Hurrah for Baffin's Bay

DESCRIPTION: Nonsense song. Ch: "Avast belay, Hurrah for Baffin's Bay! We couldn't find the pole, because the barber moved away. The boat was cold we thought we'd get the grip so the painter put three coats, upon the ship! Hip, hip! Hip, hip! Hurrah for Baffin's Bay!"
AUTHOR: Words: Vincent Bryan / Music: Theodore F. Morse (1873-1924)
EARLIEST DATE: 1903 (Broadway "Wizard of Oz")
KEYWORDS: sailor nonsense nonballad humorous exploration
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (3 citations):
Harlow-ChantyingAboardAmericanShips, pp. 230-231, "Baffin's Bay" (1 text)
ADDITIONAL: Margaret Bradford Boni, editor, _Songs of the Gilded Age_, with piano arrangements by Norman Lloyd and illustrations by Lucille Corcos, Golden Press, 1960, pp. 22-24, "Hurrah for Baffin's Bay" (1 text, 1 tune)
Stanley Appelbaum, editor, _Show Songs: from The Black Crook to The Red Mill_, Dover Publications, 1974, pp. 189-193, "Hurrah for Baffin's Bay" (1 text, 1 tune, a copy of the original sheet music)
ST Harl230 (Partial)
Roud #9157
RECORDINGS:
[Arthur] Collins and [Byron G.] Harlan, "Hurrah for Baffin's Bay" (CYL: Edison 8447, 1903)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "The Bosun's Story" (humorous song about reaching the North Pole)
NOTES [6914 words]: From the 1903 Broadway production of "The Wizard of Oz." It was performed by the comedy team of Fred A. Stone and David C. Montgomery (and may have been written with them in mind). - SL
And a surprisingly topical item it is, because there was a "polar push" going on at the time, but the participants had a pretty astounding record of failures. So this was written with that record in mind -- and the play was so popular that L. Frank Baum dedicated the second Oz book, The Land of Oz, to Montgomery and Stone, "whose clever personations of the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow have delighted thousands of children throughout the land." Ray Bolger, the Scarecrow in the MGM musical, "admitted that his vaudeville hero was Fred Stone" (Loncraine, p. 284) -- indeed, he went into acting after seeing Stone perform; until then, he had just been following in his father's footsteps. When he was offered the role of the Tin Woodman, Bolger campaigned to get the Scarecrow role instead, because of Stone (Harmetz, p. 114).
The irony is that Baum had hoped to produce a Wizard of Oz musical, but the show that went on the stage was hardly his. Baum originally met an unknown composer named Paul Tietjens in 1901; Tietjens proposed that Baum write the libretto of a musical, that Tietjens prepare the music, and that Baum's illustrator W. W. Denslow manage art, costumes, etc. (Rogers, pp. 105-106). Their first idea was for a non-Oz-related show, but eventually (after a lot of fights about royalties and such) they came up with a "Wizard of Oz" musical.
Apparently Baum planned a traditional sort of comic show -- the Scarecrow as comedian, the Tin Woodman as straight man, the Cowardly Lion a clown (Rogers, p. 107). Baum offered the script to an experienced producer, Fred R. Hamlin. (That's "Hamlin" as in "Hamlin's Wizard Oil Songsters," according to Baum/Hearn, p. lvii, so there is a musical link.)
Hamlin liked the idea of adding a comic duo to the plot -- but thought the show needed work. He called in an experienced director, Julian Mitchell, to work on it. And work on it Mitchell did. Baum's plot was submerged in the comedy of the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman; Dorothy was made a woman rather than a girl (and attracted the attentions of one "Sir Dashemoff Daily"), and Toto the dog was transformed to a cow. Only eight of the Baum/Tietjens songs were retained (although one of them, "When You Love, Love, Love," was apparently the most popular in the show). Twenty other songs were added (Rogers, pp. 107-109), including this one -- note that it is not by Baum and Tietjens.
Baum may not have recognized the result of all this work, but it certainly paid off for him; the show ran for eight years, and Baum and Tietjens, despite their limited roles, are said to have earned close to a hundred thousand dollars each in royalties (Rogers, p. 109).
Gardner, p. 262, estimates that this was the eighth most popular song in America in May 1903 (#1 for the year being Charles K. Harris's "Always in the Way").
According to Riley, p. 78, the musical was so successful that it inspired Victor Herbert to write "Babes in Toyland," which of course is still well-known. Riley believes that "Babes" survives and the Oz musical does not because "Babes" had better tunes. This strikes me as likely, although I suspect the movie version of "The Wizard of Oz" also helped to displace the earlier musical. Interestingly, Victor Herbert would later hire Stone and Montgomery to perform in "The Red Mill" (and some of the other performers from the "Oz" musical were cast in the original production of "Babes in Toyland," according to Baum/Hearn, p. lxi).
