- [Announcer] Destination North Pole. - [Reporter] The North Pole. - [Reporter] North Pole. (engine roaring) (dog barking) (bright music) - Check out this newspaper
article from 1913. "Hope To Solve Earth's Final
Puzzle-Icy Crocker Island." And then you see this map
of like the North Pole and right next to it, the theoretical location of Crocker land. A lost continent that was supposed to be right next to the North Pole. This is the early 1900s. It's a time when the world map has been thoroughly
explored and documented. There were just a few places
that were still kind of blank and this was one of them, the high north, an icy ocean that was incredibly
difficult to get through, but people thought there was
this north polar continent unexplored for now but people
wanted to get in on it. They wanted to see what was up here. And in fact, a couple explorers roaming around this area had
reported seeing land up here. It created this frenzy, this wonder. Was there a lost polar continent
up near the North Pole? I want to show you the story
of how this all went down. It's the story of the
explorers who decided to go into the most impossible terrain on earth just to explore it. And it led to a passionate rivalry between these two dudes with big egos. It's full of fake photos
and smear campaigns and it was kind of like
the space race of the day. A race to see who could be the first to get to the top of the world. (dramatic music) Okay, so let's get up to speed on what we're talking about here. The Arctic is kind of
anything above this line, but we should ditch this map. This is the Mercator projection, which I kind of have thoughts on. Where the Mercator fails is
its representation of size. It massively distorts everything
in the north and south and it's just not gonna
be good for this story. So we need a better
map. Check out this map. This one's way better. Watch. This beautiful map I have
had for a very long time and I'm finally going to be
able to use it for a story. Look at that beauty! (dramatic music) Man, this is just such a
beautiful map, just gorgeous. This is what we're going
to use to tell the story. This is the top of the world. But anyway, before we go on, I need to say thank you to today's sponsor who made today's video possible. Thank you, BetterHelp for
sponsoring today's video. I've said it before and I'm
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it's good fit for you. Thank you, BetterHelp for
sponsoring this video. Let's dive into this insane
story about the North Pole. Okay, the North Pole,
the top of the world. Reminder that this is
just one giant ocean, but the reason it looks like
this is because it's frozen. You can't just, like, sail through it. And yet many explorers
had this lofty goal. They wanted to reach the North Pole, the arbitrary place on our planet that's just a bunch of
ice sheets sliding around where all the longitude
lines come together. The place that we just decided with math was the top of the earth. You know the North Pole where Santa lives, that's what we're talking about. That is what the explorers
wanted to, like, get to. So why attempt to reach
an arbitrary bit of ocean that's super impractical and risky? Because it's there, dummy. We're humans. We don't
ask questions like that. We just have to go. (dramatic music) People had been trying to
get up here for centuries, trying to figure out what they would find. Maybe if they got through the ice, there would be some warm water ocean here. Maybe there'd be new shipping routes over the top of the globe. By 1845, explorers were
making custom ships. They were reinforcing
the hulls of war ships with thicker wood that
could take on the pressure of the ice and they would go and explore and they didn't find any
useful shipping routes. But they did find people. These people, the Inuit,
knew a thing or two about how to handle the cold. They knew how to build
shelters out in the ice. They made kayaks and parkas. They used dog sledges to get around. Oh, and these dog sledges are pretty cool. (dramatic music) But let's not get distracted. That's for a totally different story that I'm doing on Greenland. The point is that these
American and European explorers realized that any North Pole expedition with a chance of success would
need to rely on Inuit guides. So it's the late 1870s and we start to see the
first serious attempts to finally reach the North Pole. Every attempt being its
own version of crazy. Let me show you some of these. All of these little lines
are different explorers and their attempt to get here, to the center, to the North Pole, and each one was insane. Like this guy who intentionally
floated from Russia, got his boat stuck in the ice on purpose and then let the ice, which
is always moving around, sort of drift him around
and carry him with the hopes that it would, like, carry
him to the North Pole. But instead he just did these
like sort of loopy loops and eventually got, like,
spit out next to Svalbard. I mean these guys were climbing,
