Robert Peary

Based on Wikipedia: Robert Peary

Here is one of history's great ironies: the man celebrated for decades as the conqueror of the North Pole almost certainly never reached it.

Robert Peary spent twenty-three years of his life obsessed with planting the American flag at the top of the world. He lost eight toes to frostbite. He fathered children with Inuit women while his wife waited at home. He deceived indigenous people, stole their sacred meteorite, and brought six of them to America where four quickly died of disease. And in the end, after all that sacrifice and moral compromise, the achievement that defined his legacy—the one thing that was supposed to justify everything—appears to have been a lie, whether he knew it or not.

This is not a story about a hero. It's a story about ambition so consuming it devoured everything in its path, including the truth.

The Making of an Obsession

Robert Edwin Peary was born in 1856 in Cresson, Pennsylvania, a small town in the Allegheny Mountains. His father died when Robert was just three years old, and his mother moved them to Portland, Maine, where she raised him with what biographers describe as an almost suffocating devotion. Perhaps this early loss planted the seed of his relentless need to prove himself. Or perhaps some people are simply born hungry in a way that can never be satisfied.

He was smart. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1877 with a civil engineering degree, joined the Phi Beta Kappa honor society, and rowed on the crew team. After college, he took a job as a draftsman at the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey in Washington, D.C., making technical drawings—the kind of careful, precise work that builds careers but rarely builds legends.

That wasn't enough for Peary.

In 1881, he joined the Navy's Civil Engineer Corps. By 1885, he was in Nicaragua, surveying routes for a canal that would never be built. But his mind was elsewhere. That year, he wrote in his diary a resolution that would shape the rest of his life: he would be the first man to reach the North Pole.

Why the Pole? In the late nineteenth century, the Arctic was the space race of its era. The North Pole represented the last great unknown, a point on the map that no human had ever touched. For a young man desperate to distinguish himself, to escape the anonymity of drafting tables and surveying equipment, it was the ultimate prize. The person who reached it first would be immortal.

Learning to Survive

Peary made his first Arctic expedition in 1886, intending to cross Greenland by dog sled. He had six months of leave from the Navy and five hundred dollars from his mother. He arrived in Greenland in June, planning to make the journey alone—a plan that a Danish official named Christian Maigaard quickly talked him out of, explaining that solo Arctic travel was simply a complicated form of suicide.

Peary and Maigaard set off together and traveled nearly one hundred miles inland before running low on food and turning back. It was the second-farthest anyone had penetrated Greenland's ice sheet at that point, but more importantly, it was an education. Peary returned home understanding, for the first time, what Arctic exploration actually required.

The following year, back in Washington preparing for the Nicaragua survey, Peary walked into a men's clothing store to buy a sun hat. Behind the counter was a twenty-one-year-old Black man named Matthew Henson, working as a sales clerk. Learning that Henson had spent six years at sea as a cabin boy, Peary hired him on the spot as his personal valet.

It was one of the most consequential chance encounters in the history of exploration. Henson would accompany Peary on every subsequent Arctic expedition, becoming not just his assistant but his indispensable partner—the person Peary relied on more than any other when conditions were most desperate. In the rigid racial hierarchy of the era, Henson could never receive full credit for his contributions. But without him, Peary's expeditions would have ended very differently.

The Expedition That Changed Everything

Peary's 1891-1892 expedition to Greenland marked a turning point, both in his methods and his reputation. Unlike most previous Arctic explorers, who tried to impose European techniques on the Arctic environment, Peary studied how the Inuit actually survived. He learned to build igloos. He adopted their fur clothing. He realized that by wearing furs to preserve body heat and sleeping in snow houses, he could dispense with the crushing weight of canvas tents and bulky sleeping bags.

This seems obvious now. At the time, it was revolutionary.

The expedition was funded by several scientific societies, including the American Geographic Society and the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. Peary brought along his wife Josephine—a decision that scandalized newspaper editors but demonstrated his commitment to Arctic methods. He also brought Matthew Henson and a young doctor named Frederick Cook, who would later become his bitter rival in a controversy that would consume both their lives.

In July, while their ship was ramming through surface ice, the iron tiller suddenly spun around and broke Peary's lower right leg. Both bones snapped between the knee and ankle. A lesser man might have turned back. Peary spent six months recuperating in a hastily built dwelling at the mouth of MacCormick Fjord, then continued the expedition.

By May 1892, he was ready for the main journey. Setting out with Henson and a Norwegian skier named Eivind Astrup, Peary traveled over 1,250 miles across the ice sheet. From a cliff they named Navy Cliff, he looked out over Independence Fjord and saw what no European had confirmed before: Greenland was an island, not a landmass extending to the Pole.

Peary had proved something significant. He had also developed what he called the "Peary system"—using support teams to establish supply caches along the route, allowing a final dash to the objective with maximum speed and minimum weight. This system would define all his subsequent expeditions.

