Poles Apart

...Bull (not himself a hunter) tries to argue for controlled hunting as an element in a conservation program, and a case can be made for this position...

...Where the Norwegian was humble, the American was arrogant, paranoid, and obsessive...

...Where Amundsen was an egalitarian by nature, treating his men and the Eskimos as equals, Peary wasamartinet, with a nasty racist streak...

...Ultimately, though, even if the conservationist argument for hunting proves valid, there remains another consideration— the kind of attitudes encouraged by the sport...

...By the time he was ready to sail north, he was both a navigator and a scientist...

...Having clothed his plans in the garment of science, he was determined to fulfill his pledge...

...Scott, it turns out, displayed little of the form of heroism...

...He was a man of honor...

...Amundsen, together with his fellow-Norwegians Fridtjof Nansen and Otto Sverdrup, raised polar exploration to a new level of professionalism and elegance, making most of the 19th-century English adventurers and their American successors look like overeager adolescents and bungling amateurs...

...But Berton's dislike extends beyond personality to far weightier matters...

...The earliest hunters were the most worthy, because killing was not their primary or only aim...

...It is startling how quickly the wildlife began to disappear...

...By 1850, heavy game was virtually extinct south of the Orange River...

...His preparations were extraordinarily thorough, rather like training for the Olympics and studying for a PhD simultaneously...

...Berton declares that Peary "did not present a shred of scientific evidence to show that he had gone closer than 150 miles, while the circumstantial evidence against him is damning...

...In contrast to the pigheaded and incompetent Englishman, Amundsen made the difficult look easy (too easy, insofar as his reputation was concerned), approaching his tasks with care and rigor...

...No less surprising is the number of professional hunters who expressed guilt or regret toward the end of their lives...

...In that study, as well as in his later biography, Shackleton, Huntford wrought a major revision in our views of the leading polar explorers...

...Had he been less magnanimous, history would record him as the first man to navigate a North West Passage, fly across the Arctic, and reach both the North and the South Poles...

...Robert Falcon Scott, tragic hero of the Antarctic to three generations of English schoolchildren, was convincingly if somewhat savagely pushed from his pedestal and replaced by the neglected Roald Amundsen, the first man to reach the South Pole...

...Leopold M'Clintock, uncovering the sad fate of the Franklin expedition—Amundsen is preeminent, probably the greatest polar explorerof them all...

...Published in 1959, it became wholly outdated in the early 1980s with the appearance of Roland Huntford's masterful The Last Place on Earth (originally Scott and Amundsen...

...The New York Times subsequently publicized these findings by reporting them in its news columns...

...What their lives lacked was heroic content...

...His backers called him a "virtuoso.' Huntford refers to the conquest of the South Pole as the Norwegian's "masterpiece...

...But perhaps the most noteworthy, and praiseworthy, thing about him was his innate nobility...

...Berton is very much a member of the Huntford school...

...Pierre Berton's The Arctic Grail: The Quest for the North West Passage and the North Pole, 1818-1909 (Viking, 672 pp., $24.95) is a book full of heroes, but only to those who believe that the content, the physical conquest of the globe, was a goal worth the risk of life and treasure...

...He is skeptical about Peary's claim to the North Pole, and raises so many questions that any reader of The Arctic Grail is bound to conclude the explorer simply lied...

...For these people, Berton's volume is a welcome arrival...

...As a result, during his two years in the Arctic wastes he and his crew flourished, escaping the scurvy, starvation, madness, and death that had plagued so many previous expeditions...

...The same can scarcely be said of the figures who populate Bartle Bull's Safari: A Chronicle of Adventure (Viking, 383 pp., $40.00), a handsome coffee-table book that offers a quick trot through the history of hunting in Africa...

...William Burchell launched the safari tradition with a memoir about his botanical expedition into the wilds in 1811...

...Shortly after The Arctic Grail appeared, National Geographic ran an article based on recently discovered navigational notes that likewise challenges Peary's attainment of the Pole...

...My personal favorite in Bull's rollcall is a 19th-century Scotsman with the weird name of Karamojo Bell, the killer of 1,000 elephants...

...If the case against Peary is not now conclusively settled, at the least he must henceforth be considered guilty until proven innocent...

