Page 2
 lthough several
institutions in Europe and the United States, including a committee of the
U.S. Congress, concluded in the years following 1909 that Peary and his
team had indeed reached the Pole, the subject was engulfed in controversy,
continuing to this day, due to the rival and now discredited claim of Dr.
Frederick Cook. The dispute
engendered questions about Peary’s method of navigation, based largely
on a presumed need for longitude observations, and about the distances he
claimed to have traveled on the final dash. We found that remarkably
little new information had been introduced into the record by a succession
of critical books and articles in the nearly seven decades since Peary’s
death. Thus we first addressed the issues of navigation and distance.
We have determined that Peary’s method of navigation by dead reckoning corrected by observations, as he described it to the congressional committee, was appropriate and completely adequate for the polar region. It was, in fact, the method used by Roald Amundsen in his successful trek to the South Pole in 1911. Contrariwise, Robert F. Scott’s navigator, on his doomed South Pole expedition, wasted precious time struggling with the reduction of complex conventional but nonessential longitude sights. The peculiar condition close to either Pole that calls for a change from conventional lower latitude techniques is the greatly diminished size of each degree of longitude. At 135 miles from the North Pole, where Captain Bartlett turned back in 1909 after taking his last observation, degrees of longitude are within 2.4 nautical miles of one another, in contrast to 60 miles at the Equator, thereafter they grow even closer together, until they merge completely at the Pole. This phenomenon makes longitude sights, especially as one draws closer to the Pole, essentially useless. Our research uncovered sufficient celestial sights made by Peary in Arctic regions in the 1890s and the early 1900s to convince us that he was a highly competent navigator and surveyor, which is not surprising given his formal training as a civil engineer and his earlier experience in surveying a proposed Nicaragua canal route, as well as that with the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. His location by celestial observation of the farthest north point on the coast of Greenland, utilizing his surveyor’s techniques, was checked with modern equipment by scientist Robert L. Lillestrand in 1969 and found to be more accurate than most existing maps. It defies all reason to suggest that Peary (whom even Herbert describes as “the most experienced polar explorer of his day”) was unable to find his way due north when the need arose. Continued... |
 |
|
| Peary's signed letter | |
 |
|
| An explorer’s word was sufficient in the late Victorian era, but in 1909 the controversy between Peary and Dr. Frederick Cook over rival claims to having attained the Pole required each to submit additional evidence, including Peary’s written statement (above) | |