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    Peary to the Pole
    Peary to the Pole
    Peary to the Pole
    Ebook148 pages1 hour

    Peary to the Pole

    By Walter Lord

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    About this ebook

    Explorer Robert E. Peary’s quest for the North Pole—a true Arctic adventure from the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of A Night to Remember.

    On March 1, 1909, only 413 miles of formidable ice separated Robert E. Peary from realizing his lifelong dream of becoming the first man to set foot on the North Pole. On that dark morning on Canada’s Ellesmere Island, it was cold enough to freeze a bottle of brandy. The ice looked solid enough, but it sat atop seawater—and shifted violently according to the whims of the ocean below.
     
    Peary was used to the conditions—he’d barely survived them just three years before when he first tried, and failed, to reach the earth’s northernmost point. But this time around, no amount of peril could dissuade Peary and his party from their expedition. With a cry of “Forward, march!” the journey of a lifetime began.
     
    Written with thrilling detail and heart-pounding suspense by the author of Day of Infamy and other bestselling histories, Peary to the Pole is the definitive account of one man’s trek through some of the world’s most treacherous terrain, in search of adventure, discovery, and immortality, a classic for readers of books like In the Kingdom of Ice or The Last Place on Earth.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateMar 6, 2012
    ISBN9781453238455
    Peary to the Pole
    Author

    Walter Lord

    Walter Lord (1917–2002) was an acclaimed and bestselling author of literary nonfiction best known for his gripping and meticulously researched accounts of watershed historical events. His first book was The Fremantle Diary (1954), a volume of Civil War diaries that became a surprising success. But it was Lord’s next book, A Night to Remember (1955), that made him famous. Lord went on to use the book’s interview-heavy format as a template for most of his following works, which included detailed reconstructions of the Pearl Harbor attack in Day of Infamy (1957), the battle of Midway in Incredible Victory (1967), and the integration of the University of Mississippi in The Past That Would Not Die (1965).      

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    • 4/5
      This book is written in a straight non fiction title, which can make it hard to get into. However, that should not deter readers from trying, especially if you are interested in arctic exploration. Walter Lord has written a compelling account of Peary's stubbornness and determination to be the first man to reach the North Pole. The style is basic without elaborating, which left me wanting more, but the story is clearly and succinctly told and compelling enough to keep the reader (or me, at least) engaged and wanting to find out what happens next. Anyone who wants to learn about the early days of arctic exploration should read this book.FTC Disclosure: I recieved a free copy of this book in exchange for a fair review. No other compensation was paid to me, in any form.
    • 5/5
      Robert Peary spent a lifetime attempting to reach the North Pole. From each of his failures he learned a bit more, making each attempt more and more likely to succeed. Not only did he have to worry about extreme cold, he had to coordinate Eskimo's, dog sled teams and provisions. This massive undertaking finally succeeded. However, upon his return he learned that another man, Dr. Cook, was claiming that he had reached the North Pole nearly a year earlier.This book was very well written and engaging. It was written in a storytelling fashion rather than a dry recitation of facts and details. Since reading the book I have been reading about the controversy of who reached the North Pole first, which I find to be fascinating. This is a quick read, one I think teenagers could enjoy. It might even serve to spark a desire for adventure and exploration in young readers.

    Book preview

    Peary to the Pole - Walter Lord

    Peary to the Pole

    Walter Lord

    To John M. Woolsey III

    CONTENTS

    Foreword

    Foreward, March!

    The Thing That I Must Do

    I Shall Win This Time

    North to Cape Sheridan

    The Long Winter Night

    Out Over the Sea Ice

    The Final Dash

    Return

    An Old Friend Reappears

    "Somebody Ought to Be Spanked

    Bibliography

    Index

    ILLUSTRATIONS

    Peary in Arctic furs

    Peary and his daughter, Marie

    Peary and Bob Bartlett

    Ross Marvin

    Matthew Henson

    Donald MacMillan

    George Borup

    Crowd scene aboard the Roosevelt

    President Roosevelt inspecting the ship

    Butchering a walrus on deck

    Seegloo

    Ooqueah

    The Roosevelt at Etah

    Peary and Eskimo women

    Bartlett in the crow’s nest

    Sledge party at Cape Sheridan

    Climbing a pressure ridge

    Last halt before reaching the Pole

    Ferrying across a lead

    Egingwah

    Ootah

    Four views from the North Pole

    Five flags at the Pole

    Map of Peary’s and Cook’s route in Frederick Cook

    Peary and reporters at Battle Harbor

    Cartoon of Peary and Cook

    FOREWORD

    IN 1906 A THOUGHTFUL historian named John Chisholm Lambert wrote that once the North Pole was discovered, it will be necessary for would-be explorers to sit down, like Alexander the Great, and weep because there are no more worlds to conquer.

