Who was the first to reach the north pole?
Dear Cecil: I’d like the Straight Dope on one of the great controversies: Who was first to reach the north pole? I lean towards Robert Peary because of Frederick Cook’s background, but is it that simple? — Richard, via e-mail Not unless you’ll take “maybe neither of the above” as an answer–the claims of both men were bitterly disputed at the time and things haven’t cooled off much since. Cook’s story is easier to dismiss. He said he reached the pole in April 1908, a year before Peary supposedly made it. His Inuit companions reported otherwise. The party traveled across the ice a few days, always in sight of land, until Cook implausibly announced they’d arrived. Cook’s photographs, among them one of “Bradley Land,” a mythical landform allegedly encountered en route, were faked. “Proofs” Cook submitted to a Danish commission lacked the expected astronomical observations–at one point he maintained, incredibly, that he’d left them in Greenland. In his later book he included such observat
