(HOST) Commentator Willem Lange has been armchair-adventuring again – this time to the North Pole.
(LANGE) A friend of mine recently sent me a fascinating book. True North, by Bruce Henderson, describes the race to the North Pole by two American explorers, one of them regarded a national hero and the other, in his later life, publicly reviled as a charlatan. Henderson, with access to materials kept secret for 75 years, spins a great story of two quite different individuals, originally congenial shipmates on an early Arctic expedition, who ended up on opposite ends of public opinion, and one of whom clearly set out to discredit and destroy the other.
Hard as it may be to believe, there are many aficionados of exploration and mountaineering (I know a few) to whom this imbroglio is still important. The problem is that the events occurred so long ago, so many important records have been lost or destroyed, and the characters involved were so complicated that the truth is literally unknowable.
The protagonists were Robert E. Peary, a Navy Department engineer, and Dr. Frederick A. Cook, a Brooklyn physician in general practice (when he wasn’t roaming the frigid ends of the earth). Peary, raised by and utterly devoted to his mother – she accompanied him and his bride on their honeymoon – nurtured a burning desire to gain fame through exploration. Cook, on the other hand, seemed captivated by the beauty of unexplored territory, the native people he met there, and the treatment of diseases common to long, sunless winters under stress – scurvy, depression, aggression, and anemia.
In Henderson’s book, Peary appears as an imperious autocrat, jealous of prerogatives, occasionally a thief, and obsessed with reaching (or more importantly, being known for having reached) ninety degrees north. On his last epic sledge trip north, during which he could hardly walk because of toes lost earlier to frostbite, he sent back support sledges driven by competent men, one by one, until he was alone with his African-American batman, Matthew Henson, and a few Inuit, none of whom could compute latitude with the sextant he carried. He returned triumphant, to find that Cook, on a different course and with only two Inuit as company, was claiming to have reached the Pole a year earlier.
Peary and his wealthy friends in the Peary Arctic Club began systematically to destroy Cook’s reputation. A horse packer who had long claimed to have reached the summit of Mt. McKinley with Cook changed his story, and was shortly afterward able to purchase property and the first automobile in his remote Montana village.
Peary’s sealed records were finally opened in 1988 and indicate (as even his supporters admit) he probably faked it. Cook was disgraced and eventually even imprisoned. Peary died at 63 of pernicious anemia Cook had diagnosed years earlier. How did he live even that long under the burden of fraudulent fame? Again, no one knows.
This is Willem Lange in East Montpelier, and I gotta get back to work.