How Do You Win the Race to the North Pole? You Cheat.

Imagine you are an explorer who has dedicated your life to conquering one of the world’s last great unknowns: the North Pole. You have given up decades in which you abandoned your family, weathered almost unimaginable conditions, and sacrificed toes in your pursuit of becoming the first to reach the great wintry apex of the world that grabbed hold of your imagination as a youth and became the single-minded obsession of your career, of your life. 

And, yet, after all this sweat and sacrifice, you have always come up short. 

Everything has led you to this one final mission, your last chance to conquer the North Pole and claim the coveted title of “first.”

My Labor Day at the North PoleTop of the World

Mimi Sheraton, Noah Rothbaum

So, what would you do if you arrived back to civilization after an arduous expedition in which you achieved the dream of your life, or at least got close enough that you were comfortable claiming the victory as your own—after a lifetime of work, you deserve it, after all—only to discover that a fellow explorer, a man you trained and whom you now consider a rival, has declared that he reached the great icy prize nearly a full year before you? 

If you are the great arctic explorer Robert Peary, the answer is simple: you launch a full out assault including sabotage, a disinformation campaign, and a political offensive; whatever it takes to ensure that your name is the one that will go down in the history books. 

Peary’s tactics worked, at least for most of the 20th century. A media brouhaha broke out in 1909 after the two competing American claims to the North Pole were issued just five days apart, but Peary’s relentless crusade prevailed. As the decades have passed, however, the icy finger of justice—and a reexamination of the evidence—has pointed more firmly in the direction of Frederick Cook.

In the late days of the 19th century, the siren call of the arctic was strong. Robert M. Bryce explains this enchantment in Cook & Peary: The Polar Controversy, Resolved, writing that the North Pole is “a spot in the mind of man where even the concepts of the mind—time and direction—are no longer valid, where every direction is south and a year is divided into one day and one night…

“There is nothing to mark it—no land, no permanent feature. It is indistinguishable by eye from any other point on that vast frozen sea a mile, or a hundred miles, in the only direction from it. To wish to visit it—to try to visit such a place—would seem a mad quest.”

But this mad quest became an obsession of Peary’s, starting in his high school years after a bout of typhoid fever left him bed-bound with only his overly devoted mother and books on natural history for company.

As a young man, he dipped his toe into the waters of exploration by joining the U.S. Navy as a civil engineer.

On one early trip in 1884 when he was sailing down to Nicaragua on a Navy mission to see if an Atlantic-to-Pacific canal would be possible (the military ultimately chose Panama), Peary wrote to his mother that the achievements of Columbus “can be equaled only by him who shall one day stand with 360 degrees of longitude beneath his motionless feet and for whom East and West shall have vanished—the discoverer of the North Pole.” 

According to Bruce Henderson in True North: Peary, Cook, and the Race to the Pole, the North Pole was always on his mind. 

Cook entered the world of exploration on something of a whim. After losing his wife and newborn in childbirth hours after he earned his medical degree, Peary lost himself in books on Arctic exploration when he wasn’t running his burgeoning medical practice. But a cloud of depression followed him until he saw a notice in the New York Herald in 1891 calling for a doctor to join an expedition to Greenland captained by a Robert Peary. He immediately applied. 

While it is safe to say that Cook was unprepared for his new role as explorer, he took to the challenge with an equanimity and verve that would set the foundation for what would become a life of adventure. 

Peary’s objective for this mission was to discover the northern boundary of Greenland, and Cook was an integral member of the team.

He cared for the expedition staff during the long winter of hibernation and spring of exploration, including treating Peary for a critically injured leg early in the trip; he studied the culture and language of the indigenous people, without whose help no Arctic achievements would have ever been possible; and he was an essential member of many of the hunting and exploration parties.

Peary was initially satisfied with his one-off foray into adventure. But once he recovered from the long and arduous trip, Henderson says Peary admitted “the lure of the Arctic becomes a permanent drawing power for life.” 

Cook and Peary ended the trip on good terms. There was a little kerfuffle over Cook’s interest in publishing his anthropological research in the scholarly press—Peary made his team sign away all rights to their expedition accounts until a year after he published his own—but overall, both men were complimentary about each other. 

Over the ensuing decade, each continued his pursuit of exploration. While Cook was exploring the Antarctic, becoming icebound on a ship for a winter during which he designed innovative equipment for arctic exploration and spearheaded the effort to free his expedition from the ice, Peary was trying to reach the North Pole.

While Cook was being feted as the first explorer to plant a boot in both the Arctic and Antarctic, Peary was trying to reach the North Pole. While Cook was learning mountaineering and becoming one of the earliest explorers of Denali, the tallest peak in North America, Peary was trying to reach the North Pole. 

