In the extreme north, the situation had been different, and so had the men contesting the pole. First of all, this was not really a “race”: Peary made his dash to the top nearly a full year after his competitor, Cook, asserted he had gotten there. Furthermore, Peary did not hear about Cook's startling announcement until after the navy commander had returned to New York on the SS Roosevelt, convinced he had been the first to get to the pole, in 1909. Secondly, the competition to “discover” the North Pole was strictly personal—Cook and Peary were both Americans—so national pride was not on the line, as it would be in Antarctica. Without doubt, Amundsen and Scott had their own selfish motives—as usual, fame and money topped the list—for sledging to the South Pole, but these were glossed over by a patriotic veneer; both parties wanted to bring honor to their countries by arriving there ahead of the other. For Peary and Cook, wrapping themselves in the Stars and Stripes was incidental: the victory would belong to one of them, not to their country. So far the two American explorers had failed in every attempt to reach the pole. This would be their last shot at glory. The other difference in these two quests was that Cook and Peary were chasing a phantom. There was no there there. At the top of the world, no hard, irrefutable facts could be established, no measurements verified, no claims proven or disproven. Truth hinged almost entirely on the explorer's word. And with these two men that was a slender reed, indeed. Given these circumstances and their enormous ambitions, the temptation to fudge the facts and cheat was irrepressible.
Making dubious claims had been part of polar exploration since the first ships had come upon a strange, unknown land, given it a name, and boasted of their “discovery.” In the modern era, a notable case involved the then Lieutenant Commander Richard E. Byrd. In the spring of 1926, he and his copilot, Floyd Bennett, had taken off from an airfield on the island of Spitsbergen (now Svalbard), Norway, in a three-engine, Dutch-made Fokker F.VII with plans to fly over the North Pole—some 1,535 miles away—for the first time. After a nearly sixteen-hour flight, the two men returned safely, declaring they had reached their destination. Byrd was hailed as a great national hero, awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, received by President Calvin Coolidge at the White House, and feted by several hundred thousand persons during a ticker-tape parade up Broadway.7 A year ahead of Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic, America had its first hero of the skies. The following year Byrd would capitalize upon his newfound stardom to finance a similar flight over the South Pole. But, decades later, questions were raised about his first record-setting one. In 1996, Byrd's diary—long kept under lock and key by family members—was made public, revealing sextant readings that differed from what he had originally stated in his official report to the National Geographic Society. It appeared that Byrd—or someone else—had erased the solar altitude he had first recorded in his flight log to make it look as if he had flown as far as the pole. In fact, he had turned back some fifty or more miles short of his objective, purportedly due to an engine oil leak. Even at the time, some had argued that Byrd's plane, the Josephine Ford, could not possibly have covered the distance to the pole and back in the time he and Bennett had been in the cockpit. Skepticism about the flight's course had reemerged after Byrd's death in 1957, with various published accounts suggesting that the explorer had confessed to not having reached the pole. But, to this day, there is no conclusive proof, one way or the other.8 With Cook and Peary, the compulsion to alter, distort, or misrepresent the facts appears to have been just as great, if not greater.
Over a century after he claimed to have reached the North Pole in 1908, Cook remains the more complex figure, whose motives and personality cannot easily be discerned. He did experience a series of life-changing events that seem to have made him susceptible to stretching the truth. After losing his first wife, Libby, and their only child in 1890, Cook had sought solace, escape, and adventure by signing on as a physician on two earlier polar expeditions—first to the Arctic, with Peary, then to the Antarctic, on board the Belgica. Subsequently he led two parties through Alaska's Denali range. In later years, he would recall being first drawn to the polar world after hearing about Peary's plans in 1891, at a time when Cook was still struggling to get his medical career started: “It was as if a door to a prison cell had opened. I felt the first indomitable, commanding call of the Northland. To invade the Unknown, to assail the fastness of the white, frozen North—all that was latent in me, the impetus of that ambition born in childhood, perhaps before birth, and which had been stifled and starved, surged up tumultuously within me.”9 The “spell” of the Arctic had taken hold of him and would not let go. After showing compassion for others while providing medical care on these first expeditions (setting Peary's broken leg, helping men on the Belgica ward off scurvy), Cook seemed to become more self-centered. From then on, he focused on making a name for himself (and earning money) by accomplishing—or, rather, claiming to have accomplished—historic exploratory feats.10
One can only speculate what brought about this change in Cook's temperament and ambitions. Most likely it was his (not unreasonable) realization that only spectacular “firsts” would bring him the fame and the income he needed to continue exploring.11 The first of these was his 1906 climb to the top of what was then known at Mount McKinley, making him the first person to scale this highest (over twenty thousand foot) peak in North America. However, shortly after the North Pole controversy erupted, doubt was cast on this earlier claim of Cook's, as none of his photographs of the summit matched what subsequent climbers saw when they reached that point. Suspicions about his dishonesty would dog the New York physician for the rest of his life. Once he stopped exploring, his odd behavior only deepened this mistrust.12 In retrospect, it seems that Cook had come to the conclusion that if he could not accomplish what he had set out to do then he would have to settle for convincing others that he had.
