No Job Name


B O O K R E V I E W por_140 470..472

Review of How Peary reached the pole: the personal
story of his assistant, by Donald B. MacMillan, with an
introduction by Genevieve M. LeMoine, Susan A. Kaplan &
Anne Witty (2008). Montreal & Kingston: McGill Queen’s
University Press. 305 pp. ISBN 978-0-7735-3450-6.

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 atten-
tion 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 friend-
ships 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 public-
relations 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

Polar Research 28 2009 470–472 © 2009 the author, journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd470

mailto:pjc@psu.edu


authors of the introduction correctly point out, when
Peary went to the Arctic, with all the force of American
corporate and government power behind him, and then
returned claiming that the “ ‘Stars and Stripes [had been]
nailed to the Pole’ ” (p. 264), “he became an emblem of
what the country aspired to be” (p. xxiii). Or, as National
Geographic’s Gilbert Grosvenor more nakedly put it in
1920, Peary possessed a “rugged integrity, and [a] love for
everything American” (Grosvenor 1920: 322).

The details of Peary’s final assault on the North Pole as
witnessed by MacMillan are of primary interest to those
seeking answers to that great mystery, to be sure, but
more interesting are the contexts within which Mac-
Millan places Peary’s polar exploration: his experience
and the techniques gained from those hard-won trials.
The arc of that experience, from the early days in north-
ern Greenland learning to ski from Eivind Astrup to the
growing expertise of Matthew Henson in dog-driving and
in the cultural anthropology of the north-west Greenland
Inughuit, MacMillan persuasively precludes any serious
consideration of Cook reaching the pole or anywhere
near it. MacMillan and Robert Bartlett had both left Peary
well before he made his final dash for the pole, with
Bartlett turning back two degrees from the grail. But,
having confirmedly reached that high latitude, Mac-
Millan finds it inconceivable that Peary did not go the
distance, for by that point his refined techniques and
remaining personnel had left him “stripped for action”
(p. 208).

The introduction authors write that MacMillan began
this account during an Arctic cruise in 1928, but had laid
out much of the theme in his valedictory on Peary’s life in
the National Geographic after Peary’s death in 1920. “Do
not forget the great word experience”, he had written then
(MacMillan 1920: 308), and it is this theme that he
returns to again and again in his 1928 manuscript, some
of which is taken word-for-word from the 1920 article.
There are some strange alterations, however, in the eight
years separating the two accounts. In 1920, MacMillan
writes that Peary left for the final dash at “nearly the 88th

parallel”, with “only 120 miles [193 km] to go” (p. 314).
In this account, he writes that Peary was “within one
hundred and thirty-three miles [214 km] of the pole” (p.
208), which MacMillan describes as “comparatively few
miles to go”. In 1920, MacMillan writes that for the final
dash Peary took with him “48 of the best dogs of [the
remaining] 250” (p. 314). In this account, these become
“forty of his best dogs of the one hundred and thirty-three
remaining”. For those keeping score, that’s an 11%
greater distance with 17% fewer dogs. It seems that not
only did MacMillan’s worship of Peary grow with the
years, his impressions of the distances that he believed
Peary’s methods allowed him to cover also changed.

Moreover, MacMillan’s direct criticism of Cook centres
on the difference between straight-line distances in the
Arctic and the distances that a human being actually
covers when forced to overcome pressure ridges, recalci-
trant dogs, equipment breakdowns and so forth. He puts
this extra distance at about 25% of the straight-line dis-
tance. If one applies MacMillan’s own standard to Peary’s
final dash from 88°N and back, as laid out in this book
(133 nautical miles ¥ 2 + 25%), one arrives at 332.50
nautical miles just for Peary to get from the point where
he leaves Bartlett on 31 March or 1 April, depending on
which source you believe, to the pole, and back to the
point where he left Bartlett. The five or six days to travel
to the pole, by MacMillan’s reckoning, would be 150
nautical miles or more depending on the condition of the
ice and the endurance of the men. Either way you slice it,
that’s 25–30 nautical miles a day over multi-year ice, and
then even more on the return, because MacMillan claims
they did that on the double and even quadruple march.

Maybe Peary, at the age of 53, did it. More likely, as
Wally Herbert reasoned, Peary got to perhaps within 80
miles (128 km) of his goal, close enough to ensure
through his spyglass that there was no towering new
continent in the distance, and then turned around.
What MacMillan convincingly demonstrates—within the
context of Peary’s experience—is that he most certainly
could have done it. A very different thing, of course, but it
could go far in explaining Peary’s walrus smile at Battle
Harbour. If he secretly knew that, he, Robert Peary, with
all his vast experience on the ice, could not do it, then he
knew absolutely that it simply could not be done—and
certainly not by the likes of Frederick Cook. Recent
experiments “proving” that Peary made it miss the point
on numerous counts, not least the age of the experiment-
ers: the leader was only 30, and could barely duplicate
half of Peary’s claimed distances over the last five-days’
march. Find 10 rugged, dog-driving men, like Peary, aged
53, drop them at 88°N, and see how many get to the pole
and back in 10 days.

Beyond the Peary–Cook debate, MacMillan’s book
covers much other interesting ground. He gave Richard
Byrd his first taste of polar flying in 1925, but the notion
here that this expedition “demonstrated the possibility of
such a flight [to the North Pole]” (p. xxxvii) is a bit too
generous. A particularly fascinating chapter for polar
archaeologists, anthropologists and historians of science
and exploration occurs when MacMillan and two com-
panions re-occupy Adolphus Greely’s base at Fort Conger
in the summer of 1909 to follow up Greely’s tidal obser-
vations from 1881–83. The base, in “an excellent state of
preservation”, held everything that that the starving
International Polar Year group had left behind, from
“boxes of stuffed birds, boxes of geological specimens,

Book review

Polar Research 28 2009 470–472 © 2009 the author, journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 471



sections of petrified trees, fossils, Eskimo skulls, and pho-
tographic plates [along with] epaulettes, long swallow
tails, and a visored cap of the vintage of 1861” (pp. 229–
230).

A final nod goes to the 11 colour plates reproduced
here. These were hand-tinted to MacMillan’s specifica-
tions and used in his public lectures. They are a tribute
to the researchers who oversaw their restoration and to
the university press that allowed them to appear in the

work in an age when such publishers more typically
find ways to cheapen the publication process while
raising prices.

References

Grosvenor G. 1920. Peary’s explorations in the Far North.
National Geographic 37(4), 318–322.

MacMillan D.B. 1920. Peary as a leader. National Geographic
37(4), 293–317.

Book review

Polar Research 28 2009 470–472 © 2009 the author, journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd472