The Book of the Dead

explain why he was almost a godlike figure to them. Exercising his droit de seigneur, Peary now chose an Inuit mistress. “The presence of women,” he wrote, “is an absolute necessity to keep men happy.” Aleqasina was a fourteen-year-old girl who had originally come to the house as a cleaner. She was to bear him two sons, Anaakkaq (born 1900) and Kaalipaluk (born 1906). While she was pregnant with the first of these, Jo Peary turned up unexpectedly. She had had no news of her ice-bound husband for several months and was profoundly shocked by what she found. “Had I known how things were I should not have come,” she wrote afterward. Somehow Jo reconciled herself to this unconventional menage, returning twice more in 1902 and 1903, but her journal shows that she was often very low. In 1906 she wrote in her diary, “The Pole will never thank me for the anxiety and suffering I have endured.”

Peary’s relationship with Aleqasina was similar to his relationship with the Inuit as a whole. His attraction was genuine enough, but he never took the trouble to learn the language properly, still less to understand their culture. He considered them brave and resourceful, he admired them as “anarchistic philosophers,” but he was no more able to make an emotional connection with them than anyone else. He preferred striding around as “Pearyaksoah,” the great white God, dispensing largess and barking orders. “They value life only as does a fox, or a bear; purely by instinct,” he wrote. Their sole contribution would be to help him discover the Pole.

In fact, they did much more than merely help him. The “Peary System” for polar exploration, which he trumpeted as his great technical breakthrough, was nothing more than the application of Inuit survival techniques. Without their local knowledge and the huge numbers of their dogs (most of which died en route), his expeditions would never have happened at all. It is possible that the years he spent snuggled up with Aleqasina, waiting for a set of prosthetic toes to arrive, obsessively planning his next assault on the Pole, were the happiest in his life. But Peary was only really happy behind a sledge.

After he left the Arctic for good in 1909, he never attempted to contact Aleqasina or his two Inuit sons, nor —despite the wealth his fame had brought him—did he ever make any financial provision for them or the people who had served him so faithfully. Though in awe of him and proud of their role in his mighty project, the Inuit of northwest Greenland still remember Peary today as their “Great Tormentor.”

In 1897, in an act of spectacular vandalism, Peary stole the four sacred meteorites they had used for millennia as a source of metal flakes for knives and arrowheads, took them back to New York, and sold them to the American Museum of Natural History for $40,000 (worth more than $1 million today). None of the money found its way back to Greenland. Peary also brought six Inuit back with him, so he could show them off as part of his lecture series. Four of them died almost immediately of pneumonia. Peary cynically faked their burial and sold their physical remains to the museum. The youngest surviving Inuit was an eight-year-old boy called Minik. He was adopted by the family of the museum’s superintendent, William Wallace, and named “Minik Peary Wallace.” Shortly afterward Wallace resigned. It wasn’t until nine years later, as a teenager, that Minik visited the American Museum of Natural History for himself. There he was horrified to be confronted with the sight of his father’s bleached bones in a glass case in the ethnographic department. Minik begged to have the remains returned to him for a ritual burial, but the museum refused. Peary reluctantly agreed to pay for Minik to return home, from where Minik fought a running battle with the museum for the rest of his life. He died in 1918, aged twenty-nine, two years before Peary himself. The skeletons weren’t released and reburied in Greenland until 1993.

Though Peary made several attempts to reach the North Pole in the early part of the twentieth century, all of them ended in failure, and some in disaster. But his reputation in America continued to grow. He befriended Theodore Roosevelt, who adored adventure of all kinds and through whom he acquired a number of wealthy patrons to cover his exponentially mounting expenses. (The average cost of each expedition was more than $400,000, or $10 million in today’s terms.)

