Heart of the Hero : The Remarkable Women Who Inspired the Great Polar Explorers

The Remarkable Women Who Inspired the Great Polar Explorers

Kari Herbert

• Publisher: Saraband
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781908643216
• eBook ISBN: 9781908643223
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Heart of the Hero' gives a compelling insight into the lives of some of the world's most famous explorers, through the eyes of the women who inspired them to achieve great things. Author Kari Herbert explores the unpredictable, often heartbreaking stories of seven remarkable women who were indispensable companions, intrepid travellers and sometimes even the driving force behind our best-loved polar heroes, such as Scott and Shackleton. Drawing on her own unique experience as the daughter of a pioneering polar explorer, and using extracts from previously unpublished historic journals and letters, Herbert blends deeply personal accounts of longing, betrayal and hope with tales of peril and adventure.

PART ONE

A Restless Companion

CHAPTER ONE

Call of the Lodestar

Of course, if I feel so inclined, I can go out and sit on an iceberg until I freeze to it, and let the wind and snow beat upon me, even starve myself; but my tastes do not run in that direction.

JO PEARY

On the afternoon of June 6, 1891, an attractive brunette clasped the hand of her husband and turned to smile at the press gathered on board the greasy little whaling steamer Kite, moored at her dock in Brooklyn. On the quayside, crowds strained to catch a glimpse of the elegant young woman who was to be the first female member of an expedition to the Far North. Shouts of encouragement peaked over murmurs of concern as the press and family members were ushered off the ship, leaving the unworldly Mrs. Peary on board among a wild-looking band of men. Elegantly dressed and with a gentle, youthful demeanour, Josephine Peary looked starkly out of place. According to the New York Times, the decks of the Kite were stained with the “oil and fat of a hundred whales and ten times that many seals”. Precariously perched above was a crow’s nest lined with furs, ready to keep any observer warm against the bitter polar storms. In the hold were four big Newfoundland dogs, which Robert Peary hoped to use as supplementary pulling power, along with teams of huskies. The cook, a British whaler, confided to the Times reporter that he saw the addition of these dogs in purely culinary terms:

They’re the best h’eatin’ in the world… Many’s the time I’ve h’eat Esquimau dogs, but they has the taste of wolf in ’em, and you can’t get it out. American dogs, on the contrary, is good h’eatin’ seven days in the week, an’ you can take your last look at them there in the hold, for you’ll never see ’em again or my name h’aint Tom Andy.

It was with such rough companions that Jo would be confined for the next twenty-three days in narrow, cramped quarters during their passage to Whale Sound, preceding a further fourteen months of isolation upon the shores of North Greenland. The “party will abandon all the airs of its former self the moment it makes its home on the Kite”, the newspaper sagely noted.

Jo, however, was radiant. Whereas many women of her time were still living through their men by proxy, she would fully embrace the adventure and make it as much her own as it was her husband’s. Yet her motivation for joining his expedition was love rather than heroism. “I felt that my place was at his side,” she told her daughter years later. “As long as he was willing to have me along, and I was not a hindrance to his plans, I wanted to be with him.” In turn, Robert Peary did not question her courage and resilience – they both knew that there was no room on a polar expedition for any persons, male or female, who could not look after themselves.

For Peary, the clamour of the press, the cannon shot and whistles and the scores of steamers, yachts and pleasure boats spilling over with handkerchief-waving passengers were a positive omen not only for the expedition but for his place in the world, and with Jo at his side he felt invincible. To his mother he wrote, “Now I feel that all is written in the irrevocable book that I have been selected for this work, and shall be upheld or carried safely and successfully through.” This vehement belief in the importance of his life mission was something that Jo would have to support and ultimately defend.

Josephine Cecilia Diebitsch was born in Washington, D.C., on May 22, 1863, to Prussian immigrants, Herman von Diebitsch and Magdelena Schmid; Magdalena was a descendant of the family that owned the well-known German publishing firm Tauchnitz. Herman and Magdelena had independently fled the carnage of the Revolution of 1848, hoping to make a new life in the United States, where they had met and fallen in love. Herman Diebitsch dropped the “von” – the sign of nobility – from his name and searched for a suitable job. To his disappointment, although he was fluent in French, German, Russian and English and had a sound knowledge of Latin and Greek, he found it impossible to secure a position of any merit. Manual labour was the only option available to him in a land suspicious of foreigners. For several years Herman and his gentle wife, who had once enjoyed a life of rare privilege, struggled to provide for their family. In quick succession, child after child was born and then buried. Out of twelve children, Josephine – known as Josie or Jo – was the eldest of just four who lived into adulthood. Sun-drenched childhood days on a farm in Maryland were overshadowed by poverty, grief and a father who, embittered by the crash of his fortunes, had become withdrawn and deeply unhappy.

By the time she met her future husband, however, the prospects for Jo’s family had improved. Significantly, Jo’s father had been awarded the position of head clerk of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Jo was determined to avoid the hardships her parents had endured. Headstrong, clever and hard-working, she sailed through her exams before persuading her father to allow her to attend a business school, where she became valedictorian of her class. By the time she was nineteen, she had worked for two years at the census bureau and then taken over the duties of her increasingly frail father at the Smithsonian, which, particularly given that she was working at the same salary, was a rare accomplishment for her time. It was this confident young woman to whom, in 1882, Lieutenant Robert E. Peary of the Civil Engineer Corps of the U.S. Navy was irresistibly drawn.