like, 30 foot ice ridges. They were facing off with polar bears whose territory this is. I mean, these guys are out exploring in some of the harshest conditions ever in the name of adventure. Exploration? Like that is why they were doing this. They became heroes for kids back home. But anyway, this is all just backstory. Our story that I really want
to tell you about starts now and it has to do with
this guy Robert Peary. Arctic explorer who is obsessed with getting to the North Pole. I mean just look at
Robert Peary's portrait. Peary was an American Navy
engineer who was dead set on becoming famous, once writing a letter to his mother saying quote, "Remember, Mother,
I must have fame." Like, that's who this guy is. He and his obsession with being famous is a huge part of this story. So Peary is out exploring the Arctic. He makes Greenland his hopping off point, that's sort of his home base. And on his second expedition,
he breaks his leg. Luckily in his expedition
he's got this Greeny doctor who comes and helps mend his leg. And while his leg was healing, they stayed up in the Arctic
for, like, six months. And during that time, this Greeny Dr. Frederick Cook learns a bunch of skills
for surviving in the Arctic. He even starts picking
up the Inuit language. Okay, so eventually Peary's leg heals and they head back down south and Peary is like pretty impressed with the Greeny doctor who's now learned all these new skills. He's like, wow, Cook, you're incredible. We'd love to have you on our next mission here in the Arctic. But Cook wasn't into it. He didn't want to be
some footnote in history. He was feeling confident
after his one expedition and he decided to strike out
on his own as an explorer. Peary was kinda like, okay, cool Cook, like have fun trying to be an explorer. You're like super ungrateful
for everything I've taught you, like, good luck. And thus the seeds of tension were planted between these two. Old school Peary versus
newbie, starry-eyed Cook, both with big egos and both
willing to do what it takes to show that they were great explorers. So they go their separate ways. The newbie doctor turned
aspiring explorer, Frederick Cook sets out
on his own expedition back to the Arctic, feeling super confident. Wait, no, this trip doesn't
get any adventure music. It was a total failure, like they barely made it to here and then they had to like turn back and abandon their ship and like, ah, Cook. And Peary is, like, loving this. While Cook was getting
owned in the Arctic, Peary continues to kill it as this engineer turned Arctic explorer who pines to be famous. He's busy going to Greenland and bringing back three giant meteorites. Who goes out on an expedition and comes back with
meteorites, like, from space? Peary. You're the real deal. He writes a book about his adventures and starts to get heralded as the greatest Arctic
adventurer of their day. I mean, look at this face, this guy's kind of a badass. True story. I was in Greenland a few weeks ago and I tried to take a
photo just like this. It didn't really work out.
Okay, so back to Cook. He doesn't give up. He's slowly getting better at this whole explore the Arctic thing. He goes south to Antarctica
and goes on another expedition that goes horribly wrong,
but this time Cook is ready. He meets the challenge
and he makes it out alive, leveling up immensely in the process. By 1898, Peary moves to Greenland,
like, kind of permanently and makes his focus on
getting to the North Pole. Like, that is his dream. He is training, he's recruiting people and he
starts to go out on attempts. He wants to be the first
person to the top of the world. And this is where we kind of start to see Peary's true colors. Like, as much of a badass as this guy is, you do a little bit of
research and you realize that he's actually kind of an (beep) and like there's so
much to say about this, but little sampler here, he brings back six Inuit to New York. Four of them end up dying and there's this whole insane story that you can read about in the citations. But, yeah, he's not a great guy. He cheats on his wife with a 14-year old and has a kid with her. And then there's this guy,
his number two, Matt Henson. Henson was like one of the
best non Inuit dog sled drivers in the world. He even learned to speak
the Inuit language, something that Peary
wasn't even able to do. But Peary described him
as quote, "His assistant," because he's black and goes on to give
him basically no credit for all of his achievements. So yeah, Peary's kind of an (beep) but that doesn't mean that he wasn't also an incredibly skilled,
determined explorer. I mean he stays up here for four years, refining his technique
to get to the North Pole. He obsesses over gear and
designs custom sledges and even creates this
perfect water boiler. And he keeps going back,
making attempt after attempt and each time some disaster occurs and they have to turn back. In the process, he loses eight toes to
frostbite, but he keeps going. He gets closer and closer
and finally decides that it is his time. So he builds this custom ship, he mounts a massive
