Episode description

We all love a good race. The competition, the rivalry, the winner revelling in their victory at the finish line. But some races don’t have a clear winner. In fact, some destinations aren’t all that clear either. 

In the early 1900s, the race to the North Pole was in full swing and there were two competing claims as to who got there first. The problem is, the North Pole is tricky to get to, it’s tricky to notice when you’re there and it’s also very tricky to confirm that you’ve been there in the first place. 

Oh, and it also doesn’t stay still. It’s a moving target with a promise of frostbite.

Now, on September 2 1909, the front page of the New York Herald boasted that the North Pole was discovered by Dr Frederick A Cook, a lovely man, but also known to be wildly full of shit. It’s been shown that he clearly faked his claimed ascent of the highest mountain in North America. Okay mate. 

Five short days later, The New York Times declared that the first person to reach the North Pole was in fact one Robert Peary, a shall we say, less lovely, man whose one mission in life was to obtain fame. 

There was no one else more focused on Arctic exploration than Robert Peary. Heck, he’d dig up indigenous graves, steal remains and fake funerals to achieve his glory. And yes, he actually did that.

Well, perhaps he wasn’t as pigheaded as it sounds. He DID have a faithful African American field assistant join him on his adventures. Or maybe that was because he knew he wouldn’t have to share his honours with a black man. Yeah, he was probably a bigot. 

So... who actually got to the North Pole first? 

Throughout history, there have been many attempts to reach Santa’s homeland. One keen explorer was supposedly murdered by his chief scientist along the way. Another got caught in pack ice and drifted aimlessly for almost 2 years. 2 whole years. Yikes.  

But Cook and Peary both lived to tell the tale. They even wrote about their journey’s in their top-secret diaries. 

Now Cook and Peary were by no means strangers. In fact, they started out as companions and voyagers together, until it became clear that Peary was a bit obsessed with getting all the glory. 

So they went their separate ways and they took wildly different approaches to their race to the North Pole. 

Cook was described as being part of a new wave of explorers. Taking a keen interest in the indigenous people he came across in the Arctic, he learned their dialects and adopted their diet. Walrus anyone?

He left for the pole in February 1908 with a party of nine natives and 11 light sledges pulled by

103 dogs. His plan was to follow an untried but promising route. 

Peary, on the other hand, took a more imperialistic approach. Chasing fame at any cost, he cared for the local people's well-being, but only to the extent that it might be useful to him.

In July 1908, Peary left on his voyage to the Pole with a very large party indeed, including over 40 Inuit men, women and children, 70 tonnes of whale meat, the meat and blubber of 50 walruses, tonnes of coal, and nearly 50 heavy sledges and 246 dogs. 

Now, both men claimed to reach the North Pole. But what happened on their return is where the story really gets interesting. 

See, along the arduous way home, Cook met an American Hunter named Harry Whitney who offered him a trip back on a boat that was coming for him at the end of the summer. But Cook thought it would be faster to sledge another 700 miles down to a Danish trading post and catch a ship from there. (We’d opt for the boat, but each to their own.)

Given he was travelling light, Cook left all his heavy luggage in Whitney’s safe keeping, including 3 trunks of his very precious equipment and expedition records. 

Eventually, Cook reached the trading post where he wired the details of his successful mission to the New York Herald! Hooray!

In a weird quirk of fate, the boat Whitney was waiting for was none other than Robert Peary’s ship, returning from his own exciting polar expedition. 

There was no way in hell Peary was going to transport the trunks filled with proof that Cook had gotten to the North Pole first! So, Whitney had no other choice but to stash the trunks somewhere safe. Somewhere on the rocks in northern Greenland should do it!

When Peary heard that the newspapers were boasting Cook’s triumph, he was furious! As soon as he could, he sent news to The New York Times that he was in fact the first to reach the North Pole. 

The media was in a frenzy. They even put out polls (polls on the Pole?) for people to vote on the man who should get the glory. 

Most people were on team Cook, until Peary started his campaign, critiquing Cook’s lack of evidence (those darn missing trunks) and spreading the word about his dodgy mountain climbing claim (fair point). 

Meanwhile, Peary refused to show anyone his own diary. Was he hiding something?

None of that seemed to matter because President Taft signed a bill recognising Peary as the first Arctic explorer to reach the North Pole. Well if the president said it, it must be true!

For 75 years, Peary was considered by citizens and textbooks alike as the clear winner. But in 1988, National Geographic commissioned a reexamination of Peary's records that had long been secret. 

Did Peary ever get to the North Pole?

Will Cook’s evidence ever be found? Maybe it’s for sale on ebay!

And what does this all have to do with an insurance salesman named Ralph?

Previous episodes mentioned:

The Heroes and Idiots of Scientific Self Experimentation! 

Alfred Wegener and the Theory of Continental Drift! With Tanja Pejic!

Why We Forgot The Cure For Scurvy

SOURCES:

• Robert M Bryce’s Cook & Peary: The Polar Controversy, Resolved
• RK Headland et al’s Transits of the Northwest Passage to the End of the 2022 Navigation Season
• Bruce Henderson’s Who Discovered the North Pole?, in Smithsonian Magazine
• Jessie Kratz’s Mystery of the Arctic Ice: Who was First to the North Pole, in US National Archives

Pieces of History

• John Tierney’s How Dr. Cook Scooped The Times, TierneyLab, New York Times

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