Who Was the First Person to Reach the North Pole?
The first person to reach the North Pole was an engineer in the American Navy named Robert Edwin Peary, who reached the Pole on 6 April 1909, along with his employee Matthew Henson and four Inuit men named Seeglo, Ootah, Ooqueah, and Egigingwah. Although his achievement was shadowed with doubt for almost a century, a 2005 expedition by a British explorer named Tom Avery and four others were able to recreate Peary’s journey with replica wooden sleds pulled by Canadian Eskimo Dog teams, taking 36 days and 22 hours to reach the North Pole, a figure only 5 hours faster than that given by Peary. The Earth’s North Pole is extremely isolated and cold. As there is little reason to travel there except to make a point, the total number of explorers who travel to the North Pole numbers no more than a couple hundred per year. Fly-bys have been made by plane and airship, and US and Soviet submarines have passed by the North Pole and even surfaced there. Lacking solid ground, the North Pole is cover
No one knows for sure who was the first to reach the North Pole, but two men claimed to have done it at almost the same time. The American explorer Frederick Cook, along with two Eskimos, two sleds, and 26 dogs, took off from Greenland for the pole on February 19, 1908. Fourteen months later, he returned to Greenland, then went
