QI The Book of the Dead

ever make any financial provision for them or the people who had served him so faithfully. Though in awe of him and proud of their role in his mighty project, the Inuit of north-west Greenland still remember Peary today as their ‘Great Tormentor’.
    In 1897, in an act of spectacular vandalism, Peary stole the four sacred meteorites they had used for millennia as a source of metal flakes for knives and arrowheads, took them back to New York and sold them to the American Museum of Natural History for $40,000 (worth over $1 million today). None of the money found its way back to Greenland. Peary also brought six Inuit back with him, so he could show them off as part of his lecture series. Four of them died almost immediately of pneumonia. Peary cynically faked their burial and sold their physical remains to the museum. The youngest surviving Inuit was an eight-year-old boy called Minik. He was adopted by the family of the museum’s superintendent, William Wallace, and named ‘Minik Peary Wallace’. Shortly afterwards Wallace resigned. It wasn’t until nine years later, as a teenager, that Minik visited the American Museum of Natural History for himself. There he was horrified to beconfronted with the sight of his father’s bleached bones in a glass case in the ethnographic department. Minik begged to have the remains returned to him for a ritual burial but the museum refused. Peary reluctantly agreed to pay for Minik to return home, from where Minik fought a running battle with the museum for the rest of his life. He died in 1918, aged twenty-nine, two years before Peary himself. The skeletons weren’t released and reburied in Greenland until 1993.
    Though Peary made several attempts on the North Pole in the early part of the twentieth century, all of them ended in failure, and some in disaster. But his reputation in America continued to grow. He befriended Theodore Roosevelt, who adored adventure of all kinds and through whom he acquired a number of wealthy patrons to cover his exponentially mounting expenses. (The average cost of each expedition was over $400,000, or $10 million in today’s terms.)
    In 1909, now well into his fifties, Peary was ready to make his final assault on the North Pole. A team of twenty-four men with nineteen sledges and 133 dogs set out, but of these only Peary and five companions went the whole way. One was Matthew Henson, the world’s first black polar explorer. This talented, self-taught man was the son of a poor farmer. His parents died when he was small, and at the age of twelve he walked the 30 miles from Washington DC to Baltimore and went to sea as a cabin boy. He was a skilled navigator, carpenter and mechanic. He had accompanied Peary on all his major expeditions since they had met twenty-five years earlier. Like Peary, Henson had married an Inuit woman and fathered a son. Peary owed much of his success to Henson’s logistical genius and his fluency in the local language. The rest of the party consisted of four Inuit who drove the sleds.They had to sledge across melting ice riven by treacherous water channels, led by a fifty-four-year-old man with no toes. Henson had an almost infallible sense of direction, but no one except Peary knew how to take the sequence of latitude readings that would indicate their arrival at the Pole. Peary never took them. Since there were no independent witnesses, there was no evidence other than Peary’s word that they had reached their destination. Given that this was the moment he had spent two decades working towards, it’s very odd that Peary’s diary was left empty on the day of their alleged arrival (he later inserted a loose leaf recording the appropriate sentiments). More damning still, to cover the distances that he claimed they had, they would have had to travel over 70 miles a day. No polar explorer has matched this before or since. When the British adventurer Sir Wally Herbert retraced the voyage in 1969, he estimated that Peary’s ‘Pole’ was at least 50 miles short of the real one.
    Peary’s behaviour on regaining the expedition’s ship was far from triumphant. He had hardly spoken to Henson on the journey back, and Henson was tight-lipped: ‘We had a little argument at the Pole, but that’s all I’ll ever say.’ (Years later Henson intimated that the argument resulted from Peary’s resentment at having to share his moment with someone else.) The ship’s crew were eager to know if they’d reached the Pole but,