expedition and he goes out. And on what he hopes
is his last expedition, he claims to have passed
by a piece of land sticking out of the ice. This would later go on to fuel the idea that there's a continent up here. All these newspaper articles
I was showing you about, like, is there a continent near the North Pole? But anyway, on this expedition,
he still doesn't make it. The furthest he was able to get was here, just 200 miles from the North
Pole, but he had to turn back. So wait, is that it? Is Peary giving up? He lost eight toes to frostbite and he didn't make it to the North Pole? Wait, just pause on Peary for a second. We'll talk about what happens next, but first we gotta get
back to this guy Cook. What's Cook up to? Well it turns out the Cook
continued to level up, getting more and more experience, getting more and more famous. He goes to Alaska trying to
be the first to summit Denali, which is the highest
peak in North America. And he comes off the mountain saying that he made it to the top. Whoa, Cook! We're no longer playing
in the minor leagues. He's a legit explorer now. He's even elected as the president of the Explorers Club in New York. By 1906, he's kind of like
a BFD in the explorer scene and soon he's sitting in the bougie National
Geographic Society dinner in Washington DC, a dinner that was put on to actually honor Peary for
all of his Arctic explorations. Okay, so this is where it gets juicy and like the tension and drama
really starts to, like, rise because during this dinner
Alexander Graham Bell, the guy who invented the
telephone, no big deal, he gets up and is like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Peary's cool and all I know we're like celebrating
him here in this dinner. But what about Cook? Let's hear from Cook. A man who's gone to the top
and the bottom of the earth and the largest peak in America. So Cook gets up and toots
his own horn at this dinner that was supposed to be for Peary. Peary must have been
pissed at this moment. Like, this was his moment to shine. He was getting all this
attention and who's there? Cook, the guy who was like a Greeny doctor who's now his rival, but who Peary considers as a
hack, like not a real explorer. But now Cook is feeling good.
He's no longer a newbie. So he sets his sight on beating
Peary to the North Pole. The race is now on. (dramatic music) So it's 1907 and Cook heads to the Arctic. He gathers a crew to go to the North Pole. There's one other westerner,
he's got nine Inuits and a dog sledge team for each. Peary was pissed at Cook at this moment for even attempting to be the
first one to the North Pole. And to make things worse, Cook was using a bunch
of Peary's techniques and recruiting Inuit that Peary
had built relationships with and doing this all just as
Peary was about to head off on a final attempt of his own. So months go by, six months
and then eight months and now it's been a year and no one has heard from Cook. Is he dead? Who cares, says Peary. He's getting ready for his
own expedition to the north. Teddy Roosevelt wishing
him well on his way. And just like that Peary
and his crew are off, racing to the North Pole. Cook? Still out there somewhere. And the world wondering
who will get there first. Newspapers start wondering
does he still live? It is a seesaw of doubt and hope. Who may have the story
of finding the North Pole or who may be buried
somewhere in the snow and ice. And headlines back then were so cool. (dramatic music) And then on September 1st, 1909, on this little island in the north, a ragged Dr. Cook appears ashore. He heads straight to the telegraph station and sends this message. (dramatic music) This is huge news. Cook says he reached the North Pole and that he found land up here in what a lot of people thought
was just a frozen ocean. Okay, but wait, it's not over. Literally five days later who shows up on the Labrador
coast, but freaking Peary! What? Five days later he sends his own telegram. (dramatic suspenseful music) And if the press wasn't
already stoked enough about Cook having come
back and discovered land and got to the North Pole first,
now they're going berserk. This is so juicy, the great rivalry, climaxing in this big fight. They can't, where you can't,
like, make this stuff up. So they turn to Peary and they're like, "Oh, Cook arrived five days ago and said that he was the first one to get to the North Pole before you did." What? He did not just get bested by the cocky newbie that he trained. "No, Cook is lying," Peary says. The rivalry between these two
guys is hitting a crescendo and the newspapers, their cartoonists and their readers are all loving it. It leads to this waterfall of
memes depicting the rivalry, which at this point was about
ego, fame, money, reputation, all playing out in the epic
Arctic, the last frontier. I mean this should be
like a miniseries on Hulu. Like I would watch the hell out of this. - [Announcer] The true story