...Amundsen, however, re-enters the picture: He traversed the Arctic by airship three days after Byrd's flight and, according to Huntford, could have been the first over the Pole if he had chosen to, but for a variety of reasons allowed Byrd to precede him...

...Like Amundsen, Peary was a professional who took the hazards of the Arctic seriously and learned from the Eskimos...

...These men (and occasional women) possessed all the courage and daring one could wish for...

...Where Amundsen was a scientist as well as an explorer, Peary was an adventurer pure and simple, spending the long nights calculating every possible way he could cash in on his prospective fame, from selling polar souvenirs to endorsing clothing and sports equipment...

...He was willing to learn from anyone with something worth knowing—whalers, Lappländers and, above all, Eskimos, who taught him how to build igloos, drive dogs and handle kayaks...

...A mundsen was a hero in every sense...

...On his final push to the Pole, he contrived to be the only white man present, since in his eyes the rest of his party —four Eskimos and his black servant, Matthew Henson— was not entitled to a share of the glory...

...Very few of the other explorers described in The Arctic Grail would have made the same decision...

...He influenced Cornwallis Harris who, although the leader of the first true safari in 1837, did produce a number of excellent zoological engravings...

...Before taking on the South Pole in 1911, he captured the prize that had eluded men for almost three and a half centuries, the navigation of a North West Passage...

...Of all the bizarre and eccentric human creatures who sought the Arctic Grail, " writes Berton in one of the snappy characterizations that help make his book so entertaining, "Peary is the least lovable...

...After that, degeneration rapidly set in, resulting initially in a series of "great white hunters," then an unending line of wealthy clients who drank champagne in the bush before going out in an automobile to slaughter an animal or 10...

...The British, who never forgave him for beating Scott to the South Pole (and then surviving), have downplayed his Arctic achievement by claiming that he merely built upon the discoveries and sacrifices of those before him who, not coincidentally, happened primarily to be English...

...His legend rested upon the British public's sentimental longing for larger-than-life personalities who triumphed through their martyrdom...

...Nonhunters will not quickly rush to line up on the side of those like the Victorian gamesman who proclaimed: " I was struck with admiration at the magnificence of the noble old black buck, and vowed in my heart to slay him...

...The form of heroism is familiar, incorporating qualities of courage, daring, strength, stoicism, sagacity, independence, will...

...The best that can be said of him is that he got closer than any explorer to that time...

...Confronted with the opportunity to pursue the Passage during his first year, he delayed until he had completed the geographic and astronomical studies he had promised to carry out...

...Yet the best Peary had been able to manage prior to that last leg was 12 miles a day, and no other explorer, before or since, has ever come close to his claimed speed...

...In 1968, Ralph Plaisted, traveling to the Pole by snowmobile, averaged only 11 miles...

...John Rae, charting vast areas while living off the land...

...It is what causes one person's hero to appear another's villain, fool or criminal, whether Napoleon Bonaparte or Ollie North...

...With Peary's claim discredited, the crown passes to Richard E. Byrd, who flew over the Pole in 1926...

...There was no arrogance to him...

...To reach the Pole and return to camp in the eight days they were away, the six men in the party would have had to average 43 miles a day...

...He loved Africa as a land "where a man could still slit a throat or grab a native girl without being badgered by alien law...

...But there the comparison ends...

...Berton demonstrates that this was not so...

...Certainly not Robert E. Peary, the person traditionally credited with the conquest of the North Pole in 1909...

...The most incisive of these concerns speed...

...Additional evidence in support of Berton's suspicions arrived too late to be included in his book...

...Kirwan's almost-impossibleto-obtain History of Polar Exploration...

...There is a postcript to this story...

...Since the magazine and the newspaper were self-interested and highly visible backers of Peary in 1909, there is a bit of poetic justice here...

...Content, since it reflects values and gives meaning to an act, is more open to dispute...

...Most of them seem like actors in dramas of their own making, pretending to epical roles when in fact they were merely shooting innocent antelopes and elephants...

...Until now, the only general survey (covering both the North and the South Poles) was L.P...

...The format of Safari lends itself to no more than a superficial discussion of the question...

...In his catalogue of heroes—Edward Parry, commanding the first winter camp in the Arctic...

...Amundsen himself believed his North West Passage journey was his finest venture...

...He accomplished this feat during an expedition of 1903-1905, fulfilling the dream of a lifetime...