30.
“Give Me My Father’s Body”
Today, from a ridge at Cape York on the west coast of Greenland, visitors can gaze out over crescent-shaped Melville Bay, which sweeps southward for 240 kilometres. Directly west of this massive bay, all through the nineteenth century, whalers and explorers dreaded to challenge the Middle Ice. Today, that Middle Ice is just an historical memory: for months every summer, the waters of Baffin Bay lie open. From Cape York, turning and facing inland, visitors can see a twenty-eight-metre-high monument dedicated to American explorer Robert E. Peary, essentially a grotesque obelisk jutting skyward, and topped by a giant “P.”
In August 1897, Peary had arrived at this cape on a mission. During a previous expedition, three years before, he had learned the location of three ten-thousand-year-old meteorites from which the polar Inuit had been extracting metal since before 1818, when John Ross found them using metal implements. In 1895, Peary had taken the two smaller chunks, called “the woman” and “the dog,” to New York. Now, he hired all the able-bodied Inuit in the area and steamed six hours south to Bushnan Island. There, the people helped him load the largest piece onto his ship—the so-called “Ahnighito fragment,” also called “the tent,” which weighed almost thirty-five tons. Peary then returned to Cape York. “I sent my faithful Eskimos ashore,” he wrote later, “accompanied by several barrels of biscuit, and loaded with guns, knives, ammunition, and numerous other articles which I had brought to reward them for their faithful service.”
But as Kenn Harper writes in Give Me My Father’s Body, six Inuit remained on board his ship the Hope, among them a hunter-guide named Qisuk and his young son, Minik or Mene (born at Etah around 1890). On October 2, 1897, when the ship reached the Brooklyn Naval Yard in New York City, twenty thousand people paid twenty-five cents each to visit the ship and see what the Boston Post had described as “the strange cargo.”
The Inuit were brought to the Museum of Natural History, where according to Minik, “we were quartered in a damp cellar most unfavorable to people from the dry air of the north.” Two anthropologists studied the new arrivals, but then came a New York heat wave. Soon all six of the Inuit, lacking immunity to local diseases, were suffering from tuberculosis.
The first to die was Minik’s father. “He was dearer to me than anything else in the world—especially when we were brought to New York, strangers in a strange land. You can imagine how closely that brought us together; how our disease and suffering and lack of understanding of all the strange things around us . . . made us sit tremblingly waiting our turn to go . . . we grew to depend on one another, and to love each other as no father and son under ordinary conditions could possibly love.”
Robert Peary washed his hands of the Inuit he had brought south. Within eight months three more were dead. A young adult, Uisaakassak, was then sent back to Greenland, leaving Minik alone among strangers. The boy had pleaded to see his father buried with proper Inuit ceremony. Museum staff were bent on studying the dead bodies, so they mounted a make-believe funeral. As Harper writes, “They got an old log about the length of a human corpse. This was wrapped in a cloth, a mask attached to one end.” With Minik present to say his ritual goodbye, they buried the lot by lantern light.
William Wallace, the museum’s chief custodian, brought Minik to live with his family in New York City and, in summer, upstate New York. The boy attended school, learned to read and write, and became “Minik Wallace.” Meanwhile, his father’s body was defleshed. Mounted on an armature, the skeleton was put on display at the museum. As William Wallace wrote later, Minik found out the hard way. The New York newspapers had got wind of the display. At school, from other children, he learned of the reports.
The family noticed a change in the boy, Wallace wrote later: “He was coming home from school with my son Willie one snowy afternoon when he suddenly began to cry. ‘My father is not in his grave,’ he said. ‘His bones are in the museum.’” Minik had realized the truth. “But after that,” Wallace wrote, “He was never the same boy. . . . Often we would see him crying, and sometimes he would not speak for days. We did our best to cheer him up, but it was no use. His heart was broken. He had lost faith in the new people he had come among.”
William Wallace deeply regretted what had transpired. He supported Minik in a push to get the American Museum of Natural History to release the bones so they could be given a proper burial. On January 6, 1907, in a magazine supplement, the New York World published the first article to make his case. The headline gave Kenn Harper his book title: “Give Me My Father’s Body.”