    Today we know better. The moon, the planets, the stars—there seems no limit. Yet distance is not the measure of discovery. Perhaps the greatest explorer of all was the first man daring enough to paddle his primitive raft beyond the sight of the land he knew.

    In this sense, the discovery of the North Pole was a truly momentous event. For centuries men had wondered about it. For decades they had tried to reach it. For twenty-two years Robert E. Peary himself had been dazzled by the idea. When he finally triumphed, his success was more than personal—it was a historical breakthrough, over-brimming with that inspirational quality always present when man achieves some long-sought goal.

    Walter Lord

    Culver Service

    Robert E. Peary stands on the deck of his ship the Roosevelt. For Peary the North Pole was the goal of nearly a quarter of a century of desire and effort. In his fierce determination to reach the top of the world, his resourcefulness knew no limits. These furs, for instance, he adapted from the Eskimos. They were warm at 50° below zero, yet weighed no more than the clothes which the average man wears driving to work in the wintertime.

    I

    Forward, March!

    FORWARD, MARCH! THE COMMAND came in a crisp, clear voice that could be heard even above the howling wind. One by one a little group of fur-clad figures moved out across a jumbled sea of ice, each guiding a heavily laden sledge drawn by seven yelping, frisking dogs.

    The group fell into single file and headed north. Above them, the stars danced and twinkled in the queer half-light of an Arctic day. Beneath them, the snow crunched to the tread of their feet. All around them stretched an endless waste of snow and ice. It was bitterly cold—50° below—so cold that a bottle of medicinal brandy, which one of the men tried to keep warm against his chest, was soon frozen solid.

    Yet the men trudged on, heads bowed against the biting wind that slashed their faces, kept them from speaking, and all but hid them from view as it whipped the powdered snow into a fine icy dust. Bringing up the rear was the man who had ordered them forward, ready to throw his support wherever needed.

    His name was Robert Edwin Peary, and he was a commander in the United States Navy. He was a big man with bristling moustache and steel-gray eyes that peered through the fringe of his hooded jacket. Hampered by his furs, he moved slowly, but his heart beat fast, for on this first morning of March, 1909, he was setting out to achieve his life’s dream: to be the first man ever to reach the North Pole.

    Now it lay only 413 miles ahead. Not much as distances go—about as far as Boston to Washington—but these were miles of solid ice. Worse, it was not ordinary ice … the kind that covers a pond or stream. This was sea ice—the frozen surface of the Arctic Ocean itself. Strange tides and currents were always at work, leaving treacherous gaps of inky water that seemed just waiting to swallow somebody up. But Peary didn’t hesitate as he pushed steadily on.

    Behind lay the more familiar world he knew. First, there were the empty igloos at Cape Columbia, the jumping-off place his men had just left. Then, ninety miles behind these, there was the base ship Roosevelt, moored at Cape Sheridan, the farthest north a boat had ever gone. And still farther behind were other things: The memories of twenty-two years of Arctic work, seven expeditions, six attempts on the Pole itself—each defeated by some unexpected, agonizing turn of events.

    Could Peary do it this time? Common sense said no. He had always failed. Yet man can profit by failure too, and buried in these past defeats were lessons … important lessons that one day might lead to success.

    II

    The Thing That I Must Do

    IT WAS TWENTY-FIVE YEARS earlier when Robert E. Peary first thought of standing at the top of the world. And it happened not in the frozen north but in the sunny Caribbean.

    He was sailing to Nicaragua in 1884 as a young United States naval engineer. At this time there was no canal between the Atlantic and Pacific, and Peary was on a trip to study where one might be built. But as his ship passed the little island of San Salvador his mind was far from canals.

    This distant shore had been Columbus’s landfall on his first trip to the new world. Now the very sight filled restless twenty-eight-year-old Peary with excitement. What a thrill to have been Columbus! Here was a man, Peary wrote that night in his diary, whose fame can be equalled only by him who shall one day stand with 360 degrees of longitude beneath his motionless feet and for whom East and West shall have vanished—the discoverer of the North Pole.

    At the time it was only natural to think of the Pole this way. The vast, empty Arctic had intrigued men for centuries. At first people hoped that this maze of frozen seas and islands might hide a short cut from Europe to the riches of the Far East, and a long line of explorers searched in vain for what they called the Northwest Passage. Gaspar Corte-Real was doing this for the Portuguese as early as 1500; Henry Hudson was at it for the English in 1610; each country had its heroes.

    Later men knew they would never get to the Orient that way, but the fascination of the Arctic remained. It

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