“Peary Discovers the North Pole After Eight Trials in 23 Years” was the headline in The New York Times on September 7, 1909. The article described how, five days after Cook’s declaration, the famous explorer Robert Peary emerged from the Arctic. He walked into a telegraph station at Indian Harbour in Labrador, Canada, and sent his own triumphant announcement.
“I have the pole, April sixth,” Peary had wired, with subsequent messages elaborating upon his claim. Peary was a 53-year-old U.S. Navy officer who was frequently sponsored by the National Geographic Society. He had spent decades developing the sledging practices and frozen routes to reach the North Pole. In the process, he’d lost all but two toes to frostbite. Yet he always trudged onward, never abandoning his dream of being first to reach 90 degrees north.
Upon returning to the edge of civilization, Peary was shocked to receive so little attention for what he expected would be the news of the century. When he learned the reason, he was furious. Peary considered Cook to be a trivial explorer with little chance of winning the prize. As a younger man, the latter had been a field surgeon for Peary during a lengthy Greenland campaign in the early 1890s. Peary was initially impressed by Cook, whom he judged to have a calm temperament, positive attitude, and the requisite physical endurance.
However, the two men had a falling out when Cook sought permission to publish a book about the expedition. The domineering Peary refused. Lacking the influential backers that Peary had long cornered, Cook embarked on his own series of shoestring expeditions to the far north. After completing an impressive first circumnavigation of Denali in 1903, he returned three years later to bag the summit of the tallest mountain in North America. With this feather in his cap, Cook found enough notoriety to line up a single benefactor for a longshot bid at the Pole.
To investigate Cook’s claim, Peary arranged an interview with Ahpellah and Etukishook. With a damning transcript in hand, Peary felt satisfied enough to wire a rebuttal to The New York Times.
“Cook’s story should not be taken too seriously,” Peary wrote. “The Eskimos who accompanied him say that he went no distance north. He did not get out of sight of land.”
The public response was, once again, not what Peary expected. Most of the establishment, including wealthy businessmen and esteemed members of the National Geographic Society, stuck with the celebrity explorer. Everyone else was firmly on the other side. The general public viewed Cook as a plucky underdog competing against a sore loser who belonged to the elites.