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Did Peary Reach North Pole April 6, 1909?

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(page 5 of 7)

In fact, it was a 1984 "docudrama" on CBS-TV, starring Richard Chamberlain as a heroic Cook and Rod Steiger as a snarling, brutal Peary, that led to the unsealing of the Peary papers. "After that ridiculous, slanted documentary, I went down [to Washington] and read the diaries myself," Ed Stafford said. "They looked so valid and so authentic to me, I figured, 'Why are we keeping them closed? Is there some secret we're trying to hide? Let's get them out in the open; let's have them examined by someone who knows what he's doing. Let's get rid of this goddam Cook controversy. It's been going on long enough.'

"Well," he sighed, "I was successful at least in ending the Cook controversy. But I seem to have opened another whole barrel of snakes."

Last September National Geographic published a story about Peary entitled: "Did He Reach the Pole?" The answer, according to author Wally Herbert, can never be known for sure. But based on certain circumstantial evidence he says he found in the Peary papers -- blank pages in the expedition diary, Peary's "astonishingly slack navigation," a sudden increase in recorded speed after the last witness capable of taking navigational sights had departed, the explorer's peculiar reticence upon arriving at the spot (he told Henson "I don't suppose we could swear we were exactly at the Pole") -- Herbert decided that "Peary failed to provide conclusive evidence that he had reached the North Pole" and may have missed it by as much as 60 miles.

Peary critics -- especially Dennis Rawlins, an astronomer-historian who lives just a few miles away from Stafford, in Baltimore -- have been making the same objections for years. But the National Geographic article caused a sensation for two reasons. One was that it had been the National Geographic Society that originally upheld Peary's claim, after a cursory examination of his records back in 1910. The other was that Wally Herbert, unlike most earlier skeptics, was no "armchair explorer," but a veteran of 13 years of polar experience. In fact, if Peary was not the first man to reach the North Pole by foot and dogsled over the ice, it was Wally Herbert himself, who arrived there at the head of a British expedition on April 6, 1969, 60 years to the day after Peary said he made it.

Herbert's conclusions troubled even Ed Stafford, who has published many articles defending his grandfather's record. "Wally makes a good case," he admitted. "He has me about half convinced that when the admiral made that second set of observations [on April 7, the day after his arrival at the spot he believed to be 90 degrees North] ... it looks as though he was dissatisfied with how close he was. Maybe Wally's right. Maybe at that point he had to decide for himself, in his own conscience, if he were close enough to say he was there. And it took him a long time to make that decision. He was a very honest guy. His statement to Matt Henson indicates that he wasn't as close as he would have liked to have been."

When I asked Stafford if he regretted pushing to unseal the Peary records, he was quiet for a long moment.

"I guess I do," he finally said. ''I'm torn between my loyalty to my grandfather, which has been a central part of my life since I was born, and my mature status as a naval historian. I'm torn between having my grandfather's accomplishments doubted and having the truth on the record, no matter what it is. So it's a hard call. If I had to do it over again, I might not."