Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000

I have finally started reading the last chapter of Rawlins' book, about Henshaw Ward's "startling discoveries." These include the fact that some Naval Officer named Valentine Wood remembered, in 1934, that in 1913 Colby Chester (no relation to the cheese of the same name) had Peary's original field notebook (really? where is it now? how come Peary let him have it?).

Chester was asked by NGS to review the calculations (in 1913? they had already given their endorsement in 1910). Chester was leaving for Persia to engage in crooked oil deals, so he gave it to Valentine's father (a navy navigation instructor) and asked him to check the calculations. Father gave it to Valentine, who said it included observations of the sun at low altitudes (didn't say what the latitude or longitudes were). Said the calculations were full of errors and appeared, toward the end, to be faked. Apparently Valentine didn't realize the importance of all this or make any copies or tell anyone about it in 1913, (when the controversy was going strong), but instead sent a letter to Henshaw Ward after he wrote an unfavorable article.

This whole Valentine Wood thing is really a crock. Rawlins loves to cite unpublished ("suppressed") manuscripts that he gets on his dumpster diving expeditions. I am sure to the conspiracy-minded wackos that read this stuff, the credibility of these mss are enhanced by the fact that they were suppressed, but the truth is that they have not stood the test of publication. If Henshaw Ward published this crap in 1934, probably a dozen people would have come out of the woodwork to dispute it. In 1970, when Rawlins publishes it as gospel, they are all presumably dead. The story is totally incredible.

Wood supposedly said the sights were taken at low altitudes. In fact, the sights and calculations would have indicated high latitudes, if they were Peary's. Wood would have known that they could only be Cook's or Peary's in 1913. So here is a guy right out of school, just having witnessed the huge brouhaha over Cook/Peary, and he gets a bunch of sights that must have belonged to one or the other. His father has to explain what they are, and they both say, ok, so we have absolute proof that Peary was a fake. We'll just keep our mouths shut for 25 years or so. Also, Wood says there were a bunch of sights, and he checked about half. Many of these had errors, and especially toward the end, appeared to be faked. Peary only ever claimed to have taken 5 sights on the whole trip. About half would be 3 sight. The descriptions sounds like a lot more than 3 sights checked. So Peary actually took a whole bunch of sights, but in his fake story, took them all out so that he could cause problems for himself about how few sights he made? Also, Peary would not have made a bunch of errors. And how could this wet behind the ears Ensign tell that the sights looked fake. He doesn't tell us. Peary's story of going to the Pole cannot be believed without "scientific proof," but we are supposed to believe this kind of totally unsubstantiated and incredible crap.

What rubbish!

Doug