Cook's rival was driven to succeed by deep-seated insecurities. After his father had died when he was barely three years old, Peary had moved with his mother from Pennsylvania back to coastal Maine, where he would become the center of her small universe—much the way that dominant mothers of other famous men of his era (Franklin Roosevelt and Douglas MacArthur, to name two) would act after they were widowed.13 This included doting on them, being excessively protective, and dressing them as little girls (as was common practice then). Considering him fragile, Peary's mother, Mary, kept him from roughhousing with other Portland boys his age, which gave young “Bertie” the label of sissy, as well as a lifelong lisp.14 Her sheltering ways continued when she accompanied seventeen-year-old Robert to nearby Brunswick, to enroll in Bowdoin in the fall of 1873.15 For the rest of his life, Peary was seemingly bent on erasing this childhood coddling and proving that he could more than hold his own against all others.16 As one biographer has put it, “He was determined to be inferior to no man and obligated to none.”17 Early on, the unconquered and largely unexplored Far North beckoned to him as the place where he would demonstrate his worthiness. As a boy, Peary had read Elisha Kane's Arctic Explorations and first felt that region's tug on his imagination. In 1885, four years after joining the navy as a lieutenant in civil engineering, the twenty-nine-year-old Peary wrote down on a piece of paper his secret ambition to be the first man to make it to the top of the world. The following year he signed on with a whaler bound for Greenland and got his first look at the vast white expanse where his destiny lay. Practically from that day forward, Peary devoted his life to achieving that goal with almost superhuman singlemindedness.
In a broader cultural context, Cook and Peary represented the American ideal of the self-made man—a notion not as deeply rooted in the European psyche. They both were fiercely determined to rise to the top and set themselves apart from others through their own unflagging efforts, rather than depend upon personal connections, as many other explorers could. Theirs was a winner-take-all, Hobbesian view of life as ceaseless struggle, as exemplified by contemporaries like Jack London and
John D. Rockefeller and fictional characters like Horatio Alger. Being self-reliant was central to their aspirations, and it thus was no coincidence that American polar explorers like Peary and Cook showed little interest in establishing friendships with their peers or subordinates. In the annals of Arctic and Antarctic exploration, there are few American equivalents to Amundsen's easygoing camaraderie with his fellow Norwegians on their way to the South Pole or Shackleton's almost maternal devotion to his men during the Endurance ordeal. Being first at all costs was a lonely, isolating quest. Hence, Peary felt no pangs of remorse when he told his loyal companion Bob Bartlett to turn back before the final push to the North Pole so that Peary would not have to share his triumph with another white man. Bartlett shed tears over this devastating decision, but Peary did not.18
Because they (like Scott Fitzgerald's fictional Gatsby) were creatures of their own invention, governed by their own rules, desperate for personal redemption, these two American explorers could more easily slip free of the moral coils that constrained others and could keep them from fulfilling their dreams. Cook and Peary would not let anything stop them, not even the need to tell the truth. Indeed, both took various steps to prevent that from being revealed. Neither man brought along any independent, reliable witnesses on their final dashes to the pole. After waving goodbye to the New York millionaire John R. Bradley (who had accompanied Cook to the Arctic, ostensibly to hunt for bear and walrus) at the far northern Greenland settlement of Annoatok in early September 1907, the Brooklyn explorer was—save for a German named Rudolph Franke—the only white person within hundreds of miles. Cook proceeded north toward the pole the following spring with only two sleds, twenty-six dogs, and two Inuit sledders. After dismissing Bartlett, the sole remaining white man in his party, when his goal was within his grasp, Peary went ahead with only his devoted companion of many years, the African-American Matthew Henson, and four Inuit sledders. Due to Henson's unwavering loyalty and lack of experience with navigational instruments, the explorer could count on any claim of his not being disputed.
