29. ARCTIC EXPLORATION AD 1909
ROBERT PEARY
In the early years of the twentieth century the race for the poles, South and North, gripped the public imagination in very much the same way as the race to the moon would fifty years later. Of course, reaching the two poles required altogether different strategies. Getting to the South Pole (a feat first accomplished by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen in 1911) involved crossing a vast rocky continent covered by a thick permanent ice sheet, whereas the geographical North Pole was under almost fourteen thousand feet of ocean water that supported an ever-moving skin of pack ice.
In 1893 the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen allowed his ship to freeze into the Arctic ice pack, in the hope that it would drift with the ice toward the North Pole. But, alas, the ice drifted the wrong way and the attempt fizzled. Four years later an equally brave and ingenious Swede, Salomon Andrée, tried to fly from Svalbard (then known by its Dutch name Spitsbergen) to the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon. He and his companions perished after ice formed atop their balloon and brought their journey to an end. The sea and the air routes both having disappointed, only one viable option remained—dogsledding over the sea ice.
The foremost proponent of this approach was Robert E. Peary, a civil engineer from Pennsylvania who eventually joined the U.S. Navy. The child of an overbearing mother from whom he was still doubtless anxious to escape even as he approached his forties, Peary worked throughout the 1890s on his sledding techniques and logistics in remote Arctic regions, preparing for an onslaught on the North Pole. In 1906 he reached 87˚06’ N, the closest anyone had yet come; he was predictably annoyed the next year to learn that his former collaborator Frederick Cook was planning to attack the pole via “his” route through northern Greenland and Ellesmere Island.