Robert Peary to his wife, Jo
The American Arctic explorer Robert Peary
married Josephine Diebitsch on August 11, 1888. He was a handsome, powerful man with one driving
ambition, to be the first man to stand at the top of the world, the North Pole. In the years of their
marriage, as his ambition became obsession, Josephine stood by him, accepting years of anxious
waiting. Peary wrote her the letter extracted here as he prepared his final assault on his "destiny".
Eight months later, and 23 years after he had first formed the idea, he wrote excitedly in his diary,
"The Pole at last!!!...I wish Jo could be here with me to share my feelings."
Early in their marriage Jo was determined not to be left at home while
her husband went away for months at a time, and went with Peary in 1891 to the Arctic to face the
same dangers that he faced. Elegant and fastidious, she was an unlikely member of a dangerous
expedition, but she was loyal, brave, and completely devoted to her husband. Two pictures remained
fixed in his mind from that expedition. One was their first night ashore in Greenland, when they
camped in a little
"tent--which the furious wind threatened every moment to carry away bodily--she watched
by my side as I lay a helpless cripple with a broken leg."
The other vivid picture was from a month or two later,
"...this same woman sat for an hour beside me in the stern of a boat, calmly reloading
our empty firearms while a herd of infuriated walrus thrust their savage heads with gleaming tusks
and bloodshot eyes out of the water so that she could have touched them with her hand."
On a subsequent expedition in September 1893, Jo gave birth to their first
child, Marie Ahnighito, at Anniversary Lodge, their new expedition base on Bowdoin Bay, Inglefield
Gulf in northwestern Greenland. No white child, let alone a newborn baby, had ever been seen so far
north, and Inuits from miles around came to see the,
"little blue-eyed snowflake,"
to satisfy themselves by actual touch that she was really a creature of warm flesh and blood, and not
of snow, as they had at first believed.
Those expeditions and the ones that followed it were all failures, beset by
misfortunes and appalling weather conditions. On August 28, 1894, in a particularly depressed mood,
he wrote to Jo:
"Never have I felt more lonely than tonight, never if God grants me to take you in my
arms again will I leave you for so long again...I have lost my sanguine hope...I think at times
perhaps I have lost you."
But he had not lost her. How much he depended on her shows in a letter dated August 27, 1899, after
Jo had written telling him of the birth of their second child, a daughter named Francine. He wrote back:
"Never was a man more fortunate in his wife than I, never a wife more loving, tender,
delicious, yet with it all, clear and level headed. Your letter was like an exquisite soft warm
breeze of spring in this lonely desert...You are right dear, life is slipping away...More than once
I have taken myself to task for my folly in leaving such a wife and baby (babies now) for this work.
But there is something beyond me, something outside of me, which impels me irresistibly to the
work. I shall certainly come back to you, then hand in hand we will meet the days and years until the
end comes."
In a letter dated January 23, 1901, Jo wrote back, no longer able to contain her anxiety,
"You must take care of yourself. Sometimes I think you are a physical wreck, if this is so,
come home and let Marie and me love you and nurse you...Oh Bert, Bert. I want you so much. Life is
slipping away so fast--pretty soon all will be over."
Peary received this together with an earlier letter, dated March 1900. Jo had borne, alone the death
of seven-month-old Francine. To compound this grief, she had heard at the same time that Peary had been
crippled by frostbite. She had written,
"I shall never feel quite the same again, part of me is in the little grave...the news
of your terrible suffering nearly prostrated me but you know I am strong and can bear and bear...Oh
Sweetheart, husband, together we could have shared it but alone it was almost too much."
On May 6, 1901, Peary returned to his wife and daughter after an absence of
three years. He set out again in 1905, and although this renewed effort to reach the Pole ended in a
raw record Farthest North, his team were forced to turn back at a latitude of 87º 06'. In spite of the
hardships of the earlier expeditions, Peary was still obsessed with reaching the Pole. On July 17, 1908,
he set out for one last attempt. His letter, extracted here, recalls Jo's visit to the Arctic and is
full of love for their children, Marie and Robert Jr., "Mister Man", born in September 1903. It was
the prelude to a soured success.
"The Pole at last!!!"
But was it? On his return, Peary's sketchy and incomplete calculations of his team's final position
were called into question. The daily distances he claimed seemed impossible; and there were blank pages
in the record. After a two year wrangle his claim seemed to be vindicated by a bill passed trough
Congress in 1911, that thanked his for his services and placed him on the retirement pay of a rear
admiral. However, many influential people were unconvinced that he had achieved his goal. Until this
time, a gentleman explorer's word had been sufficient, and Peary had never thought he would have to
produce unimpeachable proofs. (The debate continued into the 1980's, when an investigation suggested
that he may have been 30-60 miles short of the Pole.) He was honored worldwide but, as Jo write, this
final challenge hurt more than all the hardships he endured in the Arctic. In the end, the real
consolation for a life of obsessed courage was, as it always had been, Jo's love, steadfast through
years of separation.
Text from
Famous Love Letters
Messages of Intimacy and Passion
Edited by Ronald Tamplin