Cook’s claim to have reached the pole a year earlier with two Inuit sledge drivers circled the globe in hours and became the top story everywhere. The polar community split. Adolphus Greely and Fram captain Otto Sverdrup, both of whom had felt Peary’s wrath, accepted it at face value, even as the Jeannette Expedition’s George Melville and Arctic veteran George Nares dismissed it out of hand. Amundsen gave some credence to his former Antarctic colleague’s story, while Shackleton and the leader of the Duke of the Abruzzi’s northern party, Umberto Cagni, deemed it plausible. Nansen and Scott wanted more evidence. For many, the distances covered, speed traveled, and sparse records raised doubts. Peary would challenge Cook on all three counts, leading Cook’s defenders to take Peary to task on them as well. On September 4, however, Copenhagen welcomed Cook with open arms, and three days later the Royal Danish Geographical Society awarded him its highest medal. Offers of up to half a million dollars for book rights and lectures lay before him.
While still in Copenhagen, Cook first learned from the press that Peary had returned from the Arctic claiming the pole. Cook hailed his rival’s achievement. “The pole is big enough for two,” he declared. Cook could afford to be gracious because, without challenging his priority, Peary’s success made his own appear more plausible. If one could make it across the Arctic sea ice by dog sledge in a season, more could as well. “Probably other parties will reach it in the next ten years,” Cook added.19 By this time, the American public had largely decided for Cook, and the new president, William Howard Taft, who knew far less about exploration than his predecessor, sent him a congratulatory telegram. “Thus, in the course of a single week, were the claims of two rival American explorers dramatically proclaimed to the world,” the London Daily News reported.20
On September 21, 1909, Cook returned by ship to a hero’s reception in his hometown of thirty years, Brooklyn. “It is estimated that several hundred thousand people assembled along the route of the parade,” the New York Herald reported. “Buildings were decorated, schoolchildren sang and waved flags and the people shouted, ‘We believe in Cook!’”21
Peary responded with a rage that cost him dearly. He reached Indian Harbor, Labrador, on September 5 and telegraphed his first reports a day later. “Stars and Stripes nailed to the Pole,” he wired to the Associated Press news service. “I have the pole,” he added to the New York Times.22 Showing as much concern for debunking Cook’s claim as for telling his own story, Peary wired the Associated Press a day later regarding Cook, “The two Eskimos who accompanied him say he went no distance north and not out of sight of land.”23 Peary added about Cook in a telegram to the Times, “He has not been at the pole on April 21st, 1908, or any other time. He has simply handed the public a gold brick.”24 Differentiating himself in racial terms that others turned against him, Peary proclaimed himself as “the only white man to have ever reached the pole.”25 He promised a detailed exposé of Cook’s claim upon his return and dared his rival to publish his proof. Peary even sent a telegram critical of Cook to the Herald, which its editors published alongside tributes to Cook and their own damning commentary on what they depicted as Peary’s “savage charges against Dr. Cook.”26 Controversy sold newspapers, Bennett knew, and he cast his man as the hapless victim of the powerful interests backing Peary.
