Today, on the centennial of Peary's claimed arrival, the bigger question isn't so much who as how: How did Peary's claim to the North Pole trump Cook's? Cook's claim, meanwhile, has come to rest in a sort of polar twilight, neither proved nor disproved, although his descriptions of the Arctic region-made public before Peary's-were verified by later explorers. The question then was: Who had done it? In classrooms and textbooks, Peary was long anointed the discoverer of the North Pole-until 1988, when a re-examination of his records commissioned by the National Geographic Society, a major sponsor of his expeditions, concluded that Peary's evidence never proved his claim and suggested that he knew he might have fallen short.
#Us discovery vs world explorer full
Cook." Cook, an American explorer who had seemingly returned from the dead after more than a year in the Arctic, claimed to have reached the pole in April 1908-a full year before Peary.Īnyone who read the two headlines would know that the North Pole could be "discovered" only once. But it wasn't alone.Ī week earlier, the New York Herald had printed its own front-page headline: "The North Pole is Discovered by Dr. The Times story alone would have been astounding.
Peary sending word from Indian Harbour, Labrador, that he had reached the pole in April 1909, one hundred years ago this month. And here was the American explorer Robert E. On September 7, 1909, readers of the New York Times awakened to a stunning front-page headline: "Peary Discovers the North Pole After Eight Trials in 23 Years." The North Pole was one of the last remaining laurels of earthly exploration, a prize for which countless explorers from many nations had suffered and died for 300 years.
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