Appelbaum, p. xlii, has two photos of Montgomery and Stone in the musical. One shows them as they sang this song, in nautical garb. The other is even more interesting. The Scarecrow costume looks pretty poor, but the Tin Woodman shows the Woodman with a funnel on his head, looking almost exactly like the costume used in the Wizard of Oz movie (the funnel, to be sure, goes back to the original book illustrations).
Whether this song was written with Stone and Montgomery in mind is perhaps a matter of definition. They did not audition for the musical; Mitchell -- who evidently already knew them -- actually called them back from a tour in England to play the parts. Supposedly Mitchell, upon meeting Stone, declared, "Fred, you are a perfect scarecrow." Stone, not knowing why he had been called back, responded that his clothes had been made by one of the best tailors in England. It is interesting to note that Stone and Montgomery would quit the show before its run ended, given that Stone met his wife on the set, and his brother Edwin got the part of Imogene the cow, the replacement for Toto (Gardner/Nye/Baum, p. 27).
Composer Vincent P. Bryan seems to have been fairly popular at the time; in addition to this, he wrote "Down Where the Wurzburger Flows" with Harry von Tilzer and "In My Merry Oldsmobile" with Gus Edwards.
At the time this song was written, the quest for the North Pole was looking much like the quest for the Northwest Passage fifty years earlier, or the quest to climb Mount Everest forty or fifty years later: Lots of attempts, little luck -- and the prospects for success rather poor.
Indeed, Mirsky observes (p. 293) that "In the recent history of Arctic Exploration undue stress was laid on the attainment of the North Pole. In 1896 Nansen showed conclusively by the Fram's drift across the polar basin that the Pole lay somewhere on a shifting, ice-covered sea, at a point that had to be mathematically determined." In other words, by the time this song was written, everyone knew that the North Pole was sea, not land; there would never be a base or research station there.
It's interesting to note that the serious quest for the North Pole began relatively late (though earlier than the quest for the South Pole); people had been seeking the Northwest Passage for years before they really started looking for the Pole. (For background on the quest for the Passage, see the notes to "Lady Franklin's Lament (The Sailor's Dream)" [Laws K9].) Indeed, the first two serious Northward Nuts (Elisha Kent Kane and Charles Francis Hall) started their careers searching for Franklin's lost expedition. Charles Francis Hall managed to bring home some Franklin artifacts and tales, as well as relics from Frobisher's very first Northwest Passage quest -- but he also started a ridiculous story that Franklin's second-in-command Crozier was still alive as late as 1860.
The Pole expeditions never produced the casualties that the Franklin expedition did -- but only because no one was willing to send so many men.
The first fairly modern attempts to reach the pole were made in the early nineteenth century by the British Navy. The first, in 1818, was commanded by David Buchan in the Dorothea, with John Franklin in the Trent as his second-in-command. The goal was to go forward by ship, but they made it only about to the north end of Spitsbergen. They gave up after a long summer, their ships much battered but with the crews intact (Fleming-Barrow, pp. 52-55).
The second naval attempt, in 1827, was made by William Edward Parry, the Admiralty's darling boy for his near-conquest of the Northwest Passage in 1819. This time, the ship Hecla was only to take them to Spitzbergen; from there they would proceed with sledges and small boats. They quickly discovered that the polar ice was not smooth, so the sledges were slow, and that the ice had a southward drift. The expedition set a new record for "Farthest North" that would stand for half a century (Fleming-Barrow, pp. 239-240), but finally had to return.
That ended naval attempts at exploration; there just wasn't the money for more expeditions with such feeble results. When polar exploration resumed, it was largely done by amateurs, who found amazing ways to get in trouble.
It probably didn't help that, where the Northwest Passage expeditions were led by sober men like Parry and Franklin, many North Pole expeditions were organized by fruitcakes like Elisha Kent Kane, who had little contact with reality. (It is probably not coincidence that, when Farley Mowatt published a book about arctic exploration in the 1960s, it was entitled The Polar Passion; Bryce, pp. 944-945). In the expedition Kane commanded, he faced multiple near-mutinies, ended up eating rats, and finally lost his ship (Berton, pp. 250-258, 273-295). His problems may even have been genetic; reading histories of the Mormons, I find that his brother Thomas Leiper Kane was also given to wild plans, grandiose notions, and illnesses that sound psychosomatic. (T. L. Kane was not an explorer, but he mediated between the U. S. Government and the Mormons, and later became a Civil War general, with limited success.)