Those interests rallied to Peary’s side. The Times led the drumbeat against Cook, complete with the front-page comment “His claim to have reached the north pole belongs to the realm of fairy tales” and new testimony that Cook had lied about his first ascent of Denali.27 Peary’s longtime backers in the National Geographic Society, Peary Arctic Club, American Museum of Natural History, and Explorer’s Club took up his defense, with the society impaneling a committee to certify his account. The polar community generally accepted Peary at his word but often without dismissing Cook’s claim. “Peary undoubtedly got to the pole” was how Shackleton now put it; “between him and Dr. Cook the pole certainly has been reached.”28 Nares and Melville came down foursquare for Peary, however, with Nares declaring that Peary’s “well-known arctic veracity” should settle the matter and Melville exclaiming, “Isn’t it bully!”29 Geographic societies in Europe lined up behind Peary as well, especially after December, when Cook failed to supply sufficient evidence to an agreed-upon panel of Danish experts charged with investigating his claim. The Explorer’s Club used that ruling to expel Cook. It even led Amundsen to wonder aloud about his old Antarctic colleague, “Is he a swindler, or merely ignorant?”30
The testimony of explorers, experts, and institutions mattered little to the American people, Peary found. He lost the public’s favor with his initial reaction, and Cook won it with his affable response. “It is perfectly apparent that Commander Peary has repelled and Dr. Cook has gained public sympathy,” a Buffalo newspaper commented near the outset of the controversy.31 As the back-and-forth wore on, informal surveys bore out this initial assessment. In late September, the Detroit Free Press found that 93 percent of its readers supported Cook over Peary, while the Pittsburgh Press reported that, of the 75,000-odd readers responding to its survey, over 73,000 believed that Cook reached the North Pole first and nearly 60,000 did not think Peary ever got there. “If this ratio holds good all over the country, Dr. Cook may well afford to remain indifferent to any decision finally arrived at by scientists,” the newspaper noted.32
Such findings did not come solely from pro-Cook sources or simply reflect antiestablishment bias. Late in 1909, the publisher of the serial version of Peary’s narrative, Benjamin Hampton, asked eighty professors, lawyers, doctors, and other midwestern opinion leaders, twenty of them women, about their views on the controversy and found that all but two were decidedly “anti-Peary.”33 America’s leading mass-circulation weekly, The Saturday Evening Post, satirized the controversy in a fictional play synopsis tellingly subtitled “A Typical American Drama of the Present Day,” which revealed how middle-class Americans most likely viewed the episode. The play’s befuddled Cook character claims to cover 244 miles to the pole in a matter of hours, while its tyrannical Peary character sends back supporting parties so that he alone can get there. Then he commands “his faithful Negro servitor” and four Eskimo helpers, “Forward, march, to the nearest telegraph station.”34 From England, essayist G. K. Chesterton offered the pointed double couplet:
Earth’s icy dome, the skull that wears
Terrible crystals for a crown,
Is billed at last with Cook’s renown.
And Peary’s personal affairs.35
Surveying the scene, the San Francisco Chronicle observed, “The verdict of the country is that Dr. Cook is a gentleman and Commander Peary is a cad and that without reference to whether either of them reached the Pole.”36
America’s foremost progressive theologian and dean of the University of Chicago divinity school, Shailer Mathews, drew moral lessons from the episode. “The time was when the search for the North Pole stood for the very acme of uncommercialized heroism,” Mathews noted in a popular essay published at the height of the controversy. “And now! The call of the North Pole to heroism has become a quarrel by wireless telegraph.” He complained of both claimants, “We find one man with an all but incredible story of endurance which runs counter to the entire run of experience in arctic traveling, and the other man refusing to share the honor of standing on the North Pole with another white man.” This was too much for Mathews. “A hero should be as great as his exploits,” he wrote. “Even a cad can risk his life for the sake of going on the lecture platform.”37
Peary retreated before the onslaught. Without conceding anything to Cook, he declined to accept public honors or speaking invitations until competent authorities resolved the controversy in his favor. While Cook took to the lecture circuit, Peary retired to his private island in Maine. He began venturing onto the public stage only after the National Geographic Society ruled for him and the Danish commission against Cook, but even then only for limited engagements in friendly venu
es.
In 1911, over vocal opposition, Congress recognized Peary’s claim by retroactively raising his rank to rear admiral and retiring him from the navy with pay, effective on the day he claimed the pole. By then, Cook had faded from public view, only briefly to reenter it when charged, tried, convicted, and jailed for fraud in a securities scam during the 1920s. Amundsen visited him in federal prison. Peary died in 1920 still bitter about his treatment after claiming the North Pole. He did little of public note in the intervening years except to advocate for the use of aircraft during World War I. Instead, the once very public man lived quietly with his family in Maine and Washington. Cook died in 1940 still professing that he got to the pole first. Each man left his defenders and detractors. Over time, even the New York Times and National Geographic Society qualified their support for Peary’s claim. If neither claimant reached the North Pole, then Amundsen most likely got there first by sailing over it by airship in 1926, making him the first person at both poles.
