Battle of the Arctic Grail

...Battle of the Arctic Grail THE BIG NAIL By Theon Wright John Day 368 pp $9 75 Reviewed by RUSSELL W. GIBBONS Contributor, "Commonweal," "Science Digest" The lunar age that came into its own last year brought with it an inevitable debate among philosophers and politicians over national goals If at a time when Earth itself may be approaching ecological and nuclear catastrophe, arguments concerning priorities of exploration through space toward dead planets seem unreal, there may be some merit m examining an earlier affair involving American "Manifest Destiny " The plaque on the moon says something about "all mankind," but just to remind future travelers who is responsible for the first footprints and debris, Congress passed a law declaring that the American flag should be planted on all expeditions —following a precedent established in the first decade of this century, in that age of arrogance between the "splendid little war" with Spam and World War I Then it was the "race to the Pole," the quest to reach what Farley Mowat in The Polar Passion has called a "peculiarly non-objective yet passionately desired Holy Grail The national pride that overtook much of the American public culminated m the first week of September 1909, when two expeditions returned with separate announcements that they had mdependently hoisted the Stars and Stapes at the geographical top of the Earth But within a short while the historic event turned into what some geographers still maintain is the most undignified brawl in the history of exploration, and at the very least is one of modern history's longest unresolved controversies Thus 60 years after the feud began, Theon Wright finds compelling reasons to review the whole story in The Big Nail The Story of the Cook-Peary Feud The Eskimo tribes of northern Greenland envisioned the Pole-which tor centunes had lured white men willing to risk their lives-as a huge iron spike driven into the ice Foremost among the mixed bag of Americans, Englishmen and Scandinavians who sought the mythical "Big Nail" was the candidate of the U S Navy (still a producer of flag-beanng explorers), Robert Edwin Peary A career engineer, he was as much an impersonal organization man as the pre-computer period could produce, and had programmed his whole life toward attaining the Pole Not surprisingly, his rage knew no bounds when he came home to find that five days earlier Fredenck Albert Cook, an amiable Brooklyn doctor who was once his expedition surgeon, had declared that he had reached the Arctic grail fully a year before Peary A loner in the exploration field, Cook's naivete was as pronounced as was his rival's well-known ruthless egotism ("I am the only white man ever to have reached the Pole," Peary proclaimed) The subsequent feud between them occupied much attention in the American news prior to 1915, and even spilled across the Atlantic Heated debates in Congress and a halfhearted investigation by a House committee led to Peary's receiving official honors, despite cat calls, but testimony was also heard establishing that Cook's reputation as an explorer had been the target of a well-planned hatchet job After a half-century, one might understandably expect these Polar passions to have abated Author Wright recalls, however, that during the 1965 centenary of Cook's birth a resolution passed by the New York State Legislature provoked such a storm Governor Nelson Rockefeller refused to sign it The proposed honors prompted the last surviving member of the Peary expedition, an 85-year-old retired rear admiral, to urge the Governor to disassociate himself with "anything to do with Dr Cook " All of which makes one wonder if the judgment of the geographers and the gold medals of the societies were not weighted in favor of the Navy's man, who earned with him impressive endorsements from some of the greatest financial moguls of the day (Part of the game was to name some yet-to-be-discovered Polar island, inlet, glacier, or promontory to their perpetual glory An examination of any map of northernmost real estate will show that Peary played it well ) Wright's impressive scholarship amasses psychological, physical, scientific, and circumstantial arguments leading to the inescapable conclusion that history may indeed have stamped the wrong man as the imposter Nevertheless, the book suffers some minor errors of fact (a picture captioned "an ongmal photo, hitherto unpublished" of Cook's Eskimos at the North Pole is actually a many-copied version of the original that appeared in his account, published in 1911) and a few unfortunate descriptions (Wnght calls Peary's experienced black assistant, Matthew Henson, "his colored handyman," a designation only slightly better than Peary's own abasing "bodyserv-ant") But these aside, The Big Nail is a compelling narrative that reveals a little-known figure consigned to a historical limbo as a monumental geographic charlatan Indeed Frederick Cook, lone wolf and outsider to the end (he was to spend seven years in Leavenworth for fraudulent promotion of oil lands which subsequently brought m millions), may well be the prototype for today's hero a man with the courage to buck an organizational establishment and await the ultimate judgment of history...