Charles Francis Hall had no relevant training (he was an engraver who had run a no-account newspaper in Cincinnati) and was given to prophetic dreams, quarrels with everyone, and perhaps a mild case of bipolar disorder; on an earlier expedition, he had murdered one of his crew, but was never prosecuted because no one could figure out which jurisdiction the case fell under (Henderson-Fatal, p. 44). At one point, he tried to forbid his sailors from cursing (Henderson-Fatal, p. 69), which has to be one of the most quixotic orders ever given.
Robert Peary, who came later, wasn't given to visions, but he was secretive to the point of paranoia, and so obsessed that he refused to have his toes treated for frostbite on one expedition. He ended up losing eight toes -- and being forced to stop anyway; see Berton, p. 525. Fleming-North, p. 284, calls him "probably the most unpleasant man in the annals of polar exploration," noting that in his youth he liked to trip his grandfather just to see the old man fall down. Bryce, p. 871, quotes an observer who said, "Peary strikes me as a man who never smiles except when he thinks it would be rude not to."
The Pole really did seem to lure people who were in it for the glory. This was utterly unlike the Northwest Passage expeditions, which had strong scientific components (John Franklin's Journey to the Polar Sea, for instance, which describes his disastrous 1819 expedition, notes that he was instructed to "register the temperature of the air at least three times in every twenty-four hours; together with the state of the wind and weather and any other meteorological phenomena. That I should not neglect any opportunity of observing and noting down the dip and variation of the magnetic needle, and the intensity of the magnetic force; and should take particular notice whether any, and what kind or degree of, influence the Aurora Borealis might exert on the magnetic needle..." and so forth. See the introduction to Franklin's work, p. 28 in the 2000 Brassey edition with introduction by James P. Delgado). Peary's sole goal and desire, by contrast, was to reach the Pole. So strong was Peary's obsession that, when he heard of other attempts, he gave orders to his subordinates to automatically discount them -- see Henderson-True, p. 210.
Hall's third expedition, 1871-1873, in the ship Polaris, shows how badly a polar expedition could fail: They made an incredible push northward, heading up Baffin Bay to the Kane Basin between Ellesmere Island and Greenland, then continuing up the Kennedy Channel to reach the north shore of Greenland at the place now called Hall Basin.
But the expedition crew by then was in near-total disarray, with a drunken ship's captain and a rebellious scientific staff (Henderson-Fatal, pp. 42-45, tells us that this conflict started before they even really reached the ice). Although George Tyson, clearly the best of the officers under Hall (though, unfortunately, he had no real role; Hall had hired him as a sort of spare captain), thought that Hall was energetic, persevering, courageous, and unselfish (Henderson-Fatal, p. 48), he also wondered how any expedition could survive such divisions. It is clear that Hall, who of course had no experience of military command, was unable to exert control. Yet, as events proved, the other senior officers (captain Buddington and senior scientist Bessels) were even worse. It was a disaster for the expedition when, in November 1871, Hall died.
Almost a century later (1968), Chauncey Loomis led an expedition that excavated Hall's grave -- and found he had been poisoned with arsenic.
Unlike the Franklin Poisoned By Lead theory, this doesn't seem to have been questioned, but it's not clear if it was murder or accident -- though Henderson-Fatal, p. 71, reports an ominous incident in which Captain Buddington, before Hall set out on his last sledge voyage, says that Hall won't live long. For the story, see Loomis, especially the epilogue starting on p. 303, which describes the trip to conduct the Hall autopsy. A shorter summary can be found in Berton, pp. 390-394. A third vivid account is found in Fleming-North, pp. 138-141. In Berton and Fleming, the pages before and after describe the horrid plight of the crew on the expedition, giving rather more detail than Loomis, who devotes most of his work to Hall himself.
Potter, writing long after Loomis, has another interesting footnote: that Hall (who, we should note, was married) and Dr. Bessels, the man who treated him and would have been the logical one to poison him if he had been poisoned, were both interested in the same woman! (Potter, p. 114). So we have motive, means, and opportunity, but no proof.
Other than Hall, most of the members of the expedition eventually made it home, but the Polaris was lost and the crew suffered extreme privations.
The 1879-1882 expedition of the Jeannette was worse. Paine, in the entry on the Jeanette, tells of how the former H.M.S. Pandora was sold to U. S. Navy Lt. George W. de Long. The ship was renamed for the sister of James Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald, which had earlier sent reporter Henry M. Stanley into Africa to find Dr. Livingstone (Guttridge-Ice, p. 21) and who had also sent a reporter on de Long's one previous arctic expedition, to search for Hall's Polaris (Guttridge-Ice, p. 14). Bennett loved to publish exploration stories, so he decided to fund a new polar venture. At least, he promised to fund it. In practice, he demanded that de Long keep the cost under control, causing a lot of dangerous corner-cutting (Guttridge-Ice, pp. 41-44, etc.; Sides, p. 31, comments that when de Long struck his deal, he "could not [have] know[n] nof Bennett's many obsessions, his peculiar prejudices, his random gusts of spite or whimsy... [Bennett] was also New York's moodiest brat.") The ship's boilers were inefficient, she had divided objectives, she didn't acquire a tender until the last minute, and she really wasn't designed to withstand the ice. Some changes were made before she sailed, including strengthening of the sides -- but certainly not enough (Guttridge-Ice, pp. 55-56; Sides, pp. 105-107, describes what the experts at the Mare Island naval yard recommended, most of which didn't get done -- and much of what did get done was done while de Long was on the East Coast, so he didn't supervise it! The ship came out much stronger but did not handle well).
