Читать книгу Beyond Adventure - Roy Chapman Andrews - Страница 9

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Peary only told the bald truth, for musk oxen were within easy reach had Greely known where, and how to get them, and the men could have sledged back to Fort Conger. But this frank statement made Greely a bitter enemy. One day I came into the dining room of the Cosmos Club, in Washington, with Peary. At the lunch hour the place was crowded. As we stood in the doorway waiting for a table, General Greely rose from near the center of the room and said, in a voice that all could hear, "There is that dirty dog Peary. I won't eat in the same room with him." Peary made no comment, and his face did not change expression; he simply continued our conversation where it had been interrupted.

My personal relations with Greely had been cordial, but after that day he never spoke, or wrote, to me again. I regretted this, for Greely had been president of the Explorers Club and was a charming man, but my association with Peary damned me in his eyes. Greely named "Schley Land" for his friend Admiral Schley, who had commanded the rescue ship, but Peary's explorations showed that it did not exist and geographers deleted it from their maps. Schley never forgave Peary for exposing this error, even though it was confirmed later by Admiral Byrd and other explorers.

Greely had considerable influence, and he worked actively to defame Peary and espouse Cook's cause. In 1910, when a bill was introduced in Congress to give Peary the thanks of Congress and retire him from the navy with the rank of rear admiral, Representative Macon spoke for an hour and forty minutes of almost unbelievable vituperation against Peary. He declared Peary's story to be "fake, pure and simple."

Peary endured these attacks silently and with characteristic dignity. All the leading geographical societies in the world had recognized his claim and many had awarded him medals. In Europe he had shared honors with another great American, Theodore Roosevelt, who had just returned from hunting in Africa. But he was still cruelly hurt, and his later life was saddened by the controversy that had arisen after twenty-three years of almost superhuman effort in the Arctic. Dr. Hobbs writes that when the University of Copenhagen, the only scientific body to whom Cook would submit his so-called "records," utterly repudiated Cook and his claims, the New York Nation carried an editorial which read: "As for Peary himself he has been defrauded of something which can never be restored to him. . . . Fake as it has been proved, the claim . . . has dimmed the lustre of the true discoverer's achievement. He will receive the full acknowledgement that his work merits in the form of recognition from scientific and other bodies and of a sure place in history; but the joy of the acclaim that should have greeted him at the triumphant close of his twenty-three-year quest can never be his."