It turned out that Cook had left his papers behind in Greenland, and then, after Peary refused to allow them to be taken on board the Roosevelt, they had been lost. Peary's own records were locked up for decades in the vault of the National Geographic Society, which had sponsored him. Not being white, the only other witnesses to these alleged conquests of the North Pole were considered unreliable, and so their testimony was disregarded—an outcome both explorers could have expected.32 Further disparaging of Cook was stoked by powerful, partisan institutions like the Explorers Club and newspapers like the New York Times (which had given Peary a significant advance on his book).33 For example, in a September 1909 article, the Times crowed that London papers were all lining up behind Peary, adding that it was because of his “high reputation as a man and an explorer that the world accepts his word without a shadow of hesitation.”34 The Mainer was hailed as a genuine American hero, a man who had demonstrated tremendous courage and resolve in achieving this historic milestone. At the same time, the vicious nature of Peary's personal attacks on Cook and his refusal to have anything to do with his rival cost him considerable public support. Newspaper polls found that overwhelming majorities rejected the naval engineer's assertions because, as one article put it, “he had treated ungraciously a man who was trying to rob him of his glory.”35 It seemed that character, not written records, was to be arbiter of truth.
But graver doubts about Cook's own credibility arose after reports of his having apparently lied about having scaled Mount McKinley surfaced later in 1909. In short order he was tossed out of the Arctic Club of America, the Explorers Club, and similar organizations. He became a pariah. Cook's case was further weakened when a review of Peary's available records by “independent” experts (chosen by the National Geographic Society) ended with an endorsement of Peary's claim. When he testified before a congressional committee investigating the polar controversy, Peary was treated with respect, and the lawmakers ultimately concluded, in January 1911, that he had, indeed, made it to the North Pole.36 Meanwhile, Cook's lobbying efforts in Washington to gain official recognition and a gold medal went nowhere. He was brusquely rebuffed. In the searing words of Ohio congressman Simeon D. Fess, Cook now stood exposed as the “chief imposter of the age.”37 The explorer's 1923 conviction for mail fraud drove the final nail in his coffin, by seemingly confirming that he was an untrustworthy, dishonest character.
Over the ensuing years, most of those who studied the then-available documentation concurred that Peary had likely made it all the way to the top, and Cook had not. Public opinion accepted this verdict until the early 1970s, when a closer examination of a document of Peary's in the National Archives indicated that he had only gotten to within 121 miles of the North Pole—and that he had known this. Dennis Rawlins, the independent scholar who located this long-lost document, declared that it exposed “one of the greatest scientific frauds of this century.”38 This written record confirmed doubts that the explorer could have possibly covered the distance to the North Pole and back as quickly as he had asserted. (Peary had ridden most of the way on top of a sledge.) Furthermore, Rawlins and other researchers have questioned how Peary could have marched due north for some five hundred miles and ended up at the exact location of the pole with only a compass to guide him (and without a qualified navigator). Rawlins memorably dubbed this implausible feat a “413-mile Pole-in-one.”39 This paper, combined with other suspicious findings—such as clean pages apparently inserted in his diary after the fact—convinced the Times in 1997 to retract its longstanding advocacy of Peary's claim. Once cheered as a great American hero, he was now scorned as a megalomaniacal and mendacious cheat.
At the same time as Peary's reputation was plummeting, Cook's stock was rising. He came to be seen as the victim of a vicious vendetta, or, in the words of another historian, as “neither a liar nor a con man, but a unique and valuable hero, who, at the minimum, is not simply one of the greater victims in America's history, but the all-time champion”—a man who, in Cook's own words, had suffered “so bitterly and so inexpressibly” for defending his claim to have been the first person to make it to the North Pole.40 Most recent scholars have come around to believing that both men lied and that neither actually got there.41 One historian, Roger Launius at the Smithsonian Institution, has recently chimed in, “I have no doubt from what I have learned about both that they would willingly alter the truth for their benefit. They did so many other times that it is impossible not believe them capable of it here.”42
The fact that this controversy has gone on for so long, with little sign of ever being laid to rest, says a great deal about Cook and Peary, their unbridled ambitions, and their disregard for facts when victory was all that mattered. For, even if neither man had deliberately lied about what they had accomplished, their failure to adequately document their journeys leaves them open to second-guessing and censure. But the ebb and flow in this long-running feud between backers of Cook and those of Peary says more about how American society has changed since these two larger-than-life figures dominated the headlines more than a century ago. Before then, a man's word was the measure of his character—and his deeds. To be a successful explorer one had to be an honorable person, because coping with the extraordinary challenges of surviving in an inhospitable environment, enduring prolonged isolation and hardship, and overcoming the constant dangers that came with such territory required more than physical stamina and courage; it called for moral strength. The notion that a person who made it to the North Pole could also be a liar and a cheat was tantamount to saying that a star football player could also be a paraplegic.43 They were both equally contradictions in terms. The very public Cook-Peary spat confounded this assumption that ability and integrity were inseparable, if not virtually synonymous. No matter which of the two men had tried to deceive the world in order to win glory—or if they both had—blind admiration for heroic figures was called into question.