The ship's voyage began on July 8, 1879 (Guttridge-Ice, p. 2). On August 28, 1879, after numerous delays for this and that, Jeannette set out through the Bering Straight, to try to reach the Pole from western Canada. They were seeking the alleged open Polar Sea (the crazy idea that there was a large body of open water around the North Pole), even though the U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey determined in that year that such a sea almost certainly did not exist (Guttridge-Ice, p. 80).
It was late in the year, and coal was relatively low (de Long was always profligate with fuel; he had gone through too much on the Polaris rescue mission, and on the trip to San Francisco -- Sides, pp. 99, 104 -- and had used it up at a prodigious rate pushing toward the Arctic; Guttridge-Ice, pp. 15, 63), but de Long didn't hesitate; he tried to make it as far north as possible even after the ice started to close in (Guttridge-Ice, pp. 80-81). He made little northward progress, and within days, the ship was trapped in the ice (Guttridge-Ice, p. 83).
It wasn't long before the ship sprung the first of several leaks (Guttridge-Ice, p. 114); it took all the ingenuity of chief engineer George Melville to rig enough pumps to keep the ship afloat (Guttridge-Ice, pp. 115-128, etc.) -- and even with all his exertions, much of the ship was flooded and many supplies destroyed, plus, until Melville managed a wind-powered pump, they were burning irreplaceable coal. And they were trapped in a trap they would never escape. They could perhaps have tried to leave the ship to reach Wrangel Island (which, until then, had been known as "Wrangel Land," because it wasn't until de Long passed north of it that it was demonstrated to be an island). They had sighted it just before they became trapped (Guttridge-Ice, pp. 79-81), and it would still have been within reach. But de Long wasn't ready to abandon ship for an unexplored island; not yet. (And, though he couldn't know it, Wrangel Island would prove very inhospitable for the crew of the Karluk thirty years later; see the notes to "Captain Bob Bartlett." Of course, de Long would have had his expedition in better shape than Bartlett had he abandoned immediately.)
The next summer, when they hoped to get free of the pack, they were able to make some repairs (Guttridge-Ice, p. 133 and following; Sides, p. 197 and following), but the ice had carried them north; it never quite thawed enough to let them loose. By the summer of 1881, they were passing north of the New Siberian Islands, several of which they had discovered and named (Guttridge-Ice, pp. 157-158). Several of them suffered lead poisoning in this period; even though the doctor figured out the source, several men were still debilitated when they had to abandon the ship (Sides, p. 201 and following). In June 1881, the ice finally destroyed the Jeannette (Guttridge-Ice, p. 163). The islands nearby were far too cold and small to support them; the crew sledged painfully over the ice, then upon reaching open water set out for home in three smaller boats they had hauled with them (Guttridge-Ice, pp. 185-190). Fleming-North, pp. 221-229, tells how they were separated in bad weather. One boat. commanded by De Long's executive officer Charles Chipp, simply vanished. Two landed near the outlet of the Lena river in Siberia, but not together. The crew led by engineer Melville managed to survive. De Long and his party starved to death. Before they died, de Long had sent his two strongest men to seek help, and they managed to survive and locate Melville. Melville, with the help of the Russian authorities, sought out de Long's party next spring, but none had survived (Sides, p. 385 and following). Between the loss of Chipp's party and the deaths among de Long's, over half the Jeanette's crew was killed.
Publisher Bennett probably got his money back from all the stories his reporters filed -- one even broke into the graves of the dead from the de Long party to check for whether there had been cannibalism. There hadn't (Sides, p.402).
The story of Adolphus Greely's party, which set out shortly after the Jeanette went missing, was similar, at least in terms of casualty rate (though de Long had been a much better leader). Greely and his party of 25 was sent to explore northern Ellesmere Island, gathering scientific data and perhaps making a run for the Pole. They were supposed to stay several years, with supplies arriving in summer. They were ill-equipped for the task; it was mostly an army signal corps expedition, and few men had arctic experience (Guttridge-Sabine, p. 7).
