With the rise of a more rigorous science at the close of the nineteenth century, attempts to find an open polar sea were not taken seriously. They were not, however, loudly disparaged, for the public would not accept such criticism. Between the Civil War and the beginning of the First World War, American audiences were most eager to know and read about polar adventure. Men like Kane and Charles Francis Hall, and later Stefansson and Peary, who journeyed through exotic regions far removed from the factories of industrial America, were fetchingly heroic figures.7 Peary especially, the very embodiment of determination, was revered, until his grasping and arrogant nature became too much and public sentiment turned against him.

  In September 1875, Karl Weyprecht, an Austrian army officer who discovered Franz Josef Land with Julius von Payer in 1873, urged a group of scientists meeting in Graz, Austria, to make a synchronous and, consequently, more useful examination of the Arctic. Weyprecht regarded recent attempts to reach the North Pole as nothing but stunts; and he criticized the zealous international competition to discover new arctic islands. What was the nature of the arctic climate, he wanted to know, and how did it affect Europe’s weather? Could chauvinism be set aside for international cooperation to answer this and other scientific questions in the North? It could, his colleagues believed. Weyprecht’s proposals were refined and became the plan for the first International Polar Year. In 1882, eleven countries set up twelve arctic stations for a year of observations.

  The station farthest to the north was to be an American one at Fort Conger, Ellesmere Island, commanded by army lieutenant Adolphus Greely. Greely was a humorless, mediocre commander, “an insecure … irritable martinet,” according to one historian, without arctic experience. He opted, in the American tradition, for spectacular adventure rather than tedious scientific observation, sending a Lieutenant James Lockwood up the coast of Greenland to best, if possible, the current British farthest north of 83°20´N. Lockwood reached 83°24´N with Sergeant David Brainard and an Eskimo companion on May 15, 1883, four nautical miles farther north than the Nares Expedition had got on that same shore. “We shook each other’s hands from very joy,” wrote Brainard later, “and even hugged the astonished Eskimo who wondered what it was all about.” Sergeant Brainard, one is chagrined to note, also carved an advertisement for a well-known ale into the rock before turning back.

  Greely had been put on Ellesmere Island to build Fort Conger, to make meteorological and magnetic observations, and to explore both Ellesmere and northern Greenland. The party was to be picked up in the summer of 1883. The relief ship did not show up that year, nor did it appear in the summer of 1884. Desperate, Greely led his men south along the coast to Cape Sabine in hopes of finding a cache, either one left by his would-be rescuers or one from the 1875–1876 Nares Expedition. (They found both. The former was pitifully inadequate and retrieving the latter proved too arduous.) Sixteen of the twenty-five men on Pim Island at Cape Sabine died of starvation that winter, including the young and very likable Edward Israel.

  The failure to rescue all the men in the party—Greely, himself, survived—is one of the most shameful episodes in American history. The rescue efforts of both 1883 and 1884 were inept, halfhearted affairs. The saddest part, perhaps, was the disparagement heaped on Greely by the very politicians who would not underwrite a serious effort to rescue him. Heroic attempts apparently did not count for much against unqualified success in America. Not to have rounded the tip of Greenland or discovered new land, to have bested the British by only four miles—it wasn’t enough. Greely was written off, a cruel and inhumane treatment of a man who did the best he could to keep his men alive. One of the loudest voices of condemnation was that of Robert Peary, who lived to greatly regret his self-indulgence.

  By this time, 1900, arctic exploration had largely become the story of two men, Fridtjof Nansen and Peary. Robert Peary, the older of the two, was a shrewd salesman, desperate for acclaim. His accomplishments were genuine—explorations of northern Greenland and his arrival at the North Pole in 1909, arduous journeys requiring a determination that staggers the imagination. His bluster and his ability to command, however, concealed loneliness and insecurity, which he sought to assuage by his accomplishments and by maneuvering to gain the favor and companionship of powerful people. He embodied the bearing and to some extent the ideals of Theodore Roosevelt, one of his staunchest supporters.

