A Pilgrimage to the Pole : THE NOOSE OF LAURELS Robert E. Peary and the Race to the North Pole <i> by Wally Herbert (Atheneum: $24.95; 320 pp., illustrated; 0-689-12034-6) </i>

In September, 1909, within a space of nine days, two explorers publicly claimed they had reached the North Pole.

Dr. Frederick A. Cook announced first, asserting that he had made the pole on April 21, 1908. Commodore Robert E. Peary, returning from Greenland, then proclaimed that his own long-awaited conquest of the pole had succeeded on April 6, 1909--and promptly denounced Cook’s claim as bogus. Cook received medals, wild public adulation, a tour of Europe. Peary met with scorn. A poll by the Pittsburgh Press stated that 96% of its readers believed Cook and 76% disbelieved Peary. Within two years, however, the tables so turned that Cook was denounced as a fraud and Peary elevated as a national hero.

The race to the elusive pole, a ferocious public controversy, a clash of obsessed rivals, the murky evidence--it is prime historical theater. On the whole, it is probably less hazardous to dog sled across the Arctic pack than to attempt a new inquiry. Wally Herbert has done both, and he brings to this latest retelling new data, new insights and an unusually tempered voice.

The new facts are access--for the first time since the Peary Hearings of 1911--to Peary’s diaries and notebooks from March and April, 1909. To them, Herbert restores the codes of evidence that place the burden of proof on the explorer, a practice that disappeared in the public furor that pitted the word of Cook against that of Peary. And, not least, Herbert suffuses his analysis with a highly personal understanding of the Arctic that tempers irony with sympathy.

His conclusion is that neither man reached the pole. Cook he dismisses, after lengthy analysis, as a fraud. Peary, he believes, came close to the pole--very close, perhaps within a few score miles--and his deception was more subtle, an assertion of personal will over an icy reality, an act compounded of defiance and exhaustion that led Peary to convince himself, so Herbert surmises, that he really did stand at the pole.

It is Herbert’s contention--the ironic axis around which spins his narrative--that Peary’s laurels were an unworthy ambition and that they did not sit on his head as a wreath but closed around his neck as a noose. Peary had lusted after fame.

“Remember, mother,” he wrote in 1887, “I must have fame.” He had selected the trek to the North Pole as a means to fame. He had sacrificed years of manhood, marriage and family for it; lived for years in Inuit villages, suffered amputated toes, and more than once nearly died from starvation or drowning; subjected himself to public scrutiny for it--tracking down official sponsors, issuing outrageous public declarations, practicing deceptions, countering each failed expedition with the promise of a future triumph.

The North Pole was his by destiny. He earned it. He claimed it. He must have it. When fame’s laurels descended, however, they did not put his demonic soul to rest. Peary’s roaring fame could not substitute for the missing evidence that he had, in truth, reached the pole.

When asked by Matt Henson if they were at the pole, Peary replied: “I do not suppose that we can swear that we are exactly at the Pole.” When, upon his return, he was asked point-blank if he reached the pole, he answered with a dissembling double-negative: “I have not been altogether unsuccessful.” His diary for the 30 hours after declaring the pole is a blank page. Instead of arguing his own case, he attacked that of Cook. Charges replaced claim.

The imbroglio engulfed everything and diverted attention away from the weakness of Peary’s proofs. The proper evidence, as Herbert notes, “is a well-kept log . . . . But Peary’s diary and observations do not measure up. . . .” In particular, Herbert believes that negligent navigation failed to track the drift of the pack and put Peary at the right number of miles but in the wrong location. Instead of proof, Peary asserted his success--and was believed.

Peary’s trek contributed little to geographic understanding or to scholarship. Probably 80% of his gripping account, “The North Pole,” was ghost written, though with heavy editing by Peary. Not the pole but Peary was the real objective. The North Pole was an assay of courage, stamina, skill and resolution--more a dream quest than a geographic inquiry. The Arctic, Peary asserted, “is a great test of character . . . that brings a man face to face with himself. . . .”

Defined in this way--as Peary himself defined it--deception does matter. If the pole was a quest for character and its conquest a moral parable, then to lie was a greater failure than to fall physically short.

Cook’s claims could be countered with hard evidence of falsified photos, witness affidavits, revelations about a previous deceit at Mount McKinley; partisans had to posit counter-evidence presumably lost, perhaps, some have darkly suggested, sabotaged by Peary.

But Peary’s evidence, pro and con, was Peary. As proof, he offered only his word. It was accepted by a friendly board of examiners from the National Geographic Society and subsequently, almost by default, by the rest of the world’s scientific societies. We can only truly know if Peary reached the pole by truly knowing Peary.

That is a goal as elusive as Peary’s imponderable pole. Herbert wisely lets Peary speak for himself in extensive quotations (30-50% of some chapters). Correspondence with his mother, children and long-suffering wife, Jo, show Peary in a role other than that of Arctic Ahab. But the promise of the new data is empty: The revealed diary is conspicuous, less for what it contains than for what it lacks. Narrative advances haltingly, like a sledge journey across the pack, constantly feeling its way between floe and lead, fact and speculation. Always there is that willful obsession with a single goal--the North Pole. In the end, of course, there is no way to know what truly did or did not happen.

He brings to his subject the judgment of a polar explorer, not a polar historian. He neglects to sight on historical landmarks, to check Peary’s progress toward the pole against the colossal drift of Western civilization, having him sledge instead along a constant line of historical longitude. There is some sense of Peary as Arctic adventurer, but little of Peary as American, as a cultural phenomenon or mythic figure.

If anything, Americans were conspicuous by the absence of national expeditions. The Peary Arctic Club had its counterparts in European and even Japanese industrialists who sponsored polar exploration. Strike off nationalism and you eliminate the greatest of polar explorers, the incomparable Norwegians. Thus, while a disapproving Herbert shows Peary (literally) wrapping himself in the flag, he fails to show the international setting of such acts. Instead, one is left with an addict to adulation.

Not surprisingly, “The Noose of Laurels” is destined for a television special. Herbert tries to shift his inquiry from the question of fame to the question of character; but, like Peary’s near-miraculous final rush to the pole, he withholds this attempt until the very end, and while his mileage seems right, his location is less certain. That swirl of laurels--tantalizing, infuriating, misused, maddening--that strangled Cook and (perhaps) hung uneasily around the neck of Peary would seem to descend also over the judgment of Herbert.