How Peary reached the pole: the personal story of his assistant

This beautifully produced reprint edition of Donald B. MacMillan’s 1934 paean to his mentor Robert E. Peary arrives just in time for the centennial of Peary’s claim to have reached the geographic North Pole on 6 April 1909. As the writers of the concise introduction point out, it also arrives in the middle of a growing international focus on how climate change is altering both the environment of the Arctic and the human responses to this change. It could even be argued that there is more sustained attention being paid to the High North at this moment than at any time since Peary’s famous feud with fellow American claimant to the North Pole, Frederick A. Cook. The introduction also provides a mini-biography of MacMillan, a man who enjoyed a very long life and had an underappreciated career introducing generations of researchers to the Arctic while developing deep friendships with the natives of Greenland. Born in 1874 to a seafaring family in Provincetown, Massachusetts, Donald MacMillan moved to the state of Maine as a boy after the death at sea of his father and the early death of his mother. He worked his way through Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, studying geology and participating in numerous sports. Running a summer camp on Casco Bay, Maine, brought him into contact with Peary, the much-disputed heavyweight champion of American polar exploration. Peary invited MacMillan on his 1905/06 polar expedition, but a contractual obligation forced MacMillan to decline. When Peary failed to reach the pole in 1906, he again invited MacMillan north, and so at the age of 33, MacMillan found himself as a member of Peary’s last great attempt to reach the goal of his lifetime. In this volume, Peary looks every bit the Cheshire walrus in a remarkable photograph taken at Battle Harbour, Labrador, in September 1909, polar exploration’s wildest and most argued-over month. Unfortunately, we do not get the precise date of this image: whether, for example, it was taken before or after Peary’s publicrelations disaster of a telegram accusing Cook of handing the world a gold brick. Reams of psychoanalysis could be produced if this man was putting on this face even in the knowledge of Cook’s claim and Peary’s awkward dismissal of it, to say nothing of Peary’s self-knowledge of the truth, or lack of it, of his own claim to the pole. Or, if one believes MacMillan’s account—and so far as it goes it is highly convincing—Peary merely looks as confident as he should have been in the knowledge that no one could seriously believe that Frederick Cook could have crossed a thousand miles (1600 km) of pack ice with little more than the shirt on his back. The idea was indeed laughable, but Peary— the eternal anti-Cook—never possessed the ability to get other people to laugh along with him. Through his friendship with President Theodore Roosevelt and the patronage of, among many others, the National Geographic Society, Peary’s crag of a face became a central icon of Roosevelt’s muscular new America. Frederick Cook was too much of an enigma; Walter Wellman too much of a technological dilettante; and Evelyn Briggs Baldwin too much of a failure. As the Correspondence P.J. Capelotti, Division of Social Sciences, Pennsylvania State University, Abington College, Abington, PA 19001, USA. E-mail: pjc@psu.edu