A Glorious Feat? : Peary Foes, Backers Still Poles Apart

In April of 1909, in raw and cruel climes of 30 below zero, Cmdr. Robert Edwin Peary, hooded and covered in bearskin, penciled some fabled words onto a page in the small, brown notebook that served as his Arctic diary.

“The Pole at last!!!” Peary wrote in his slanted, careful, clear hand. “The prize of 3 centuries, my dream and ambition for 23 years. Mine at last. I cannot bring myself to realize it. It all seems so simple & commonplace. . . . “

The notebook is kept these days in a vault at the National Archives in Washington. Its 80-year-old pages, so delicate that only Archives employees are allowed to turn them, make clear that there is a problem with its most dramatic entry.

Slipped In as Entry

One page is loose. And it has not simply fallen loose. It has been torn from some other section of the notebook and slipped in as part of the entry for April 6--the day, according to all school textbooks, that Peary, in one of the last glorious feats of the age of exploration, discovered the North Pole.

That loose page has spawned a wrenching controversy.

Did Peary accidentally use a page out of order and then simply try to right things by putting it in its logical place? Or, did Peary, in the excruciating joy of triumph, somehow forget to record that triumph in his diary and then feel forced to cover up that oversight later?

Or, did the Navy commander--in the most terrible scenario of all--fail to reach the pole at all and decide after a few anguished days to fake his triumph?

The mysterious notebook is just one of a myriad of bits of evidence that Thomas D. Davies, a 74-year-old retired Navy admiral, and his Foundation for the Promotion of the Art of Navigation are sifting and weighing as they try, once and for all, to determine whether Peary, one of the great American heroes of the North, returned from that fateful, grueling, magnificent trek over the ice of the Arctic Ocean in 1909 with a lie.

‘Would Be Dostoevskian’

If it is proven that he did lie, the evidence may show that an obsessed Peary proclaimed his fraudulent claim out of bursting anger over the earlier, even more fraudulent, claim to the North Pole by another explorer, an amiable charlatan now largely forgotten named Dr. Frederick Cook. Should that be so, says Joseph Judge, the senior associate editor of the magazine of the National Geographic Society that has commissioned the research, “it would be Dostoevskian.”

The trend is moving away from Peary. The National Geographic itself published an article by British explorer Wally Herbert last September that cast doubt on Peary’s feat and guessed that he probably fell short by 30 to 50 miles. Canadian historian Pierre Berton, in a book published last year, concludes that Peary, like the knights of Camelot, “could not complete his quest.” These conclusions rest largely on the failure of Peary to come home from the polar North with anything more than a few rudimentary navigational jottings to confirm his feat.

The critics infuriate the Peary family.

“Peary had been exploring the Arctic for 20 years,” said retired Naval Cmdr. Edwin Peary Stafford, the 70-year-old grandson of the explorer, at his home near Chesapeake Bay just outside Annapolis. “He had his own system of navigation. He had a system of navigation that they cannot relate to.”

Persistent Critic

This argument is dismissed by Baltimore astronomer Dennis Rawlins, probably the most persistent critic of Peary in the last 15 years. “Peary was a courageous man,” said the 51-year-old Rawlins over dinner at the Baltimore Museum of Art recently. “He almost died in the Arctic. He deserved to become a famous man, a rich man. But in science you have to present evidence for your claim.” Rawlins believes Peary was forced to turn back more than 100 miles short of his goal.

Has Ramifications

There is more at stake than Peary’s reputation. Matthew Henson, an assistant, trekked throughout the polar regions on every Peary expedition. He and four Eskimos traveled as far north as Peary on that final trip. The coffin of Henson was transferred to a plot next to that of Peary in Arlington National Cemetery only last April. An elaborate monument there now honors Henson as a “co-discoverer of North Pole.” But, if Peary did not make it to the pole, neither did Henson.

