Bathymetrical chart of depth of North Polar Seas drawn by Fridtjof Nansen, 1893-96.
ROBERT PEARY
By the late nineteenth century, with the Northwest Passage finally discovered (though not yet completely navigated – see Roald Amundsen Conquers the Northwest Passage – and the Race to the South Pole entry here), the geographic poles, as the last great parts unknown, beckoned. It remained a complete mystery as to what would be found there. The possibility of an Arctic Ocean frozen solid, and therefore necessitating trek by foot, was unacceptable – surely there had to be a navigable route to the geographic North Pole. And so the early belief held by sixteenth-century explorers like Sir Martin Frobisher, in a liquid Arctic sea thawed by the sun’s intensity, had not died but evolved through scientific conjecture. For Victorian Polar explorers this came in the theory of the respected German cartographer August Petermann, who proposed in the 1850s that warm southern currents created portals in the walls of the pack-ice barrier, leading to a negotiable channel. The suggestion of these Thermometric Gateways had fatal consequences – in 1879 the American explorer George Washington De Long pursued such an entrance aboard the Jeanette to this theoretical Open Polar Sea. The ship became trapped in ice beyond the Bering Strait, and the thirty-three-man expedition was forced to strike out with sleds and then small sailing boats for Siberia. De Long and nineteen of his crew died.
Three years after the Jeanette had been snared in the Arctic ice, remains of the ship were found to have been spat out and carried adrift all the way to the southwest coast of Greenland. This gave rise to one of the most ambitious ideas in the history of Polar exploration. In 1889, with the solidity of the Arctic ocean now reluctantly accepted, the Norwegian explorer and future Nobel Peace Prize laureate Fridtjof Nansen proposed that, instead of battling the ice and dodging the closing jaws of the floes in search of a way through, what if a ship were designed to be deliberately trapped in the ice, to ride the natural drift of the sheets as they – theoretically – carried the vessel effortlessly to the Pole. The Fram (‘Forward’) was constructed in Norway using the strongest oak available, with a rounded-hull design that would ensure the boat would be lifted upwards as the ice closed around it.
In June 1893 the most robust vessel ever built, and smaller than its predecessors, left Oslo with a crew of just twelve and followed the Siberian coast. Pack ice was sighted and Nansen led his ship into the stiffening field at a position of 78°49’N, 132°53’E, where he gave the order to stop the engine and raise the rudder. For sixteen months the Norwegians were borne by their ice-floe cradle towards the Pole, the men passing the time by reading from the 600-volume library and enjoying the ample provisions. However by early 1895 it became clear that they would drift past the North Pole by some 300 miles (500km) and so with magnificent bravery Nansen left the ship and, with Hjalmar Johansen, set out to reach the North Pole by trekking across the ice. After hitting a record 86°N their chronometers stopped and they found themselves on a floe carrying them south faster than they could move north, and were forced to retreat, riding the floe south to Franz Josef Land. To the astonishment of both parties there they encountered a British expedition led by Frederick Jackson, and in September 1896 Nansen was reunited with the Fram.
Assaults on the Geographic North Pole continued into the twentieth century, and in September 1909 the front page of the New York Herald broke the news: ‘The North Pole is Discovered by Dr Frederick A. Cook’. Cook, an American physician and explorer, had last been seen in February 1908, when he had set out from Greenland to cross Smith Sound to Ellesmere Island in the northern Canadian Arctic. With a party of ten Inuit assistants, eleven sledges and 105 dogs, he had crossed the frozen Bay fjord to reach Cape Thomas Howard, a headland that projected into the Arctic ocean. After three days of crossing the frozen Arctic Ocean only two Inuit companions, Ahwelaw and Etukishook, remained, and together the three men had disappeared into a Polar blizzard on a direct heading for the Pole. Now, back from the ‘dead’ after a year of mysterious wanderings through the Northland, Cook telegrammed home the news that he had reached the North Pole on 21 April 1908, after which he had been unable to return to Greenland because of open water, and so had waited out the season on Devon Island.
The news was celebrated around the world, and Cook received a celebrity reception on his arrival in Copenhagen en route home. The public was in for a shock, however, when just a week later the newspapers carried a second announcement: ‘Peary Discovers the North Pole After Eight Trials in 23 Years.’ Robert Peary, an American explorer and navy officer, had sent a telegram from Labrador declaring his own North Pole discovery made on 6 April 1909, and furiously contested Cook. Ahwelaw and Etukishook, he revealed, had testified to him that Cook had never left the mainland. Thus began the Cook–Peary controversy, which to this day has never been resolved – we still can’t conclusively identify the first man to reach the Geographic North Pole. This is because the accounts of both explorers have been found to be seriously flawed, with neither providing sufficient supporting evidence. Cook’s photographs of himself at the North Pole were found to be cropped pictures of Alaska taken years before (his photos supporting his earlier claim to have conquered Alaskan Mount McKinley have also been proven to be fake). He never produced detailed navigational records, and the diary he handed to Danish authorities was clearly written after the fact. He had also mapped a new landmass he called Bradley Land, ‘with mountains and high valleys’, which has been shown to be non-existent.
With so much cause to doubt Cook, then, what of Peary’s claim? He too appears to have invented a landmass, named Crocker Land in honour of the banker George Crocker who had stumped up $50,000 for Peary’s expedition. None of his Inuit helpers nor his servant Matthew Henson corroborated his calculations, and subsequent analysis of his logbook revealed troubling inconsistencies in his measurements. This includes the claim to have travelled 225 miles (362km) in the four days in which he went to and from the Pole, a daily speed of 56 miles (90km) that no one has ever come close to matching.
