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Peary's life was divided into two parts—preparation and accomplishment. From earliest boyhood he fought for everything he had, or did. There was no golden spoon, or even a silver one, in his mouth when he entered the world, May 6, 1856, in the little town of Cresson, Pennsylvania. His father and uncles made "shooks"—staves for the manufacture of barrels. It wasn't a lucrative business. The first blow came when Peary was three years old. His father died. His mother took her husband's body and her little son to her native state of Maine, at South Portland. Peary lived until after college in that rugged state.

He loved nature passionately. He taught himself taxidermy and added materially to the resources of the family by mounting birds and animals. One of his dominating characteristics, according to Hobbs, was a complete indifference to personal comfort. One day while hunting near Fryeburg, Maine, a friend killed two ducks in the middle of a frozen pond. He was going to leave them, but Robert pulled off his clothes, broke the ice in front of him with a fence rail, and swam out to retrieve the birds. He was an all-around athlete, an expert shot, a fine horseman and particularly good in all winter sports. He thought nothing of walking twenty-five miles in seven or eight hours and did it every week.

After high school Peary entered Bowdoin College in Brunswick, having won in competition the Brown Memorial Scholarship. He chose civil engineering as his major course. When twenty years old he graduated from Bowdoin second in his class, with top honors in engineering, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Then he became for a time town surveyor of Fryeburg and did a year or two as draftsman in the Coast and Geodetic Survey at Washington. Peary apparently enjoyed his job, but the virus of exploration was working in his blood. He thought of Panama. Talk of a canal was in the air, and he projected a plan to explore the Isthmus, combining natural history with engineering studies. But his mother turned thumbs down on the expedition, and he took the examination for the Civil Engineering Corps of the U.S. Navy. Out of two hundred contestants, only four passed the grueling technical and physical requirements. Peary was one of the four. His first job was work on a naval pier at Key West, Florida, under the distinguished engineer A. G. Menocal. A method of sinking the iron plates for the pier devised by Peary saved the government $24,000 and gained Menocal's admiration. By a strange trick of fate, Peary's next assignment took him to the Isthmus, the very place he had been hoping to explore. Upon the organization of the Provincial Interoceanic Canal Society in 1880, the U.S. government offered to the society the services of naval engineers and put Menocal in charge. He chose Peary as his chief assistant. Even then, when he was twenty-eight years old and en route to the tropics, he may have begun to dream of the conquest of the North Pole.