which were used for sending messages. They also carried a small ax or mace. Each man had a saddlebag with his own food rations, rope, and sharpening stone, and a string of five or six spare horses. This meant there was no baggage train or camp followers to slow things down. A Mongol army could travel well over a hundred miles a day —they ate on the move and even stood up in the saddle to evacuate themselves while galloping along.
Genghis was a superb military planner. Each campaign was mapped out in advance and extensive use was made of spies and field intelligence. The troop structure was based on the decimal system: squads (ten men), companies (one hundred), regiments (one thousand), and divisions (ten thousand). Commanders controlled regiments and were given a high degree of independence.
A Mongol attack was devastating and virtually impossible for a traditional army to withstand. Appearing at terrifying velocity, the cavalry suddenly split into three or more columns and mounted a multipronged assault. The tactics required remarkable horsemanship and the troops were rigorously trained. This was done through hunting exercises. A posse of horsemen would set out onto the steppe until game was sighted, surround the animals at speed and at a distance, and then gradually close the circle, making sure nothing escaped.
The Mongols usually tried to ambush an army and destroy it in the field rather than besiege a major city, but when the time came they were both ruthless and highly original. Innovative siege warfare was another of Genghis Khan’s great skills. First, small undefended local towns would be taken and the refugees driven toward the city, putting pressure on living space and food resources. Next, rivers were diverted to cut off the water supply. If necessary, siege engines were then deployed, built on-site from local materials by prisoners of war. Mongol catapults were particularly effective, sometimes firing the bodies of plague victims over the city walls—one of earliest examples of germ warfare. Once a city was taken, its leaders were captured and executed to remove the focus for any future rebellion.
Brutal though this sounds, even Mongol siege techniques bore witness to the sense of fairness that Genghis Khan had enshrined in the
Genghis Khan’s achievements can hardly be overstated. By the time he died (still fighting, in northwestern China in 1227), he had transformed a haphazard patchwork of squabbling goatherds into an empire of unparalleled military strength, with a language, a constitution, and an international postal service. In Mongolia today, he is still considered a national hero.
Though he was said to have more than five hundred concubines (and untold numbers of bastards), Genghis Khan stayed loyal all his life to his original wife, Borte, and their four legitimate sons. He had appointed his third son, Ogedei, as his successor, and for fifteen years things went well. Under Ogedei’s leadership the Mongols put down a rebellion in Korea and demolished the Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, and Hungarians. By 1241 the Golden Horde had reached the gates of Vienna. It felt like the end of civilization. Then, in what seemed to be a miracle, the Mongols mysteriously melted away. They went home to Mongolia; a
As was the custom among Mongols, he was buried in an unmarked grave. His four legitimate sons were so paranoid about keeping its location secret (to avoid its being despoiled) that their men slaughtered every single person the funeral cortege came across—Marco Polo later claimed this exceeded twenty thousand people. Leaving nothing to chance, they then got soldiers to execute the slaves who had excavated the tomb, and then had those soldiers executed in turn. To find it again themselves, they sacrificed a suckling camel in front of its mother and buried it in their father’s tomb. Camels have long memories, so once a year they released the mother camel, which unerringly returned to the precise position it had last seen its offspring. The only flaw in the plan was that when the old mother camel finally died, all knowledge of the location was lost. Despite many false claims, Genghis Khan’s grave has never been found.
As for his permanent legacy, it stretches far beyond the boundaries of Mongolia. Recent genetic studies have found that 8 percent of the current male population of central Asia are direct descendants of Genghis Khan.
Among the direct descendants of the American naval officer and polar explorer Rear Admiral Robert E. Peary (1856–1920) are Peary S. Fowler, a female county circuit judge in Florida, and several Inuit.
Robert Peary believed it was his preordained destiny to be the first man to reach the North Pole. He talked about the Arctic as though it were his own private property, treating other expeditions as infringements and becoming visibly upset when it was pointed out that he was retracing the routes of previous explorers. With astonishing willpower, superhuman powers of endurance, and a fanatical ability to ignore pain, he made eight separate attempts to reach the Pole in ten years, losing all but two of his toes to frostbite.
Peary decided from an early age that he wanted to be famous. In his twenties, when he was just beginning his career in the navy, he wrote to his mother: “Remember, mother, I must have fame, and I cannot reconcile myself to years of commonplace drudgery.” Robert’s father died suddenly when he was three, and his mother Mary’s way of coping with the tragedy was to devote her life to her son: protecting him from the world at every turn, not letting him play with other boys, telling him he was too delicate, making him wear a sun bonnet. It was a deep but suffocating bond: His mother went with him everywhere, even on his honeymoon. Robert Peary married Josephine Diebetsch in 1888. At the time, he had made only one short, failed expedition to Greenland, but that was soon to change. In twenty-three years of marriage, they would spend only three of them together. Nonetheless, Jo would be Peary’s rock, remaining his principal encourager, confidante, and public mouthpiece until his death.
In 1891 she went with him on a reconnaissance mission to Greenland, becoming the world’s first nonnative female Arctic explorer. She wrote a surprisingly cheerful journal and the following year gave birth to their first child, Robert Jr. The family lived among the Inuit, and Jo thought her hosts the “queerest, dirtiest-looking individuals” she had ever seen, reminding her “more of monkeys than human beings.” She was tough, unsentimental, and above all, on her husband’s side. Those who crossed the Pearys or let them down were cut off immediately. One young geologist, John Verhoeff, who had put his life savings into the venture, was so traumatized by the way the Pearys treated him that he effectively committed suicide. Disappearing into the snow, alone and against specific instructions, he shouted back to no one in particular: “I hate them! Her and him both!” and shortly afterward fell down a crevasse.
Peary, meanwhile, set off north. He had a hunch that Greenland was an island and, after an incredible journey, sledging a thousand miles in three months, he and his men finally reached open water, naming it Independence Bay. They believed they had found the northernmost point of Greenland and were looking at the Arctic Ocean. In fact, it was what today is called Independence Fjord, an immense inlet on the northeast coast, some 100 miles long by 15 wide. They were still about 125 miles short of where they thought they were. It was an impressive feat all the same. That part of Greenland is still called Peary Land, and Peary had gone much of the way with a broken leg, which was saved with an improvised splint by the expedition’s doctor, Frederick Cook.
Returning a hero to America in 1892, Peary threw himself into a fund-raising tour for an assault on the North Pole. He traveled the length of the country, delivering 165 lectures in 103 days—earning up to $2,000 a night (about $50,000 today). He looked every inch the bluff polar explorer: almost six feet tall with deep blue eyes, a mane of red hair, and a large handlebar mustache. He delivered his lectures in polar furs, on a stage dressed with an elaborate reconstruction of an Inuit camp, accompanied by five huskies trained to howl in unison at the end of his speech.
His public image concealed a touchy and insecure human being. He suffered all his life from a stutter. Opaque and emotionally distant with everyone, he would fly into a rage at the least hint of disloyalty. Though he was capable of being charming when he wanted something—and was always decisive out on the ice—in private he was a brooder, seeing conspiracies on every side. The wrong side of Robert Peary was a cold, dark place to be, and sooner or later everyone found themselves there—even his wife.
In 1898, leaving Jo behind to bring up their two children and manage their precarious finances, Peary returned to live among the Inuit for three years. Photographs of him standing imperiously in his sealskins help
