Let's sum up Robert Peary
Peary was the first person to reach the North Pole, in 1909. Except, maybe he didnât. People think he couldnât possibly have covered the ground he said he did, in the time given. His ex-colleague Frederick Cook claimed to have reached the Pole before him, except he probably didnât either, but it doesnât matter, because Peary pulled out every stop he could to discredit him. Itâs possible that Amundsen was actually the first to reach the Pole (and the South Pole, too), but by airship, almost twenty years later, in 1926.
While Pearyâs wife and child were at home, Peary shacked up with a pubescent Inuit girl, maybe around 14 or 15, and had two children with her.*
Peary removed three meteorites from Greenland, the metal from which the Inuit used to make their tools. One weighed 34 tons.*+
He also removed Inuit â six of them, to New York, promising them âwarm homes in a land of sunshine.â They got rooms in the basement of a museum. Four of them died within a year. They were dissected and their bones were kept in the museum. He listed two of them, after this, in his book, saying they were living in peace in Greenland.*
He also dug up recently dead Inuit bodies and took them to the US as anthropological specimens.*
He was rude and belittling about the Inuit, describing them as childlike and naive, describing himself as a father figure to them. He compares their homes to slums, and complains of how much they stink, when heâs been invited to come out of the freezing weather to sleep in them. He trusts them to help him to the Pole, but also constantly implies theyâre superstitious idiots.+
He seems to be something of a white supremacist, repeatedly going on about the first White this, the First White that, and belittling the âbrown-skinnedâ, âuncivilizedâ Inuit.+
His assistant, or valet (heâs described as both) Matthew Henson was black. He is the best, bar the Inuits, at dog and sled driving, and most other arctic pursuits. Heâs been Pearyâs right hand man for twenty years. He, along with some Inuit men, were the only ones to reach the Pole (or supposedly reach the Pole) with Peary. The reason Peary took him, apart from his skills? In Pearyâs book The North Pole he states, unabashed, âhe would not have been so competent as the white members of the expedition in getting himself and his party back to the land. If Henson had been sent back with one of the supporting parties from a distance far out on the ice, and if he had encountered conditions similar to those which we had to face on the return journey in 1906, he and his party would never have reached the land. While faithful to me, and when with me more effective in covering distance with a sledge than any of the others, he had not, as a racial inheritance, the daring and initiative of Bartlett, or Marvin, MacMillan, or Borup. I owed it to him not to subject him to dangers and responsibilities which he was temperamentally unfit to face.â+
At any rate, Henson was the one who reached the Pole, or what was claimed to be the Pole, before Peary, because he broke the trail in front of Peary.#
Peary seemed to be consumed with jealousy and a lust for fame. He states in a letter to his wife, âFame, money, and revenge goad me forward till sometimes I can hardly sleep lest something happen to interfere with my plans.â+
This is the man that Peary was. An American hero.
[Information marked + comes straight from Pearyâs book The North Pole (available for free on Project Gutenberg). Information marked * comes from Edward Larsonâs book To the Edges of the Earth. Information marked # comes from this New York Times article, citing Wally Herbertâs book The Noose of Laurels. Hensonâs book A Negro Explorer at the North Pole is also on Project Gutenberg.]
