As America was celebrating victory in the war with Spain, Robert Peary was setting off on his third attempt at reaching the North Pole. He arrived in Greenland in July 1898 and after laying in a store of walrus meat tried to drive his ship the Windward north through the thin summer ice. But the ice was thicker than usual this year and the Windward's engines weren't powerful enough to break though. By mid-August, the expedition was ice-bound 400 miles from where he'd hoped to start his trek. The explorer had co-opted the Roman philosopher Seneca's motto "Inveniam viam auto faciam" (I'll find a way or make one). Once the ocean ice solidified, he began making one, portaging supplies to sites that could serve as advance depots for his major attempt.On December 20, Peary, accompanied by his African-American assistant Matthew Henson, four Inuits, and dog teams, set out for an earlier expedition's abandoned base, hoping that the supplies they left there were still usable. He almost lost his life in the process. By December 29, the expedition was struggling through the complete darkness of the Arctic winter illuminated only by the stars and an almost full Moon (the full moon falling on December 27 that year). They stumbled around for a few hours before digging a burrow in the snow to sleep in, then started across Lady Franklin Bay, at 81N where the Sun does not rise at all from October 17 to February 25. With temperatures down to -63F, it took until January 6, 1899 for Peary to reach the shelter of the old camp.
It had been an incredible feat of navigation and endurance that saved them but for the last stretch of the trip, Peary noticed a suspicious numb sensation in his feet. Henson later described how, when they removed his boots, his legs were pale as a sheet up to the knee and when the boots were taken off, several of Peary's toes clung to the hide and snapped off at the joint. Peary lost parts of seven toes and suffered weeks of agony before he recovered enough to be sledged back to the Windward.Meanwhile, his supporters in the US met and founded the Peary Arctic Club which ensured continued funding for his expeditions. Also he learned that there was in fact not a rival Norwegian expedition taking place now as he'd feared. Despite the loss of his toes, Peary refused to give up and he kept trying again and again until he could report that he raised the Stars and Stripes on the North Pole on April 6, 1908. But it would be a Pyrrhic victory as a Brooklyn physician named Dr. Frederick Cook, who'd spent a year in Antarctica in 1898, insisted he'd gotten to the North Pole a year earlier. The exact dispute has never been resolved, although it is generally believed nowadays that Peary did in fact reach the North Pole first.
>>16803509>On December 20, Peary, accompanied by his African-American assistant Matthew Hensonwait is this one of those things where you're taught in school that a black man actually reached the North Pole first and the white dude just took the credit?
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