of two very different men in pursuit of the same goal. - My favorite cartoon is this one. It's a "Puck" cover showing the North Pole holding a bag of money, with Cook holding a note
saying, "I saw you first" and Peary holding a
note saying, "So did I." (laughs) Oh, it's so good. Oh. Oh, and Cook was super
into like gum drops apparently. Anyway, so now it's like full
blown information warfare between these two. Peary's going out on
this, like, smear campaign to undermine Cook's credibility
saying that he's been lying about all of his accomplishments. "He didn't actually summit
Denali," says Peary. So then Cook fires back
revealing kind of his snarky side reminding the world that
Peary is this 52-year-old man with just two toes. Oh, and it's awfully suspicious that he didn't take anyone with him who could corroborate the
latitude that he was at. Among all these memes
and selling of newspapers and the public bickering, the question still remained
who actually got there first? Well, shouldn't that be easy? Why don't we just go to the North Pole? We can obviously go there now and see what flag is planted there. No, because remember the North
Pole is just a frozen ocean and the ice drifts like miles per day. So that won't work. The only way to actually
prove who got there first is to review the evidence
from these expeditions, the journals and the
records that these guys kept and then compare that
against solid evidence. And to be honest, both these
guys' accounts are full of weaknesses and weird stuff. Like remember when Peary insisted that there was a land mass up here? Well, a later expedition went out and had this like horrendous experience of trying to look for that land and they discovered that it was not there, that this was totally made up. Many think that Peary made this
up in an earlier expedition to rally excitement to raise
money for future trips. So what did that mean? Who
actually got there first? Was everyone just lying about everything? Has the North Pole ever been discovered? Well, it would actually be decades of exploration, observation, and analysis before some clear conclusions
started to emerge. For this story we read through
books written by scholars who have dedicated much of
their professional lives to answering this question. And here's what we can
finally say with some clarity. Peary probably made it to
the North Pole on this trip. Academics have debated this
and most say that he came between making it like
within a hundred miles to actually making it dead
center to the North Pole, just depending on who you ask. And while we're at it, it's
also possible that Henson, remember Henson, the number
two who didn't get any credit because Peary is probably racist, was actually the first to get
there because he was the guy who forged the path for Peary to follow. Meaning it was very possible
that the first person to step foot on the North
Pole was a black man. Kind of cool. Okay, but what about Cook? Didn't he start his journey
like almost a year before Peary? Did he actually get there first? No, Cook did not get there first. Years of research has
revealed that Cook was a liar, like a full-blown liar. The furthest that he probably
made it was like here, 400 miles off of the North Pole. AKA, he never actually traversed the really difficult
portion in all of this. He made it far enough to be
able to tell a convincing story and then he headed back and
sent this telegram saying that he made it there first. Whoa, Cook. Okay. But at least he's like
a legit explorer, right? Like he summited Denali
first. I mean he had pics. Wait, no, turns out these pics
are not the top of Denali. They're actually shots from
like 15,000 feet further down. AKA, not even the elevation
of Denver, Colorado. Like this was a total staged photo that he lied to the world about to say that he was the
first one to make it to the tallest peak in North America. Cook was a liar. He had tricked the world and
many believed him. Wow, okay. So Peary was a (beep) set on being famous, but at least he was a legit explorer who probably made it to the
North Pole or close to it first. And Cook, seemingly a decent explorer, was actually just a
much better storyteller and a full-blown liar. (sad deflated music) But this is kind of unsatisfying because we don't actually
know definitively who was the first person
to, like, touch their foot on the North Pole, which is like, why do we even need to know that? Why is that important? Because it is. No one gets the credit
without needing to go into all of these caveats and there's way more caveats
than I've gone into here. Instead, this is a story
of reputation manipulation and media blitzes, of
controversy and debate, optics and lying. And instead of seeing a Neil Armstrong, we're left with more of like
a couple of Elon Musk types, but I won't leave you there. Let's just say definitively who made it to the North
Pole first with no asterisks. In 1926, Roald Amundsen, the man who had previously won
the race to the South Pole, became the first to get to
the North Pole undisputed by flying over it. So he didn't actually touch the ice, he just flew over it. But it wasn't until 1948 that a Russian was the
