Peary’s Claims in Doubt : Ralph Plaisted Is No Legend, but Data Shows He Was 1st to North Pole

When a researcher interpreting long-closed documents concluded recently that the legendary Robert E. Peary was not the first explorer to cross the shifting Arctic ice to the North Pole, it came as no surprise to Ralph Plaisted.

“We knew Peary didn’t do it. All the members of our expedition knew it,” said Plaisted, who led a group of nine do-it-yourself snowmobile explorers to the pole in April, 1968, in the first “indisputable” conquest by surface.

Still, Plaisted was an asterisk in the record books behind Peary until last fall, when original navigational records, uncovered from Peary’s 1909 dog-sled voyage, indicated that the renowned explorer probably never got closer than 121 miles from the pole.

Peary Claim Certified

Though Peary’s record has been in doubt from the day he returned, a Senate committee and the influential National Geographic Society, which co-sponsored the Peary expedition, certified his claim in 1911. Peary was promoted to rear admiral in the Navy and retired on a comfortable pension.

“He became wealthy from books and lecture fees, but I didn’t,” said Plaisted, now 61, sitting in a study adorned with clothing, photographs and memorabilia from his expedition in the large mobile home he shares with his wife.

Plaisted said his own difficulties in the Arctic, including a failed expedition in 1967, convinced him that Peary’s claim was only wishful.

“He said he went to the North Pole in 37 days and came back over the same trail in 16, and we knew that couldn’t happen because the roads we built were gone in a few hours,” said Plaisted. “Up there, there’re 5 1/2 million square miles of ocean, and it’s moving constantly.”

His own expedition took “43 days, 2 hours and 30 minutes.”

Inner Contentment

For 20 years, Plaisted and his crew, which included a schoolteacher, a lawyer, a doctor and a movie cameraman, had to content themselves with knowing inside that they were first.

Meanwhile, Plaisted ran his own insurance agency until 1971, when he and his family built a log cabin near a remote lake in Saskatchewan and lived for a year on moose and caribou meat, fish and canned food. He and his wife now run a small fishing camp at the site for spring and summer vacationers.

“If I had started 20 years ago and tried to promote myself and say, ‘I know Peary didn’t do it, and I know I did, and I should be in the history books instead of Peary,’ they would have said: ‘It’s just sour grapes. He doesn’t have any proof,’ ” Plaisted said.

Proof that Peary never reached the pole came when Baltimore astronomer Dennis Rawlins unearthed and analyzed Peary’s navigational observations from the day he claimed to have been at the pole.

Calculations Don’t Jibe

The notes, sealed for 50 years, didn’t jibe with real observations, according to Rawlins.

“The sun is virtually steady at the North Pole, whereas here we have it rising rapidly,” he said. “The position I’ve calculated from the data is 88 degrees and 15 minutes latitude, 14 degrees longitude, if his clock was correct.

“It means he was 105 nautical miles (or 121 statute miles) from the pole.”

Even National Geographic, a champion of the Peary legacy for nearly 80 years, has published an article indicating that Peary faked his greatest achievement.

Disputed Diary

Wally Herbert, a British polar explorer, wrote in the magazine’s September issue that Peary apparently inserted after his return the page in his diary where he celebrated reaching “The Pole at last.”

Though evidence suggests Peary perpetrated a hoax, Plaisted, Rawlins and Herbert all say he was a great navigator with a noble goal and shouldn’t be judged too harshly.

“He’s 53 years old, his feet are frozen and he knows he’s never going to do it again, and he’s 121 miles from the North Pole,” said Plaisted, referring to Peary’s loss of eight toes in six expeditions. “With his supplies, he knew, ‘I can get there, but I can’t get back.’

“I know he didn’t want to lie.”

Not Eager to Go Back

Because of the dangers, Plaisted said he “wouldn’t go back there if you put a million dollars on my desk right now.”

His group spent months in northern Minnesota training on snowmobiles, which had just been invented. They wore $1,000 synthetic outfits based on Eskimo designs and signed up 89 financial backers.

When the expedition reached the pole--”one mass of jumbled ice not any different from anywhere else up there”--Plaisted’s group spent the night waiting for a U.S. Air Force plane to fly over and document their achievement.

“The next morning at 10 o’clock we had to move our tents some 2 1/2 miles so we could be in the same position as the night before,” he said.

‘Indisputable Attainment’

Three types of Air Force navigational instruments confirmed the 90 degrees North position, and the Plaisted Expedition became known in the Guinness Book of World Records as “the earliest indisputable attainment of the North Pole over sea ice.”

The discrediting of Peary’s claim means that Plaisted will take his place beside such polar record holders as Roald Amundsen of Norway, who in 1911 was the first person to reach the South Pole and in 1926 reached the North Pole by airboat, and Joseph Fletcher, the first person to stand at the North Pole after flying there in 1925.

“I’ve been called and told they’re going to change the history books,” Plaisted said, laughing. “I said that and 50 cents will get me a cup of coffee.”

Welcomes Recognition

But he acknowledges that the recognition is better late than never.

“Now I can write the book I want to write” about the expedition, he said. “To write it before, it would just be sour grapes to the National Geographic, and they’d shoot me down.

“I should be very grateful that people created this hoax long enough for me to be born, grow up and raise enough money to make the expedition,” Plaisted said.

“If they had said Peary didn’t do it, then there would have been someone who would have before me.”