Robert Peary
The Arctic explorer who took the great Cape York iron meteorites from Greenland to New York in the 1890s.
Key facts
- Born
- 1856
- Died
- 1920
- Nationality
- American
- Field
- Naval officer and Arctic explorer
Robert Edwin Peary was an officer in the US Navy who made a series of expeditions to Greenland and the Arctic, and in 1909 claimed to have reached the North Pole, a claim that is still disputed.
For centuries the Inughuit people of north-west Greenland had obtained metal from three great iron masses near Cape York. They chipped flakes off the irons and set them into bone handles to make knives and harpoon points. They called the masses the Woman, the Dog and the Tent. European explorers had heard of them since 1818, but none had found them.
In 1894, guided by Inughuit hunters, Peary reached the irons. He shipped the Woman and the Dog, of about 3 tonnes and 400 kilograms, to the United States in 1895. The largest, the Tent, known as Ahnighito, was a far greater challenge: it weighs about 31 tonnes. After a failed attempt in 1896, Peary's crew loaded it onto his ship in 1897 and brought it to New York, where the three irons are now in the American Museum of Natural History.
The removal of the irons, which the Inughuit had relied on for generations, is now seen as an act of colonial taking. Peary's expedition also brought six Inughuit people to New York in 1897, most of whom died there of disease, a deeply troubling part of the story.