But such a change in outlook did not come easily: we like to look up at our heroes, not down on them. We don't want to go rummaging through their closets, discovering unpleasant facts. Thus, in the wake of the Cook-Peary dispute, a new yearning for genuinely selfless, uplifting, and uncomplicated heroes returned. In the polar realm, men like Scott and Shackleton amply filled this bill, their careers and reputations (seemingly) unblemished by any hint of moral failing. So did—especially for Americans—Charles Lindbergh, whose youthful innocence, naiveté, humility, and quiet courage revived the nineteenth-century notion that bona fide virtue undergirds great achievement. In the United States, belief in this truism persisted through World War II and into the 1960s. But then the country became embroiled in a war in Vietnam that put this to a severe test. As that conflict dragged on and tore the country apart, the discrepancy between honorable intentions and sordid deeds became all too apparent. The reason given by President Lyndon Johnson for going to war—an attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on an American destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin—turned out to be a fabrication. Then lies to the public and Congress about the conduct, progress, scope, and likely outcome of the Vietnam War were exposed by the publication of the “Pentagon Papers” in the New York Times. Concurrently, President Richard Nixon's dishonesty and criminality were revealed during the Watergate scandal and the subsequent congressional investigation that resulted in his impeachment. Millions of Americans were compelled to acknowledge the previously inconceivable fact that the leader of their country had deceived them, broken the law, and used government agencies to discredit his political opponents.
It is hardly coincidental that several books exposing the apparent lies and deceptions of Robert E. Peary were researched, written, and published during that turbulent period of American history, when belief and trust in authorities reached an all-time low. After assuming that men and women of great stature were above such behavior, many Americans began to reexamine what they had previously been told about their leaders as well as their heroes—past and present. No lon
ger could the aura of fame protect them from close scrutiny. In light of these altered circumstances and a more critical perspective, the long-dormant Cook-Peary case, once apparently settled on the basis of flimsy evidence, was reopened. This time Peary's words would be weighed against his actions, and a more objective sense of what had really happened would emerge. The past would now be reassessed using a new epistemology: facts would be determined independently of the person or persons who reported them. This re-examination of historical events inevitably extended to other explorers and their claims. Men like John Franklin, Elisha Kent Kane, George De Long, and Robert Falcon Scott would no longer be wrapped in hagiographic phrases like “tragic martyr” or “gallant hero.” One prominent example of this change in approach was Roland Huntford's 1979 book detailing Scott's poor planning and numerous mistakes made on the way to the South Pole, comparing the English explorer unfavorably with Amundsen, and deflating his heretofore mythical status. Huntford's later book on these two competitors, The Race for the South Pole (2010), further diminished Scott's image by including unflattering sections from his journals that had been left out of earlier published versions. In this book, Huntford concluded that the explorer's words reveal him as “a man given to blaming his colleagues for his own failings; a man with a strong sense—quite early in the expedition—that his preparations have been inadequate; a man who describes one of his dying colleagues as stupid; a man who, on realising he has missed out on being the first to the pole, writes that he can still salvage his reputation if he can get the news to the outside world before Amundsen. A man eager to mask his failure by playing up his mission's scientific endeavour. A man who at one point writes his expedition is a shambles.”44
For Peary, a similarly damning verdict was delivered by Robert M. Bryce's encyclopedic (nearly one thousand pages of text alone) Cook & Peary: The Polar Controversy, Resolved, which appeared in 1979. Yet, despite its title (and exhaustive research) Bryce's book does not definitively “resolve” this dispute for all time—only, perhaps, for our own. Future historians will pore over all the records as well as dissect the characters of the two men in a different light, under the influence of their own cultural values and perspectives, and quite possibly arrive at different conclusions. This constant process of revisiting and revising the past is already evident in more recent books that have defended Scott against Huntford's attacks—notably, Susan Solomon's The Coldest March (2001) and Ranulf Fiennes's Captain Scott (2003).45
There are three major problems that frustrate attempts to verify who had first reached the North Pole. First, as was noted earlier, there are no visible, permanent landmarks to indicate where Cook or Peary may have been. (At the South Pole, the Norwegians’ tent is now estimated to be covered by more than fifty feet of snow and ice.46) Secondly, there were not sufficient geographic measurements to establish their precise locations. Early in the twentieth century there were no orbiting satellites that could pinpoint a spot on the ice. Ironically, in an age that put much emphasis on exact measurement, the North Pole stubbornly resisted such spatial definition—and, in fact, exposed its limitations, much as quantum mechanics would reveal inadequacies in Newtonian physics. Thirdly, the expedition leader's monopoly over what was reported to the outside world eliminated the possibility of any independent verification of his claims. And objective observations were not always in the explorer's best interests, especially when they might not bear out what he had asserted. This was certainly true for both Cook and Peary. Indeed, if one accepts the current consensus that neither man actually set foot at the North Pole, then the lack of accurate geographic coordinates made their false claims hard to refute. Each explorer could concentrate on destroying his rival's reputation, confident that the other could not produce compelling evidence that these damning allegations were untrue. In the end, it would come down to one man's word against the other's, and which one the public chose to believe. Certainty could never be firmly established, and so the outcome remains shrouded by doubt. To this day, the reputations of Cook and Peary are mired in a kind of no man's land, somewhere between truth and falsehood, between hero and charlatan.
