Robert Edwin Peary, a US Marine engineer, was the first person to reach the North Pole in 1909 with his clerk and four Inuit men. The North Pole is isolated and covered in sea ice, making it impossible to build permanent structures. The first expedition was controversial, but a 2005 expedition recreated the journey.
The first person to reach the North Pole was a US Marine engineer named Robert Edwin Peary, who reached the Pole on April 6, 1909, along with his clerk Matthew Henson and four Inuit men named Seeglo, Ootah, Ooqueah, and Egigingwah. Although its success has been overshadowed by doubt for nearly a century, a 2005 expedition by a British explorer named Tom Avery and four others was able to recreate Peary’s journey with replica wooden sleds pulled by dog teams Canadian Eskimos, taking 36 days and 22 hours to reach the North Pole, a figure only 5 hours faster than that given by Peary.
The North Pole of the Earth is extremely isolated and cold. As there is little reason to travel there other than to score a point, the total number of explorers who travel there does not exceed two hundred a year. Overflights were carried out by planes and airships, and US and Soviet submarines passed the North Pole and even surfaced there. Lacking solid ground, the North Pole is covered in a thick shuffling of sea ice. This makes it impossible to build any permanent structures there.
During the summer, the North Pole receives 24 hours of sunlight and during the winter, 24 hours of darkness. To understand why, remember that the Earth’s axis is not directly perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic, but rather is offset by a factor of 23 degrees, called the axial tilt. So while most of the planet is pushed in and out of sunlight every 24 hours, small portions around the North and South Poles experience 6-month nights and days. Naturally, this makes them even more hostile to would-be polar colonizers or scientific researchers.
Numerous controversies surrounded the first polar expedition. With the exception of Peary, no one on the voyage was trained in navigation, and thus no one could confirm Peary’s navigational work. In a book later published by Henson, he recalled the journey as difficult, involving winding detours to avoid ice crests and areas where the ice shelf thinned. This contradicted Peary’s account of a quick and direct trip to the Pole. However, as previously stated, their journey was recreated by explorers using period equipment, and therefore seems more plausible than many 20th century historians would have thought.
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