The Meteorite and the Betrayal

To understand who Robert Peary really was, you have to understand what he did in 1894.

During an expedition that year, Peary became the first Western explorer to reach the Cape York meteorite, a massive iron rock that the Inuit had relied upon for generations. In a region where metal was almost impossible to find, this meteorite was their primary source of iron for tools and weapons. It was, in a very real sense, sacred to them.

Peary took it. Over the course of several expeditions, he removed the meteorite and its fragments and shipped them to the American Museum of Natural History, where they remain today. The Inuit, who had used this iron source for centuries, were left with nothing.

But that wasn't the worst of it.

Peary convinced six Inuit to travel with him to the United States, promising they would return within a year bearing tools, weapons, and gifts. Among them was a young boy named Minik Wallace, who was traveling with his father.

The promise was never kept. Within a few months of arriving in New York, four of the six Inuit died from diseases to which they had no immunity. Minik's father was among them. The Museum of Natural History, rather than returning the body for burial, secretly kept it for study and display—even staging a fake funeral with a log wrapped in furs so that young Minik would think his father had been properly buried.

Minik eventually discovered what had happened to his father's remains. He spent years fighting to have them returned, but the scientific establishment closed ranks against him. He died in 1918, two years before Peary, never having recovered his father's bones.

Peary's journals and letters show no remorse for any of this. The Inuit were, to him, useful instruments for achieving his goals—nothing more.

The Farthest North

Through the late 1890s and early 1900s, Peary made several more expeditions, each pushing farther into the Arctic. His 1898-1902 expedition reached Cape Morris Jesup, the northernmost point of Greenland. He achieved a "farthest north" record for the Western Hemisphere in 1902, traveling beyond Canada's Ellesmere Island.

These were genuine accomplishments. But they weren't the Pole, and the Pole was all that mattered to Peary.

In 1905-1906, backed by wealthy donors through the Peary Arctic Club, he tried again. A banker's son named George Crocker contributed fifty thousand dollars. Morris K. Jesup, after whom Peary had named that Greenland cape, gave twenty-five thousand. They built Peary a new ship, the SS Roosevelt, which pushed farther north through the ice than any American vessel before it.

The expedition that followed was brutal. Peary and his teams made less than ten miles a day across the rough sea ice, and then a storm separated them. Peary found himself without any companion trained in navigation—meaning there was no one who could independently verify how far north he actually traveled.

What happened next is where the historical record gets murky.

Peary claimed to have reached 87°06' north latitude on April 21, 1906—a new world record. But when the British explorer Wally Herbert examined Peary's records decades later, he found something strange. The typescript of Peary's diary stops abruptly at 86°30' on April 20, one day before the claimed record. The original diary pages for April 21 are the only missing diary entries in Peary's entire exploration career.

Peary also claimed, from the summit of Cape Colgate in June 1906, to have seen a previously undiscovered land to the northwest, which he named "Crocker Land" in honor of his donor. His diary entry for that day, however, reads: "No land visible."

In 1914, an expedition set out specifically to find Crocker Land. They found nothing. It didn't exist.

The Final Expedition

On July 6, 1908, the Roosevelt departed New York with Peary's eighth Arctic expedition. This was his last chance. He was fifty-two years old, missing most of his toes, and facing mounting skepticism about his previous claims. His rival Frederick Cook—the same doctor who had served on the 1891-1892 Greenland expedition—was also making attempts on the Pole.

The expedition used the refined "Peary system" at its fullest scale. Twenty-two men, including Peary's most trusted companions: ship captain Robert Bartlett, Matthew Henson, and several scientists and support personnel. They recruited Inuit families at Cape York and wintered near Cape Sheridan on Ellesmere Island. The plan was to send waves of support parties ahead, establishing caches of supplies along the route, while Peary made a final dash to the Pole with a small, fast team.

On February 28, 1909, the parties headed north. Over the following weeks, one support team after another turned back, each having pushed the supply line farther toward the objective. By April 1, only Peary, Henson, and four Inuit remained: Ootah, Egigingwah, Seegloo, and Ooqueah.

Notably absent from this final group was Robert Bartlett, the expedition's most experienced navigator after Peary himself. Bartlett later estimated his turning-back point as 87°46'49" north latitude—tantalizingly close to the Pole, but still over 130 nautical miles short. Many have wondered why Peary didn't take Bartlett all the way. The most common explanation: Bartlett was the only person besides Peary who could have independently verified whether the Pole was actually reached.

Henson was an extraordinary explorer, but he had limited formal training in celestial navigation. The Inuit had none. Whatever readings Peary claimed to have made, there was no one who could confirm them.

The Claim and the Controversy

On April 6, 1909, Peary established what he called Camp Jesup. According to his readings, they were within three miles of the North Pole.

But how fast had they been traveling? Here's where the problems begin.

