WHEN Robert Edwin Peary died 76 years ago, on February 20th, 1920, the greatest mystery of Arctic exploration was still not satisfactorily resolved: did he, or did he not, on an April morning 11 years earlier, succeed in reaching the North Pole and become the first person ever to achieve that goal?
Peary was born in Pennsylvania in 1856 and spent much of his life exploring the northern latitudes. Naturally his great ambition was to be the first to reach the pole itself. According to his own story, he left Camp Bartlett at 5 am on April 2nd, 1909, and after travelling 176 miles across the ice, reached the pole at 10 am on April 6th. There, he said, he planted the American flag, took some souvenir photographs and turned homewards. And that, one might well have thought, was that.
But then, enter a Brooklyn doctor, Frederick Cook, who said he had reached the pole the previous year and gave a colourful description of his journey there and back to prove his point. The contesting claims became something of a cause celebre.
Cook, by all accounts, was a gentle, albeit somewhat enigmatic soul, who was acknowledged to be a talented doctor, a learned ethnologist and a skilled explorer of the polar regions. Peary, on the other hand, was opinionated, brash and quarrelsome, but he had powerful backers who, it was alleged at the time, spared no effort, fair or foul, to ensure that their man won. Poor Cook, embroiled in this unfamiliar world of machiavellian intrigue, stood little chance.
The committee appointed to investigate the claims concluded with due delicacy that the documents supplied by Cook "do not contain certain observations and information which can be regarded as proof that Dr Cook ever reached the North Pole". Individual committee members, however, were less tactful: they hinted that Cook's evidence was forged.
That left Peary - but his story, too, was controversial. If his claims were true, he had completed the return journey from Camp Bartlett to the Pole at the unbelievable average of 38 miles a day over eight consecutive days. The experts found this difficult to countenance: it was suggested that Peary had missed his goal by more than 60 miles, and planted his flag, intentionally or nor, in the wrong place. Ultimately, however, Robert Peary was more or less believed. "Cook was a liar and a gentleman; Peary was neither", was the reluctant verdict of one of those involved.