In April of 1909, a year after Frederick Cook claimed to have arrived at the North Pole, Robert Peary (1856-1920) announced that Cook had never reached this point and that he, Peary, was the first man to reach the pole. Peary's record of the expedition tells of the arduous conditions he and his men endured, first breaking through the ice in a ship, then traveling via dog sleds. Along the way, Peary made extensive observations on hunting wildlife such as reindeer and musk-oxen, the geograph...

It may not be inapt to liken the attainment of the North Pole to the winning of a game of chess, in which all the various moves leading to a favorable conclusion had been planned in advance, long before the actual game began. It was an old game for me—a game which I had been playing for twenty-three years, with varying fortunes. Always, it is true, I had been beaten, but with every defeat came fresh knowledge of the game, its intricacies, its difficulties, its subtleties, and with every fr...