Every day thousands of people fly over the North Pole when traveling between the U.S. East Coast and China. So it is hard to grasp just how caught up people were, at the turn of the twentieth century, in the race to reach it by dogsled across the vast ice fields of the Arctic Ocean.
In Battle of Ink and Ice, his very readable debut book on the subject, Darrell Hartman, who has written for The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and many other publications, brings that race to vivid life. But he greatly enriches the story by showing how two great journalists covered it and changed journalism in the process.
The two explorers were Robert Peary and Frederick Cook. The two journalists were Adolph Ochs of The New York Times and James Gordon Bennett Jr. of The New York Herald, although other famous journalists of the day, such as Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, are also present in the tale.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the golden age of newspapers, before the coming of radio and movie newsreels in the 1920s and ’30s. In large cities competition was stiff among papers, of which there were often half a dozen or more, to be the first with the news. And not just in English: New York had daily papers in Italian, Yiddish, and German as well, to serve the vast immigrant population.
The introduction of Linotype in 1886 (first used by the New-York Tribune) greatly sped up typesetting and reduced its costs, allowing for more editions, and extras, per day. Halftone printing, which allowed the inclusion of photographs in newspapers, came in the 1890s.
Newsboys by the thousands would buy bundles of papers for seventy cents per hundred and sell them on the streets for a penny each, their street-corner shouts of the latest headlines a major component, now long lost, of the urban soundscape.
James Gordon Bennett Sr. had established the Herald in 1835 with $500 in capital and a desk made of two barrels and some planks in a basement. But within a few years the Herald had become the dominant American newspaper thanks to Bennett’s incomparable nose for news and a string of journalistic innovations that created the modern newspaper. Among them were the first Washington and foreign corespondents as well as the first stock tables and weather, society, and sports reporting in a general-interest newspaper. Bennett even coined the word “leak” in its journalistic sense. By the time of the Civil War, Bennett was not only the most powerful journalist in the United States but also fabulously rich.
In 1867, Bennett retired and his son took over as editor of the Herald. While the junior Bennett had many talents as a journalist, he was also a sportsman (he later won the first transatlantic yacht race, for instance), a playboy, a heavy drinker (or, more accurately, one who had no head for alcohol), and a man much given to bad behavior. After a scandal in New York, he moved to Paris, which became his principal residence for the rest of his life. Even with successful completion of the first transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, he was largely an absentee editor.
One of Bennett Jr.’s major interests was exploration. It was he who dispatched Henry Stanley in 1871 to search for Dr. Livingstone in deepest Africa. In 1879 he funded what is remembered as the Jeanette expedition to reach the North Pole from the Pacific Ocean via the Bering Strait, named after the ship used. It was led by Lieutenant Commander George Washington De Long of the U.S. Navy.
The ship soon got stuck in the ice and for two years drifted with it before being crushed and sunk. Of the complement of thirty-three, only thirteen survived. De Long was among those who perished.
In the race to the North Pole thirty years later, Bennett backed Frederick Cook. Born in upstate New York, Cook attended Columbia University and graduated from medical school in 1890. He served as the surgeon on Robert Peary’s Greenland expedition the next year and on the Belgian Antarctic expedition of 1897–99.
On the latter expedition, Cook met the English missionary Thomas Bridges, who had worked with the indigenous people of Tierra del Fuego for two decades and compiled a grammar and dictionary of the local language. Cook later tried to pass off Bridges’s work as his own, beginning a pattern of deception. In 1905, he claimed to have been the first to scale Denali, the highest mountain in North America, then known as Mount McKinley. But the claim is almost certainly fraudulent, as he likely scaled what is known as Fake Peak, twelve miles from and fifteeen thousand feet below the summit of Denali itself. Later, in the 1920s, he was imprisoned for several years for being part of a Ponzi scheme.
In 1909, after a long absence on an expedition to the North Pole, Cook landed in Denmark and claimed to have reached it the previous year. He was greeted with public adulation on both sides of the Atlantic. Bennett paid him the enormous sum of $28,000 for his exclusive account. (In the early twentieth century, $5,000 was a comfortable upper-middle-class annual income.) But had he really been to the pole? He claimed that he had left his records with a hunter named Harry Whitney, but they never surfaced. The University of Copenhagen, after examining what he finally submitted, decided that his claim was “not proved.”
Adolph Ochs could hardly have been more different from Bennett. Born in 1858 in Cincinnati to an immigrant Jewish family, he worked as an office boy for the editor of the Knoxville, Tennessee, Daily Chronicle and later as a printer’s devil. At nineteen he borrowed $250 from his family and bought a controlling interest in the struggling Chattanooga Daily Times. He soon turned it around. In 1896 he bought the then-moribund New York Times, which had been founded in 1851, for $75,000. It had a circulation of only about 9,000 at the time, but by the 1920s its circulation was 780,000 and it was widely recognized as the country’s leading newspaper. Unlike the Herald and the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, the Times avoided sensationalism, adhering instead, under Ochs, to the highest journalistic standards. It was Ochs who coined the Times’s motto, “All the news that’s fit to print.”
Ochs backed Robert Peary in the race to the pole. Peary was born in Pennsylvania in 1856 but grew up in Maine, where he attended Bowdoin College. In 1881 he joined the navy as a civil engineer. He was soon bitten by the Arctic bug and made his first expedition in 1886, an attempt to cross Greenland by dogsled. He failed but learned much of what he needed to know about Arctic exploration.
He also studied Inuit survival techniques and learned from them. In his 1891–92 expedition to Greenland, for instance, he dressed in furs as the natives did and built igloos for shelter. This greatly lessened the baggage needed by eliminating tents and sleeping bags.
At this time, it was not known for sure if Greenland was an island. Some thought it reached as far north as the pole itself. Peary was able to demonstrate that it was, in fact, an island (the world’s largest).
In 1894 he reached the iron meteorite that the Inuit had used for centuries as a source for tools. Over three years Peary was able to extract a thirty-four-ton fragment and move it to New York, where it can be seen today at the American Museum of Natural History.
Peary made two expeditions to reach the North Pole, in 1905–06 and 1908–09. After the latter, he returned and claimed that he had reached the pole.
The newspapers were soon filled with arguments between the two explorers and their journalistic backers as to who had reached the pole and who had not. Peary, always touchy about rivals, damaged his own reputation with the ferocity of his contentions. As the Herald pointed out, “Strange to say, more people today believe Dr. Cook reached the North Pole because Peary says that he did not, than those who believe it on the strength of Cook’s own assertion.”
Peary’s records were better than Cook’s, most of which never materialized, but Peary’s were deposited with the National Geographic Society, which for years refused to allow scholars to examine them. It is now thought that he probably got within about sixty miles of the pole, if he did not quite reach it. (It should be noted that using navigation instruments such as the sextant at the North Pole is difficult, to say the least, since every direction is south.)
By so extensively utilizing the newspapers of the day, Hartman lets us experience the world of the early twentieth century by the same means that people of the time used to learn about what lay beyond their own ken. It is an effective device and makes for a very satisfying read.
