Peary’s Arctic ship launched in Maine a century ago

Long before he reached the North Pole, Arctic explorer Robert E. Peary was a national celebrity. In Maine, where he had been raised and gone to college, he was a superstar whose every public utterance was recorded in the newspapers.

So when he announced on Sept. 14, 1904, in a speech before the American Geographical Society in New York that his new Arctic exploration ship would be built at a little shipyard on Verona Island on the banks of the Penobscot River across from Bucksport, there was a swelling of pride among Mainers, whose shipbuilding industry had been facing stiff competition of late.

The 184-foot, heavily timbered vessel would be shaped to resist damaging encounters with the grasping, crushing Arctic ice. Besides the Virginia oak in its keel and other supporting timbers, it would be made of pine from New England and Oregon as well as steel and iron. An armor belt of greenheart from Guyana, so tough it had to be drilled before spikes could be inserted, would sheath the water line.

The deal had been struck in July at the Bar Harbor summer estate of Morris K. Jesup, the wealthy New York philanthropist who was president of the Peary Arctic Club. Besides Jesup’s lawyer, only two other men were there, Peary and Capt. Charles B. Dix, owner of McKay and Dix, the Verona shipyard. The captain was respected both as a boat builder and as a master seaman who owned vessels used in the Greenland cryolite trade.

All of the money had not been raised to get the project started, and Jesup, who had agreed to write a large check, refused to take complete financial responsibility. Then Dix stepped forward. He would order the timber on his own, and if the money weren’t raised, he would take the loss. Of course, the money was raised, but Dix’s brave move allowed the project to proceed on schedule.

During the next few months, Peary spent much of the time traveling between Verona Island and Portland, where the engine, boilers and other machinery for the vessel were being built by the Portland Co. for installation there after the launch.

Dix hired expert workers from the Bucksport area and beyond. He scoured the coast from St. Croix to the Rio Grande for the right oak and pine and other materials. After weeks of delay waiting for the Virginia timber to arrive, the first spike was driven for the keel with a 9-pound maul wielded by Mrs. Frank Houghton, whose husband was superintendent of the boatyard.

Five months later, the vessel was launched with a gala celebration that local people would not soon forget. An estimated 3,000 to 5,000 onlookers arrived on the morning of March 23, 1905, a century ago this Wednesday, to watch the event from the Bucksport side of the river.

“By ten o’clock the crowds began to drift towards the waterfront and soon formed a cordon extending over a mile from the Verona Bridge which was lined three deep, up Main Street, on the bank, in the street, on the sidewalks and at every possible point of vantage, all eyes focused on the stern of the craft just showing through the end of the great building across the channel, and over which floated a beautiful bunting ensign, presented by the citizens of Bucksport,” said the story that appeared the next day at the top of Page One in the Bangor Daily News.

Vendors hawked oranges, hot dogs, postcards and pieces of oak left over from the building of the ship. “It seemed as if every other person had a camera, from the wee Brownies to the big view cameras and paraphernalia enough to load a dray,” commented the reporter.

A great block of ice encasing a bottle of champagne hung by a rope in front of the bow. At the appropriate time, Mrs. Peary, dressed in “priceless” blue fox furs, sent it swinging against the ship to smash into pieces, the first ice the ship would encounter.

As the craft splashed into the river, a loud cheer went up from the crowd. A large pennant was unfurled with the ship’s name, which until that moment had been kept secret. Peary diplomatically had named his vessel the Roosevelt after the president who had given him additional time away from his job with the Navy to pursue his glorious goal.

The force of the launch propelled the ship across the channel into the Bucksport mud on the other side. Photographers ran and the crowd gave a collective groan as the vessel became stuck, requiring the services of a tug.

The next afternoon, the Roosevelt sailed into Portland Harbor. One Bucksport man, George Wardwell, had joined the crew as chief engineer.

Peary traveled to Bangor to give a speech at City Hall on March 28. The newspaper predicted that within a year the great explorer would be “traversing the desolate wastes of snow and ice at the very tip-top of the earth, where the foot of man has never trod.”

The explorer would not make it to the North Pole a year later. It would be four more years, including one failed expedition in 1905-1906, before the explorer would attain his goal in 1909, using the Roosevelt as the launch pad for his victorious dash across the ice. By then, both Jesup and Dix had died. The latter reportedly was broken-hearted and practically penniless, after prolonged bickering with the Roosevelt’s owners over a financial settlement.

“It is said Captain Dix exhausted his resources and the owners advanced money to finish the vessel, but that is a matter that is not generally known beyond the fact that the firm was bankrupt soon after, and the plant eventually sold at auction,” according to a typed transcript of a news story taken from an undated “Boston paper” on file at the Buck Memorial Library in Bucksport.

Unlike the Bowdoin, Maine’s other great polar exploration vessel, the Roosevelt would die an ignoble death many years later. After Peary was through with it, the ship was used as an oceangoing tug and a government patrol boat on the West Coast. In his memoir, “Secrets of Polar Travel,” in 1917, he expressed regret that he had not had the financial means to preserve the vessel.

In 1937, long after the explorer’s death, the Roosevelt developed mechanical problems off Panama and was abandoned on a beach at Cristobal in the Canal Zone.

Wayne E. Reilly has edited two books of Civil War era diaries and letters including “The Diaries of Sarah Jane and Emma Ann Foster: A Year in Maine During the Civil War.” He can be reached at wreilly@

bangordailynews.net.