  Nansen, a Norwegian scientist and humanitarian, was a different sort of man—nearly as driven as Peary, but not a showman, not an imposing presence. He had a larger view of the world than Peary did, a better understanding of the scale of human events, and he made lasting contributions in several fields. He was the first explorer to cross the Greenland ice cap; he derived and then proved a theory of polar drift; and he wrote a scholarly two-volume work on early arctic exploration, In Northern Mists. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts on behalf of refugees after World War I.

  While there is an aura of the unrequited lover about Peary, the proportions of Nansen’s life seem ideal. Nansen, however, was not harried the way Peary was, dogged by a bewildering series of misfortunes that culminated in a self-destructive dispute with Dr. Frederick Cook over who had gotten to the North Pole first.

  When he read in 1884 that part of the wreckage of a ship called the Jeannette had turned up on the southwest coast of Greenland, Nansen began to speculate about polar drift in the Arctic Ocean.8 With Scottish ship architect Colin Archer, Nansen built the Fram, a 128-foot, broad-beamed, three-masted schooner designed to survive in the polar pack.9 The Fram was outfitted for five years, and on June 24, 1893, with eleven companions, Nansen set his course from Norway to intersect the Jeannette’s. By the end of September the Fram was beset as intended, north of the De Long Islands. For two years Nansen drifted in safety, making numerous observations. The ship rode beautifully in the ice; the drift, though slow, went as Nansen had expected, a clockwise movement westward from the De Long Islands. Bored and eager for a struggle, Nansen left the ship on March 14, 1895, with Frederik Johansen and twenty-six dogs in an effort to reach the North Pole. They passed beyond 86°N, but spring was upon them and they dared go no farther. As it was, they barely reached Franz Josef Land with two of the dogs. They overwintered there and sailed for Norway in August, with the English explorer Frederick Jackson, whom they were fortunate enough to meet there, quite by accident.

  The Front’s captain, Otto Sverdrup, brought the ship safely out of the ice and into the Greenland Sea in August 1896. Two years later, on another expedition, Sverdrup was forced into winter quarters with the Fram by heavy ice on the eastern coast of Ellesmere Island. A suspicious Peary suddenly showed up in Sverdrup’s camp—he wanted to know what Sverdrup’s intentions were. To explore to the west and not try for the Pole, said the Norwegian. Peary, snubbing a courteous offer of coffee, bade the Norwegians an abrupt adieu. Another slight Peary would regret.

  Between 1898 and 1902 Sverdrup and his companions explored southern and western Ellesmere and discovered Axel Heiberg Island and Amund and Ellef Ringnes islands to the west.10 Not since Parry’s first expedition had so much new land been discovered and mapped. It was thorough, competent exploration, which went largely unheralded in America, like the Danish exploration of east Greenland.

  One winter in Yellowknife, in the Northwest Territories, when the temperature did not get above –40°F for seven weeks, I found plenty of time to read. Ringing in my mind was a conversation about the perception of landscape that I had had with a man named Richard Davis, at his office at the Arctic Institute of North America in Calgary. I had explained my fascination with a set of journals, written about travels over the tundra north and east of Yellowknife, those of Samuel Hearne, John Franklin, Warburton Pike, and Ernest Thompson Seton.11 Hearne had lived off the land like his Slavey and Chipewyan companions on a journey to the Northern Ocean (1770–1772). The land does not take on the proportions of an enemy in his journal, nor does it seem bereft of life. A different understanding emerges from Franklin’s journal, in which the land reflects the name it was to bear ever after—the Barrens. (Franklin’s 1819–1822 expedition was troubled by execution, starvation, murder, and cannibalism.) In Pike’s journal (1890) the tundra is construed as a wild place that sagacious and incessantly tough men are meant to subdue, to survive in. For Seton (1907) the same tundra is so benign, its economic promise so bright, he even attempts to change its name from the Barrens to the Arctic Prairies.

  The same land—plants, animals, small trees, weather, the low hills, rivers, and lakes—is, as one might easily guess, seen differently in different eras by men of dissimilar background. I speculated about the overlap and contrast in the journals with Davis, who had himself written a paper comparing the journals of twentieth-century travelers in the subarctic. Something that comes up in a comparison of such journals, he said, is how much a description of the land in an early report affects the description of the same landscape in a later report. Confirming the existence, in other words, of a landscape like Pike’s in the North—“the most complete desolation that exists on the face of the earth”—is partly the result of choosing that writer over another to read before departing.

