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As the sun dragged low,
circling the heavens in its perpetual polar arc above the horizon,
Paul Landry bounded from his sled and embraced his travel partner Paul
Crowley at the top of the world. The men planted the Canadian flag in
a wind-carved snow dune, snapped photographs of each other and celebrated
their accomplishment.
In 42 days, they had
shot 777 km from tiny Ward Hunt Island off Ellesmere Island's north coast
to the geographical North Pole, most of it straight up the 70th longitudinal
meridian. They traveled by custom-built sledges powered by Canadian Inuit
dogs, bred for centuries to run and run.
The men, from Iqaluit,
Nunavut, fulfilled a lifelong dream of reaching the Pole. They survived
weeklong stretches of -45 C and pushed their dog-driving skills to the
limit to traverse jagged pressure ridges of ice that loomed several stories
above the Arctic Ocean. And in completing their ice-bound journey, they
also resurrected that vital mystery of Arctic exploration: Did Robert
Peary, the shaggy American who first claimed to reach the North Pole in
1909, actually do it?..
The Peary debate,
if you will, is polarized. Proponents, including Landry and Crowley, accept
Peary's claims that he, his faithful black servant Matthew Henson and
four Inuit reached the Pole by dogsled on April 6, 1909, after a 38-day
expedition launched from Ellesmere's bleak Cape Columbia. But Peary's
detractors say the great explorer's monumental ego and quest for worldwide
glory drove him to fabricate his claims.
Critics say Peary
could not have reached the Pole so quickly, especially considering a huge
body of open water, called a lead, delayed him for six days early in the
journey. They say his travel times — Peary claimed to average an
astonishing 30 miles (48 km) a day over the expedition's final five days
— were surely exaggerated. Peary's lack of corroborating evidence
is questioned, as well. Neither Henson nor the explorer's Inuit helpers
could use turn-of-the century navigational equipment such as sextants.
Robert Bartlett, Peary's ship captain and one of the few crew members
who could gauge latitude, never made the Pole; Peary turned him back 240
km short of 90 degrees north.
Landry, a 44-year-old
who runs an adventure travel company in Iqaluit, does not dispute that
Peary's claim would have benefited from another able navigator's authentication.
But Landry says his and Crowley's expedition shows Peary could have reached
the Pole in the time he said he did. "As Peary did, we did this as
a marathon race to the Pole. We were able to maintain and actually pass
Peary's mileage all the way until two-thirds of the trip," Landry
says now. "I'm not a professional navigator, but I now know for sure
that the distances Peary claimed are doable. We proved it."
The expeditions of Peary and Landry, while similar in spirit, were
far different in scale. Landry and Crowley traveled alone and received
only one resupply, from an airplane that landed halfway through their
journey at 86 degrees 30' North. Peary, meanwhile, carried out his 1909
expedition with military precision, commanding 24 men, 19 sleds and 133
Canadian Inuit dogs. Groups of men, which Peary calls "divisions"
in his book The North Pole, traveled ahead of the explorer, dropping
off supplies and building igloos for him to use along the way.
Continued...
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