The Race For The North Pole

Robert Peary and team, not at the North Pole, it turns out

If you would have asked me when I was a kid who the first person to the North Pole was, I and many others would have said Robert Peary. He was an American explorer who had endeavored to reach 90 degrees north for two decades. Then, it was supposed that his assistant, Matthew Henson, who was African American, may have been the first. But things have changed. The first person to actually reach the Pole overland was an insurance salesman named Ralph Plaisted.

The earliest exploration of the Arctic was by those, such as Henry Hudson, Martin Frobisher, and others, who were looking for the elusive Northwest Passage, a direct sea route from Atlantic to Pacific. It wasn't until the 1840s that explorers were determined to reach the North Pole. The supposition, created by early mapmakers who must have been just guessing, was that the Arctic Ocean was actually open water, surrounded by ice. This view held until the 1880s.

Many tried, but all failed. John Franklin, and his two ships, the H.M.S. Erebus and H.M.S. Terror, disappeared in 1847 (the ships weren't found until 2014 and 2016, respectively). More than one hundred expeditions were sent to rescue him, and though they couldn't find the men or the ships, each expedition offered a new insight into navigating the labyrinth of ice.

Most attempts failed because of pack ice, which would render a ship immobile, sometimes crushing it. Crews would be forced to endure months of bitter cold and starvation. Because the ice moved, if they were on foot they might actually trudge for months but only cover a few miles. It wasn't a game for the meek.

Explorers from many countries, especially Britain, got closer and closer, and it became something of a race to see who could get farthest north. A Swedish team tried by balloon, but they crashed after three days. Their bodies weren't found until the 1990s, and film was intact that showed they survived the crash but not the conditions afterward.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, two men competed to reach the top of the world. Frederick Cook claimed to reach there in 1908, but his accounts were unproven, and his records disappeared. Peary and Henson said the got there in 1909, and for many years were accepted as the first men to reach the North Pole. It wasn't until the 1980s that it was determined that they didn't actually make it. But since Peary was accepted as the first, nobody really tried after that.

The first people to actually reach the North Pole were Soviets who arrived by airplane in 1948. But the first to do it overland was Plaisted, who covered the distance by snowmobile in 1968. So retroactively he was proclaimed the first to do it. There is a film being made about him starring Will Ferrell.

Explorers to the Poles have always captured my imagination. I suppose this is because this is the last thing I would want to do--I hate cold weather. So I live (and die) vicariously through these very brave individuals, who were heading to a place no human being had ever been before.