When a laundry wagon ran over a drunk old Newfoundlander on the streets of New York City in 1924, a few eyewitnesses recognised him. He had once been a great man, the famous polar explorer Bob Bartlett.
Bartlett had been born into a long line of sailors in Brigus, Newfoundland in 1875. His mother wanted him to become a Minister. Bartlett, however, wrote in his autobiography called Log of Bob Bartlett: “The sea was calling me.”
At the age of 17, he took to the sea. Over the next six years, he spent fishing seasons working off Newfoundland, and then the rest of the year sailing to Latin America and Europe on great merchant ships.
After accumulating enough experience by the age of only 22, in 1898 he took his exams in Halifax to become a master mariner.
Unable to afford his own ship, he spontaneously took a lesser role on a ship called the Windward. It was a scientific research ship focussed on polar exploration, about which Bartlett shrugged: “I had no fancy dreams about exploration. I had no scientific education or training.”
It was commanded by Robert Peary, a charismatic and media-savvy American explorer determined to reach the North Pole. Bartlett was not awed by the American’s profile, though, cuttingly assessing that: “Peary then was forty-nine and a failure. He had laboured hard and accomplished practically nothing.”
This was a time when the world was in a frenzy to discover the few remaining parts of the world untouched by humans — the North and South Poles. Explorers making extremely risky voyages into the unknown became celebrated national icons.
Bartlett would soon become Peary’s First Mate.
For a decade, the American explorer and his Newfoundlander first mate became Arctic explorers. Finally, in 1909, Peary assembled a team that would allegedly become the first humans to reach the North Pole.
However, Bartlett wouldn’t actually make it all the way to the North Pole.
Midway through the expedition, Peary ordered him to turn around. In the initial plans Bartlett was supposed to continue to the Pole while another assistant returned, but Peary observed this other assistant was better at navigating the sleds.
By 1928 when he penned his autobiography, Bartlett wrote: “Peary’s reasoning was sound and I have never held it against him.” That was not, however, how he felt the moment he was asked to turn around. In an interview with the New York Herald newspaper, he commented “It was a bitter disappointment … I don’t know. Perhaps I cried a little.”
The expedition received a shock when they made it back to America. A plucky newcomer named Frederick Cook claimed to have beaten the veteran Peary to the North Pole.
America’s curious habit of politicising every news item is hardly new. One New York newspaper wrote that debate over who made it to the North Pole first caused “the setting of households against each other and bringing not peace, but a sword to every breakfast table.”
The average American aggressively picked a side in the Peary/Cook debate. This more or less reflected voting patterns, with Republicans and coastal elites backing the established Peary, while Democrats and middle-Americans supported the more freewheeling Cook.
Remarkably, neither explorer could actually prove that they had reached the North Pole.
Bartlett tried to avoid the debate. Nonetheless he found that he now had plenty of new career opportunities, writing: “I was urged to write books, magazine articles, go on the lecture stage, appear in vaudeville and preach sermons. … Babe Ruth and Gene Tunney haven’t got anything on me!”
Despite a European-speaking tour, Bartlett was listless. He wanted to go back to exploring. However, he found that in the wake of the North Pole having been conquered, interest in polar expeditions waned.
As part of his increasingly desperate efforts to gain funding to return to the Arctic, Bartlett got American citizenship. He even served in the United States Navy during the First World War, where he held the rank of Lt. Commander.
Despite this, his autobiography/diary shows him becoming increasingly despondent, writing: “In
a way I am sorry to say I was not one of the thousands of brave Newfoundlanders who went over and died in the trenches.”
By the early 1920s, Bartlett realised that he might never return to the Arctic ever again.
With no prospects of ever returning to his beloved Arctic again, he hit the bottle hard. According to Harold Horwood’s biography of him, around this time Bartlett “gained such a reputation as an incurable drunk … solitarily drinking alone in his New York hotel room …”
“I fell into a spell of drifting in the years after the war,” Bartlett explained in his autobiography. “I wasn’t getting anywhere. I wasn’t making any money. I am not sure that I was even making any friends. Thus I can say perfectly frankly that I was just a mangy lion, a has-been…”
Then, in 1924, while wandering around New York City in his usual drunken stupour, Bob Bartlett got run over by a wagon filled with laundry.
Newspapers worldwide published his obituary. It told a sad tale of a one-time hero who had sunk into alcoholism.
Bartlett didn’t die though. He spent his three-month stay in the hospital obsessively reading his obituaries. Devastated by how he would be remembered, he vowed to never touch alcohol again.
Meanwhile, those same obituaries reminded the scientific establishment that he existed.
When he got out of hospital, wealthy institutions including the Smithsonian Institute, National Geographic, the American Museum of Natural History and the New York Botanical Garden lined up to fund new scientific expeditions to the Arctic led by Bartlett.
Over the next two decades, Bartlett mounted fourteen more expeditions to the far North. This time his expeditions focussed not on exploration, but on education.
Bartlett wrote in his memoirs: “If I had to do it over again I should be a sailor just the same. There is nothing so satisfying as the sea.”
