The rival explorers independently converged on the pole in 1908–09. Cook traveled light, with just two Inuit for company. Peary began his trek with several sleds and a sizable team of companions. The Peary group arrived in Greenland to learn that Cook had long since headed north, but they remained confident that their larger operation had the edge.
By March 1909, Peary’s expedition had seen considerable attrition, and the two remaining sleds were moving more slowly toward the pole than expected, at not much more than ten miles a day. Still, progress was being made when, on reaching 87˚47’ N—a new northerly record, about 133 miles from the pole—Peary sent the leading sled back to the mother ship the SS Roosevelt, anchored far south at Ellesmere Island. The colleagues who returned with the sled included his navigator, Robert Bartlett.
That left Peary, his longtime personal assistant Matthew Henson, and four Inuit without navigational experience to carry on. According to Peary, at this point daily travel increased significantly because the party was traveling lighter, until on April 6 he recorded a latitude of 89˚57’ N, virtually at the pole itself.
Circling around to make sure he’d hit the spot, Peary lingered briefly and then rapidly returned south, rejoining his ship on April 26, only a couple of days after the other sled. Soon he learned that Cook and his Inuit companions had returned from the pole some time earlier, minus dogs and sleds but still alive.
The stage was thus set for an epic and long-drawn-out dispute over who had first arrived at the North Pole, one in which both protagonists proved extremely reluctant to produce detailed evidence for their claimed feat.
First out of the gate, Cook had initially led the field, but when he could produce only typewritten transcriptions rather than actual field records, suspicions that he hadn’t actually reached the pole began to mount—especially when the public was reminded by Peary advocates of his widely dismissed claim to have summited Mount McKinley in the previous year. Things did not improve when, allegedly paid off by those same Peary supporters, Cook’s only Mount McKinley climbing companion denied that the pair had attained the peak, and by the end of 1909, Cook’s polar claim had been formally rejected by a committee of the University of Copenhagen.
Then Peary’s extensive network of connections kicked in. In 1910 a committee of the National Geographic Society (which had sponsored his expedition) verified his polar feat, and this success emboldened Peary the next year to petition Congress to certify his achievement and to promote him to vice admiral in the navy. A bill approving both items passed the Senate and ultimately—though not without some pointed questioning—the House. Peary duly retired from the military, to die nine years later laden with honors.
And yet… and yet. Nagging questions remained about the amazing speed of his last dash to the pole and back. Up to the time he inexplicably dismissed most of his remaining companions, he had covered less than ten miles a day. But over that final stretch he allegedly traveled an amazing twenty-six miles daily; and the British geographer J. Gordon Hayes calculated in 1934 that if Peary had actually returned from the pole to the fateful parting point in the time claimed, he would have to have covered an unimaginable and unprecedented fifty-three miles a day. In his book Cook and Peary the author Robert Bryce put it this way: Peary “was a man with big secrets to hide.”
The simplest explanation for sending his expert navigator Bob Bartlett back at the last minute was that Peary knew by then that he was not going to reach the pole; and numerous subsequent analyses confirm that, in reality, he had at best come no closer than about one hundred miles to his goal. Even his sponsor, the National Geographic Society, which for a century supported his claims, eventually conceded that “Peary was actually 30 to 60 miles… short of the Pole.”
What is more, according to the loyal Henson, when he congratulated Peary on arrival at their final camp, purportedly only six miles from the Pole, the evasive response was “I do not suppose we can swear that we are exactly at the Pole.” And that was just the beginning. Henson later recalled: “From the time we knew we were at the Pole Commander [Peary] scarcely spoke to me. Probably he did not speak to me four times on the whole return journey to the ship.… After twenty-two years of close companionship he refused even to say goodbye when we separated in New York… Nearly ten years before we had carried Peary nearly 200 miles with his feet frozen, traveling days and hunting nights for food to keep him and ourselves alive!”
What about Peary himself? Despite his evident reservations at the time, and his rather guilty behavior toward Henson, did he eventually convince himself that he had actually reached the North Pole? That is something we are unlikely ever to know for certain.
Still, chances are that at some level Peary remained aware. By 1909 his strength and endurance were waning. He had already lost most of his toes to frostbite, and he knew, at the age of fifty-three, that this would be his last chance to reach the pole. Blindly, he took it; and then his human capacity to rationalize seems to have taken over. Maybe what went on in his mind was aptly characterized by Frank Bruni of the New York Times, who once wrote, “Of all the abilities that human beings possess, perhaps none is as mysterious as our talent for compartmentalization.… It’s because there are so many chambers inside [the mind], and a few are more hidden from others, even from the person himself.”