Arctic Snow Job
By Dennis Drabelle
Sunday, March 2 1997; Page X09
The Washington Post
COOK & PEARY
The Polar Controversy, Resolved
By Robert M. Bryce
Stackpole. 1133 pp. $50
HERE IS a prodigious attempt to settle one of the century's most
intriguing
squabbles: that between American explorers Robert Peary and Frederick
Cook
(and their respective supporters) over which, if either, of them first
stood at the North Pole. The stakes included fame and fortune: In the
1910s,
as now, participants in sensational events could rake in handsome sums
for writing and lecturing on what they'd seen and done. The North Pole,
though, is a queasy place. It doesn't exist in the same way as the
South
Pole, which is a fixed point on dry (if frozen) land. The North Pole is
covered by shifting ice, so that a cairn or flag left there is bound to
have migrated by the time someone else comes along to check an
explorer's
claim. More than perhaps any other place on earth, the North Pole
depends
on the probity of its visitors. Also at stake, then, was a nation's
faith
in the honor of courageous men. Robert Bryce leaves no doubt on that
last
score. Peary may have been a spoiled, insecure New England aristocrat
who
invariably slighted the help he got from Eskimos and his
African-American
aide, Matthew Henson, but he trekked onward despite being in the early
stages of the pernicious anemia that eventually killed him. And the
great
irony about Cook, less polished than Peary but more of a mensch, is
that
his most fought-over journeys contain little-known, undisputed segments
that would do any explorer proud. The two men first met as colleagues.
Cook, a Brooklyn-born physician of German ancestry, signed on as
surgeon
for Peary's 1891-92 expedition to scout the north coast of Greenland.
For
Peary, this turned out to be a solid success: He seemed on his way to
achieving
the glory he sought with a red-hot passion. For Cook, it was a chance
to
soak up expeditionary know-how, to learn from the Eskimos, and to test
himself. He proved to have two remarkable gifts: for ad-libbing
solutions
to the physical problems (e.g., equipment failures) that bedevil
expeditions
and for comfortably inhabiting his own mind during the oppressive
months
of Arctic darkness. That first expedition ended with Cook hooked on
exploring.
He mounted his own trip north in 1894, but it was an undercapitalized
fiasco.
His next foray took him south, as surgeon to the Belgian Antarctic
Expedition
of 1897-99, where he made a lifelong friend of a promising colleague
named
Roald Amundsen. At century's end, Cook was famous: He had become, in
Bryce's
words, "the only man ever to winter within the polar circle of both
hemispheres
. . . " At the same time, Peary kept trying for, but making little
headway
toward, the Pole. Cook and Peary encountered each other again in 1901,
when Cook joined a relief expedition for a Peary venture that had
stalled
in Greenland. At this point they were still on good terms, and for the
next several years Cook stayed off the Arctic board, caught up in a
campaign
to be the first man atop Alaska's Mt. McKinley, the highest peak in
North
America. After failing once, Cook made it in 1906 -- or so he said, and
his climbing partner, Edward Barrill, backed him up. Although it took
several
years to ripen, the first controversy of Cook's career stemmed from
this
expedition. He was accused of passing off a photo of Barrill holding a
flag on a lesser peak as a shot taken at the summit -- a fraud meant to
conceal another failure. Soon afterwards, both Cook and Peary claimed
to
have reached the Pole (in 1908 and 1909, respectively), each at the
head
of his own expedition, conveniently accompanied only by underlings who,
in the belief system of the time, could not testify credibly against
their
superior: Eskimos in Cook's case, Henson in Peary's. As a bemused Cook
supporter observed on hearing the news about Peary, "That is truly
extraordinary
if it is really true. That the pole should be twice discovered in that
short space after all these years of failure on failure is most
remarkable."
Then, putting the best face on it, he added, "It is what I had been
hoping
earnestly for . . . [Now] they [can] corroborate each other; Cook's
story
[can] be verified by Peary's . . . " No such thing. Instead of
hammering
out a joint vindication, the explorers turned on each other. Peary
supporters
persuaded Barrill to renege. He and Cook got nowhere near the top of
McKinley,
he now swore, and the entry to the contrary in Barrill's diary had been
dictated by Cook. A man who would lie about climbing a mountain, it was
said, could hardly be trusted when it came to a pole. But now the great
irony of Peary's career kicked in. His onslaughts against Cook
unwittingly
called attention to the creaky joints of his own account -- especially
the paltry navigational data in support of an almost supernaturally
rapid
dash to the Pole and back. The debate over who discovered the North
Pole
became a national fixation, further intensified by events down under:
In
1912 Amundsen, a Norwegian, won the race to the South Pole, beating the
Englishman Robert Falcon Scott, who got there five weeks late and then
perished in an Antarctic blizzard. BRYCE, who is a research librarian
at
Montgomery College, has mastered a staggering amount of material.
Drawing
on several recent books and articles about Peary, he dismisses that
explorer's
claim relatively quickly. In a rare sally, Bryce scoffs at the National
Geographic Society's 1990 announcement that it had resolved the
controversy
once and for all in Peary's favor: "It was a decidedly unilateral
declaration."
Instead Bryce dwells on Cook, whose character clearly fascinates him.
Late
in his career, Cook was convicted of mail fraud in connection with a
Texas
oil well scheme, and served time in jail. But rather than lazily assume
that one swindle proves two others, Bryce has pored over every page of
the record, from the first Greenland trek to the last day in the Texas
courtroom. In this he has been helped by the human propensity to play
magpie.
Cook's last lineal descendant died in 1989, leaving her forebear's
papers
to the Library of Congress. "They were to reveal," Bryce writes, "far
more
than anyone expected of them." What they showed, in essence, was that
Cook
had indeed faked his triumphs: cropping photographs, publishing
accounts
that varied markedly from his field notes, leaving telltale erasures
and
inconsistencies in the notebooks themselves. After all this time, Cook
has been damned, in effect, out of his own mouth. What will always
remain
a mystery is how he -- and Peary, for that matter -- justified his lies
to himself. (Perhaps such a deception builds upon the horrendous
conditions
in the far north, the explorers' heroic work, and fate's cruelty in
keeping
them from reaching their goal; given those conditions, the urge to
claim
as true what ought to have been true may be irresistible.) Since
Richard
Byrd's claim to have flown over the North Pole by plane has been
largely
discredited, all of this seems to leave Amundsen, who swung by in a
dirigible
in 1926, as a polar champion twice over. Its immense length aside, Cook
& Peary is a demanding book. Bryce has made what seems to me a
strategic
mistake: laying out the facts with next to no comment in Part One and
interpreting
them in Part Two. This division burdens the reader with too many
pedestrian
pages to labor through before being rewarded with the author's densely
reasoned conclusions. And even in Part Two Bryce's style fails to evoke
the drama called for by the material. Still, exploration buffs and
students
of popular culture will find Cook & Peary riveting, and if the
controversy
has not come to an end it has at least been raised to a new level of
formidable
research and exactitude. Dennis Drabelle is a Washington writer and
editor.
He won the 1996 National Book Critics Circle citation for excellence in
reviewing.
@CAPTION: Map drawn by Cook (left) and map of Peary's route.
Drawing
of Cook (top) and a photograph of Peary (c) Copyright 1997 The
Washington
Post Company
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