Apr 6, 1909
Peary's expedition reaches North Pole?
On April 6, 1909, American explorer Robert Peary accomplishes a long elusive
dream, when he, assistant Matthew Henson, and four Eskimos reach what they
determine to be the North Pole. Decades after Peary's death, however,
navigational errors in his travel log surfaced, placing the expedition in all
probability a few miles short of its goal.
Peary, a U.S. Navy civil engineer, made his first trip to the interior of
Greenland in 1886. In 1891, Henson, a young African-American sailor, joined him
on his second arctic expedition. Their team made an extended dogsled journey to
the northeast of Greenland and explored what became known as "Peary Land." In
1893, the explorers began working toward the North Pole, and in 1906, during
their second attempt, they nearly reached latitude 88 degrees north--only 150
miles from their objective.
In 1908, the pair traveled to Ellesmere Island by ship and in 1909 raced
across hundreds of miles of ice to reach what they calculated as latitude 90
degrees north on April 6, 1909. Although their achievement was widely acclaimed,
Dr. Frederick A. Cook challenged their distinction of being the first to reach
the North Pole. A former associate of Peary, Cook claimed he had already reached
the pole by dogsled the previous year. A major controversy followed, and in 1911
the U.S. Congress formally recognized Peary's claim.
In recent years, further studies of the conflicting claims suggest that
neither expedition reached the exact North Pole, but that Peary and Henson came
far closer, falling perhaps 30 miles short. On May 3, 1952, U.S. Lieutenant
Colonel Joseph O. Fletcher of Oklahoma stepped out of a plane and walked to the
precise location of the North Pole, the first person to undisputedly do so.
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