Jo had had no shortage of suitors, a situation that she found amusing but rather tiresome. Her first impression of Peary at the popular dance hall Marini’s in Washington was that he was an “old man”. Tall and rake-thin with piercing blue eyes, this intense-looking gentleman nine years her senior was a world away from the carefree young men who had pursued her. When Peary first called upon her, Jo left the entertaining to her widowed mother, believing that they would have much more in common. Her apparent lack of interest exasperated and intrigued Peary. She would soon discover that little would deter her new suitor once he had set his sights.

An only child, Robert Edwin Peary was born in Cresson, Pennsylvania, on May 6, 1856, to Charles Nutter Peary and his wife, Mary Webster Wiley. The newlyweds had left their home state of Maine to seek a new life in the sweeping, forested landscape of the Alleghenies, where Charles quickly secured work in the shook trade – the manufacture of staves for barrels which would be sent to the West Indies and returned to the United States filled with rum or molasses. When Mary discovered she was pregnant, they were overjoyed. But before long their future together was shattered: aged just thirty, Charles was struck down with pneumonia and died shortly after. Inconsolable, the gentle, pious Mary Peary immediately packed up their modest possessions and with Bertie moved back to Maine. From that moment on she devoted her life to her only child.

Overprotective and fearful that her son’s natural high spirits were an early sign of “deep-rooted depravity”, Mary brought her son up as she would a daughter, teaching him needlepoint and insisting that he wear a sunbonnet when he went outside, to protect his fair skin. Ironically, her efforts to protect him from the more boisterous side of life only made him want to experience it more fully. Mercilessly teased for both his bonnet and his lisp, which would plague him even as an adult in moments of anger or excitement, he became increasingly mischievous. He would throw stones at windows just to hear the tinkling sound of the glass shattering, took great delight in frightening girls with a variety of tricks and – unspeakably shocking his God-fearing mother – learned a wide vocabulary of oaths and expletives, which he used to great effect when the minister came to visit.

By his early twenties Peary was steadily gaining confidence in both his work and his social life and was beginning to extricate himself from his mother’s well-meaning but cloying protection. Obsessed with the desire to improve himself, he swam every day for at least a mile – one hundred feet of it underwater – frequented the theatre and took dance classes.

“I feel myself overmastered by a resistless desire to do something,” he wrote to his mother at the time. “I do not wish to live and die without accomplishing anything or without being known beyond a narrow circle of friends. I wish to acquire a name which shall be an ‘open sesame’ to circles of culture and refinement anywhere. A name which shall make my mother proud & which shall make me feel that I am peer to anyone I may meet.” He also needed someone other than his mother by his side – someone who could match his spirit and be comfortable in the company of the great and the good. It was clear from their first meeting that Jo Diebitsch was of a very different calibre than any girl he had so far encountered.

Courting Jo was one of the most significant decisions that Peary would ever make. She would become his fiercest advocate and guiding light. Yet, although the attraction between them was intense, their courtship became an excruciatingly long affair. Peary’s hankering for fame, which in time would become an obsession, coloured their relationship from the start. He believed that if he could only discover a route for a trans-isthmus canal – a cut through unexplored jungles and swamps that would provide a navigable waterway between the Atlantic and the Pacific – then he would be guaranteed not only wealth but also a place in history. Marriage would have to wait.

Peary’s time in Nicaragua was harrowing. He and his men hacked through impenetrable undergrowth and spent hours wading through murky water that reached to their necks. It was here that he learned some of his most valuable lessons in leadership by “singing with them, yelling at them, and at the last moment, giving them a drink of Gin all around, which brought them yelling into camp at 6:05 PM”.

Peary was a complicated suitor, and his early relationship with Jo was punctuated by misunderstanding and confusion. One moment he could be attentive and adoring, the next cold and unreachable. Her innocent inquiries about his work only amplified his frustration at his lack of progress. His work in the jungle was gruelling, and the men under his command were slow and thick-headed. Peary fumed that they couldn’t cut a trail in the woods if their lives depended on it. Emaciated and irritable, he longed to return to Jo. “My Smiling Eyes,” he wrote as his leave neared:

Sweetheart I am coming home, can you realize what it means. Coming home. The very sunlight glistens “sweetheart”, the breezes whisper “sweetheart” the perfume of the flowers throbs “sweetheart”. I already feel & yet cannot realize that I shall feel your warm, throbbing embrace, shall look into your clear starry eyes, shall feel your eager lips pressed to mine… I must come to your arms at once. Do you understand?

Peary returned to Washington intermittently, and on one occasion, in a favourite bookshop, he found a slim booklet entitled Conjectures on the Inland Ice of Greenland. Struck with a powerful sense of destiny, Peary went on to read all he could find on the subject of the mysterious island. Perhaps the Arctic, not Nicaragua, was the place where he could make his name. The following year, on a self-financed expedition, he attempted a crossing of Greenland’s unexplored ice cap. After penetrating the inland ice for just a hundred miles, he was forced to turn back. Nevertheless, Peary believed that he had found his calling. On February 27, 1887, he wrote to his mother:

The trip means to me, my mother, first an enduring name and honor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• PART ONE: A Restless Companion
• PART TWO: Love and Labour
• PART THREE: Darkest Days
• PART FOUR: A Hero, My Husband
• Afterword
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology
• Select Bibliography
• About the Author
• Copyright