Because of the small size and makeup of their entourages, Cook and Peary controlled the geographical data that were recorded along the way and then released to the press (and, later, to skeptical observers) about how far they had traveled. But neither man was particularly adept at determining their positions. This deficiency made it easier for them to get the figures wrong or inaccurately calculate the point they had reached. The pole itself was too protean to be precisely located—by them or by anyone else. So Cook and Peary could get away with admitting that, even though they had made their best, good-faith efforts to verify their “discovery,” they could not be absolutely certain of it. In the first of three articles he published in Hampton's Magazine in 1911, the upstate New York doctor portrayed the Arctic as a “region of insanity, where one cannot believe the evidence gathered by one's eyes.”19 This peculiar state of mind had made it impossible for him to say exactly where he had been. Yet in this same article Cook asserted that he had, indeed, reached the pole. He was, in effect, taking his readers with him down the rabbit hole that lay at the top of the world. In his book-length account of his epic journey, Cook would reiterate that he could not be completely sure that he had made it to the top of the world. All he could state with certainty was that he had been the first person to reach “that spot known as the North Pole as far as it is, or ever will be, humanly possible to ascertain the location of that spot.”20 This vagueness and uncertainty plagued Peary as well. In fact, after he had returned to civilization, the explorer did not immediately issue a statement attesting that he had reached the pole.21 It wasn't until he had heard about Cook's claim after arriving back in New York that Peary became convinced that he had gotten there first.22
Finally, aside from the quicksilver nature of their destination, any need to be sure of having reached ninety degrees north was trumped by their greater need to win this race. Peary had pursued the North Pole with ruthless tenacity for twenty-three years, neglecting family, friends, and a secure naval career in doing so.23 (He spent only three of his first twenty-three years of marriage with his wife and their two children, and two of those with Josephine were in the Arctic.) When he left Greenland for the pole in the spring of 1909, he was fifty-three years old—nearly as superannuated as John Franklin had been when he had disappeared into the Arctic mists. Peary knew time was running out: this would be his last hurrah, his final bid for immortality. Likening his long quest to a chess game, he realized that “It was win this time or be forever defeated.”24 He fully knew that Americans only loved winners: his book about failing to reach his elusive goal during a previous (1906–1907) expedition had not sold well at all, even though Peary had managed to set a new Farthest North record.25 In financing this next trip, he had cobbled together just enough money from the Peary Arctic Club to pay for necessary repairs of the Roosevelt and then gotten last-minute contributions from the widow of his philanthropist friend Morris K. Jesup, as well as from other donors, to cover the remaining expenses so that the ship could sail. But if Peary failed this time it was not likely they would help him again.
Cook was a younger man, still in his early forties, but also near the end of his rope. To sustain his checkered career, he, too, badly needed cash, and only reaching the North Pole would keep the funds flowing into his shrinking Brooklyn bank account. The son of German immigrants of modest means, Cook had never made a profitable living as a doctor (he was largely reliant on his second wife's assets) and had few of the wealthy, well-connected friends Peary could count upon—not to mention an influential admirer like President Theodore Roosevelt.26 (Bradley, the big-game hunter from New York, was his only major benefactor.) Cook's ascent of Mount McKinley a few years before had been motivated by a shortage of money, and Cook was not in much better financial shape in 1908. In short, for both men, winning the “dash” to the pole was not only an abiding dream but an essential outcome for their psychological and material well-being.
Because getting there first was so vitally important to both men, it was almost inevitable that a bitter, interminable, and perhaps unresolvable dispute would arise over which one really deserved the laurels. Initially, the world wasn't quite sure what to make of this unprecedented and unsightly spectacle of two explorers arguing publicly over who had won what has been called the “most prized jewel in the crown of human exploration.”27 It was as if two dapper gentlemen in tails had showed up at the Metropolitan Opera house holding a ticket to the same front-row orchestra seat and then would not stop fighting over it when the curtain went up. The nasty squabble was embarrassing and demeaning. In the opinion of one contemporary author, even Peary's jubilant telegram announcing that he had “Nailed the Stars and Stripes to the Pole” was in bad taste, totally out of character for a “dignified naval officer.”28 Reflecting this general consternation, the first books written about the controversy diplomatically sought to stay above the fray. Opined another observer, “There is glory enough in it for both the daring explorers.”29 But clearly that was an unsustainable position: either one or the other had to be declared the winner.
The problem was that neither explorer had definitive proof. So, to secure this prize, they had to fight it out in the court of public opinion as doggedly as they had fought the elements in the unforgiving Arctic. Cook won the first round with his stunning announcement of success in September 1909. At first, he was wildly celebrated around the world and rapturously welcomed in Copenhagen as the greatest hero of the day. But then, after he failed to produce any documents to back up his word, doubt and skepticism crept in. In the professional and social circles that mattered, the little-known doctor did not enjoy the same stature and credibility as Peary to lend credibility to his claim. Enraged by his rival's claim and apparent attempt to steal his glory, the navy captain then launched a venomous verbal barrage, denouncing Cook as a liar and a fraud. (In 1911, Peary would snarl “What a consummate cur he is!”30) A legion of eminent scientists and explorers,
including Ernest Shackleton, quickly rallied to Peary's side, having concluded that Cook could not possibly have arrived at ninety degrees north in the time period he had specified.31 At first taken aback by this ferocious attack, Cook soon fired off his own salvo, insisting he had gotten to the pole first and calling Peary not only a liar, but a murderer and adulterer as well. (Peary had taken Inuit “wives” and fathered children by them.)
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