Even though the expedition had to sail north to their base at Lady Franklin Bay, was little inter-service cooperation (Greely had boats, but no navy men; apart from one former seaman and a sergeant brought up on Cape Breton, no one even knew how to manage a boat! -- Berton, p. 459). Greely had a congressional appropriation to outfit his party, but it was too small and long-delayed; it was nearly impossible for Greely to acquire the supplies he required with the money he had available (Guttridge-Sabine, pp. 39-47). He had a hard time finding the officers and specialists he needed. Finally, on deadline, the party set out despite not really being ready.
It didn't take long for trouble to arise. Greely had a strange notion of discipline (reading Guttridge-Sabine, pp. 117-118, and other passages, he seems to have been the sort who felt that forcing people to obey silly and arbitrary commands promoted military order; Berton, p. 437, calls him a martinet and humorless -- very bad for an expedition in the arctic, where initiative is key). He sacked his second in command (Guttridge-Sabine, pp. 64-66) almost the moment the expedition arrived at its destination, then (p. 118) started taking duties away from the doctor/naturalist. When trouble came, he was in a position where he had no intelligent subordinates whose advice he could trust.
The first supply ship, which was supposed to arrive in 1882, never showed up; the army bureaucracy in effect placed all the arrangements in the hands of a private, who was given conflicting orders and had no useful experience (Guttridge-Sabine, pp. 92-97); the ship he chartered was blocked by ice, and he gave up after caching a bare handful of the supplies he had brought (Guttridge-Sabine, pp. 100-101). Not long after, the private would die of a drug overdose (Guttridge-Sabine, p. 203).
The ship involved, the Neptune (Guttridge-Sabine, p. 92), was a Newfoundland whaler/sealer that is mentioned in several songs; see the notes to "Neptune, Ruler of the Sea."
The next year's supply expedition was bigger -- it included the Proteus, which had brought the expedition north in the first place, and the naval vessel Yantic -- but the Yantic was neither fitted nor supplied for the ice (Guttridge-Sabine, p. 130), and the Proteus ended up "nipped"; she sank with most of her supplies (Guttridge-Sabine, p. 138). Plagued by indiscipline in the transport's crew (her excellent complement of two years earlier having been replaced by a different and more mutinous bunch; see e.g. Guttridge-Sabine p. 139), it took some effort just to get the relief expedition home; they left no supplies (Guttridge-Sabin, pp. 144-146). As with the Neptune, several of the ships involved on this occasion (the Arctic and the Aurora; Guttridge-Sabine, p. 270; Lubbock, p. 415); are mentioned in other songs; for the Aurora, see expecially "First Arrival -- 'Aurora' and 'Walrus' Full" and "The Old Polina"; for the Arctic, see "The Old Polina." But the Arctic and Aurora bear no blame in the failure of the expedition; they merely led the way for the relief ships as they went on their normal whaling trips.
After two years without contact, Greely decided to abandon Fort Conger, the base on northern Ellesmere. This was written into his instructions: if he hadn't been resupplied by September 1, 1883, he would depart. After 721 days at their base, Greely decided to leave just a little early, on August 9 (Guttridge-Sabine, p. 152; Berton, p. 448). Greely can hardly be blamed; while there was still sufficient food for at least another year, the men were unhappy (especially with him, as it would prove), and travel in the arctic winter was never easy.
What followed showed the disastrous effects of inadequate planning; Greely did not really know what course to take, and made assorted errors along the way. He took too many records and equipment (which could always have been recovered from Fort Conger at a later date) and too few rations. Plus, as an example of the nut case he was, he insisted on hauling along his heavy dress uniform (Berton, p. 458). Had everything gone exactly as planned, he had just enough food to get to where he was going (Guttridge-Sabine, p. 157)
But nothing ever goes according to plan in the arctic. The engineer in charge of keeping the motorboat's engine running was an alcoholic, and Greely couldn't keep him sober (Berton, p. 459; Guttridge-Sabine, p. 158, 162, etc.). Greely eventually decided to take passage on an ice floe, leading the rest of the expedition to discuss mutiny (Berton, p.. 460; Guttridge-Sabine, p. 163-164). Greely himself fell in the water, and though he was rescued, many of the party thought he should have been left to drown (Guttridge-Sabine, p. 164). His failed planning caused one of the boats to be destroyed (Guttridge-Sabine, p. 173). Even his most reliable sergeant described this part of the trip as "madness" (Guttridge-Sabine, pp. 198-199). The map in Guttridge-Sabine, p. 213 shows how the ice drove them around the Kane Basin as they tried to get to the island known as Cape Sabine; twice they came within sight of it only to have the ice turn them around).
As all this went on, the Yantic headed south on September 15 (Guttridge-Sabine, p. 171), and the war department decided not to send further help (Guttridge-Sabine, p. 184).
