Robert Edwin Peary Sr. was an American explorer and officer in the United States Navy who made several expeditions to the Arctic in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is best known for, in April 1909, leading an expedition that claimed to be the first to have reached the geographic North Pole.
Matthew Alexander Henson was an African American explorer who accompanied Robert Peary on seven voyages to the Arctic over a period of nearly 23 years. They spent a total of 18 years on expeditions together. He is best known for his participation in the 1908–1909 expedition that claimed to have reached the geographic North Pole on April 6, 1909. Henson said he was the first of their party to reach the North Pole.
Frederick Albert Cook was an American explorer, physician, and ethnographer who is most known for allegedly being the first to reach the North Pole on April 21, 1908. A competing claim was made a year later by Robert Peary, though both men's accounts have since been fiercely disputed; in December 1909, after reviewing Cook's limited records, a commission of the University of Copenhagen ruled his claim unproven. Nonetheless, in 1911, Cook published a memoir of the expedition in which he maintained the veracity of his assertions. In addition, he also claimed to have been the first person to reach the summit of Denali, the highest mountain in North America, a claim which has since been similarly discredited. Though he may not have achieved either Denali or the North Pole, his was the first and only expedition where a United States national discovered an Arctic island, Meighen Island.
Dennis Rawlins is an American astronomer and historian who has acquired the reputation of skeptic primarily with respect to historical claims connected to astronomical considerations. He is known to the public mostly from media coverage of his investigations into two early twentieth-century North Pole expeditions. In his first book, Peary at the North Pole: fact or fiction? (1973), Rawlins argued that Robert Peary never made it to the North Pole in 1909. His second book (1993) is the standard critical edition of Tycho Brahe's 1598 catalogue of 1004 stars which detected ten star places that were fabricated, partially or entirely. In 1976, as the only astronomer on the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, he looked into the purported Mars effect. In 1996 he made headlines when page one of the New York Times covered his report to Ohio State University which concluded that in 1926 Richard E. Byrd's airplane flight towards the North Pole turned back 150 miles from the pole. Rawlins's third book, his detailed report on Byrd's trip and on the competence of lingering defenses of it, was co-published simultaneously in 2000 by DIO volume 10, 2000 and by the polar research center at the University of Cambridge. Because explorer Frederick Cook's story of reaching the North Pole in 1908 is generally rejected, the elimination of Peary and Byrd leaves fourth North Pole claimant Roald Amundsen as first there in 1926 in the airship Norge. Having attained the South Pole in 1911, Amundsen thus became the first to reach each geographical pole of the earth, as proposed in Rawlins's 1973 book.
Farthest North describes the most northerly latitude reached by explorers, before the first successful expedition to the North Pole rendered the expression obsolete. The Arctic polar regions are much more accessible than those of the Antarctic, as continental land masses extend to high latitudes and sea voyages to the regions are relatively short.
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The presidency of William Howard Taft began on March 4, 1909, when William Howard Taft was inaugurated the 27th president of the United States and ended on March 4, 1913.