Part of what makes it so hard to prove whether Peary--or anyone else--has in fact been to the pole is the nature of the North Pole itself. Reaching it was one of the last great prizes of the romantic Victorian age of exploration, a time when newspapers and their readers were excited by the tales of men and women trekking through the fevers and fears of darkest Africa to find the source of the Nile or the Mountains of the Moon. But, unlike the earlier geographic prizes, the pole or, as the Eskimos liked to call it, “the Big Nail,” is not really anything at all.

The pole is not a pole or a nail or a hill or a hole or a rock or a place. It is an imaginary, theoretical, mathematical point exactly on top of the Earth, the most northerly point in the world. But whereas the South Pole lies on solid land, the top of the Earth is covered by ocean--frozen, constantly shifting and drifting ocean.

Can’t Mark Location

You know you are at the North Pole only by measuring the angle of the sun or the stars in the sky with scientific instruments. And in Peary’s day at least, there was no way to mark your location so others could verify it.

If an explorer at the North Pole carved his initials on the ice or buried a box of mementoes in it, this evidence of discovery would soon float far away.

The latest flare-up of the controversy has its roots in a television movie in 1984 that painted a villainous Peary cheating Cook of recognition as the discoverer of the pole. “It made me sick,” said Stafford, who has an unmistakable resemblance to his tall, red-haired grandfather. “They had Richard Chamberlain, their Dr. Kildare, playing Cook, and Rod Steiger playing Peary. That tells you all you need to know about the program. Cook was a likable, affable man. But he was a liar. He lied all the time.”

Diary Released

In the wake of the program, the Peary family decided to release the diary and all the rest of Peary’s papers to researchers, hoping this would solidify Peary’s claim to the pole. Yet, while all reputable scholars now dismiss Cook’s claims, the release of the papers also led to the National Geographic article that questioned Peary’s claim.

A greater shock came a few weeks after the Geographic article appeared.

Proven Wrong

Rawlins, the Baltimore astronomer, cited a number-strewn sheet in the Peary papers as absolute proof that Peary knew he was far from the pole on April 6, 1909. That, if true, stamped Peary as a knowing cheat. In the end, Rawlins was proven wrong about the supposedly incriminating evidence, but his accusation prompted the National Geographic Society to act.

For years, the society had been looked on as the champion of Peary. It helped sponsor his North Pole expedition, corroborated his claim to the pole without checking his data closely and defended his reputation almost blindly for many years afterward.

Now, it decided to sponsor a thorough and judicious investigation, calling in Davies and the Navigation Foundation.

All sides seem to trust the integrity and determination of Davies, a former assistant director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Aside from examining all the Peary papers in the Archives, he and his board are using satellite maps, computer programming, Arctic Ocean soundings and modern navigational techniques to determine whether Peary could have done what he said he did. They plan to announce their conclusions in July.

There never was any doubt that Peary had claimed an astounding feat. In the final spurt to the pole, he, Henson and the four Eskimos--Ooqueah, Ootha, Egingwah and Seegloo--covered the final 133 miles on their dog sledges in five days. That was double Peary’s normal speed. “I had not dared to hope for such progress as we were making,” he wrote later. “Still the biting cold would have been impossible to face by anyone not fortified by an inflexible purpose.”

Guided by the Sun

Peary said he achieved his great speeds on these days of 24-hour daylight by managing to keep on a straight line due north with almost no detours for openings in the ice or hillocks of snow. Although he had no time to take sextant readings to make sure that he had not wandered off his longitude along the way, Peary said he knew he was going directly north by “dead reckoning.” By this he meant that, knowing the time of day when the sun would be due north, he simply used the sun as his guide.

On April 6, Peary took enough observations with a sextant to determine that he was at 89 degrees, 57 minutes, 11 seconds north latitude, theoretically less than three miles from the North Pole. Since his eyesight and instruments had some margin of error, he zigzagged over 10 miles in hopes of crossing the exact point of the pole or close enough to count himself as its discoverer. “I had passed over or very near the point where north and south and east and west pass into one,” he said.

