It’s to the point that when a new issue of Smithsonian magazine comes out (I have a gift subscription), I expect a major error of either fact or interpretation in a major story.
And, I also expect the magazine not to do anything about it.
April’s entry? Excerpts from Bruce Henderson’s book, “Who Discovered the North Pole,” insinuating Frederick Cook beat Commodore Robert Peary to the North Pole.
Henderson, both in the excerpts and the full book, stacks the deck in favor of Cook, without explicitly saying he beat Peary.
That said, he willfully ignores the painstaking work done by people BESIDES Peary backers showing that, four years before his claimed trek to the Pole, he faked the alleged first ascent of Mout McKinley, and faked it by more than 10,000 feet of altitude.
That said, do I think Peary got to the Pole 100 years ago this month?
Not likely. Probably neither one did. Neither did Admiral Byrd in his plane from Spitzbergen in 1926, per his own mechanic. And, since the Peary and Byrd had eliminated further claimants to going North 90 those two ways, at least until further handicapping like solo voyages, voyages without dogs, etc., probably the first person or people to visit the North Pole, if not from 20,000 leagues deep, in all likelihood popped up from below …
The USS Nautilus in 1958.
However, if it’s the battle of the two by-land claimants for first there, Peary is much more likely than Cook. And, albeit with modern synthetic clothing, gear, etc., his 1909 per-day mileage claims have been met and even exceeded in recent years.
Peary’s claim is plausible. (So, too is fraud; having announced this would be his last journey, he had good motive for fraud.)
Then again, so did Cook; it seems to have been part and parcel of his personality, something that Henderson also ignored.
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