Upon returning to a new Navy assignment in Washington, D. I will be foremost in the highest circles in the capital, and make powerful friends with whom I can shape my future instead of letting it come as it will Remember, mother, I must have fame.
Peary, born in , was one of the last of the imperialistic explorers, chasing fame at any cost and caring for the local people's well-being only to the extent that it might affect their usefulness to him. In Greenland in , he ordered his men to open the graves of several natives who had died in an epidemic the previous year—then sold their remains to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City as anthropological specimens.
He also brought back living natives—two men, a woman and three youngsters—and dropped them off for study at the museum; within a year four of them were dead from a strain of influenza to which they had no resistance. Cook, born in , would join a new wave of explorers who took a keen interest in the indigenous peoples they came across. For years, in both the Arctic and the Antarctic, he learned their dialects and adopted their diet.
Differences between the two men began to surface after their first trip to Greenland. In , Cook backed out of another Arctic journey because of a contract prohibiting any expedition member from publishing anything about the trip before Peary published his account of it.
Cook wanted to publish the results of an ethnological study of Arctic natives, but Peary said it would set "a bad precedent. Cook sailed north on a rescue ship, found Peary and treated him for ailments ranging from scurvy to heart problems.
Cook also traveled on his own to the Antarctic and made two attempts to scale Alaska's Mount McKinley, claiming to be the first to succeed in Peary, for his part, made another attempt to reach the North Pole in , his sixth Arctic expedition. By then, he had come to think of the pole as his birthright. Any endeavor to reach the pole is complicated by this fact: unlike the South Pole, which lies on a landmass, the North Pole lies on drifting sea ice.
After fixing your position at 90 degrees north—where all directions point south—there is no way to mark the spot, because the ice is constantly moving.
Cook's expedition to the pole departed Gloucester, Massachusetts, in July on a schooner to northern Greenland. There, at Annoatok, a native settlement miles from the pole, he established a base camp and wintered over. He left for the pole in February with a party of nine natives and 11 light sledges pulled by dogs, planning to follow an untried but promising route described by Otto Sverdrup, the leader of an Norwegian mapping party. According to Cook's book My Attainment of the Pole , his party followed the musk ox feeding grounds that Sverdrup had observed, through Ellesmere and Axel Heiberg islands to Cape Stallworthy at the edge of the frozen Arctic Sea.
The men had the advantage of eating fresh meat and conserving their stores of pemmican a greasy mixture of fat and protein that was a staple for Arctic explorers made of beef, ox tenderloin and walrus. As the party pushed northward, members of Cook's support team turned back as planned, leaving him with two native hunters, Etukishook and Ahwelah. In 24 days Cook's party went miles—a daily average of 15 miles.
Cook was the first to describe a frozen polar sea in continuous motion and, at 88 degrees north, an enormous, "flat-topped" ice island, higher and thicker than sea ice. For days, Cook wrote, he and his companions struggled through a violent wind that made every breath painful. At noon on April 21, , he used his custom-made French sextant to determine that they were "at a spot which was as near as possible" to the pole.
At the time, speculation about what was at the pole ranged from an open sea to a lost civilization. Cook wrote that he and his men stayed there for two days, during which the doctor reported taking more observations with his sextant to confirm their position. Before leaving, he said, he deposited a note in a brass tube, which he buried in a crevasse.
Cook, like other Arctic explorers of the day, had assumed that anyone returning from the pole would drift eastward with the polar ice. However, he would be the first to report a westerly drift—after he and his party were carried miles west of their planned route, far from supplies they had cached on land.
In many places the ice cracked, creating sections of open water. Without the collapsible boat they had brought along, Cook wrote, they would have been cut off any number of times. When winter's onslaught made travel impossible, the three men hunkered down for four months in a cave on Devon Island, south of Ellesmere Island.
After they ran out of ammunition, they hunted with spears. In February , the weather and ice improved enough to allow them to walk across frozen Smith Sound back to Annoatok, where they arrived—emaciated and arrayed in rags of fur—in April , some 14 months after they had set out for the pole. At Annoatok, Cook met Harry Whitney, an American sportsman on an Arctic hunting trip, who told him that many people believed Cook had disappeared and died.
Whitney also told him that Peary had departed from a camp just south of Annoatok on his own North Pole expedition eight months earlier, in August Peary had assembled his customary large party—50 men, nearly as many heavy sledges and dogs to pull them—for use in a relay sledge train that would deposit supplies ahead of him. He called this the "Peary system" and was using it even though it had failed him in his attempt, when the ice split and open water kept him from his caches for long periods.
On this try, Peary again faced stretches of open water that could extend for miles. He had no boat, so his party had to wait, sometimes for days, for the ice to close up. Peary's party advanced miles in a month. When adjusted for the days they were held up, their average progress came to about 13 miles a day.