Greely's crew came ashore south of their destination at Cape Sabine, with some of the men starting to become ill from their ordeal (Berton, p. 462). They had perhaps three months' worth of food to last the entire arctic winter (Berton, pp. 463-464). They built a shelter that was more cave than hut (25 feet long, 18 wide, but only 5 feet high; Guttridge-Sabine, p. 222), and basically prepared for rescue or death. (They hoped at first to be able to sledge to the Greenland side, but the ice, for once, never closed over the passage, and they were too debilitated to try the remaining boats; Guttridge-Sabine, p. 239).
By New Year's, the doctor was amputating a soldier's foot and fingers due to frostbite (Guttridge-Sabine, p. 226). They had lived at Fort Conger for two years without scurvy, but now, with little fresh food, the traces began to appear; when the first man died on January 18, 1884, it was of a mix of scurvy and starvation (Guttridge-Sabine, p. 234; Berton, p. 469).
Ironically, Greely, a failure until this point, managed to be a good fairly leader at this time (Berton, p. 472), rationing the food and keeping the the men relatively sane (Berton, pp. 467). But they slowly died off due to malnutrition. There were several instances where men stole food (Berton, pp. 467, 470, 473, etc.); in the end, they had to execute the worst thief, who had enlisted under an assumed name to hide his history (Berton, p. 475; Guttridge-Sabine, p. 272, says that he was not really given a trial, simply shot -- though he admits that, in the circumstances, the formality of a court-martial "was out of the question"). On the last day before rescue, when the tent by the burial plot (to which they had moved their base, Guttridge-Sabine, p. 266) fell in, no one was strong enough to put it up again. And it was later shown that someone had engaged in cannibalism (Berton, pp. 484-485). It was probably the doctor, since it was skillfully done and ceased at about the time he died (none of the men who died after him had any flesh removed), but Guttridge-Sabine, pp. 271, 275, offers a few cryptic hints that others might have been involved.
By early June, the deaths were happening almost daily, and the survivors had no strength left to bury the corpses; the last one was simply pushed out into the snow. When they were finally rescued in the fourth week of the month, only seven men were still alive, and one of them was the man who had had his feet amputated; he would soon after die of his injuries, leaving only six. Out of 25 who had set out. Apparently only two were still relatively mobile when found. Greely was the only officer to live.
A constant theme of Polar expeditions, repeated in exploratory party after exploratory party, is men who went out of control. Some of this, no doubt, is commanders who didn't know how to command (even Peary was a civil engineer, not a line officer). But I wonder a little about seasonal affective disorder. In any case, in 1903, the quest for the pole had a worse record than the quest for the Passage had shown when Franklin set out.
No wonder, then, that the repeated Polar expeditions became the subject of mirth: What sane person would risk what the explorers had been through? Besides, there were all the mad inventor types the quest encouraged: Peary was mailed ideas for building a wooden tunnel to the pole, for building a pipe to transport hot soup, and to fire himself to the pole by cannon (Henderson-True, p. 185; compare Fleming-North, p. 353).
In 1904, about the time this song came out, Peary founded the Peary Arctic Club with the declared mission of "altering... public opinion so that existing prejudice against Arctic work would be lessened" (Henderson-True, p. 159). You almost wonder the song and the club were cause and effect.
Note that the Pole was not reached until 1908 at the earliest (by Cook and/or Peary, for whom see below), five years after this song was performed -- and it was probably much later. The first person we are certain saw the North Pole was Roald Amundsen and the crew of the dirigible Norge, which flew over the pole in 1926.
This was days after Robert Byrd's attempt to fly over the Pole. Although Byrd claimed success, the evidence is against him (for Byrd's failure, see Roberts, pp. 155-168).
Roberts, pp. 159-160, summarizes the case against Byrd: In trials, his plane never exceeded 75 miles per hour, and was slower with landing skis, but his flight time of only fifteen and a half hours meant he had to average 87 miles per hour to reach the pole. He returned with an engine leaking oil, which would have forced him to turn around as soon as it was noticed, whether he had reached the Pole or not. And his only sextant had been broken, so that, even if the readings were accepted, the instrument's error could not be checked.
It was very Peary-like: No one could prove Byrd didn't make it, but there was no good evidence and the claim required travel speeds while unobserved which Byrd had never managed while observed. Byrd's claim isn't as outrageous as Peary's -- he claimed a tailwind helped him out, which at least means he acknowledged the problem -- but the probability is low. And he went to great lengths to hide his records; Roberts, p. 164. Bryce, p. 921, makes the interesting point that the man who "verified" Byrd's record was the same one who "'proved,' and improved, Peary's observations at the 'Pole.'"
The following list shows key dates in the quest for the North Pole (adapted from Berton, p. 637 and following).