first verified person to walk on the pole, like actually like put your
boot on the North Pole. He took a plane to get there and then just like
walked on the North Pole. In 1958- - [Announcer] The USS Nautilus, the world's first nuclear
powered submarine. - Went under the pole,
which was another first, and submarines are really awesome and we made a whole video about
them that you should watch. Then finally, the first undisputed person to reach the North Pole by land was a guy from Minnesota. It was essentially the
culmination of like a bar bet that got way out of hand. That's a whole other story. But yeah, it was 1968
and with a snowmobile. So it really gives you an appreciation of what Peary was capable
of doing decades earlier using Inuit wisdom, his
own clever inventions and a lot of sled dogs. (bright music) So today the question of who
got to the North Pole first is not really a question that most people are thinking about a lot when it comes to the Arctic. I went to Greenland a few weeks ago and have been reporting
on the changing Arctic, exploring how different
countries are vying for ownership and influence in this space because this frozen ocean
won't be frozen for long and now it's opening up
to new shipping routes, new resources unlocked as the ice melts. But one thing that hasn't changed is how the media treats a story like this. A race, a rivalry of public
gossip fest with big egos, hungry for attention and
especially when there's imagery to go along with it. I think we're all eager
to believe what we see when it fulfills some deep need to witness the excitement of exploration. And today, the people who still want to be in the spotlight do so
by bickering and boasting about how great they are. And the media still
gleefully covers it all. Covering the lies,
covering the deceptions, as long as there's a great story and a great image to go along with it. And sometimes that's fact
checked and the truth comes out and sometimes we just never know. (dramatic music) Wasn't this a nuts story? Like, isn't it just wild,
these two characters and how it's like not that much different from people on Twitter today? Anyway, this was another deep dive where we had so much stuff and
if you look at the info doc, which is like our kind
of research doc for this, it's literally hundreds of pages long. So anyway, thanks for watching. I hope this was a fun one for you. And, yes, this map is
permanently just up in my studio because I want to look at
it every day of my life. Speaking of maps, let
me show you something. I made a poster about maps and I'm very, very excited about it. It is called All Maps are Wrong, and it is a display of a
bunch of map projections, basically the mathematical
algorithms that we use to take a spherical thing called the Earth and put it onto a flat thing
called a piece of paper. This map kind of celebrates that. It has a little explainer in the middle that explains why we need to do this. And then it has a name of
all of the map projections that are displayed on this poster. This is beautiful and cool and fun and I've been wanting to design something like this for years, but it's also a way that
you can help support what we're doing here. We're trying to make rigorous
journalism on YouTube, not as a part of like
a big corporate entity, but just like us. And to do that we more and
more rely on our community to help us do it better and to be able to pour
ourselves into these stories. And we kind of have a big team
that helps us do this now, like our team is growing. In fact, speaking of our team, we publish an extra video every month that introduces you to
the behind the scenes of what we do here. It is an intro to our team, to all of the people and the
processes and the shenanigans of running this studio. That is available to people who
are members of The Newsroom, which is just what we call our Patreon. The Newsroom is a place that supports us, but also gets you this
extra video every month. It gets you access to scripts, you get royalty free
music that you can use, and it's just a fun community. I like post things there like, like I ask for help on
thumbnails and titles. I get feedback every once in a while. Do a Q&A with the community. So that is patreon.com/johnnyharris. We have lots and presets that we use to color
our videos and photos. We're publishing more
courses over at Bright Trip, which is the travel startup
that we started a few years ago and is growing. I think that's it. So thank you all for being here. Thanks for watching this video. We've got a lot more coming and I'll see you in the next one. Bye. What? - [Director] And go get your poster. - And go get your poster.
And go get your poster. Should I reference Greenland? I should. I'd be like, I just was up here. Like, I can't not be
like by the way, like. - [Director] No, it's not relevant. - Really. - [Director] You can say
that at the end of a video. We have all this footage. Can I not be, like, keep me
honest with Peary. (slurping)
