Who got to the North Pole first, Frederick A. Cook or Robert E. Peary? In my Findings column, I suggest that the answer is neither. We can debate their claims and consider other candidates here. Peary’s claim was championed by The Times and certified by the National Geographic Society (which both helped sponsor his expedition). It was formally accepted by the U.S. Congress, which promoted him to rear admiral and gave him a corresponding pension. Peary’s claim certainly looked stronger than that of Cook, whose own companions testified to his fraud on his expeditions to the pole and Mount McKinley. But Peary’s sparse records aroused suspicion at the time, and the doubts grew as scholars took a closer look at his logs and navigational techniques.
How, without taking celestial observations to determine his longitude, had Peary steered nearly 500 miles straight north and then landed right on the North Pole? In a 1973 book, “Peary at the Pole: Fact or Fiction,” Dennis Rawlins called it a “pole-in-one” and deemed it too good to be true.
Peary’s supporters hoped that he would be exonerated after another Arctic explorer, Wally Herbert of Great Britain, was given access in the 1980s to previously unseen material from Peary’s archives. But Herbert, who had crossed the Arctic Ocean by dogsled and racked up far more miles on the ice than Peary, was hardly persuaded by the newly available evidence — quite the contrary.
He too ended up skeptical of Peary’s claim. The National Geographic Society, which had invited him to check out Peary, printed his conclusions in its magazine (and he later published them in a 1989 book, “The Noose of Laurels”). Herbert’s analysis in National Geographic persuaded the Times to run a correction in 1988. The National Geographic Society didn’t accept Herbert’s conclusions so readily. After publishing them, it commissioned a report from the Navigation Foundation, a nonprofit group led by Thomas D. Davies, a retired Navy admiral.
I can’t point you to an online copy of that report, but here’s the Times coverage of its release in 1989. I’ve read the report and can tell you I’ve never seen such an enthusiastic and thorough exoneration of a controversial figure and his sponsors. I might have found it a little more persuasive if the authors had been less certain of Peary’s heroism. In any case, it didn’t resolve the mystery of how Peary steered to the pole, and outside experts sharply criticized its methodology and conclusions, including the analysis of the fuzzy shadows in Peary’s photographs. While the report concluded that the pictures must have been taken near the pole, the critics said they could have been taken more 100 miles away. In 1991, the report was debated in a symposium summarized by Boyce Rensberger in the Washington Post:
Sponsored by the U.S. Naval Institute, it was the first public face-to-face meeting of Peary supporters and skeptics. The session was not a judicial proceeding but it came close — without a jury — to convicting Peary of having pulled a fast one on the history books.
Two years later, the case for Peary weakened further when another assertion in the National Geographic’s report was contradicted. The report had claimed that Peary’s steering technique was plausible because Roald Amundsen had used a similar method — relying mostly on a compass — and had reached the South Pole without taking any celestial observations to determine his longitude. But then contrary evidence was produced by an amateur historian, Ted Heckathorn. It turned out Amundsen, like other polar explorers — and like Peary himself on previous polar travels — had taken longitude observations in order to steer correctly. The journal Science summarized the new evidence in 1993:
Skeptics, however, have long argued that it would have been almost impossible for Peary to have reached the Pole as quickly as he claimed without longitudinal navigation. Now that Heckathorn has shown that Amundsen took such measurements, Peary’s claims become all the more suspect.
But the report and Peary’s claims to command respect in some places. When I asked the National Geographic Society for its current stance on Peary’s claim, I received this statement:
National Geographic’s most recent work on the question of Robert Peary reaching the North Pole occurred in 1988-89. That was a year-long investigation by the Navigation Foundation that determined that Peary, Matthew Henson, and the expedition team did reach the pole on April 6, 1909. The Navigation Foundation used state-of-the-art technologies to reach the conclusion, many of these technologies never previously applied to the data Peary brought back from the Pole.
Despite this compelling evidence, National Geographic remains open to any new information, including application of new technologies, that would shed light on the question. National Geographic continues to revere and encourage exploration as well as explorers past and present.
I’m afraid I don’t find the report’s evidence “compelling,” and I don’t need any new information or technologies to make me doubt Peary’s claim. To me, there’s already a mountain of damning evidence from Mr. Rawlins, Herbert and Robert M. Bryce, the author of the 1997 book, “Peary and Cook: The Polar Controversy Revolved.” You can review some of the evidence against Peary (and Cook) in Mr. Rawlins’ history-of-science journal, Dio, and at Mr. Byrce’s blog, From Hero to Humbug News.
But if Cook and Peary weren’t first, who was? For a while it looked as if Richard Evelyn Byrd Jr. deserved that honor for his reported flight over the North Pole in 1926. But in 1996, as my colleague John Noble Wilford reported, Mr. Rawlins turned up evidence against Byrd’s claim, too. So I (like Mr. Rawlins and Mr. Bryce and others) would give the honor to Amundsen, making him the discoverer of both poles. The great Norwegian explorer floated over it in a a dirigible in 1926 along with a group of companions.
And then who would be the first to get there across the ice? That would be be Ralph Plaisted, a Minnesotan who traveled to the pole by snowmobile in 1968. The following year, Wally Herbert reached it in Peary fashion, traveling by dogsled. Peary’s supporters would later accuse him of trying to tarnish Peary’s claim in order to make himself the first person to the pole on foot, but he was hardly alone in his skepticism.
Herbert, unlike Peary, was resupplied by air while en route. The first unsupported dogsled expedition to make a one-way trip to the pole was led in 1986 by Will Steger and Paul Schurke. In 1995, another member of that expedition, Richard Weber, and Mikhail Malakhov made an unsupported to the pole and back — the round trip that Peary claimed he’d made (albeit with lots of ground support from Inuits en route).
Who’s your candidate for first at the North Pole? What does it say about human trustworthiness that the first three explorers to reach the North Pole have been accused of faking it? For a defense of Peary’s rival, check out the Frederick A. Cook Society.
And why have their claims been believed by so many for so long? For an explanation of “motivated reasoning,” check out the article in the current Sociological Inquiry (cited in my column) by Monica Prasad of Northwestern University and her colleagues, including Andrew J. Perrin and Kim Manturuk of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Kieran Bezila and Kate Kindleberger of Northwestern; Steve G. Hoffman of the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, and Ashleigh Smith Powers of Millsaps College. And here’s an earlier article about brain scans of political partisans by Drew Westen and colleagues at Emory University.
Poster Comment:
Do your own research on this if you have any doubts, it is the NYT after all and cannot be trusted....
