快猫短视频

WOULD you believe that it is still not certain who was first to the North Pole? Robert Peary and Frederick Cook were both American and were once firm friends and explorers together; they ended up in a bitter feud.

Cook, asked if he had actually stood on the spot, answered, 鈥淥h, I couldn鈥檛 say that. I got to where there wasn鈥檛 any longitude.鈥� The statement became famous, as did Peary鈥檚 counter: 鈥淐ook has simply handed the public a gold brick.鈥�

Cook had joined Peary in 1891 as doctor on an expedition to northern Greenland, on which he treated Peary for a broken leg. But by 1909 they had fallen out. Peary claimed that he had reached the pole in April, but was followed by Cook, who had disappeared on another expedition and now returned with his claim that he had reached it a year earlier.

Henderson gives an exciting account of the pair鈥檚 adventures on various explorations in which high dangers, privation, starvation, scurvy and icy death all play a part. Both men are complicated and heroic. We meet Eskimos who were disappointed that Peary refused to share his wife with them, as was their custom, and a meteorite called Woman. Illustrations are few but the portraits of men fantastically dressed in furs wonderfully evoke the age of polar exploration.