The Noose of Laurels, The Discovery of the North Pole

Herbert, Wally

About the book

Now, eighty years on, the internationally respected polar explorer Wally Herbert offers the assessment he was invited to make of the records upon which Peary based his claim, documents which have been locked away from public scrutiny for the last seventy-five years. In doing so, he accepted the obligation not only to question Peary but, as a fellow polar traveller, also to represent him, for Peary’s published record speaks of incredible fortitude and single-minded persistence over the twenty years that the Pole was his objective.

When Wally Herbert opened Peary’s log to those triumphant dates in April 1909, however, he was surprised to find blank pages. He was also shocked by Peary’s astonishingly slack navigation, there being no indication among the papers that Peary had taken any observations for longitude on his outward journey to check his drift. As for some of the speeds and distances he claimed, they were nothing short of incredible.

In the three years’ research that followed, Wally Herbert was to confirm his long held belief that Peary was a complex man who was driven by a destructive force, an intense inner craving for fame. Highly competitive, devious, jealous, burdened not only with his sense of duty but also by his fear of failure, Peary emerges as a domineering, insensitive man, and yet a man respected by the polar Eskimos who risked their lives to go with him. Only through his diaries and hiss letters to his wife does the human side of his nature show, and even then it appears to have been a constant struggle between his self-destructive obsession and his yearning to go home.