I’d like the Straight Dope on one of the great controversies: Who was first to reach the north pole? I lean towards Robert Peary because of Frederick Cook’s background, but is it that simple? –Richard, via e-mail
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Not unless you’ll take “maybe neither of the above” as an answer–the claims of both men were bitterly disputed at the time and things haven’t cooled off much since. Cook’s story is easier to dismiss. He said he reached the pole in April 1908, a year before Peary supposedly made it. His Inuit companions reported otherwise. The party traveled across the ice a few days, always in sight of land, until Cook implausibly announced they’d arrived. Cook’s photographs, among them one of “Bradley Land,” a mythical landform allegedly encountered en route, were faked. “Proofs” Cook submitted to a Danish commission lacked the expected astronomical observations–at one point he maintained, incredibly, that he’d left them in Greenland. In his later book he includes such observations, one of which shows signs of having been cribbed from Peary. Among Cook’s papers after his death were found several north pole diaries that read like evolving drafts of a novel–which probably isn’t far from what they were.
So Peary’s distance is reasonable. What about his direction? There the argument gets complicated. Arctic navigation was (and is) tricky, not least because the geographic north pole (Peary’s goal) and the magnetic north pole (where compasses point) were then more than 1,000 miles apart. Peary expected to head straight north, which he seems to have done using a rough-and-ready navigational method involving solar sightings and compass corrections. But the method only works reliably if you stay true to your original course–if you veer, errors accumulate.
