QI The Book of the Dead

even when asked directly, all Peary would say was: ‘I have not been altogether unsuccessful.’
    When the expedition returned to New York, they found there was a rival claim. Dr Frederick Cook, the man who had saved Peary’s leg eighteen years before, had emerged from the ice saying he had reached the Pole a whole year earlier. This stung Peary into action. All sheepishness forgotten, he set aboutdestroying Cook’s claim (which was even less credible than his own). Peary pulled in every favour he had ever been owed. The resultant publicity savaged Cook’s moral character and previous polar experience with such ferocity that his reputation never recovered. The press didn’t give Peary the unequivocal acclamation he had hoped for, and questions continued to be asked in private, but as far as the world was concerned, it was Robert Peary who had conquered the North Pole. ‘I have got the North Pole out of my system after twenty-three years of effort,’ he proclaimed.
    Twenty-two gold medals from the world’s leading geographical societies followed, along with three honorary doctorates and the French Cross of the Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour. He was received by royalty all over Europe and promoted to the rank of rear-admiral at home. His ghostwritten memoirs became best-sellers, enthralling a whole generation of armchair explorers. Peary had got all the fame he ever wanted. He withdrew from public life to Eagle Island, his retreat off the coast of Maine, to enjoy his retirement.
    But he did not enjoy it in the least. His health collapsed and he suffered severe bouts of depression. His wife blamed his decline on the doubters who had subjected him to such a grilling on his return, saying that it ‘did more toward the breaking down of his iron constitution than anything experienced in his explorations’. After all he had done, Peary must have had a terrible sense of anti-climax and boredom – and (one can only hope) regret for the way he had treated his innocent Inuit. And perhaps, in the dark watches of the night, he turned over in his mind the guilty knowledge that he had never reached his goal, and that all the fame he’d craved and won was based upon a lie.

    Peary desperately wanted the approval of the world because he had never had the approval of a father. His mother had smothered him with love and he loved her in return – his gushing letters to her are full of tenderness – but he needed to be free of her. Psychotherapists call this ‘spousification’, where the child develops guilt and anxiety because the parent is acting like a lover: Peary’s mother joining him on honeymoon is a classic example. The North Pole was a long way to go to get away from her, but it was where Robert Peary felt safe and free and where he could try to prove himself a hero to the father he never knew. He died of pernicious anaemia aged only sixty-three.
    The first definitely verifiable successful land assault on the North Pole did not take place until 1968. The name we should remember is not Robert Peary but Ralph Plaisted, a high-school dropout and former insurance salesman from Bruno, Minnesota.

     
    The Victorian explorer Mary Kingsley (1862–1900) also had difficulties with her parents, but her escape from what Peary referred to as ‘commonplace drudgery’ could not have produced a greater contrast.
    Mary’s father was Sir George Kingsley, a physician and amateur scientist. Her mother was one of his kitchen staff whom he made pregnant by accident. They married just four days before Mary was born. Although Mary had avoided the stigma of illegitimacy, her childhood hardly differed from that of a servant. Her mother was an invalid and Sir George was rarely there: he worked for wealthy patrons who felt they needed a doctor in attendance as they toured the world. Leaving the house within weeks of Mary’s birth, he was sometimes away for years at a time, writing sporadic and alarmingletters home, giving his address as ‘Abroad’. When Mary was fourteen, he casually wrote to say that a last-minute change of plan had narrowly avoided his accompanying Custer to certain death at the Battle of the Little BigHorn.
    The conditions in which Mary found herself meant no school and hardly any social life: the only people she met were domestics. As a result she had a strong cockney accent and the vocabulary of a builder. Her earliest memory was of her father on one of his whistle-stop visits, carrying her downstairs to