Robert Edwin Peary

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Robert E. Peary (1856-1920) Signature of Robert Peary.jpg

Robert Edwin Peary (born May 6, 1856 in Cresson , Pennsylvania , † February 20, 1920 in Washington, DC ) was an American engineer and polar explorer . He claimed to have been the first person to reach the North Pole in 1909 . However, this has been questioned time and again and is still the subject of fierce controversy today.

Life

Early years

Robert Edwin Peary was the son of the farmer Charles Peary (1828-1859) and his wife Mary (nee Wiley, 1827-1900). In 1877 Peary graduated from Bowdoin College , where he was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa and Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternities . As an engineer he was hired by the navy and went to Nicaragua because the USA were planning to build a canal there, but it was never realized.

Greenland expeditions

Peary on the deck of the Roosevelt steamship (around 1909)

Peary joined the US Navy as an engineer in 1881 and served in Nicaragua for several years . He developed a great interest in polar research and carried out several expeditions to Greenland and the Arctic ice between 1886 and 1909 . In 1886 , three years before Fridtjof Nansen's successful attempt to cross Greenland with a dog sled , he had to turn back after 150 km. On April 30, 1892, he and his crew set out to cross Greenland. After 250 km, Peary and the Norwegian Eivind Astrup went on alone. After successfully crossing Greenland, he repeated the crossing again between 1893 and 1895. Because the Arctic Ocean is usually only ice-free in summer, it used to hibernate in the far north and then set off to explore well rested in the spring without wasting time. Peary used this strategy on his first expedition from 1891 to 1893.

His Greenland expeditions were highly profitable for Peary: he received ivory and furs more or less voluntarily from the Inuit in exchange for tools, gifts, iron and wood. In 1897 he brought a large meteorite to New York that the indigenous peoples had used as a source of raw materials for generations before Peary took possession of it. He also abducted six Inuit from Greenland to the USA, who were housed in the basement of the American Museum of Natural History for anthropological research on living objects, which was carried out by the local curator Franz Boas . Four of the Inuit died of tuberculosis soon after . The bodies of the dead were dissected without consent and exhibited in several museums in the country until the late 20th century . In the summer of 1898 one of the surviving Inuit was allowed to return home. Peary did not let Minik Wallace , who was only ten years old , return to his homeland twelve years later, where he was no longer at home. Wallace describes Peary in his memoirs as the "great white pirate" who kidnapped him and made him homeless. Commenting on the PBS documentary series American Experience executive producer Mark Samels, “While we celebrate the adventurers who broaden our horizons, discovering new lands is often dearly paid for. In this case [the price] was not only the innocence and life of Minik, but also that of the Inuit people. "

Race to the North Pole

Peary was determined to be the first to step on the North Pole. On an expedition from 1898 to 1902 he lost eight toes to frostbite. At 84 ° 17 'N, however, it did not come as far north as Fridtjof Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen in 1895 or Umberto Cagni in 1900. In 1905/1906 he made an advance to 87 ° 6' north latitude, with which he was only 280 km was away from the Pole, more northerly than anyone before him. During this expedition he wanted to have seen a still unknown land mass on the horizon off Ellesmere Island , which he called Crocker Land .

In 1908 he started another polar expedition, after which he claimed to have reached the North Pole on April 6, 1909. He wants this with his assistant Matthew Henson and the four Inughuit Iggiánguaĸ (1883–1918, in Peary's notes Egingwah ), Sigdluk (1883–1927, Seeglo ), Ôdâĸ (1880–1955, Ootah , Iggiánguaĸs brother) and Uvkujâĸ (1880–1921 , Ooqueah ).

Private

From 1888, Peary was married to Josephine Peary, born Diebitsch. From this marriage came the children Marie (1893–1978), Francine, who was born in January 1899 and died at the age of six months, and Robert Edwin jr. (1903-1994). In addition, Peary had from an extramarital relationship with the Greenlander Aleqasinnguaq, who was born around 1880, the sons Anaakkaq (1900-1927) and Kaali (1906-1986). Peary suffered from pernicious anemia ( anemia ) during which he fell into a coma on February 19, 1920 and died the next day. His grave is in Arlington National Cemetery .

meaning

The expedition allegedly reaching the North Pole, April 1909

The former ship's doctor on the Peary Expedition of 1891/1892, Frederick Cook , claimed throughout his life to have reached the North Pole on April 21, 1908. In the absence of appropriate evidence and due to his also controversial first ascent of Mount McKinley , Cook was only recognized by a few experts, including his friend Roald Amundsen . Cook also threw, & quot; a. alleged to have looted his supply store.