THE DUKE OF THE Abruzzi returned to Europe just as the public controversy over the North Pole broke. His arrival managed to snag lead headlines in the New York Herald for one day of that critical first week, but gave place to the Cook-Peary controversy on every other day. Even then, the second paragraph of the Herald article turned to press inquiries about the duke’s views on the polar controversy and an aide’s terse reply, “He never gave interviews to the press and would consequently say nothing.” The following paragraph reported on the duke’s private comments about the topic to local officials. He did not know enough about Cook to have an opinion, the Herald noted, but “in regard to Commander Peary he said that everybody would trust him.”38 Even in the duke’s presence, interest focused more on Peary and Cook than on his own record climb. After five full paragraphs debating Peary and Cook, the article turned to rumors about the duke’s romance with Katherine Elkins. Gossip had him returning to meet her in Paris in defiance of the king’s wishes.
Royalty has its privileges, which the duke enjoyed, but it also came with its burdens, which the duke accepted. He returned to active duty as an admiral in the Italian navy and led a task force during his nation’s ensuing war with the Ottomans over control of Libya. World War I followed. Italy fought on the side of Britain and France, with the duke serving as commander in chief of allied naval forces in the Adriatic. Victory in both wars cost Italy dearly, and soon the royal House of Savoy became little more than a front for Mussolini. His days of serious climbing over, the duke shifted his focus to exploring the headwaters of the Shebelle River in the Ethiopian highlands and building a sustainable agricultural community in Italy’s African colony of Somaliland, where he died in 1933. He never married Katherine Elkins, although he always loved her, and upon her death, three years after his, she was buried wearing his bracelet.
By leaving Italy during Mussolini’s rule, the duke retained more dignity than other members of the House of Savoy. Character matters in the judgement of history, and the duke maintained his good name by living up to the highest standards of his rank in his public service as well as in his mountaineering. David and Mawson, too, were men of character who pushed themselves to the limits of human endurance. As shown by the promises he made and broke to Scott, Shackleton was more of a hustler and opportunist than these others, yet his extraordinary resolve and resourcefulness became clear in crisis. “For a joint scientific and geographical piece of organization, give me Scott,” polar explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard later observed, but “if I am in the devil of a hole and want to get out of it, give me Shackleton every time.”39 Of the top explorers of 1909, only Peary left a mixed legacy. Few doubted his courage and determination. Even in his lifetime, however, many questioned his treatment of the Inuit and the truth of his claims. These doubts have only grown with time, so much so that the historical marker at his Eagle Island home, while hailing Peary as “America’s foremost Arctic explorer,” never mentions whether he reached the North Pole. Character indeed matters.
THE MEANING OF HEROISM changes with time and conditions. If Peary had reached the North Pole as he claimed, his efforts to defend his priority against Cook’s claim would not have offended a later generation. He would have remained the gentleman, while Cook became the cad. An earlier generation might not so readily have forgiven Shackleton’s decision to turn back a few days short of his goal, and instead expected from him the same resolve that David showed in reaching his. David’s heroism peered back toward the nineteenth century; Shackleton’s looked forward to the twentieth century. Shackleton clearly had the Victorian response in mind when he asked his wife whether she preferred a live donkey to a dead lion, yet he became the lion of the Edwardian era, as struggle replaced success for an empire in decline. Even in his day, the Duke of the Abruzzi’s heroism in setting farthest-north and altitude records seemed of an earlier age, when royals led their troops in battle and suffered at the front, but Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Rider charges and expedition heroics demonstrated its ongoing appeal.