  As I sat reading in Yellowknife I was mindful of this, of the caution with which one should approach any journal, of the tendency to make a single appealing narrative stand for the entire experience or, worse, to stand in place of the experience. I also felt a sense of privilege, having been able to walk over some of the same country these explorers traversed. Even if I did not always care for the shape of the mind, I could see they had been there. Hearne’s journal rings with authentic detail, some of it quite subtle. I reflected that week in Yellowknife how infrequently any of us is able to do this, to verify what is given to us to read about a far place. And how in reading three or four journals about the same region one sees even better the gaps, the strange lacunae that emerge in our understanding of anything. And something else: one wants to get a sense of the land itself, to know what it is; but one is also drawn irresistibly to the people who walk around on it, figuring out both the landscape and themselves.

  The literature of nineteenth-century arctic exploration is full of coincidence and drama—last-minute rescues, a desperate rifle shot to secure food for starving men, secret letters written to painfully missed loved ones. There are moments of surreal stillness, as in Parry’s journal when he writes of the sound of the human voice in the land. And of tender ministration and quiet forbearance in the face of inevitable death. As if caught up in the plot of a great Victorian novel, ships and people often turn up again in ironic circumstances—Sir John Ross was rescued in 1831, after being trapped in the ice of Prince Regent Inlet for four years, by the Isabella, the ship he had sailed into Smith Sound in 1818, since converted to a whaler. The Terror, which George Back barely got clear of Foxe Channel in 1837, the near-disaster that almost ended British arctic exploration, was Franklin’s flagship in 1845.

  Francis M’Clintock, who would be the first to find records from the Franklin Expedition, on King William Island in 1859, also had a hand in M’Clure’s completion of the Northwest Passage. In the spring of 1851 he left a message under a rock at Winter Harbor, Melville Island, giving the location of his ship’s winter quarters. It was found the following spring by M’Clure, who, realizing the note was now dated, added information to it about the location of Investigator at Mercy Bay and the dire circumstances there. M’Clintock’s note was checked by a colleague in the fall of 1852 and, the ship’s fate then known for the first time, preparations were made for a rescue expedition in the spring of 1853. (A single member of Investigator’s crew, Samuel Cresswell, was fortuitously present when a supply ship, HMS Phoenix, departed Beechey Island for London on August 24, 1853. He thus became the first person to travel through the Northwest Passage—the rest of the crew spent another winter in the Arctic.) Another note left by M’Clintock, on the north shore of Prince Patrick Island, was discovered in 1915 by Stefansson and delivered, still legible, to his widow in 1921.

  Of the many dramatic events, several became fixed in my mind.

  In 1900, Peary placed a cairn on the northeast shore of Greenland at 82°37´N. In the previous twenty-five years the Danes had been making a systematic reconnaissance of Greenland’s remote east coast. The only hole in their map was that between Peary’s cairn and Cape Bismarck (76°45´N), a distance of about 400 miles. In August 1906, the Danmark Expedition arrived at Cape Bismarck to complete the coastal survey. On May 1, 1907, having spent the previous autumn laying down caches, Mylius Erichsen, Höeg Hagen, and an Eskimo companion named Jörgen Brönlund parted company with J.P. Koch and his party, after traveling north from Cape Bismarck with them. Koch headed for Peary’s cairn. Erichsen turned west into Independence Fiord, the east entrance to a channel that Peary had reported led to the west coast of Greenland. On May 27, by accident, the parties met again. Koch had found Peary’s cairn while Erichsen had traveled 125 miles into Danmark Fiord and found his way blocked. He told Koch he was going to run up Independence Fiord to the vicinity of Academy Glacier, from where he thought he might be able to look westward into Peary Channel. He thought it would take only a few days.

  Erichsen’s party never returned. Koch and the others searched unsuccessfully for them in the fall, laying down emergency supplies along the coast as they went. The following spring they began a careful check of the depots. In a small cave, which served as a cache on the coast of Lambert Land, they found Brönlund’s body. At his feet were a bottle containing all of Hagen’s maps and his diary, all but the last page written in Eskimo syllables. On the final page, in Danish, Brönlund had written:

  Perished 79 Fiord after attempt to return over inland ice in November. I arrive here in waning moonlight, and could not go farther for frozen feet and darkness. Bodies of the others are in middle of Fiord off glacier (about 2½ leagues). Hagen died 15th of November, Mylius about ten days later.