In the shadow of Cook's alleged success, Peary initially received little attention. But after more and more doubts about Cook's sincerity arose, which Peary had stoked with the help of his connections to the press and the National Geographic Society , Peary moved more and more into the limelight, was honored many times and is still considered the discoverer of the North Pole in the USA . But in the course of time many doubts arose:

  • Neither the way there nor the way back are mentioned in the important route book. The April 7th page - the first day Peary claims to have spent entirely at the North Pole - is completely blank except for the date. The jubilant passages are on loose sheets of paper that could also have been created later.
  • Likewise, there are no references to the moments of the North Pole conquest in his diary. This is all the more strange because Peary otherwise meticulously jotted down every thought.
  • Furthermore, it is not clear why Peary only took companions for the last miles of the journey who were unable to confirm his measurements. The physically well-suited and experienced Arctic traveler and navigator of the Bartlett expedition had to turn back around 240 kilometers from the pole, contrary to previous agreements.
  • The main point of criticism, however, related to the huge daily stages that were supposedly covered. Up to this point, about 20 km a day was covered. The last 250 kilometers, on the other hand, were allegedly covered in 4 days on the way there. In the last eight days of the way back, Peary claims to have covered an average of 70 km a day; sometimes it was even more than 100 km a day, although even today researchers barely manage 35 km a day with modern sleds. These data can hardly be explained even by ice drift and other favorable circumstances. However, in 2005 a dog sled expedition undertaken by the polar explorer Tom Avery with the same means as Peary could undercut the time claimed by Peary by four hours. On the last stages, the ice turned out to be less fissured than, for example, in the pent-up press ice off the mainland coast.
  • On return, the otherwise boastful Peary was noticeably reticent with the travel description. It is now believed that he wanted to await the description of Cook's alleged conquest of the North Pole in order not to be embarrassed to describe the North Pole as an ice desert if Cook had described it as open water or a collection of rocks.
  • The photos allegedly taken at the pole do not allow a clear determination of the geographical latitude of the location. The height of the sun on a certain date above the North Pole is known. However, the position of the sun cannot be seen in the photos and can not be clearly determined even with the help of the shadows . The shadows are either not visible or the end of the shadow cannot be clearly identified due to uneven terrain. So it can only be proven that Peary was within a circle of 110 kilometers from the pole. Peary knew how to use photos and the date they were taken to determine where the photo was taken. Nevertheless, only recordings were made that did not clearly allow this determination.

Honors

The Peary Crater near the North Pole of the Moon , Mount Peary in Antarctica and Pearyland , the northernmost peninsula of Greenland, are named after Peary . A supply and ammunition transporter of the Lewis and Clark class , the USNS Robert E. Peary (T-AKE-5) launched in 2007 , was also named after him .

See also

literature

  • Robert E. Peary: The Discovery of the North Pole. With a preface by Theodor Roosevelt. Authorized translation by Gustav Uhl. Süsserott, Berlin 1910. [New edition: Salzwasser Verlag, Paderborn 2012], ISBN 978-3-86444-319-0 .
  • Fergus Fleming: Ninety degrees north. The dream of the pole. Piper, Munich 2004. ISBN 3-49224205-7 .
  • Know Harper: My father's soul. Minik - The Eskimo of New York. With a foreword by Kevin Spacey. Diana Verlag, Munich / Zurich 2001. ISBN 3-453-19143-9 .
  • Otto Emersleben : In the cracks of the Arctic. Florstedt & Greis, Leipzig 2003. ISBN 3-00-009239-0 (Biography of a novel, which mainly deals with the Peary / Cook press dispute)
  • Johannes Zeilinger: On brittle ice. Frederick A. Cook and the conquest of the North Pole. Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-88221-746-9 .

Web links

Commons : Robert Peary  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Robert Edwin Peary ( Memento of the original from September 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Bowdoin College information site. Retrieved November 28, 2008. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.bowdoin.edu
  2. ↑ Who Belongs To Phi Beta Kappa ( Memento of the original from January 21, 2012 on WebCite ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Website of the student union Phi Beta Kappa. Retrieved October 4, 2009. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.pbk.org
  3. ↑ Günther Wessel : Once to the end of the world Legendary explorers and their adventurous stories . 1st edition. Arena, Würzburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-401-06653-0 , p. 196 .
  4. ↑ Greenland. In:  Wiener Zeitung , supplement Wiener Abendpost , No. 262/1890, November 13, 1890, p. 2, bottom center. (Online at ANNO ). Template: ANNO / Maintenance / wrz.
  5. ^ Günther Wessel: Once to the end of the world . 1st edition. Arena Verlag GmbH, Würzburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-401-06653-0 , p. 196 .
  6. ↑ Minik - The Lost Eskimo , short biography of Minik Wallace on the website of the US television station PBS . Retrieved April 24, 2013: “While we celebrate the adventurers who expand our horizons, the discovery of new lands often comes at a price. In this case, it was the innocence and lives of not just Minik, but also the Inuit people. "
  7. ^ David Welky: A wretched and precarious situation. In search of the last arctic fronture. WW Norton & Company, New York 2016, ISBN 978-0-393-25442-6 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  8. ^ Robert Edwin Peary , entry in the Find a Grave database (accessed October 13, 2013).
  9. ↑ Christian Krug: Eternal Ice, Eternal Questions. Article in the magazine of the Süddeutsche Zeitung , No. 14/2009, pp. 29–33.
  10. ↑ a b Terra-X: The North Pole Conspiracy , TV documentary (2009), available in the ZDF media library until November 15, 2019
  11. ↑ Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera , University of Arizona information page, December 24, 2009 (accessed October 15, 2011).
  12. ↑ Mount Peary in the Geographic Names Information System of the United States Geological Survey
  13. ↑ USNS ROBERT E PEARY (T-AKE 5) in the Naval Vessel Register
personal data
SURNAME Peary, Robert Edwin
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Peary, Robert E .; Peary, Robert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American engineer and polar explorer
DATE OF BIRTH May 6, 1856
PLACE OF BIRTH Cresson, Pennsylvania
DATE OF DEATH February 20, 1920
Place of death Washington, DC