1818 - David Buchan's expedition from Spitzbergen (two ships, the other commanded by Lt. John Franklin)
1827 - William Edward Parry's expedition from Spitzbergen passes the latitude of 82 degrees N
1860-1861 - An American expedition under Isaac Hayes seeks (and naturally fails to find) the "Open Polar Sea"; it also produces some hideously inaccurate maps (Berton, pp. 353-364; Fleming-North, pp. 61-78)
1871-1873 - North Pole expedition of the Polaris (Hall's third northward expedition, but the first devoted to the Pole rather than Franklin), which features the death of Hall and the stranding of half his crew; see description above
1875-1876 - British naval expedition under George Nares. This is the last try by the British navy, and it does briefly set a new Farthest North record -- but scurvy, which the Admiralty thought it had solved, forces the expedition home a year early (Berton, pp. 413-429; Fleming-North, pp. 161-186)
1879-1882 - Jeannette expedition, described above. All told, 20 out of 33 involved die.
1881-1884 - Adolphus Greely explores Ellesmere Island and his team sets a new "farthest north" record, but only six of 25 survive (due mostly to American government errors), and at least one man was guilty of cannibalism
1886 - Robert Peary fails to cross Greenland (crossing Greenland may not sound like a big deal, but the island is all glacier; there is no life at all for hunters to harvest, and the Inuit wouldn't go near the interior. Had Peary succeeded, it would have been a testimony to his techniques; also, there was at the time a hope that Greenland might provide a route to the Pole). Peary also claims to chart shoreline later shown not to exist
1888 - Fridtjof Nansen crosses Greenland
1891-1892 - Another Peary expedition to Greenland. He doesn't chart any more territory -- and makes off with sacred and irreplaceable Inuit artifacts which he sells entirely for his own profit. Later he will lure six Inuit back to "civilization" where they will become the victims of "scientific" experimentation; all will die young, and it will be decades before their bones are returned north for burial
1893-1895 - Nansen, using a new type of boat (the Fram) and later sledges, sets a new Farthest North but does not reach the pole
1897 - Salomon Andrée tries and fails to reach the pole by balloon. He and his crew make it back to the uninhabited islands of Franz Joseph Land but die there; their bodies are not discovered for more than thirty years
1898-1902 - Another Peary expedition fails -- this time leaving Peary with damaged feet
1899-1900 - Abruzzi expedition sets another Farthest North record but doesn't approach the Pole
1901-1902 - Ziegler/Baldwin expedition from Norway fails to reach the pole
1903-1905 - Ziegler/Fiala expedition, again from Norway, fails with the loss of the ship America
1905-1906 - Peary fails again. He claimed to reach a new "Farthest North," but at least some observers doubt his data (Larson, p. 110) -- and we have very good reason to think he futzed his data in his next expedition. In both expeditions, he claimed his fastest sledge runs at times when there was no one who could verify his numbers (Rawlins, p. 68).
1908-1909 - Peary claims to reach the Pole (April 6, 1909). So does Dr. Frederick Albert Cook (April 21, 1908).
Examination of the incomplete records of Cook and Peary makes it unlikely that either ever made the Pole -- but Peary saw to it that Cook's instruments and many of his records were lost, making it impossible for Cook to offer proper evidence for his claims. (In fact, Bryce, p. 848, notes that Peary began a six-part plan to discredit Cook the moment he learned the doctor had set out for the pole. To make things even harder for Cook, an accident also destroyed many of his photos -- Bryce, pp. 335 -- but these probably would not have affected the case, since they were taken before his run for the pole.)
In addition, Edward Barrill, who had accompanied Cook on an expedition to Mt. McKinley (Bryce, p. 280, etc.), released a report claiming Cook never made the summit (Henderson-True, pp. 267-269, offers evidence that Barrill's account was made up after the fact and that he was paid by Peary supporters to concoct it, and Bryce, p. 797, says that Barrill definitely *was* paid a great deal for producing it, but Fleming-North, p. 386, offers evidence that Cook's description doesn't match reality, and Roberts, pp. 120-124, covers attempts to retrace Cook's actual footsteps, which allowed them to take photos which matches Cook's but from points other than where he said he took them). With Cook's claim definitely unprovable, and with his reputation damaged, Peary's equally unprovable claim was accepted almost by default (for details on this, see the notes to "Captain Bob Bartlett").
