshine land, and guns and knives and needles and many other things’. They, too, were sold to the Smithsonian and, like the meteorites, were housed in the basement. By May 1898 four of them were dead. The remaining two, both children, eventually made their way back to the Arctic – but not before one of them discovered that his father’s skeleton was now a museum display.

  Peary did not care. Garlanded with gold medals from geographical societies in America and Britain, hailed as ‘without exception, the greatest glacial traveller in the world’, his one concern when he returned was that he was in his 41st year and that unless he galvanized himself a younger person might steal the prize he coveted so fiercely. There were a few stumbling-blocks to be overcome: the first was money; the second was permission from the Navy, from which he was still receiving officer’s pay and in which he had not served for almost a decade. The matter of funding was solved by a collection of wealthy industrialists who later became known as the Peary Club. The second was solved by President Theodore Roosevelt, who was so impressed by Peary’s determination to conquer the Pole (or rather his declaration that he wanted to conquer it for America) that he personally signed the papers giving him indefinite paid leave until he had achieved his goal. In July 1898 he was once more steaming for the Arctic.

  His destination this time was not Greenland but Ellesmere Island, to the west of Kane Basin and Robeson Channel. Here, having established a forward base, he would wait until the opportunity presented itself before firing himself at the Pole ‘like a ball from a cannon’. He would do so with only two American companions – Henson and a doctor named Tom Dedrick – and whatever Inuit he managed to recruit en route. And he would succeed by means of what he called ‘The Peary System’. This system (which was not entirely new, but to which Peary gave his name nevertheless) involved a tripartite method whereby one sledge party prepared the trail and built shelters, a second laid down caches of food, and a third followed in their wake relying on the work of their predecessors to leave them fresh for the final push to the Pole. The truly novel, and possibly more important, aspect of Peary’s system was that all members of the expedition were required to wear furs, sleep in igloos and, whenever possible, supplement their provisions with walrus, seal or any other game they might shoot – in short, it eschewed Western technology in favour of traditional Inuit survival skills.

  The Peary System looked good in theory and was even better in practice. Peary’s choice of Ellesmere Island over Greenland was also good. Unfortunately, this was not the expedition in which he was able to prove their worth. Landing at Cape D’Urville, on the west coast of Kane Basin, he became fixated by the notion that a team of Norwegians, led by Otto Sverdrup, Nansen’s second-in-command on the Fram, were trying to steal a lead on him. In fact they had no interest in the Pole and were engaged in purely scientific and geographical research – and when the two parties met, they told him so – but Peary was jealous of his glory. Fearing that he might be thwarted by Sverdrup, he drove his men overland to Greely’s old redoubt at Fort Conger. He did so in the middle of winter, a time when no sane person would venture into the Arctic gloom. In temperatures lower than – 70° F he, Dedrick, Henson and two Inuit battled over the ice and snow until, in January 1899, they fell into Fort Conger.

  The barn-like wooden building was in good condition. On entering it Peary lit a lamp – the last of his oil – and peered about. There were tables, chairs
, crates of food and enough fuel to see them through the winter. He lit the kitchen range and a stove in the officers’ quarters before admitting to Henson that he no longer had any feeling in his legs. Henson took a knife and sliced through Peary’s sealskin boots and the rabbit-skin undershoes beneath. His legs were frostbitten to the knees. When Henson pulled away the undershoes the tips of several of Peary’s toes came with them. Dedrick amputated six toes on the spot. Later, as they festered in the darkness of Fort Conger, Dedrick removed another two, leaving him with just a little toe on each foot. Peary was philosophical: ‘A few toes aren’t much to give to achieve the Pole,’ he said. But he did not achieve the Pole this time. Forced to turn back by his Inuit, who had already begun to desert, he returned to Cape D’Urville. Here he recuperated until the spring of 1900, when he turned again to his task. As he explained, ‘There is something beyond me, something outside of me, which impels me irresistibly to the work.’ That year he crossed to Greenland, from where he shuffled to its northernmost point, Cape Morris Jessup, before turning back. In 1902, from Fort Conger, he and Henson sledged north through Ellesmere Island and onto the pack. They reached 84° 17’ N, but the wilderness of ice was more than they could cope with. ‘The game is off...’ Peary wrote. ‘I have made the best fight I knew. I believe it has been a good one. But I cannot accomplish the impossible.’ Retreating to ice-free waters in August 1902, he was picked up by the expedition ship and carried to America.

  ‘Peary Failed to Reach the Pole’ was how the New York Times greeted his return. There it was in black and white: he was a failure. Nothing could be more galling for a man who strove so desperately to succeed. More infuriatingly still, while Peary had been toiling uselessly in the ice above Ellesmere Island, an Italian expedition under the Duke of Abruzzi had been breaking records in the ice above Franz Josef Land, trumping even Nansen with a furthest north of 86° 33’. If sometimes Peary had considered abandoning his quest – and there had been many such times – the news of Abruzzi’s triumph gave him renewed vigour. ‘Next time I’ll smash all that to bits,’ he told Henson. ‘Next time!’ But would there be a next time? After so many failures, Peary was not quite the hero he had been. Funding was no longer so easy to find, and the Navy was adamant that he do the work for which it was still paying him. The spirit of patriotism came to his rescue. The Peary Club saw no reason why America should be beaten to the Pole by any other nation and dug into its collective pockets to furnish their man with all the equipment he required. The President, too, let it be known that he wanted Peary to try again. Bowing to Roosevelt’s wishes, the Navy informed Peary not only that he had paid leave but that he was actively instructed to try for the Pole. ‘Our national pride is involved in this undertaking,’ the Navy Secretary wrote, ‘and this department expects that you will accomplish your purpose and bring further distinction to a service of illustrious traditions.’