By becoming the determiners of truth at the poles, explorers risked becoming further alienated from “the real world.” They had already physically removed themselves from it by venturing so far into the barren ice caps and becoming utterly isolated from civilization. If a commander then gave in to the impulse to distort, exaggerate, or lie about what he had accomplished, he would have to live with the secret of this deception. In public, he would always be concealing the truth—hiding behind his heroic image, a man divided against himself. He might have gained fame, but he also lost his soul in the process. For Cook and Peary, this Faustian bargain was a price well worth paying. If they needed to assuage their consciences about their lies, they could always find ways to rationalize them. Perhaps they had made an inaccurate calculation, but who could say for sure? Even if they had fallen a bit short of their goal, hadn't they accomplished enough to deserve the accolades? There was little risk of their ever being challenged on these points. For the people back home badly wanted their explorers to succeed. This need took precedence over insisting they stick to the facts. One could even say that the public and the explorers were colluding to assure that great patriotic achievements would be celebrated, even if they never took place. Both the teller of the tale and his audience longed for glorious deeds. As the polar historian Beau Riffenburgh has written, “Those involved in the business of exploration knew that it often bore little resemblance to the accounts that were presented to the public, but the depiction of exploration was rarely changed once formats were discovered that were not only mutually beneficial to the explorers and the newspapers, but popular with the hero-seeking public.”47 This was the lesson taken to heart by fame-hungry predecessors like Elisha Kent Kane, who wielded his pen more adroitly than a dogsled. Long before Cook and Peary, other polar explorers had played loose with the facts, embellishing their adventures to sell more books. The public was captivated by these hyperbolic accounts. Polar fabrication fulfilled their need for the kind of grandiose gesture that was missing in their humdrum, civilized lives. Cook's and Peary's stretching the truth about reaching the North Pole was the outgrowth of this well-established polar tradition of amplifying reality. Back then, Americans needed to see these two men as singularly courageous figures surmounting unimaginable obstacles to reach a goal that had evaded conquest for centuries. That they were also self-absorbed scoundrels who cheated and then tried to hoodwink the world would take decades to be conceded, during an age with different needs and a different view of human nature.
This bifurcation of the explorer into public and private selves has numerous parallels in our own day. Politics is the most obvious example. To succeed in such a highly visible career, one has to become adept at compartmentalizing and pretending to tell the truth. Today we assume that what public figures have to say is self-serving: the dichotomy of inner and outer truth is a necessary evil. But during the nineteenth century, there was no such assumption. On the contrary, words and deeds were supposed to flow from the same source—one's integrity—and any inconsistency between them was a serious moral defect. Since then facts have come to count for more than character, and truth to be based on more than belief. Our view of men like Cook and Peary stems from a twenty-first-century recognition that heroes are not always what they seem to be, much as we might wish they were.
Thus we have learned to wrestle with questions that seem impervious to definite answers. We live in an age of ambiguity—the age of “Rashomon,” the uncertainty principle, and persistent conspiracy theories, when truth seems ultimately subjective. This fact can be frustrating (as when some Americans persist in believing that the first moon landing was staged in a movie studio), but also liberating. It expands our possibilities. Yet, this same freedom to shape reality comes with its own psychological costs—the loss of a clear sense of who we are and what is real. Before 1900, facts were seemi
ngly fixed and irrefutable: they anchored us in the world. After Cook and Peary had strutted across the world stage, this changed. Since then, we are forced to live with doubts. Did they torment these explorers as well? Did they lie awake at night ruing the lies they had told so that they could uphold their reputations? Did they suffer from some form of madness? We can only wonder.
This last written communication ever found from the doomed Franklin expedition revealed that Sir John Franklin himself had died the year before (in 1847) but gave no clue about the fate of the surviving officers and men, thus keeping alive faint hopes that they might have survived. Photo by John Powles Cheyne, British Franklin Search Expedition.
The body of native son Elisha Kent Kane lying in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, in 1857. Kane's two-week-long funeral procession from New Orleans drew tens of thousands of mourners, giving powerful witness to the nation's fascination with polar adventurers. “The Death Watch”; engraving by DeWitt Clinton Baxter.
Because of his undaunted optimism, Lt. George De Long continued to press on northward after his ship, the Jeannette, became icebound in the Arctic in 1881. When the vessel began to sink, his party had to abandon it and make a desperate attempt to reach land, but all perished on the way. Crew of Jeannette dragging boat over ice, 1881; engraving by George T. Andrew.
In order to maintain discipline with their food running out at their Arctic outpost in 1884, Lieutenant Adolphus Greely imposed severe punishments for those who broke the rules. When twenty-eight-year-old private Charles Henry, a German immigrant, was caught stealing shrimp and showed “neither fear nor contrition,” Greely promptly had him shot. Greely order for Pvt. Henry's execution, 1884.
To the Ends of the Earth Page 30