So did Cook or Peary reach the pole? The controversy continued for years, with Cook's supporters and his descendants fighting to clear his name until the last of them died out. Cook's case is much weakened by his lack of observations; indeed, there are charges that he could not so much as use a sextant to find his latitude (Bryce, p. 860fff.). Peary's partisans also stuck to their guns, and the National Geographic Society apparently still refuses to re-examine the matter; they initially accepted Peary's claim -- after all, they had supported his expedition; in fact they never really tested his data. Forty years later, just discussing the matter was enough to get Walt Gonnason thrown out of their offices (Bryce, p. 747). They still maintain that attitude; the eighth edition of their World Atlas (no copyright date but released after 2000) still lists him as the first to reach the pole (Roberts, pp. 153-154, considers this to be the result of loyalty to its own reputation).
Of other authorities I checked, Henderson-True thinks Cook made it and Peary may have. Asimov does not state an explicit opinion but strongly implies that Peary made it and Cook didn't. Berton thinks neither did (though Berton, whose general policy is to consider everyone a disreputable idiot, does make the observation that, though Peary didn't reach the Pole, he came closer than anyone else to go there solely by muscle power, without support from aircraft, and returning under his own power; see p. 624). Roberts of course is sure that neither Cook nor Peary made it. Fleming thinks Peary didn't but doesn't see why it matters (a view more meaningful in hindsight: We now know there is no land under the pole, so there is no real distinction between 88 or 89 or 90 degrees north. But Peary *didn't* know that -- in fact, he reported seeing land that wasn't there -- and he wasn't doing science anyway). The 1972 edition ofWebster's Geographical Dictionary did not mention Peary and says the Pole was first crossed by foot and dogsled 1968-1969, though the 1998 edition credits Peary with reaching the Pole while admitting the claim is disputed.
Bryce, p. 876, makes an interesting observation. On p. 864, he hypothesizes that the navigationally-challenged Cook might have tried to reach the Pole by "following the magnetic meridian." This in fact would not work, but Cook might have thought it would. This allows two possibilities: That he was trying to cheat all along -- or that he tried his meridian trick, came back thinking he had made it, learned when he returned that his method was not adequate -- but tried to revive his claim once he realized that Peary's 1909 effort had not reached the Pole. But, as Bryce points out, Cook's behavior would have been much the same either way, so we can't tell which is true. I will admit that I find much of Cook's behavior incomprehensible, making me wonder if he was entirely sane; it's interesting that several other witnesses cited by Bryce (pp. 844, 901), including Roald Amundsen, thought the same thing -- and, indeed, the Arctic was good at driving people mad; see again "Lady Franklin's Lament (The Sailor's Dream)" [Laws K9]. Bryce, however, does not accept this explanation.
Bryce's first conclusion on Peary (p. 880) is that "All of Peary's actions after April 6, 1909... give every indication of a guilty man trying to shield his greatest deceit from the spotlight of any impartial investigation. Moreover, evidence preserved by Peary himself shows that all his expeditions before 1909 had produced exaggerated or false claims." Interestingly, though Bryce absolutely rejects Cook's claim to have reached the Pole, he considers his story of attaining it far more plausible than Peary's (p. 916).
At this time, the matter probably cannot be settled by direct evidence; we must rely on the (very strong) indirect evidence. Hence my firm belief that neither Cook or Peary made it to the pole.
Even if you disagree, I would make a secondary observation: We don't let athletes who use steroids earn credit for winning races. Nor are candidates who commit vote fraud generally allowed to win elections. Why shouldn't Peary be held to the same standard? Did he reach the Pole? Maybe. Did he lie (to the Inuit), cheat (Bartlett, whom he had promised to take to the Pole), and steal (from Cook and from the Inuit -- taking at various times their meteorites, their people to be museum exhibits, and, for his last expedition, their much-needed dogs; Bryce, p. 332)? Yes. Indeed, at one point, his behavior could be called murder, since he refused to allow a doctor to treat Inuit who needed help (Bryce, pp. 319-320). By today's definitions, he was guilty of abduction and perhaps even rape of underage girls (Bryce, p. 341) and child pornography (Roberts, between pages 100 and 101, reprints one of his nude photos of a 14-year-old Inuit girl). Bryce, p. 854, reports that some Inuit labelled him "the great tormentor" for decades. His behavior should disallow his claim.
Incidentally, the first people to stand at the Pole may not have arrived (by plane) until 1953 (Roberts, p. 166). And, although trips to the North Pole are now almost routine (since a traveler in trouble can always radio for help and be rescued by air), the arctic has not entirely relented since Peary's time. Alfred Wegener, who did noteworthy work on meteorology and lunar craters and who invented the modern theory of Continental Drift in the period before the first world war (though it did not come to be accepted until decades after his death) sought evidence for his theories in Greenland, and died there in 1930 when the expedition ran into trouble (Asimov, p. 595; Gribbin, p. 448). And, of course, no less a man than Roald Amundsen died on the polar cap while searching for the survivors of another wreck (Asimov, p. 561; Mirsky, pp. 314, 317). - RBW
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