Led Group in Cheers

He put up the American flag and four other flags, including those of his Bowdoin College fraternity and the Red Cross, and then led Henson and the Eskimos “for three rousing cheers, which they gave with the greatest enthusiasm.”

“I had at last succeeded in placing the flag of my country at the goal of the world’s desire,” he wrote later in his account of the expedition. “It is not easy to write about such a thing, but I knew that we were going back to civilization with the last of the great adventure stories.”

Defies Belief, Critics Say

In the view of critics, the adventure story is so neat that it defies belief. They cannot accept Peary’s speeds across the ice and doubt that he could have rushed northward in a straight line. They have no faith in his “dead reckoning” and believe the drift of the ice would have taken him far off course. They wonder about the accuracy of his chronometers and whether he took the shifting position of the magnetic North Pole into account when using his compass. They are suspicious of his failure to obtain proper soundings of the depth of the Arctic Ocean as he traveled. They also say that his only data--his sextant readings at the pole--could have been faked later.

The main critic, Rawlins, who teaches at Loyola University in Baltimore, was embarrassed in February when Davies, in an interim report, discredited the astronomer’s contention that the readings on a sheet of paper in the Archives provided absolute proof that Peary was a fraud.

These readings, which could not have been taken at the pole, were in an envelope marked by Peary’s widow as containing the data for April 6, 1909. That would have meant Peary was elsewhere than the pole on that celebrated day. But Davies discovered that the widow had made a mistake; the page contained readings made in the Arctic three years earlier and thus proved nothing about the pole.

Yet the flare-up over this sheet of paper was no more than a diversion. Davies is still pursuing all the issues, including the speed of the sledges and drift of the ice, that Rawlins and other critics have raised. The investigation was supposed to be part-time work for the small, nonprofit Navigation Foundation.

But Davies, working in an office set aside for him at the National Geographic Society, has become caught up in all its fascinating nooks and byways. “It is such an interesting detective story that it is hard to let go of it,” he says.

Bitterness Over Cook

It is a detective story with psychological overtones--what Commander Stafford, the grandson, sneeringly calls “revisionist psychology”--and most emanate from Peary’s bitterness over Cook.

Historians have not been kind to Peary’s personality. “No other explorer in Arctic history,” wrote Pierre Berton, “was ever as single-minded in the pursuit of his goal as Robert Edwin Peary, no other as paranoid in his suspicion and even hatred of those he considered rivals and interlopers, no other as ruthless, as arrogant, as insensitive or as self-serving.”

Yet Peary, even before the 1909 expedition, was the greatest American polar explorer of his time. He had led expeditions across the north of Greenland in 1892 and 1895 and onto the Arctic ice in 1902 and 1906. He was already credited with reaching farther north than any other explorer. Books about him, his wife and his daughter, Marie, born in the North and known as the Snow Baby, were best-sellers. He was the hero and beneficiary of branches of the Peary Arctic Club throughout the United States. It was unthinkable that an upstart like Cook would beat him to the pole.

Moreover, Peary knew that greater prizes of immortality in history and of immense wealth awaited him if he reached the pole first. While sledging across the ice, in fact, he jotted down money-making ideas in his diary. Pieces of North Pole bearskin fringe for souvenirs to women ... Special Peary North Pole snowshoes ... Have Henson make pattern “Peary North Pole” sledges.

His Last Chance

At age 53, crippled with all but one of his toes amputated from frostbite on an earlier expedition, Peary also knew he would never have another chance to try for the pole. And he feared that Cook, whom he believed capable of the most blatant lies, would try to usurp the prize that rightfully belonged to Peary.

The fears were soon realized. When Peary finally reached a wireless station on land to send the world news of his claim, he found that Cook had just claimed the discovery of the pole a year before.