The geography and place of heroism also changes. At least since the days of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mary Shelley, ice has held a special spot in the British and American imagination, with both the poles and highest peaks exerting an intense attraction. “The ice was here, the ice was there, / The ice was all around,” Coleridge wrote in his epic The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. “The ice did split with a thunder-fit; / The helmsman steered us through!”40 Volume upon volume, in both fiction and first-person narratives, lined nineteenth-century European and American bookshelves with tales of heroics and hubris in the high Arctic and alpine regions. They became spaces where nature tested the mettle of men and found it as often cowardly as courageous. Their ships entrapped by the Arctic ice, explorers could face the defining choice of eating either their boots or each other. Peary could learn from the native people, while Nares did not. Shackleton and Mawson could display heroic leadership skills that became legendary, while Adrien de Gerlache and Carsten Borchgrevink all but disappear from history. After going there himself as a young ship’s surgeon, British writer A. Conan Doyle could knowingly speak of the Arctic as “a training school for all that was high and godlike in man” yet pen a story where an icebound ship’s captain goes stark raving mad and dashes after visions to his death “on the great field of ice.”41
Having reached new heights in latitude or altitude in 1909, Shackleton, Peary, and the Duke of the Abruzzi shrank and shifted the space for heroism. Once Peary or Cook made it there first, the North Pole was no longer an ultimate destination for explorers. David and Mawson wiped the south magnetic pole off the list as well. Having shown the way to the south geographic pole, Shackleton left room for Amundsen and Scott to cover the remaining miles, but their efforts—one triumphant, one tragic, both epic—caused a further retreat in the space for heroism. The duke’s altitude record and long duration at extreme heights helped to shift the focus of the climbing elite toward the Himalayas and Karakoram for mountaineering glory, with the region becoming known as “The Third Pole.” Summiting Everest, once it became open to Westerners by 1920, emerged as the ultimate goal. There, after dozens of efforts modeled in part on the duke’s K2 expedition, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay gained lasting fame for their heroic first ascent in 1953.
The edges of the earth no longer held unreached places for humans to explore. Interstices and outer spaces replaced them in the geography of exploration and adventure. Aviation, of course, offered a place for heroics before 1909, but it literally took off with improvements in aircraft during and after World War I. Amundsen quickly adopted it as a means for Arctic exploration, ending in his death during a rescue flight in 1928. The American Richard Byrd became a national hero for his pioneering flights toward the North and South Poles during the late 1920s, while Charles Lindbergh attained the status of a living legend for completing the first solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean on May 21, 1927. With the refinement of jet and rocket engines following World War II, test pilots like Chuck Yeager
set altitude and speed records beginning in the late 1940s, while Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and American astronaut John Glenn gained worldwide acclaim for orbiting the earth during the early 1960s. Of course, modern heroes emerge from fields such as science, technology, business, warfare, and public service that have nothing to do with exploration. Following his celebrated Arctic explorations, for example, Nansen gained added glory for his relief work with refugees after World War I, leading to his receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922.
The earth’s edges—north, south, and altitude—continue to attract, of course, but the ice encasing those alluring extremes has retreated as well. By their words or deeds, Peary, Shackleton, and the duke (despite their willing use of mechanical means and steam travel to get them to their starting points) eschewed modern technology in their quest to show what humans could achieve. “Man and the Eskimo dog are the only two mechanisms capable of meeting all the varying contingencies of Arctic work,” Peary declared.42 Shackleton relied on ponies and man-hauling. The duke tested the ability of humans to live unaided at high altitude. By feeding climate change, however, human technology has transformed even the earth’s edges that these men explored. The duke’s Karakoram is warming rapidly, even though a heavy covering of rubble has so far kept the valley glaciers intact. Greenland’s ice sheet, where Nansen and Peary first made their marks, has melted at the astonishing rate of nearly 270 gigatons of ice per year during the twenty-first century. The Arctic ice pack can no longer serve as a foundation for sledging from the northernmost points of land to the pole itself as it did in the days of Nansen, the Duke of the Abruzzi, and Peary. The multi-year-old ice floes that they relied on have virtually disappeared.
Whereas in 1903–06 Amundsen became the first explorer to sail through the Northwest Passage, in 2015 I lectured on the first cruise ship to take the route. The landscape remains forbidding and starkly beautiful, but warming has diminished the ice dramatically, turning adventures into commonplace trips. Both the Northwest and Northeast Passages will soon be open for commercial navigation, at least during the summer months, and I met families, some with small children, who transit them in private sailboats. Humans still do great things every day, but our times call for different types of heroics.
To the Edges of the Earth Page 30