  The three of them, it turned out, had run into warm weather on the way back, which made travel over the sea ice impossible. They ran out of food and their dogs perished. They had found a geography Peary’s descriptions did not prepare them for. Hagen’s maps, which the Eskimo had carried with him to the end, corrected the errors.

  There was no Peary Channel. Where Peary had reported the frozen northern reaches of the Greenland Sea, they had found two enormous peninsulas, Crown Prince Christian Land and land now named for Erichsen. (In fairness to Peary, other explorers made such errors, though few were ever pointed up in such a regrettable way.)

  Peary’s own journeys were full of desperate moments, including one of the most harrowing in arctic literature. In 1906, retreating south across the ice after an unsuccessful attempt to reach the Pole, Peary found his way blocked by a lead a half-mile wide. The party, camped on the north side, sent men to reconnoiter east and west, and waited, day after day, for the lead either to close or to freeze over. Peary’s provisions ran perilously low. The men finally killed their dogs for food and broke up their sleds for fuel. The lead was by then two miles wide, but some distance from camp a thin film of ice had formed over it. The ice would not support a man without snowshoes—to stumble, even to pause, would mean breaking through. They tied on their snowshoes with great care, spread out in a wide line abreast, and set out in silence. Each man moved with a rhythmic shuffle. The young ice rose in bow waves like water at the tips of their snowshoes. When the toe of his rear shoe broke through the ice on two successive steps, Peary thought his life was finished. He heard someone cry out behind him but did not dare stop or turn around. “God help him,” he thought. When they reached solid ice on the other side no one spoke. Peary heard the quivering sighs of the two men nearest to him. The shout had been from a man whose snowshoes, like Peary’s, had broken through. But everyone had made it.

  That moment, indeed the intensity with which Peary lived, contrasts sharply with the highly accomplished but unsung arctic voyage of one Richard Collinson. Collinson left England in January 1850 in HMS Enterprise, with his consort M’Clure in Investigator. Somewhere en route to the Bering Sea, around Cape Horn and via Hawaii, M’Clure decided he would just as soon be the first ship through the Northwest Passage as to find Sir John Franklin. M’Clure was already forty-three, and his chances for promotion were not good. Accordingly, he slipped ahead of his commanding officer.

  Collinson, a few weeks behind M’Clure (who had made a bold charge through an uncharted part of the Aleutian chain), arrived too late to get past the ice at Point Barrow. He turned south and spent the winter in Hong Kong. In the summer of 1851 he rounded Point Barrow and, unknowingly, followed M’Clure’s 1850 route up Prince of Wales Strait. On one of the Princess Royal Islands, Collinson found a note indicating M’Clure had tried to cross Viscount Melville Sound to reach Parry’s Winter Harbor but was prevented by heavy ice. Collinson also tried and was repulsed. He returned south, doubled Nelson Head, and sailed up the west coast of Banks Island (unaware, again, that he was just two weeks behind M’Clure). The ice proved too great an obstacle, however, and he turned south again. He headed for the southwest shore of Victoria Island, where he set up winter quarters.

  In 1852 Collinson deftly navigated the 300-ton Enterprise through Dolphin and Union Strait, a stunning bit of seamanship, to winter at Cambridge Bay on the southeast coast of Victoria Island. Had he had an interpreter along (the interpreter was with M’Clure), he very likely would have learned the location of Franklin’s tragedy. As it was, he only collected some relics of the expedition from local Eskimos. In the spring of 1853 he explored the east coast of Victoria Island as far as Gateshead Island, finding that he had been anticipated there by Rae in 1851. (The relics Rae collected among the Pelly Bay Eskimos in 1854 would also arrive in England a year before Collinson was able to get back with his.) Collinson set sail for England in the summer of 1853. After again navigating unscathed through the treacherous shoal water south of Victoria Island, he was forced into winter quarters at Camden Bay, Alaska. He finally reached England via the Cape of Good Hope in May 1855.