In 1909, now well into his fifties, Peary was ready to make his final assault on the North Pole. A team of 24 men with 19 sledges and 133 dogs set out, but of these only Peary and five companions went the whole way. One was Matthew Henson, the world’s first black polar explorer. This talented, self-taught man was the son of a poor farmer. His parents died when he was small, and at the age of twelve he walked the thirty miles from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore and went to sea as a cabin boy. He was a skilled navigator, carpenter, and mechanic. He had accompanied Peary on all his major expeditions since they had met twenty-five years earlier. Like Peary, Henson had married an Inuit woman and fathered a son. Peary owed much of his success to Henson’s logistical genius and his fluency in the local language. The rest of the party consisted of four Inuit who drove the sleds. They had to sledge across melting ice riven by treacherous water channels, led by a fifty-four-year-old man with no toes. Henson had an almost infallible sense of direction, but no one except Peary knew how to take the sequence of latitude readings that would indicate their arrival at the Pole. Peary never took them. Because there were no independent witnesses, there was no evidence other than Peary’s word that they had reached their destination. Given that this was the moment he had spent two decades working toward, it’s very odd that Peary’s diary was left empty on the day of their alleged arrival (he later inserted a loose leaf recording the appropriate sentiments). More damning still, to cover the distances that he claimed they had, they would have had to travel more than seventy miles a day. No polar explorer has matched this before or since. When the British adventurer Sir Wally Herbert retraced the voyage in 1969, he estimated that Peary’s “Pole” was at least fifty miles short of the real one.

Peary’s behavior on regaining the expedition’s ship was far from triumphant. He had hardly spoken to Henson on the journey back, and Henson was tight-lipped: “We had a little argument at the Pole, but that’s all I’ll ever say.” (Years later Henson intimated that the argument resulted from Peary’s resentment at having to share his moment with someone else.) The ship’s crew were eager to know if they’d reached the Pole, but even when asked directly, all Peary would say was: “I have not been altogether unsuccessful.”

When the expedition returned to New York, they found there was a rival claim. Dr. Frederick Cook, the man who had saved Peary’s leg eighteen years before, had emerged from the ice saying he had reached the Pole a whole year earlier. This stung Peary into action. All sheepishness forgotten, he set about destroying Cook’s claim (which was even less credible than his own). Peary pulled in every favor he had ever been owed. The resultant publicity savaged Cook’s moral character and previous polar experience with such ferocity that his reputation never recovered. The press didn’t give Peary the unequivocal acclamation he had hoped for, and questions continued to be asked in private, but as far as the world was concerned, it was Robert Peary who had conquered the North Pole. “I have got the North Pole out of my system after twenty-three years of effort,” he proclaimed.

Twenty-two gold medals from the world’s leading geographical societies followed, along with three honorary doctorates and the French Cross of the Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor. He was received by royalty all over Europe and promoted to the rank of rear admiral at home. His ghostwritten memoirs became bestsellers, enthralling a whole generation of armchair explorers. Peary had got all the fame he ever wanted. He withdrew from public life to Eagle Island, his retreat off the coast of Maine, to enjoy his retirement.

But he did not enjoy it in the least. His health collapsed and he suffered severe bouts of depression. His wife blamed his decline on the doubters who had subjected him to such a grilling on his return, saying that it “did more toward the breaking down of his iron constitution than anything experienced in his explorations.” After all he had done, Peary must have had a terrible sense of anticlimax and boredom—and (one can only hope) regret for the way he had treated his innocent Inuit. And perhaps, in the dark watches of the night, he turned over in his mind the guilty knowledge that he had never reached his goal, and that all the fame he’d craved and won was based upon a lie.

Peary desperately wanted the approval of the world because he had never had the approval of a father. His mother had smothered him with love and he loved her in return—his gushing letters to her are full of tenderness— but he needed to be free of her. Psychotherapists call this spousification, when the child develops guilt and anxiety because the parent is acting like a lover. Peary’s mother’s joining him on his honeymoon is a classic example. The North Pole was a long way to go to get away from her, but it was where Robert Peary felt safe and free and where he could try to prove himself a hero to the father he never knew. He died of pernicious anemia, aged only sixty- three.

The first verifiable successful land assault on the North Pole did not take place until 1968. The name we should remember is not Robert Peary but Ralph Plaisted, a high-school dropout and former insurance salesman from Bruno, Minnesota.

The Victorian explorer Mary Kingsley (1862–1900) also had difficulties with her parents, but her escape from what Peary referred to as “commonplace drudgery” could not have produced a greater contrast.