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<\/a>As a young woman in the 1880s, Josephine Diebitsch socialized among the literati in the nation\u2019s capital, wearing white gloves or carrying a parasol. Before long, in the company of Robert Edwin Peary, one of Maine\u2019s most famous Arctic explorers, she found herself hunting reindeer hundreds of miles north of the Arctic Circle, sporting sealskin gloves and a Winchester rifle.<\/p>\nJosephine fell in love with the young Navy lieutenant Peary, a Bowdoin-educated civil engineer who indulged his penchant for supporting America\u2019s nineteenth-century expansionism. As he hacked his way through the jungles of Nicaragua, surveying for a shipping canal (later shifted to Panama), Josephine wrote of her devotion to him. In one she pledged: \u201cI will be just as happy with you in Nicaragua as I would be in Greenland and just as happy in either of these places as I would be in New York.\u201d<\/p>\n
Peary held her to this promise. As a young man, he\u2019d become infected, metaphorically speaking, with \u201cArctic fever,\u201d a passion for discovering the mysteries at the top of the world. Three years after their 1888 marriage, Josephine sailed with \u201cBert\u201d on the barkentine Kite<\/em>, a 280-ton sealer outfitted for the geographic exploration of Greenland.<\/p>\n Like sea captains\u2019 wives before her, Josephine maintained the role and dress code befitting a lady of her time while on board ship. Ashore, however, barren terrain and temperatures reaching 50 or more degrees below zero required radical modifications to women\u2019s fashion typical for her time.<\/p>\n On one hike in the chilly Arctic summer, Josephine wore a \u201cred blanket combination suit\u201d with a scandalously short, that is, ankle-revealing, hemline. She concluded, \u201cWhen you go out in a city, you think more particularly about how you look. In the North, you dress to be warm and nothing else.\u201d<\/p>\n Josephine\u2019s participation on the expedition, as much as her exposed ankles, raised a few eyebrows. The Arctic had long been the region where men \u201cate their boots,\u201d if not each other. John Verhoeff, a member of the Greenland expedition, quipped, \u201cThe Arctic is certainly no place for \u2018the Woman.\u2019\u201d Unabashed, Josephine confided to her diary: \u201c[Verhoeff] is an uncanny and very homely dwarf. Nothing gentlemanly about him. There is no doubt that he is not quite right in the \u2018upper story.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Another expedition member\u2019s presence surprised \u201cgentlemen scientists,\u201d that of Matthew Henson, an African-American whom Peary had cast as \u201cvalet\u201d or \u201cmanservant,\u201d something he ap parently required in Nicaraguan jungle and frozen desert alike.<\/p>\n Once settled on the northwestern coast of Greenland, Peary enlarged the support team, recruiting Inuit families to work as hunters, guides, and seamstresses. Peary traded guns, needles, knives, and biscuits for sled dogs, meat for dog food, and fur clothing, Inuit-tailored for Arctic survival. Although Josephine adopted the fur parka and mitts, she drew the line at traditional Inuit undergarments\u2013including birdskin shirts\u2013opting for long woolies instead. Later, she downplayed the challenges for reporters, \u201cI was never cold. That was one reason why I felt able to go. I have suffered more here [in D.C.] from cold than I did in the North.\u201d<\/p>\n More difficult was basic housekeeping for the expedition. Josephine marvelled, \u201cIt was no easy task for me to cook for six boys, and for such appetites.\u201d Josephine quickly learned that Henson\u2019s cooking skills were as competent as his carpentry and acquisition of Inuit language. By November, she celebrated, \u201cMatt got supper tonight, and will from now until May 1 prepare all the meals under my supervision. This gives me more time to myself.\u201d By May, Josephine relied most upon him as a fellow explorer: \u201cI have determined to go to the head of the bay\u2026to await Mr. Peary\u2019s return, and I wish to have Matt for my companion.\u201d Henson\u2019s trustworthiness and skills would become increasingly indispensable, if still underacknowledged, with each subsequent expedition.<\/p>\n After the expedition\u2019s return in 1892, reporters, eager to publish tidbits about \u201chousekeeping in the North,\u201d sought Josephine out nearly as much as her husband. This acclaim helped launch her writing career with publication of her first of three books, My Arctic Journal: A Year Among Ice-Fields and Eskimos<\/em>. While her husband published alternatively terse and epic prose in his accounts, Josephine revealed the buffoonery that characterized Arctic expeditions.<\/p>\n For instance, during a hunting trip, the party ran out of rifle ammunition and resorted to wrestling a wounded reindeer to the ground until they could shoot it point blank with a revolver. Later, Frederick Cook, the German-American doctor and future Peary archenemy, carried Josephine across a glacial stream. He crossed back for Norwegian outdoorsman Eivind Astrup. Josephine observed: \u201cIkwa, who had taken off his kamiks and stockings and waded the stream, was lying flat on his back on a mossy bank nearly convulsed with laughter at the sight of the doctor carrying Astrup.