#peary

Ya'll look, it's PEARY the platypus 🍐

Our dogs were selected in Siberia and Manchuria. They were not Greenland dogs but dogs that were used to following trails over which the mails were carried.  Greenland dogs were better and hardier but were not for us since the Danish government had already promised all that could be spared from Greenland.

Had these dogs been promised for Amundsen? Maybe, but Filchner's Deutschland expedition took Greenland dogs at this time.

Silas, p.41 (italics are CSW's memoir)

The Expedition did have two “Esquimaux” dogs (as per RFS) which were gifted to them, and were named Cook and Peary.  I have always assumed because of this that they were American and therefore possibly Alaskan, but I don’t think I’ve read any definitive statement of where they originally came from. Meares rejected Cook and Peary from the dog teams which he’d spent months assembling in Siberia, but Clissold took them under his wing and trained them up for fun, with one of Meares’ Siberian dogs as leader.

Yesterday Clissold took the same team to Cape Royds; they brought back a load of 100 lbs. a dog in about two hours. It would have been a good performance for the best dogs in the time, and considering that Meares pronounced these two dogs useless, Clissold deserves a great deal of credit.

You know how they say, "Good afternoon?" Well, it isn't.

We had seen God in His splendours, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man.

- Ernest Shackleton

Thursday, April 8, 2021

If there are any delusional eccentric billionaires who believe the world is flat, I would love to use your money to go to Antarctica and try to find the edge.  As we all know, there’s obviously a wall of ice keeping the oceans in, and with enough of the money you’ve stolen from those beneath you your hard earned cash, I’m sure I can find it!

1909: Robert Peary reaches the North Pole (allegedly)

1911: Roald Amundsen reaches the South Pole

1953: Tenzing Norgay summits Everest

1961: Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human in space

1969: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon

202X: Florida Man becomes the first person to reach the edge of the world?

With your sponsorship, we can make it happen!  I’ll even let you take credit as expedition leader if you want; you’ll get top billing on the Wikipedia page they eventually write about us, Tom Hanks will play you in the biopic, you’ll be world famous.

Peary was the first person to reach the North Pole, in 1909. Except, maybe he didn’t. People think he couldn’t 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 didn’t either, but it doesn’t matter, because Peary pulled out every stop he could to discredit him. It’s 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 Peary’s 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 – six of them, to New York, promising them ‘warm homes in a land of sunshine.’ 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 he’s 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 they’re 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 ‘brown-skinned’, ‘uncivilized’ Inuit.+

His assistant, or valet (he’s described as both) Matthew Henson was black. He is the best, bar the Inuits, at dog and sled driving, and most other arctic pursuits. He’s been Peary’s 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 Peary’s book The North Pole he states, unabashed, ‘he 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.’+

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, ‘Fame, money, and revenge goad me forward till sometimes I can hardly sleep lest something happen to interfere with my plans.’+

This is the man that Peary was. An American hero.