From the point where Bartlett turned back to the Pole was approximately 130 nautical miles. Peary claimed to have covered this distance in just five marches—essentially twenty-six miles per day. On the return journey, he claimed even more astonishing speeds: he made it back to land in just sixteen days, covering distances that would have required speeds of over fifty miles per day at certain points.

No other Arctic explorer, before or since, has ever matched these speeds over rough sea ice. The ice north of Ellesmere Island is notoriously difficult terrain, broken by pressure ridges, open water leads, and unpredictable shifting. Peary's own earlier expeditions had averaged well under ten miles per day in similar conditions.

When Peary arrived back in civilization, he discovered that Frederick Cook had announced his own claim to have reached the Pole—supposedly a year earlier, in April 1908. The two men's claims became a massive public controversy, with newspapers taking sides and scientific societies issuing competing pronouncements.

Cook's claim was eventually rejected as fraudulent. His navigation records were inconsistent, his Inuit companions later disputed his account, and his photographs appeared to have been taken far from where he claimed. The scientific establishment largely concluded that Cook had lied.

Peary's claim, by contrast, was endorsed by the National Geographic Society, which had partially funded his expedition. The Society appointed a committee to examine his records, and the committee certified his achievement. In 1911, Congress passed a resolution thanking Peary for his discovery and promoting him to rear admiral.

For decades, that appeared to settle the matter. Robert Peary had reached the North Pole.

The Unraveling

Doubts never fully disappeared, but they remained on the margins until 1988, when the National Geographic Society commissioned British explorer Wally Herbert to conduct a thorough examination of Peary's records in preparation for the expedition's centennial.

Herbert was a genuine Arctic expert—he had led the first surface crossing of the Arctic Ocean in 1969. He was not predisposed against Peary. But what he found troubled him deeply.

The travel speeds Peary claimed were, Herbert concluded, physically impossible given the conditions and the equipment available. The navigation records were suspiciously sparse for the final leg of the journey. And there was the matter of those missing diary pages from the 1906 expedition, and the discrepancy between Peary's published claim about seeing Crocker Land and what he actually wrote in his diary.

Herbert's conclusion, published in 1989, was devastating: Peary almost certainly did not reach the North Pole. He may have come within sixty miles of it—a remarkable achievement in itself—but the Pole? No.

The National Geographic Society, understandably reluctant to discredit a claim it had certified for eighty years, commissioned additional studies. Some were more sympathetic to Peary than others. But the consensus among independent historians and polar experts has shifted decisively: Peary's claim cannot be verified, and the evidence strongly suggests he fell short.

The Tragedy of Matthew Henson

If Peary did reach the Pole—or anywhere close to it—he did so because of Matthew Henson. Henson was the better dog handler, the more skilled builder of igloos and sledges. He spoke Inuktitut, the Inuit language, fluently. On the 1909 expedition, he was often ahead of Peary, breaking trail.

Yet when Peary returned to acclaim and a rear admiral's commission, Henson received almost nothing. He worked for decades as a customs clerk in New York, occasionally giving lectures about his experiences but never receiving the recognition he deserved. Only in 1944, at age seventy-seven, was he invited to join the Explorers Club. Only in 1988, sixty-eight years after his death, was he reinterred at Arlington National Cemetery alongside Peary.

The racial dynamics are impossible to ignore. Peary needed Henson but could not acknowledge him as an equal without diminishing his own achievement. In Peary's telling, he reached the Pole accompanied by his faithful assistant and some Eskimos. In reality, Henson was arguably the most capable person on the ice.

What Remains

Robert Peary died on February 20, 1920, in Washington, D.C. He was sixty-three years old, celebrated as one of America's greatest explorers. His body lies in Arlington National Cemetery beneath a globe of the world with a star marking the North Pole.

What should we make of him now?

He was, without question, an extraordinary Arctic explorer. His contributions to polar technique—the Peary system of support parties and supply caches, the adoption of Inuit methods—advanced the field significantly. He reached farther north than almost anyone before him. He mapped previously unknown coastlines. He endured suffering that would break most people.

He was also vain, ruthless, and apparently dishonest. He exploited the Inuit who made his expeditions possible. He may have fabricated his greatest achievement. He certainly fabricated Crocker Land. He took credit for work done by others, particularly Henson, while treating them as subordinates unworthy of recognition.

The woman mentioned in the Substack article about Mina Hubbard, who mapped Labrador and revolutionized exploration literature, represents something different: exploration as genuine discovery rather than conquest, as collaboration rather than domination. Peary represents the older model—the great man theory of exploration, where what matters is planting a flag and claiming a prize, whatever the human cost.

That model produced remarkable achievements. It also produced lies, exploitation, and stolen meteorites. Perhaps both things are true. Perhaps heroism and villainy can coexist in the same person, and our job is not to choose between them but to see clearly.

The North Pole doesn't care who reached it first. The ice shifts and moves; no footprint lasts. What remains are the stories we tell about who went there and what they did along the way. Robert Peary's story is more complicated than he wanted it to be—but complication is closer to truth than legend.