Piri against Cook. Polar detective length in the table

Who was the first at the North Pole? Piri or Cook? Today, scientists have practically proved that none of them came to the cherished goal. However, everything was not so obvious a little more than 100 years ago. Robert Piri awarded himself a victory. How legitimate? How did he succeed? Why are we convinced today that its priority in achieving the crown of the Earth was nothing more than a fiction?
Arctic - desert, lifeless, inaccessible area of ​​our planet. Going there, we can say with confidence: everything that you then present to the public, neither confirm nor refute no one except a few of your comrades in the campaign, will not be able to. This is how it happened with two American polar explorers - Frederick Cook, who announced the first to achieve the North Pole in the history of mankind in 1908, and Robert Piri, proving that this is an extraordinary achievement - his feat, which he performed in 1909.
The confrontations, such a dispute of Cook and Piri, probably does not know the polar story. However, there was no dispute as such. In his ambitiousness and uncompromisingness, Piri destroyed Cook as a researcher and as a person. He not only insisted that Frederick Cook was not at the pole, but also subjected all his previous achievements to doubt, exposing the former expedition comrade as a deceiver and a thief of someone else"s glory. This stigma destroyed Cook"s life, first professional, and then personal.
And in fact - what evidence should present to the society, consisting of amateurs, the applicant for the record on the edge of the Earth, where none of the members of this society has ever been and will not be?
Vladislav Koryakin, a scientist, a writer and a polar explorer with great experience, answers this question. Scrupulously analyzing the Devtniki book personally written by Cook and Piri, he proves: observations of nature, knowledge of navigation, attentiveness and careful fixation of events - these are the very witnesses and evidence that will prove the truth.

Vladislav Sergeevich Koryakin by profession a glaciologist, a specialist in the study of glaciers. Doctor of Geographical Sciences, a full member of the Russian Geographical Society. I met Arctic more than 60 years ago, working under the program of the International Geophysical Year (1957-1959) Wintering on New Earth and in Antarctica. He participated in 11 expeditions on Spitsbergen, 7 expeditions to northern land, swam in the Arctic seas. Since 1971, its essays and articles are published in the magazines "around the world", "nature", in the almanacs "Chronicle of the North", "Earth and People", "On land and at sea". In 1981, his first book was published "Routes of a glaciologist". Since then, V.S. Koryakin published many popular science books about the Arctic and Antarctic