The Icegate

PEARY AT THE NORTH POLE: FACT OR FICTION

by DENNIS RAWLINS

319 pages. Luce. $8.95.

WINNER LOSE ALL: DR. COOK AND THE THEFT OF THE NORTH POLE

by HUGH EAMES

346 pages. Little, Brown. $8.95.

According to the first law of hero-dynamics, every epic action has an equal and opposite reaction. One nation's hero is some other nation's villain; one man's idol is another's voodoo doll. The second law is that legends tend to polarize and absolute legends polarize absolutely.

For most Americans, Rear Admiral Robert Edwin Peary, U.S.N., is an absolute legend that goes like this: on April 6, 1909, after 23 years, eight attempts and Arctic hardships that included the loss of his toes, Peary became the first man to stand at the North Pole. It is a nearly perfect schoolboy legend of endurance and courage rewarded with honor and wealth. There is even a touch of Melville in Peary's faithful black polar companion, Matthew Henson, who wound up with a $900-a-year job as a messenger at the U.S. Customs House.

Yet, as history, the saga of Robert Peary was fissured from the beginning. Peary was never reticent about his hunger for glory. Like Douglas MacArthur, he wrote ringing letters about ambition to his mother. Resting in his igloo after the last polar trip, he contemplated elaborate designs for his mausoleum. But according to Matt Henson's recollections, Peary was sullen and evasive about their exact positions at the top of the world. He asserted his claim to the Pole only after returning to civilization and learning that the world was already crediting the achievement to Frederick A. Cook, a Brooklyn physician. The stakes were high for both men: the polar itch had become the obsession of their lives, but there were also publishing contracts and lucrative lecture tours.

Peary and Cook were quite different. A Peary expedition was a big production with Government support and financial backing from a group of New York millionaires. Cook was a loner who had worked his way through medical school as a milkman. He preferred to travel light, live like an Eskimo and depend on his ingenuity. On one expedition to the Antarctic he saved his ship from the ice by using the bodies of penguins as bumpers. He designed clever gear, including a sled that could be converted into a kayak.

Once below the Arctic Circle, however, Peary and his friends could pull most strings. It took them two years to turn the tide of public opinion against Cook and in their favor. Cook fought back, but he was his own worst enemy. He had seriously damaged his credibility in 1906 with a photograph purporting to show him atop Mount McKinley--an assertion that has never been satisfactorily proved. His last great misadventure was as an oil-stock promoter in Texas, where a mail-fraud scandal got him five years in Leavenworth.

Nevertheless, the Peary-Cook controversy smolders on, as dark and smelly as an Eskimo's blubber lamp. The Pearyites generally stand pat on the slushy record. Cook's boosters, like California Biographer Hugh Eames, author of Winner Lose All, tend to heap benefits where there is clearly doubt and portray their man as an unworldly underdog, victimized by the Establishment. Eames' assertion that Cook reached the North Pole on April 21, 1908, is not even borne out by Cook himself, who would not vouch for the accuracy of his instrument readings beyond a "reasonable certainty." It is also reasonably certain that Peary's friends, who included newspaper executives, took special care and relish in destroying Cook. For all his shadiness, he still cuts a heroic figure. Unfortunately, the fullness of his personality is flattened by Eames' frequently naive attempts to prove what remains unprovable.

Dennis Rawlins, a former professor of physics and astronomy at New Jersey's Upsala College, appears to have come closer to the truth. It is most unlikely, he concludes, that either Peary or Cook ever reached the North Pole, 90DEG north latitude, 0DEG longitude. The odds against their finding it were too great. For the North Pole is a purely theoretical location hovering over immense seas of drifting, heaving ice. To Rawlins, Peary's claim that he made a beeline to the Pole over such terrain in--50DEG F. temperatures is hard to swallow, particularly since he used his sextant sparingly. On the last leg of his trek, he ordered his only thoroughly trained navigator to stay behind. Peary's recorded speeds of the final march far exceed the rate he had managed previously. Others have noted that the logs Peary presented as evidence were surprisingly clean considering that Arctic explorers seldom washed before or after eating their greasy pemmican.

Scientific Job. The absence of verifiable navigational calculations also discredited Cook's story. Yet in 1911, Peary's records struggled past a congressional subcommittee review. Despite serious reservations, none of the Congressmen were eager to question Peary's words as a gentleman and Navy officer. Such was the atmosphere in the days when exploration was a patriotic sport and not a scientific job.

Who then was the first man to verify beyond doubt reaching the North Pole on a journey over the ice? Revising history is frequently a comedown for the hero (and antihero) worshiper. But for the record: it was not one man at all but a U.S.-Canadian team led by one Ralph Plaisted of Minnesota. The party arrived April 19, 1968, without so much as a mush. They were riding Ski-Doos.

qed R.Z. Sheppard

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