QI The Book of the Dead

both!’ and shortly afterwards fell down a crevasse.
    Peary, meanwhile, set off north. He had a hunch thatGreenland was an island and, after an incredible journey, sledging 1,000 miles in three months, he and his men finally reached open water, naming it Independence Bay. They believed they had found the northernmost point of Greenland and were looking at the Arctic Ocean. In fact, it was what today is called Independence Fjord, an immense inlet on the north-east coast, some hundred miles long by fifteen wide. They were still about 125 miles short of where they thought they were. It was an impressive feat all the same. That part of Greenland is still called Peary Land, and Peary had gone much of the way with a broken leg, which was saved with an improvised splint by the expedition’s doctor, Frederick Cook.
    Returning a hero to America in 1892, Peary threw himself into a fund-raising tour for an assault on the North Pole. He travelled the length of the country, delivering 165 lectures in 103 days – earning up to $2,000 a night (about $50,000 today). He looked every inch the bluff polar explorer: almost six feet tall with deep blue eyes, a mane of red hair and a large handlebar moustache. He delivered his lectures in polar furs, on a stage dressed with an elaborate reconstruction of an Inuit camp, accompanied by five huskies trained to howl in unison at the end of his speech.
    His public image concealed a touchy and insecure human being. He suffered all his life from a stutter. Opaque and emotionally distant with everyone, he would fly into a rage at the least hint of disloyalty. Though he was capable of being charming when he wanted something – and was always decisive out on the ice – in private he was a brooder, seeing conspiracies on every side. The wrong side of Robert Peary was a cold, dark place to be, and sooner or later everyone found themselves there – even his wife.
    In 1898, leaving Jo behind to bring up their two children andmanage their precarious finances, Peary returned to live among the Inuit for three years. Photographs of him standing imperiously in his sealskins help explain why he was almost a godlike figure to them. Exercising his droit de seigneur , Peary now chose an Inuit mistress. ‘The presence of women’, he wrote, ‘is an absolute necessity to keep men happy.’ Aleqasina was a fourteen-year-old girl who had originally come to the house as a cleaner. She was to bear him two sons, Anaakkaq (born 1900) and Kaalipaluk (born 1906). While she was pregnant with the first of these, Jo Peary turned up unexpectedly. She had had no news of her ice-bound husband for several months and was profoundly shocked by what she found. ‘Had I known how things were I should not have come,’ she wrote afterwards. Somehow Jo reconciled herself to this unconventional ménage, returning twice more in 1902 and 1903, but her journal shows that she was often very low. In 1906 she wrote in her diary, ‘The Pole will never thank me for the anxiety and suffering I have endured.’
    Peary’s relationship with Aleqasina was similar to his relationship with the Inuit as a whole. His attraction was genuine enough, but he never took the trouble to learn the language properly, still less to understand their culture. He considered them brave and resourceful, he admired them as ‘anarchistic philosophers’, but he was no more able to make an emotional connection with them than anyone else. He preferred striding around as ‘Pearyaksoah’, the great white God, dispensing largesse and barking orders. ‘They value life only as does a fox, or a bear; purely by instinct,’ he wrote. Their sole contribution would be to help him discover the Pole.
    In fact, they did much more than merely help him. The ‘Peary System’ for polar exploration, which he trumpeted as his greattechnical breakthrough, was nothing more than the application of Inuit survival techniques. Without their local knowledge and the huge numbers of their dogs (most of which died en route), his expeditions would never have happened at all. It is possible that the years he spent snuggled up with Aleqasina, waiting for a set of prosthetic toes to arrive, obsessively planning his next assault on the Pole, were the happiest in his life. But Peary was only really happy behind a sledge.
    After he left the Arctic for good in 1909, he never attempted to contact Aleqasina or his two Inuit sons, nor – despite the wealth his fame had brought him – did he