Peary was naturally domineering when it came to his crew. But as the years passed and the prize remained just out of his grasp, his mania for the North Pole became even more pronounced and his methods even more shady.

He was known to refuse assistance to competing explorers, to ignore their finds and to instead claim those places and naming rights as his own, and to publicly tout the “discoveries” of new landmasses and features that would turn out to be not quite what he claimed. 

As Henderson writes, “Peary increasingly believed the Arctic to be his private domain and regarded with suspicion any man whose ambitions might converge on his own.” 

While the North Pole never really left Cook (“It is the ambition of my life,” he once said), his desire to reach the elusive spot wasn’t a burning passion that he plotted and planned to achieve for years. Instead, in 1907, the opportunity fortuitously arose for Cook to return to his first stomping grounds as a guide to a wealthy hunter.

Just months ahead of their departure, he decided to prepare for a dash to the Pole. If the opportunity arose—good weather, available indigenous guides and dogs—he would take it. If not, he would return home with his patron. 

At the same time, Peary was also planning his final expedition to the North Pole. The trip that was supposed to launch in 1907 was delayed due to boat repairs, and his departure for Greenland rescheduled for the next year. While Peary was stewing in New York in the fall of 1907, he received word that Cook was in Greenland, hunkering down for the winter and planning a dash north once spring hit. Peary was livid. 

By most accounts, that dash to the Pole was successful. Cook had the very best instruments for determining his position, assiduously recorded his progress, and was as confident as any scientist could be that he had achieved the dream of reaching the North Pole. But Cook and his two companions faced major difficulties on their return home. Unable to get back before winter set in, they were forced to hunker down for the season in conditions of extreme deprivation. 

So, while Peary was in Greenland in 1908 settling in for the winter before making his own attempt on the Pole, Cook was holed up in an ice cave waiting to make his way home after his trip to the Pole. 

Despite the insurmountable odds against them, Cook and his two companions finally made it back from the great unknown. Planning to take the long road home through Europe, Cook left his instruments and many of his notes and logbooks in three locked trunks with the wealthy hunter, asking him to take them directly back to the U.S. on his ship home. Cook knew these materials would be vital to proving his achievement. 

While Cook was attending dinners in his honor in Copenhagen, Peary was emerging from the North claiming his own victory. The timing was not on the former’s side. The available ship home for his boxes of evidence turned out to be Peary’s. 

When Peary first arrived in Greenland while Cook was still in the North, Peary declared his rival dead and commandeered all of the possessions that the other adventurer had left behind—all of his supplies as well as the collection of furs and skins that he had amassed in order to help pay for his trip home. 

According to Henderson, Peary had a sign posted on Cook’s house that proclaimed: “This house belongs to Dr. F.A. Cook, But Dr. Cook is long ago dead and there is no use to search for him. Therefore, I, Commander Robert E. Peary, install my boatswain in this deserted house.” 

When Peary returned from his own trip to the North Pole, he got wind that Cook had come through claiming to have succeeded a year earlier and that he had left behind some things for transportation. Peary demanded that not one item belonging to Cook should ride home on his ship. The three locked boxes were forced off and stowed in Greenland. They would never be seen again. 

Now that he had compromised the evidence, Peary began to spread the word that Cook was a fraud and to bolster his own claims as the first man to reach the North Pole. The records of Peary’s own achievements were lacking, to say the least. As he neared the Pole, his measurements were fewer and far between and the numbers just didn’t add up.

Cook gave a detailed account of what he saw; Peary waited until he had a chance to read Cook’s recollections before he gave his own. Cook initially told two explorers in Greenland of his adventure, not to mention the two Eskimos who had witnessed it, and the stories never changed as he began to face fierce scrutiny. Most of the men closest to Peary’s expedition doubted that he had truly reached the coveted spot. (Many believed he had turned back just shy of the goal.)

Despite the evidence against him, Peary’s campaign was a success. He was named the first to the North Pole by National Geographic and in a bill passed by Congress, both of which were the result of heavily prejudiced pressure. 

While Cook was never one to seek public praise, he spent the rest of his life fighting to have the controversy revisited and his record reclaimed. While he may not have achieved the recognition he hoped for in his life, he did achieve one equally as important distinction.

While Peary refused to honor anyone else who contributed to his achievements, including his African-American assistant who was with him on every single one of his journeys, Cook was the first to give credit where it was due. The book he wrote about his North Pole adventure was dedicated: 

“To the Indian who invented pemmican and snowshoes; 

To the Eskimo who gave the art of sled traveling; 

To this twin family of wild folk who have no flag 

Goes the first credit.”