When they were some miles from the pole, Peary sent everyone back except four natives and Matthew Henson, an African-American from Maryland who had accompanied him on his previous Arctic expeditions.
A few days later—on April 6, —at the end of an exhausting day's march, Henson, who could not use a sextant, had a "feeling" they were at the pole, he later told the Boston American. On that hour in April, , that this man stopped his dog sledges, pulled out his sextant, and with mittened fingers fixed the instrument on the north star, shining out of the arctic night, he found himself — if the world will credit his statement — at latitude 90 and longitude anything he pleased.
He found that by shifting the position of his feet on the tip of the world he could throw himself across a span of longitudinal lines that swiftest train and steamer could not cover in forty days. Perhaps in a whimsical moment this Brooklyn explorer balanced himself on the toe of one bearskin boot and whirled from right to left.
It took Dr. Cook months to work his way back from the region into which he had penetrated. It took only a few hours for his deed to become known in every city, every village, every spot on earth where civilized men hold communication with one another.
And the world gasped and smiled, and cried out the questions:. Who is Cook? How did he do it? What good is it? What does it mean to the world of the future? Thousands of men seized thousands of maps and searched for the spot whose attainment had caused all this uproar. They found ragged lines showing where continents had been traced by voyagers of former years; and then they found a blank — a blank indicating the spaces never penetrated.
They found a circle, the imaginary line tracing the realm of the arctic, and other circles showing 80 degrees north latitude, and 85 degrees north latitude, and in the center of it all, that blank. Some now drew a dotted line from Greenland to the middle of this vacant spot, and they began to understand what Dr. Cook had done.
What he did was to enter one of the few fastnesses of the earth, to explore one of the two spots thus far left unexplored, — one the North Pole, and the other the South Pole. He had been to a place where, says Sir Robert Ball, the noted English astronomer, "the sun rises and sets only once a year — six months daylight, six months night, mitigated only by a little twilight at the beginning and end of a period of awful gloom, broken by occasional moonlight or aurora.
Cook, standing there, faced due south, whichever way he looked. He was more than twenty miles nearer the center of the earth than if he stood at the equator. His weight was greater than anywhere else on the surface of the globe.
A plumb-line in his hand pointed vertically upward to the pole of the heavens, around which all stars revolve. The famous constellation Orion ever circled around and around this horizon. The pole star stood directly over his head.
In summing up the meaning of what Dr. Cook did, Herbert L. Bridgman, secretary of the Peary Arctic club of New York, used these telling words:. What is the value of this achievement? Viewing the matter from viewpoints of the general public — as a great triumph of man over nature, as the achievement of a daring physical feat of the first magnitude — the news from Copenhagen makes Dr.
Cook deservedly one of the great figures of the decade. He is the Columbus of the Arctic. What he has done no one can ever excel. In Part I of this two-part article, author Jeff Blumenfeld explains how skis played a critical role in the early Arctic and polar expeditions of Fridtjof Nansen Greenland, , Robert E. Scott South Pole, and T hroughout the modern era of polar exploration, skis have played an invaluable role in propelling explorers forward—sometimes with dogsled teams, sometimes without, and more recently, with kites to glide across the polar regions at speeds averaging 7 mph.
Modern-day polar explorers including Eric Larsen, Paul Schurke, Will Steger and Richard Weber all continue to use skis today, taking a page right out of history. Were it not for skis, reaching the North and South poles in the early s might have been delayed until years later. This long-awaited message from American explorer Robert E. Peary — flashed around the globe by cable and telegraph on the afternoon of September 6, But was Peary first to achieve this expeditionary Holy Grail? That was the year a wiry Minnesotan named Will Steger, a former science teacher then aged 41, launched his day Steger North Pole Expedition, financed by cash and gear from more than 60 companies.
The expedition would become the first confirmed, non-mechanized and unsupported dogsled and ski journey to the North Pole, proving it was indeed possible back in the early s to have reached the pole in this manner, regardless of whether Peary or Cook arrived first. Dogs are the long-haul truckers of polar exploration.
The teams faced temperatures as low as minus 68 degrees F, raging storms and surging tofeet pressure ridges of ice. In its basic equipment, this mode of travel was not far removed from the early days of polar exploration. Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen — , an accomplished skier, skater and ski jumper, carved his name in polar exploration by achieving the first crossing of the Greenland ice cap in , traversing the island on skis.
Some might even consider their display of the flag desecration. Yet, it should be remembered that the U. Flag Code was first created in , and it was not until that the Federal Government adopted it. Posted by John M. Hartvigsen at PM. Vexman October 8, at PM. Newer Post Older Post Home. Subscribe to: Post Comments Atom.
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