![]() He had established a record for the Western Hemisphere by sledging out across the Arctic Ocean in 1902 to 84° 17’ North Latitude, and established a new “farthest north” for mankind by approaching to within 174 nautical miles of the North Pole in 1906. He had twice crossed the 6,000-foot-high Greenland ice cap using dog sleds for the first time on that high desert. He had determined for the first time, by exploring its northern shore, that Greenland is an island. In the course of those expeditions, he had, among other accomplishments, mapped hundreds of miles of previously uncharted coasts. #Icefloor block outgoing application full#He was without question more experienced, knowledgeable, and proficient in the demanding and esoteric skills of Arctic travel and navigation than any man then living or any man since.īy the imaginative application of his engineering knowledge to the proven Eskimo techniques of travel and survival in the Arctic, by earning the confidence and respect of those Eskimos, and by virtue of his own iron determination and physical stamina, he had been able in those 23 years, in eight separate expeditions lasting a total of 12 full years, to sledge some nine or ten thousand miles across the ice caps and frozen seas of the far North. On the first day of March 1909, when Peary departed Cape Columbia at the northern tip of Ellesmere Island for his final attack on the Pole, he had been vigorously active in Arctic exploration for 23 years. The nature of the Proceedings-i.e., as a “forum”-and the fact that the majority of its readers are naval officers with a natural and special, understandable pride in the Discoverer of the North Pole require that, if there is any “lingering doubt,” it be put to rest. The latest effort of this kind is an article entitled “Peary and the North Pole-the Lingering Doubt” published in the June 1970 issue of the Naval Institute Proceedings. ![]() Since all such writings have necessarily been based on fragmentary data taken out of context and shaped to make their authors’ points, while ignoring facts which fail to fit that shape, they have attracted little mention and, with rare exceptions, have not been considered worthy of response. ![]() ![]() ever led a party of his fellow-creatures to a Pole of the Earth,” someone has come forth in public print to doubt or deny that he so. Ernest Hemingway once said about his writings, “If the book is good, is about something you know, and is truly written, and reading it over you see that this is so, you can let the boys yip.” Then the noise of yipping “will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow, and you are in your own cabin that you have built and paid for with your work.”Įvery few years since April 1909 when Commander Robert E. ![]()
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