SCEPTICISM ABOUT THE VALUE OF POLAR EXPLORATION WAS STILL rampant after our attempt at Mt. McKinley. The one explorer who seemed to be exempt from it was Peary, who had risen to his new rank of commander on the basis of seniority, the openly hostile navy admirals being scornful of the notion that polar exploration could be construed as service to either the navy or the country.
Peary, Dr. Cook learned at a meeting of the Peary Arctic Club, had been voted the backing for yet another ship, and he would try for the North Pole again starting in the summer of 1905. “You’d think,” Dr. Cook said, “that all that had kept him from succeeding the last time was the Windward.” But he appeared to take the news of what seemed to me to be a major setback for him surprisingly well.
“There is a general feeling,” he said, “that it would not be right if his disastrous four-year expedition proved to be his last. He is being allowed one last chance, not to make it to the pole, but to save face, to go out on the proper note. He has fooled the money-men again. And he has named his ship the Roosevelt. The president believes Peary to be as fine an example of American manhood and the ‘hardy virtues’ as can be found—next to himself, of course. While Peary is failing yet again to reach the pole, I will be making my way to the top of Mt. McKinley. And when my success is set beside Peary’s failure, there will be no question as to which of us is America’s foremost explorer.” It sounded hollow, almost desperate.
In the summer of 1905, Peary steamed from Smith Sound to Cape Sheridan in the hopes of making it to the northernmost tip of Grant Land before proceeding from there by sled to the pole. He was soon beyond the range of the farthest-flung telegraph station, so there was no telling how much progress, if any, he was making.
Dr. Cook began making plans for his second try at Mt. McKinley, which was to take place in the summer of 1906, almost exactly a year from the date of Peary’s departure for the pole.
Peary’s exact whereabouts were unknown when Dr. Cook and I set out for Mt. McKinley with an entirely different climbing party than before, including one highly experienced climber named Herschel Parker, a physics professor from Columbia University. This second attempt was again being funded by Mrs. Cook, and by an advance from Harper’s Monthly magazine for the exclusive rights to our story, which Dr. Cook had been asked to write.
We again crossed the American continent northwest by train—again travelled the same Klondike boat route to Tyonek, endured the same hardships, overcame the same obstacles as before, so that I could not help thinking of the backer who was quoted in the papers as having asked what the point was of “giving money to explorers to enable them to re-enact their failures.”
We travelled on slush-thick streams that were fed by melting glaciers. We completed the same steep hike to about seven thousand feet as before, at which point the real mountain climbing began and it became apparent who the real mountain climbers were.
I was not much interested in McKinley, and so was not disappointed when Dr. Cook told me that I would not be among those to attempt the summit.
One of our group, William Armstrong, at the first sight of snow on Mt. McKinley, declared that he would “rather jump from the Brooklyn Bridge than climb McKinley above the snow line.”
Informed by Dr. Cook that the chances of anyone making it even close to the summit were slim, Professor Parker also turned back. The rest of us were still on the mountain when he was halfway to New York on the eastbound continental.
Dr. Cook chose from among the remaining members of the party a man named William Barrill to be his lone companion on the climb from the snowline to the summit. They left base camp on August 27, fully expecting to fail, and returned on September 22 with the news that they had reached the top. A photograph, taken by Dr. Cook, of Barrill standing at the end of an upward-sloping set of footprints in the snow and holding the American flag on the summit of Mt. McKinley was printed in Harper’s shortly after we returned to Brooklyn in the fall. Herschel Parker dismissed Dr. Cook’s accomplishment as “merely a feat of endurance having no scientific value.”
But Dr. Cook was otherwise celebrated as a hero. Peary, his exact whereabouts unknown, was still up north.
Dr. Cook was suddenly in great demand as a lecturer and dinner guest, as was I suddenly in great demand as what the papers called his “precocious sidekick.” Wherever he spoke, wherever we went, he said he could not have reached the summit of McKinley if not for me, the only member of the climbing party, including Barrill, who had never doubted him.
As before, I felt that I had merely taken part in an extended camping trip. But I knew that it would diminish his accomplishment to make light of my own contribution to it, so I accepted his compliments with what was taken to be my “characteristically laconic modesty,” even though I suspected myself capable of getting lost in Central Park, my promised tutelage at the hands of Dr. Cook having not yet begun.
I was eager to begin what I considered to be our real quest, a quest on which, as it would involve no climbing, Dr. Cook would have the time to explain his methods and strategy to me, and I could be of real assistance to him.
Peary returned after yet another failed attempt to reach the pole, the Roosevelt so badly damaged that it had to be moored in Philadelphia for fear it would sink on its way back to its home port of New York.