\u201d<\/p>\n Embarking on the second expedition, Josephine attracted even greater attention, since she was eight months pregnant. On September 12th, 1893, Josephine gave birth to a baby girl, Marie, later the subject of her world-famous nonfiction bestseller, The Snow Baby<\/em>. Cynics from many quarters challenged the Pearys\u2019 judgment in good parenting by risking their newborn to the piercing cold. Even the expedition\u2019s physician speculated about whether or not the child, like a plant, could survive the winter without sunlight. Josephine faced more immediate concerns: \u201cEvery thing available put on my bed to catch the water which comes down in streams\u2026House leaks very much.\u201d Undaunted, she swaddled Marie\u2013later nicknamed the Snow Baby\u2013in the expedition\u2019s American flag. As the weather cleared, she photographed little Marie outside in the last twilight they would see for months.<\/p>\n As an Arctic celebrity, Josephine\u2019s personal life was painfully public. Newspapers lauded her loyalty in enduring Peary\u2019s lengthy absences as he slogged, year after year, toward the elusive North Pole. Upon her second pregnancy, in 1898, Josephine remained behind in D.C., sending Robert off with a 45-star American flag that she\u2019d sewn of taffeta. Peary later reported he wore this memento \u201cwrapped about [my] body\u201d to safeguard it in case his sledge broke through the ice.<\/p>\n While the flag-wrapped Peary continued to fall short of the Pole, Josephine gave birth to their second child, Francis, in January of 1899, only to lose her to illness eight months later. \u201cI shall never feel quite the same again; part of me is in the little grave,\u201d she confessed. Soon after the loss, news arrived by ship that Peary had lost eight of his toes to frostbite and had gained an Inuit mistress.<\/p>\n Rather than boot him the rest of the way to the Pole, Josephine turned the blame inward: \u201cI used to brag, sweetheart, that I did not feel married, but I feel very much so now and look it, too. You will wish yourself back with your sleek, fat Eskimo woman after you have seen me. If you have succeeded, everything will look rosy to you for a little while and you may even persuade yourself that I am not half bad.\u201d She penned this not once, but five times\u2013sending multiple copies northward via whaling ships. Despite Peary\u2019s infidelity, he and Josephine continued their romance, privately and in the headlines.<\/p>\n In 1909, twenty-one years after Josephine married Robert Peary, he sent her a telegram at their summer home on Eagle Island announcing that five months earlier he\u2019d planted her Stars and Stripes at the North Pole. For years, Peary had been cutting out pieces of Josephine\u2019s flag, leaving them at his \u201cfarthest north\u201d conquests. At the Pole, he left behind a diagonal slice.<\/p>\n Robert\u2019s discovery, and the controversy generated by Cook\u2019s competing claim, catapulted the Peary family even further into the limelight. Four years later, in 1913, Robert\u2019s gift to Josephine on her 50th birthday attested to the extravagance of their life\u2013a custom-designed necklace of Maine gem tourmalines. Some think the gift was an act of contrition; more likely it was designed to impress guests at the extraordinary events scheduled for that year\u2013medal-granting ceremonies at geographical societies in Geneva and Paris, Marie\u2019s debutante party in D.C., the wedding of Woodrow Wilson\u2019s daughter, and the Peary\u2019s 25th wedding anniversary.<\/p>\n In 1953, at 90, Josephine was a First Lady of the Arctic, \u201cMother of the Snow Baby,\u201d\u00a0 and a veteran of half a dozen polar expeditions who\u2019d outlived her husband by three decades. At her 290 Baxter Boulevard, Apartment No. E2 in Portland, she received news that two Canadian scientists had recovered one of the flag patches Robert had cached on Ellesmere Island 47 years earlier. The diagonal slice left on frozen sea ice at the North Pole would never be recovered.<\/p>\n Her final gesture before passing away in 1955 was to donate her tattered flag to the National Geographic Society. Perhaps Josephine\u2019s most important legacy is not the many artifacts and personal papers she leaves behind for family and scholars, but her demonstration that women could participate fully in Arctic expeditions.<\/p>\n When Patricia Erikson isn\u2019t writing on Peaks Island, she teaches in American and New England Studies at USM and consults for museums. She is the author of Voices of a Thousand People: The Makah Cultural and Research Center<\/em>, as well as articles in American Anthropologist<\/em>, Cultural Anthropology<\/em>, and Ethnohistory<\/em>. After years of research, Erikson traveled this past summer to Greenland, retracing Josephine Peary\u2019s adventures. She is currently editing the manuscript of her historical novel detailing the American quest for the North Pole from Josephine\u2019s perspective.<\/strong><\/p>\n