When that campaign faltered, young Minik turned his energies to getting Robert Peary to send him home. On May 9, 1909, the San Francisco Examiner offered a sensational treatment under the headline, “Why Arctic Explorer Peary’s Neglected Eskimo Boy Wants to Shoot Him.” The story described how, set adrift after the death of his relatives, “Little Mene Wallace . . . had seen his father’s skeleton grin at him from a glass case in the New York Museum of Natural History.”
When he learned that his father’s bones were on display in the American Museum of Natural History, Minik Wallace lost faith in the people he had come among.
Eventually, Peary’s people decided to cut their losses. Later, they claimed that they sent Minik north with many gifts, but Harper determined that the young man arrived in northern Greenland with only the clothes on his back. In August 1909, he came ashore at Uummannaq, an Inuit camp in North Star Bay at the site of present-day Thule. He wore a light sweater, a thin overcoat, a pair of short socks, and shoes fit for New York City. He had his medical and dental kits and nothing else.
Minik had forgotten much of his first language, but picked it up quickly. He also became a notable hunter. He worked as a handyman for Knud Rasmussen and Peter Freuchen, who set up a trading post nearby, Thule Station. For a time, he was married. Even so, he remained an outsider, and a teller of tall tales, and he felt happiest when Qallunaat visited from the south, white men for whom he could work as a guide and translator. In 1913, at age twenty-three, he joined the American Crocker Land Expedition, which set out to confirm the existence of a huge island north of Ellesmere Island—one that Robert Peary claimed he had seen from the far north in 1906.
Peary had invented this island in hopes of securing the financial support of a wealthy banker named George Crocker. Doubts about its existence became significant after 1909, because Peary’s rival, Dr. Frederick Cook, claimed to have traversed that territory en route to the North Pole. Peary’s backers undertook the expedition to prove Cook a fraud, but they ended up demonstrating that their own man was the scam artist.
In April 1909, and after supposedly completing a twenty-three-year quest to reach that same Pole, Robert E. Peary had refused a congratulatory handshake from his right-hand man, Matthew Henson. On April 6, after taking an astronomical reading in foggy conditions, Peary planted an American flag and ordered Henson to lead their four Inuit companions in three cheers. He then snapped a few photos.
Yet when Henson removed his glove and offered his hand, Peary turned and walked away—perhaps, the all-too-generous Henson wrote later, because “a gust of wind blew something into his eye.” A few days previously, on March 31, Peary had sent the expert navigator Bob Bartlett, a Newfoundlander, back to base camp on the north coast of Ellesmere Island—despite his protests. Before leaving, Bartlett—the last of the party who, besides Peary, could take astronomical readings—situated the expedition at latitude 87°46´ north or 134 miles (215 kilometres) from the Pole.
During the next five days, Henson had led the two-dog-team charge. And Peary, disabled by the years-ago loss of eight toes, rode on the second sledge. On April 5, Peary took a reading and declared the party to be within thirty-five miles (fifty-six kilometres) of the Pole. Next morning, Henson “dashed out early,” drove hard and eventually stopped and built two igloos.
When Peary arrived, Henson said, “We are now at the Pole, are we not?” And Peary said, “I do not suppose we can swear that we are exactly at the Pole.” Yet the next day, as Henson innocently reported, “when the flag was hoisted over the geographical centre of the earth, it was located just behind our igloos.”
During the return journey, Henson wrote, the dazed Peary proved “practically a dead weight.” On April 27, when the men reached the Roosevelt, Bartlett rushed out to greet him: “I congratulate you, sir, on the discovery of the Pole.” Peary responded without enthusiasm: “How did you guess it?’
He then withdrew to his cabin and stayed there. No cheering. No celebrating. “From the time we were at the Pole,” Henson wrote later, “Commander Peary barely spoke to me. Probably he did not speak to me four times on the whole return journey to the ship . . . On board the ship he addressed me a very few times . . . [And he said] not a word about the North Pole or anything connected with it.” Peary would appear to have been in a terrible funk—hardly the mood of a man who had achieved success in a life-long quest.
