EP 01 - MURDER. MYSTERY AT THE NORTH POLE

Murder. Mystery at the North Pole

- Episode 01-

‘a day of undiluted hell’

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‘a day of undiluted hell’

15 May 2024

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NEW SERIES Murder. Mystery at the North Pole

[photo] US Navy Commander Robert Peary on board SS Roosevelt

The Polar Challenge

On 1 March 1909 an expedition led by Robert Peary set out from Cape Columbia to walk across the polar ice to the north pole. If they got there it would be an extraordinary feat of endurance. It would also be a masterpiece of navigation since the ice under their feet was constantly moving, the compass was shifting unpredictably and the sun which was essential for navigation would barely be visible for many days.

Peary reckoned that, sledging steadily (with dogs), they would make one degree of latitude north every five days. An average of about 14 miles a day. But that’s only if you managed to travel in a straight line. In practice it could mean walking many more miles if the ice drifts. And the ice was also piled up in jagged ridges, some 60 feet high, extremely difficult to cross.

On the first day, George Borup, one of the young American assistants, on his first expedition, noted in his diary that it had been ‘one of the hardest day’s work I have ever put in.’ Struggling to keep his sledge from turning over, ‘it was a case of Huk! Huk! Huk! with a few forceful English words thrown in and put your back into it at almost every step.’

The sledge would hit a block of ice, the rope would break and the dogs would scatter. Borup would yell to the sledges in front to catch them before they ran off to join the wolves. And then they would have to start all over again. It was 50 degrees Fahrenheit, 45 degrees celsius, below zero. Sometimes they were delayed by heavy winds, which had the ice groaning and cracking like gunshots.

Borup recorded in his diary for Thursday 4 March 1909 a heavy snowstorm and a fire in one of the igloos. It was a 'day of undiluted hell'. But it was very far from the only one.

(None of this would have been possible without the Inughuit and their sleds, dogs, clothes: knee-length trousers from polar bear fur; caribou parkas for sleeping and wearing in camp; sheepskin parkas for strenuous activity -presumably from sheepskins Peary had brought with him; arctic fox fur parkas for when it was warmer. Then there were various kinds of sealskin boots.)

[photo] Inughuit explorers Odaq, Sigluk, Iggianguaq, and Ukkaujaaq and Matt Henson at the North Pole 6 May 1909. Photo by Commander Robert Peary

Why risk the Skipper?

But exactly why Bob Bartlett, skipper of the expedition ship, was among those heading out onto the ice is a good question. Even if they walked all the way to the North Pole, it would serve no scientific purpose. And since Bartlett was the captain of the ship, he was the last person who ought to have been risking his life with a dog team and a sled across polar ice which would grow dangerously thin as the sun rose higher.

Without him the rest of the expedition would struggle to get home to New York, where they had set off, one sweltering summer day, seven months before. They had very nearly not made it back three years before, limping home in a badly damaged boat, on their last treacherous attempt to reach the pole.

So why the skipper was now heading out onto the perilous ice was a question you would have to ask the leader of the expedition, the American navy commander Robert Peary. And he turns out to have been one of most difficult and slippery individuals ever to lead a column of explorers into the unknown.

#97 'a day of undiluted hell' - Ep 1 Murder. Mystery at the North Pole

Bob Bartlett - the first to sail north of 88 degrees latitude, led 40 Arctic expeditions and rescued many, including Donald MacMillan stranded for 4 years, whom he first met on the polar challenge 1909.
Enjoy this video 'Arctic Adventurer' © Copyright 1997 – 2024 Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage Web Site. CLICK on photo below

[photo] Peary (left) and Bartlett on board SS Roosevelt, Battle Harbour, Labrador, 1909

'The Pole at last!!! The prize of 3 centuries...'

[photo] Peary's diary entry - 'the Pole at last' - on a separate page added in later

No credible latitude readings

Robert Peary claimed to have been the first to reach the North Pole on 6/7 April 1909. He claimed only to have taken readings of latitude to discover – and later prove - where he was. And yet historian Lyle Dick has pointed out that many of the latitude readings Peary claimed to have taken only started appearing long after his return.

On 20 March, for example, he later said he had reached 85.23 North (85 degrees 23 mins). But that was the day the young American assistant George Borup turned back with a frostbitten heel. Borup was proud to have reached his ‘Farthest’ north and yet in his journal there is no latitude figure given. He seems to have added, for example, temperatures for each day in the margin, but apparently Peary never shared the vital latitude reading for the furthest north his young team member had reached.

And you have to say that it is inconceivable, had Peary in reality obtained a reading that day, that he would not have shared it with Borup, bursting with pride at what he had achieved as the young man’s journal shows him to be.

Most important by far was the reading of 89.57, which would have put Peary very nearly at the Pole itself (90 degrees North) and which Peary said he had taken ‘in a temporary break in the clouds’ on 6 April. But that reading first appears in a talk Peary gave at the Albert Hall in London in May 1910. It is not in Peary’s original journal and not even in Peary’s first typescript of it. It only appears in a second typescript, made in 1911, which placed it on the day he wrote in his diary ‘the pole at last.’

But that whole entry, which Peary claimed to have written on his journal the day he reached the pole - ‘the pole at last… The prize of 3 centuries, my dream and ambition for 23 years’ and so on - has very obviously been inserted later. It is written in a different way and on a sheet of paper cut out from some other notebook.

[photo] Matthew Henson, Peary's right-hand man over 18 years, was denied the fame of reaching the North Pole because he was black. Also 'invisible' were the four Inughuit who made the expedition possible

Without credible latitude readings Peary's whole case begins to crack and sink

Perhaps for this reason, in his talk at London’s Albert Hall in May 1910, Peary made a lot of fuss about how his sextant readings were taken.

First you had to build a semi-circular snow wall to protect the sextant from the wind. Then the sextant was set up on its box, firmly bedded down and levelled using a mercury level. Then a fur was spread around it, partly to keep the snow compact and partly to protect the eyes of the observer from the white glare, once he had taken his snow goggles off. Now the observer lies down flat and takes a reading. If he can.

The problems with this whole palaver are enormous. Peary admits that condensation freezes on the sextant eyepiece. But this is the least of the challenges. Along the arctic horizon there is an ice haze, which makes a clear observation of a low sun very difficult. If you cannot get a proper fix on the horizon, you are supposed to use a tray of mercury to establish a level. Henson – who did not know how to use a sextant - records handing the mercury tray to Peary to use. The problem is that liquid mercury solidifies at minus 37.89 F. And for many degrees above this, mercury is extremely time-consuming to level.

Peary's claim to have knocked off a quick reading 'in a temporary break in the clouds' whilst marching beggars belief. So, to take another example, does the reading Peary reported for 15 March 1909. That day assistant Borup records the temperature as between minus 41 F and minus 52 F. A reading would not have been possible.

Much worse, when the sun is only a degree or two above the horizon, as it was for most, if not all of Peary’s time on the ice, it is distorted by refraction. Peary himself mentions that it was compressed to the shape of an American football. But this refraction introduces a serious error into the readings. At a temperature of plus 50 F the error is known to be around 20 miles. But, as one of Peary's assistants on the expedition, Donald MacMillan, noted as long afterwards as 1934, ‘when the temperature is minus 50 F no one knows what the error is.’ All we know, he added, is that ‘it is enormously increased.’

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