Great Exploration Hoaxes
False Claims Made by Dr. Frederick Cook and Robert E. Peary
Dr. Frederick Cook and Robert E. Peary were experienced Arctic explorers but lied when they said that they reached the top of Mt. McKinley and the North Pole.
In the long history of exploration there have been men strong in body but deceitful in mind to announce to the world that they had been the first to reach the summit of a mountain, or the first individual to sail around the world solo. In this book written by David Roberts, several accounts of fraudulent exploration claims are brought to light and among the most controversial of all are Robert E. Peary's quest to reach the North Pole, Dr. Frederick Cook's assertions that he reached the top of Mt. McKinley, and the peculiar story of Donald Crowhurst, an ill prepared yachtsman who was determined to sail around the globe by himself and eventually perished in the Atlantic.
Dr. Frederick Cook
Dr. Frederick Cook was an experienced Arctic explorer and at 41 years of age had already participated in six expeditions. One of these was a trip to Antarctica in 1898-99 where he served as the doctor (he graduated from New York university's medical program). His companions had painted a favourable picture of Cook, remembering him as a skilled explorer, especially Robert E. Peary who had sustained a broken leg on an expedition to Greenland. The doctor had expertly treated that injury.
But there were men who had deep suspicions about Dr. Cook's claim that he reached the top of Mt. McKinley on September 16th, 1906. Two men in particular, named Professor Herschel Parker and Belmore Brown exposed Cook as a fraud when they made a second attempt at McKinley in 1910. Cook brought back a photo with himself and a guide named Edward Barrill on top of what they said was the peak of Mt. McKinley, but Parker and Browne had copies of this photo and found the exact spot where Cook had stood. A formal investigation followed and Cook was dismissed from the American Alpine Club. He spent five years in prison on charges of mail fraud, and then died penniless in 1940.
Robert E. Peary
Born in 1856, he made his first trip to Greenland when he was 30 years old. Six expeditions to the far north followed and by 1908 he was convinced he could reach the North Pole. But the biggest obstacle to achieving his goal was that he was 52 years old, and was clearly not as energetic as he had been in years past when he first went up to Greenland. His physical condition also suffered, while undertaking these dangerous expeditions he lost most of his toes to frostbite.
Peary was successful at gaining personal and financial support for his jaunt to the North Pole and on July 6th, 1908 left New York for Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic. In September of the following year he sent word to the U.S. from Labrador that his journey was successful, but his claims were too incredible to be believed by some people. In 1929 a British author named J. Gordon Hayes pointed out that according to Peary's own admission, he travelled more than 400 miles to, around and back from the North Pole from April 2nd-9th, 1909 with only "a few hours" of rest. Simply put, he and his exhausted companions managed to cover more than 50 miles a day of extremely difficult sledging across the uneven Arctic tundra.
Peary's credibility was further damaged when he claimed that by compass use and blind luck he made it from Ellesmere Island to the Pole and back in an almost straight line. He had no notes at all to confirm his transverse position (deviation from the starting point to the Pole). His detractors believed that he was close to his target, within 100 miles, but his prize eluded him. Given Peary's age and the fact that his goal of reaching the Pole was fast disappearing, and made worse by the realization that this would be his last expedition, it's not hard to understand why he told everybody that he was successful.
Donald Crowhurst
The story surrounding Donald Crowhurst is one of the most astonishing in David Roberts' book. Determined to win an around-the-world boat race, and with limited knowledge of sailing and navigation, Crowhurst pushed ahead with his plans. He supervised the construction of his ship himself, which he named the Teignmouth Electron. But a trial run of his boat was less than successful. On October 31, 1968 he set off and began his fateful journey, but his boat was far from ready. His navigational computer was still a tangled mess of wires, and in his rush he forgot a vital component of the bilge pump. A few days into the voyage when water started to leak into his craft he had to pump the water out by hand.
He knew he would have to sail across the Atlantic down to the Cape of Good Hope near South Africa, then across the Southern Ocean to Australia and New Zealand and finally to Cape Horn at the bottom of South America, which has the toughest ocean tides in the world. Instead of giving up and facing shame and possible financial ruin, he decided to sail to South America and wait for the other competitors to catch up. For weeks he zigzagged off the Brazilian and Argentinian coasts. On July 10, 1969 his boat was found but there was no sign of Crowhurst. Two log books were found, one contained the details of his real journey and the other was the fake version. In his final break from sanity, he wrote a long confession which detailed his deception and disappeared into the Atlantic.