The front page of the Los Angeles Times on Sept. 7, 1906, told the story. The main headline proclaimed: “I Have The Old Pole,” Wires Peary. But the subheads made it clear that he was only the second explorer to get there and that Cook, the first, was being honored and feted in Copenhagen as the discoverer of the North Pole. “For Second Time Within a Week,” the headlines said, “the World Learns That an American Has Attained the Goal of Centuries--Most Remarkable Coincidence in History. . . . “

Supporters of Peary hounded Cook and demanded proof that he could not provide. In a few months, Cook was exposed as a fraud. Some historians believe he never moved more than 13 miles off the coast of Greenland. Cook was stripped of his honors and fame, and the world soon hailed Peary as the true discoverer of the North Pole. Yet, though the National Geographic Society and a congressional committee endorsed the feat of Peary, no one ever demanded of Peary the same proof demanded of Cook. A second fraud was unthinkable.

Strange Twist

The role of Henson adds another bewildering note to the Peary case. Henson, 10 years younger than Peary, acted as a kind of servant to Peary and a foreman of Eskimos for him. There is no doubt that Henson developed Arctic skills remarkable enough to earn recognition as a distinguished American explorer.

Yet a rift developed between Peary and Henson on that April 6. While Henson believed that the anger of Peary was directed at him for daring to share Peary’s triumph, some critics interpret the anger instead as a reflection of Peary’s dark mood over his failure. Henson’s testimony is thus often used against Peary.

In an article in the Boston American in 1910, Henson described the scene:

“ ‘Well, Mr. Peary,’ I spoke up, cheerfully enough, ‘we are now at the Pole, are we not?’

“ ‘I do not suppose that we can swear that we are exactly at the Pole,’ was his evasive answer.

“ ‘Well, I have kept track of the distance and we have made exceptional time,’ I replied, ‘ . . . If we have traveled in the right direction, we are now at the pole. If we have not traveled in the right direction then it is your own fault.’

“Commander Peary made no reply. . . .

“Naturally I am forced to the belief that he had intended to visit the pole accompanied only by a couple of Eskimos leaving me a few miles short of the great destination and, having fooled himself in the matter of distance, and by an oversight permitted me to be with him at the North Pole, he was a bitterly disappointed man.”

Hard Feelings Still Linger

Peary and Henson were never reconciled after that. And a hint of the rift still lingers in the Peary family. Although Commander Stafford attended the Arlington National Cemetery ceremonies honoring Henson, he said recently, in an interview: “I think the pendulum has swung too far. . . . If he was co-discoverer of the North Pole, then the lookout on the Santa Maria was co-discoverer of America.”

Yet the integrity of Peary has no greater supporters than the champions of Henson. If Peary loses his prize, their favorite loses it as well. It would be a bitter pill to take after so long a battle to win recognition for the long-neglected Henson.

“I had an interest in Matthew Henson for some time and in seeing that he received proper recognition for polar exploration,” said S. Allen Counter, a neurophysiologist at Harvard Medical School who led the campaign to bury Henson at Arlington cemetery. “Everything I’ve studied suggests to me and convinces me that Perry and Henson made it to the pole, or close enough.”

If the Navigation Foundation concludes that they did not reach the pole, a Russian scientist will probably emerge in geography textbooks as the first man to set foot on or very near the point that is the pole.

Russians Land

Once Peary proclaimed his conquest of the pole, other famous explorers, such as the Norwegian Roald Amundsen, erased the pole from their list of Arctic goals. In 1937, however, a plane flew a Russian expedition, led by Ivan Papanin, to the pole. They descended, thinking themselves the first people to reach the pole since Peary. Papanin and the other scientists took measurements on the pole and then elsewhere in the Arctic as they drifted southward on an ice floe for much of the year.

But, if Peary failed, the first man to reach the pole by dog sledge--in the Peary manner--would be British explorer Wally Herbert, the author of the National Geographic article that disappointed the Peary family by using the newly released papers in the Archives to cast doubt that Peary ever made it. Herbert, while crossing the Arctic Ocean from Alaska to Spitsbergen, reached the pole on the 60th anniversary of the day that Peary claimed as his moment of triumph.