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This is a truly remarkable body of prose. On the following pages will be
found on one readily apparent level the record of a sensitive, intelligent
woman reacting to a primitive people and a remote, hostile environment.
But on a second level, just below the surface, lie the germinating seeds
of many of the critical aspects of Arctic exploration for the succeeding
twenty years. |
Jo Peary, age twenty-eight, three years married to a naval engineer of
high ambition and singleness of purpose, is uprooted of her own volition
and transported to an arctic wilderness more remote than the craters of
the Moon are today, whose inhabitants balance continuously on the razor’s
edge of mere survival. The only Caucasian woman for hundreds of miles, far
ahead of her time in resourcefulness, courage and stamina, she provides
physical and emotional support to her injured husband, gains the respect
and affection of the natives, cooks for six men (who she calls her “boys”)
through the three-month arctic darkness, and with her own rifle and
shotgun brings down deer and fowl for the expedition larder. This in
itself is first class adventure illuminated by intelligent and articulate
perception.
On the second level Mrs. Peary, in this personal story of the first
serious Peary expedition1, unwittingly reveals human and material factors
that will directly affect the course of history. In relating her
association with the Eskimos (the word Inuit was not yet in use), she
previews the use of native methods of travel, clothing, hunting and
shelter and the rewarded use of the Eskimos themselves, which were
controlling factors in her husband’s eventual attainment of the Pole 18
years later.
In her descriptions of the men of the party and their activities she gives
us glimpses of characteristics that will govern their actions for good and
evil in later years. Of primary importance is the thorough and meticulous
planning of all aspects of the expedition by Peary himself, a lifelong
professional practice that will see its
apogee in the military style
coordinated use of multiple sledging parties that ultimately achieved the
Pole. But she also tells of the remote and abrasive Verhoeff, the only
casualty of the expedition, who loses his life in a crevasse on a
prohibited one-man trek across a glacier.
More significantly she tells of Matthew Henson, who had first served with
Lieutenant Peary in Nicaragua (surveying a possible route for a canal),
now a trusted and respected assistant to both Pearys. His carpentry skill
helps to construct their fortress for winter survival, Redcliff House, as
well as the expedition sledges. Josephine records his valued friendship
with the natives and his dependability as a hunter, and in his sharing of
routine duties, in the positioning of supplies for the coming exploration
of the ice cap, sees him in all respects as a peer of the other expedition
assistants.
In an era when racial discrimination was the norm, the reader must refer
to the publisher’s introduction to learn that Henson was “colored” since
Josephine never mentions this, nor refers to Matt in any way other than as
a respected expedition member. In Peary’s absence on The Great White
Journey, it is Matt who acts as her guardian and companion on hunting and
scouting forays along the frozen coast. Here Henson is already displaying
the energy, skills and loyalty that will make him increasingly
indispensable to Peary and lead directly to the day the two men will stand
together, with four Eskimo helpers, as the first human beings to reach a
Pole of the Earth.
And of equal though opposite significance she tells of Frederick Cook, a
volunteer from Brooklyn, New York who acts as the expedition’s physician
despite only having completed a 2-year course of study. Cook treats
sufferers from the “grippe” (a form of influenza) but when Peary is away
on his expedition he goes off on an overstocked hunting trip loaded with
crucial supplies of food and ammunition only to return ten days later with
nothing of either, nor with any fresh meat to show for the expenditure.
Nor does the affable Cook enhance his popularity when he carelessly
discharges a heavy caliber rifle through the ceiling, narrowly missing
Henson who was sunning himself on the roof. Later it will be Cook who,
after faking the first ascent of Mt. McKinley, and from Patagonia
attempting to pass off another man’s work as his own2, perpetrates the
greatest fraud in the history of exploration by claiming, that with only
two lightly loaded sledges of supplies and two Eskimos, to have visited
the North Pole a year before Peary, thus hoping to pervert history to his
advantage and cheat his former mentor of a lifetime of effort, sacrifice
and achievement.
Thus in this seemingly straight-forward personal narrative of a year in
the far north we can see the genesis of high accomplishment: the
determination of the insularity of Greenland, the mapping of hundreds of
miles of unexplored arctic coastlines, the first soundings of the Polar
Sea (later used and confirmed by the USS NAUTILUS on her own submerged
journey to 90 North) and ultimately the Discovery of the Pole for the
United States of America.
But unfortunately in My Arctic Journal we can also see the genesis of a
bitter polar controversy that raged for several months in 1909 until
Cook’s lies were exposed and Peary given full credit for his historic
achievement. Sadly, fading traces of that great fraud still smirch the
public record, kept alive by the finances of a trust fund created my
Cook’s vindictive daughter and by those who would deny the truth for their
own private purposes.
Jo Peary, with characteristic courage, would bear her first child on these
same forbidding Greenland shores the following year, support and inspire
her explorer husband through another half dozen expeditions until final
victory, and outlive him by more than thirty years.
My Arctic Journal provides a unique insight into a lost culture in a
forbidding land as seen by an adventurous and articulate young woman, and
foretells heroic deeds and high accomplishments through the determined
teamwork of Robert Peary and Matthew Henson.
Ed Stafford
July, 2003
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