Polar Pathways: Robert E. Peary's Arctic Expeditions
The North Pole - Sending Borup Home
A portrait of Borup
"I regretted that circumstances made it expedient to send Borup back from here in command of the second supporting party. This young Yale athlete was a valuable member of the expedition. His whole heart was in the work, and he had hustled his heavy sledge along and driven his dogs with almost the skill of an Eskimo, in a way that commanded the admiration of the whole party and would have made his father's eyes glisten could he have seen. But with all his enthusiasm for this kind of work, he was still inexperienced in the many treacheries of the ice; and I was not willing to subject him to any further risks... It was a serious disappointment to Borup that he was obliged to turn back; but he had reason to feel proud of his work—even as I was proud of him. He had carried the Yale colors close up to eighty-five and a half degrees, and had borne them over as many miles of polar ice as Nansen had covered in his entire journey from his ship to his "farthest north."- Robert E. Peary in The North Pole, published in 1910
"Borup in fur, portrait" by Donald B. MacMillan, 1908, Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum Collections
