PEARY, ADMIRAL ROBERT EDWIN

SOMETIMES SECOND EFFORT IS JUST not enough. As recently as 1886 it was thought that the North Pole was located in Greenland, but while exploring there, Admiral  (and surveyor) Robert Peary deduced that it was actually farther away. Driven by a fascination with the polar regions dating from his student days, and a desire for fame
he confided in a letter to his mother (“I must have it”), he was committed to be  the first to find the exact location of the North Pole, the first to stand on the top of the world. His  desires  were very strong indeed. Braving unimaginable hardship,  Peary tried and failed seven times to reach the North Pole, breaking a leg and losing toes to frostbite. But some 756 other men had died trying—at least he was still alive.

Friends and colleagues urged him to forget his dream and give up, but he also had his partisans and stalwarts, none more helpful than his wife, Josephine. Had Peary been locked away in a Turkish prison, she would have found a way to get him out. As it was, in 1895, he was in straits almost as bad:  marooned in northern Greenland without a ship to carry him home. Peary could have traveled over land south to civilization, but then he would have had to take a ship to Denmark and then back to the United States.

Josephine couldn’t bear to be without him that long. Instead, she started what writer Napoleon Hill would have called a “mastermind group.” She contacted a number of wealthy individuals, like Morris K. Jesup, millionaire founder of the YMCA, and raised $12,000 to hire a ship to fetch her husband. Peary  made it home tired, defeated, and talking of quitting. But after resuming his job at the Brooklyn Navy  Yard and having time to regain his spirit, strength, and stamina, and after he spent sometime on the lecture circuit, soon enough his vision took over again and he was raising funds for another journey.

His fund-raising took a huge leap forward with the incorporation of his “mastermind group” as the Peary

Arctic Club in 1904. The group included some of the most accomplished, wealthiest Americans, including

President Teddy Roosevelt and many corporate luminaries. The club raised funds for a state-of-the-art vessel to carry Peary to the North Pole. It was the first icebreaker ever constructed; the 614-ton powerhouse featured steelsheathed, thirty-inch wood hulls, oversized propellers, and engines powered

by multiple boilers. It cost some $100,000, a staggering sum at the time. It was completed in

1905 and named Roosevelt, after the president and club member.

Thus fortified, Peary set out for the North Pole a seventh and then finally an  eighth time. Accompanied by his explorer partner African-American Matthew Henson, four Eskimos, and a team of part-wolf sled dogs, he finally reached his goal on April 6, 1909—his life’s work achieved, his lifelong goal met.  (However, others claim another explorer, Frederick Cook, beat  Peary to it, and a controversy ensues to this day.)

First or second, Peary was a casebook of determination. At Arlington National Cemetery, his grave site is

Topped by a huge globe with his personal credo that may be freshly adopted by any comeback seeker who needs more than just second effort: Inveniam viam aut  facium , “I shall find a way or make one.”