Four years later, in 1913, Minik Wallace signed on with the American Crocker Land Expedition, which set out to confirm the existence of a huge island Robert Peary claimed he had seen from the northern reaches of Ellesmere Island. On March 11, 1914, Wallace, three Americans and six other Inuit eventually set off from Etah on the 1,900 kilometres journey to “Crocker Land.” In freezing-cold conditions, they reached and climbed the 4,700-foot Beitstadt Glacier. One of the Americans suffered frostbite and had to be evacuated. By April 11, only two Americans and two Inuit continued to advance.
Now came another instance of Fata Morgana—the kind of elaborate mirage that, almost one century earlier, had ruined Captain John Ross. Organizer Donald Baxter MacMillan saw, as he said later, “hills, valleys, snow-capped peaks extending through at least one hundred and twenty degrees of the horizon.” Piugaattoq, an Inuit hunter with twenty years of experience of the area, told him this was an illusion. MacMillan insisted on chasing the mirage for five days, trekking across two hundred kilometres of threatening sea ice before he admitted that the Inuk was right and turned back. Robert Peary had invented “Crocker Land.” His contemptible ruse had failed because in response to the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, George Crocker turned to rebuilding his devastated hometown.
In 1916, having sought to return south several times, Minik Wallace took passage in the George B. Cluett, bound for New York. For a while, he was a curiosity quoted in newspapers. Minik described his seven years in Greenland with good humour, while admitting that he felt like a man without a home: “I still have the impression that it would have been better for me had I never been brought to civilization and educated. It leaves me between two extremes, where it would seem that I can get nowhere. It would have been better if I had never been educated . . . It’s like rotting in a cellar to go back there after living in a civilized country.”
Minik took a job working in a lumber camp in New Hampshire, and became friends with a fellow worker, a local man named Afton Hall. When winter shut the camp down, Minik accepted Hall’s invitation to live with his family on a nearby farm, where he could help out. But then, in autumn 1918, an influenza pandemic swept the area. It killed members of Hall’s family and also many itinerant workers who worked seasonally in the lumber camps—among them Minik Wallace, who at twenty-eight died of bronchial pneumonia. He was buried in the Indian Stream Cemetery in Pittsburg, New Hampshire.
Decades later, author Kenn Harper took up the campaign to retrieve the remains of Minik’s father, Qisuk, and the other three Inuit who had died in New York, and to accord them a proper burial. In 1993, thanks to his advocacy, and also the backing of the Cape York Inuit and William Wallace’s great-granddaughter, the American Museum of Natural History sent the remains to Qaanaaq, formerly Thule, where they were buried with due ceremony. The Cape York meteorites, brought south by Robert Peary, are still on display at the New York City museum.
As for Frederick Cook, he and Peary embodied different attitudes towards the Inuit. Cook was compassionate and gentlemanly; Peary, who was harsh and abrasive, fathered two Inuit sons and abandoned them both. By 1911, Peary had discredited Cook as a fraud, and had convinced Congress to honour him, Peary, as the first man to have attained the Pole.
During the second half of the twentieth century, most Arctic historians concluded that neither Peary nor Cook reached the North Pole. And yet, as we entered the twenty-first century, some people began to wonder: What if Frederick Cook really did reach the Pole? What if, as he claimed, he had pointed at low-lying clouds to reassure his frightened travelling companions that they remained always within reach of land? Later, the two young hunters would recall how Cook had “jumped and danced like an angacock (witch doctor)” when he looked at his “sun glass” and realized that they were only a day’s march from the Big Nail. In True North, published in 2005, author Bruce Henderson argues that Cook’s story rings true. Cook, a master of Inuit travel methods, completed several remarkable sledge journeys. And his unprecedented reports, including one of a westward ice-drift, have since been vindicated.
Henderson also rebuts fraud charges levelled against the doctor-explorer by his enemies, and repudiates allegations—this will surprise some—that Cook made false claims about climbing Mount McKinley in Alaska. He offers telling evidence that a fellow climber was bribed to offer false testimony. He reveals that the first verified summiteer supported Cook’s description of the climb. And he shows that Cook never claimed that a photo taken on Mount McKinley had been taken at the summit. If Henderson is correct, then Peary not only abused the Greenlandic Inuit and betrayed Minik Wallace but, having failed to reach the North Pole, destroyed the man who first succeeded.