EP 02 - MURDER. MYSTERY AT THE NORTH POLE

Murder. Mystery at the North Pole

- Episode 02-

‘so coarse, so manly’

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'so coarse, so manly'

22 May 2024

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NEW SERIES Murder. Mystery at the North Pole

[photo] Ross Marvin, expert navigator. Taken by George Borup also on the expedition

Ross Marvin was never meant to be there

Ross Marvin was an instructor in astronomy and mathematics at Cornell University. If there was any man on Robert Peary's 1909 expedition to the North Pole who could do the calculations and try to correct for the many enormous errors caused by the low sun and the freezing temperatures, it was Marvin. He was also the only one of the expedition assistants who had been out onto the arctic ice before.

But Marvin was not supposed to be there. He had been on Peary’s 1906 expedition and had even then acted as Peary’s secretary. But Marvin had not been invited in 1908. One of the members who had, Donald MacMillan, later recalled that, on 5 July 1908, the day before they were due to set sail from New York, Marvin had come aboard to wish them bon voyage. MacMillan tells the story. ‘A casual remark revealed that he would like to accompany us. Satisfactory arrangements were soon made. Marvin was to hurry home, pack his things, say good-bye and catch the ﬁrst train for Sydney.’ [Sydney is a harbour at the north end of Nova Scotia].

It was a most un-Peary like situation. This expedition had been in the planning for years. And he had clearly had no intention of taking Ross Marvin.

Peary openly planned to get rid of him as soon as possible. Douglas MacMillan later recorded Peary telling him that he would send Marvin back ‘within a few days, while Bartlett, Henson and I were to go on.’ Peary apparently meant Marvin to return even before the sun had climbed high enough to take any readings for latitude. But that plan was scuppered because both MacMillan and Borup went down with frostbite and could not go any further.

[photo] SS Roosevelt in her winter quarters, in the moonlight

So what became of Ross Marvin?

The fittest of the team, he ended up dead. He fell through the ice on his way back to the ship and the two Inghuit with him, in accordance with their beliefs it was said, unloaded all Marvin’s personal possessions and left them on the ice.

But miraculously a certificate, apparently signed by Marvin, was found in a small canvas bag on his sled. It was tied to the ‘upstand’ at the back of the sled, the handle they held to guide the sled as it went along. Somehow, in all the remaining days of their trek, and when they finally unloaded the sled back at the ship, the Inughuit never saw it. Instead, according to Douglas MacMillan, it was the other Americans on the expedition who discovered it and opened it.

It was dated 25 March 1909. It read, ‘this is to certify that I turned back with the third supporting party.’ It then gave details of the men, sleds and dogs who were left. And it went on. ‘Determined our latitude by observations on March 22, and again today March 25. A copy of the observations were as follows.’ The document then gives some figures for latitude. It is then signed, ‘Ross G. Marvin, College of Civil Engineering, Cornell University.’

It's an extraordinary document. While everyone else was scribbling accounts of life on the ice in the pencilled journals they would later copy up on the ship, Marvin was writing out a formal certificate and signing it. And instead of giving it to Peary, he kept it in a small canvas bag. Which, astonishingly, survived, unaccountably missed by the Inughuit and found by the Americans back at the ship.

What a very remarkable stroke of luck – in fact a whole series of lucky chances - you will say, for Peary.

And in 1925 one of the Inughuit who had been closest to Peary confessed that he had shot Ross Marvin out on the ice. Had the Cornell man discovered too much about Peary's complete lack of proper latitude readings?

#98 'So coarse, so manly' - Ep 2 Murder. Mystery at the North Pole

The future of Americans, as the tough frontier people, depended upon extremes of endurance

[photo] President Theodore Roosevelt - such a manly hunter

There was never any chance of Peary not reaching the Pole

Peary’s backers were the wealthy railway barons and bankers of New York. It didn’t matter to them whether Peary got to the North Pole or not. What mattered was that he had to say he’d reached the Pole, and then tell a strong, manly tale about it which could be trumpeted in their newspapers and give the men who had everything a unique sense of achievement.

Peary’s heroic endurance, exploitation of the Inughuit, and conquering of the top of the world, fed into a whole basket of belligerent beliefs held by Peary’s backers. One was the peculiarly American concept of ‘manifest destiny’, the notion that the United States had been divinely ordained to dominate its continent and beyond.

It was a belief that had grown up in the nineteenth-century decades of westward expansion through the central plains, when smallholders, ranchers and miners had systematically exterminated Native American peoples and stolen their lands. Check out our series on the Wild West. This current series could almost be a continuation of it. With the Wild West tamed, the New York millionaires had developed an enthusiasm for exploration and hunting, and anything else that smacked of back-to-nature survival.

One of the smart New York clubs, the Canadian Camp, held an annual black-tie dinner in which wealthy armchair explorers were served dishes made from leopard or monkey. In 1905 Peary even donated his collection of arctic – and other – mice. That year the Canadian Camp kitchens minced them up for their annual jamboree and served them to the diners. What better symbol of ‘coarseness and strength’ could you possibly imagine?

And the epitome of this tough, white American outdoor man was the President after whom Peary’s ship was named, Theodore Roosevelt. He’d been to see Peary off and wished he could go with them. ‘No better, and I may add no more characteristically American, work could be done,’ he’d said.

[photo] American Museum of Natural History displays the largest 4.5-billion-year-old meteorite Peary stole from the Inughuit. Peary carved a 'P' on it

Peary exploited the people who made his expeditions possible

We know that Peary took a number of women on board his expedition ship – along with their husbands and children - because he depended on the women to make all the clothing his team would need.

Renée Hulan, who is a Canadian academic, and historian Lyle Dick have shown that Peary’s team then sexually harassed the women, taking, for example, many naked pornographic photographs of them. One set shows a naked woman tied to the mast of the ship.

The excuse for this atrocity was that this woman was suffering from hysteria - not unknown amongst humans and dogs in the extreme conditions of the arctic, especially during the long winter months with no sunlight. But the women on Peary’s ship suffered far more than normal. The skipper, Bob Bartlett, commented that it was happening almost every day.

Peary’s team inaccurately claimed that the Inughuit didn’t have proper marriages in order to justify their sexual abuse of women on the ship who were clearly already married to Inughuit men. Unable to stand up to the predatory white men they tried to escape by building huts out of packing cases on the shore. Historians Susan Kaplan and Genevieve Le Moine have found the traces of these shoreline huts.

Peary's exploitation knew no bounds. He stole three enormous meteorites completely ignoring the fact that the meteorites were the only source of iron for the Inughuit he had employed and sold them to the American Natural History Museum.

Most scandalously, in 1897 he brought a family of six Inughuit to be studied as anthropological specimens at the American Museum of Natural History. There was one woman, Atangana, three men, Qisuk, Nuktaq and Uisaakassak, and two children Aviaq and Minik. Within months four had died of pneumonia, their rituals of grief observed and duly documented by an anthropologist.

The Inughuit appealed to Peary who’d put them in this predicament but he ignored them. Over the protests of the survivors, the dead were subject to post-mortem, and their brains and bones then kept by the museum.

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