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Welcome, welcome everyone and congratulations.
I have some great news.
I, your trusty narrator, have just come across a previously undiscovered island paradise—and
for the low low price of you clicking on the sponsor link in the description, plus three
small installments of $49,999, I am willing to give you the exclusive naming rights.
What’s your username—xXSirFartALotXx?
Well then, xXSirFartALotXx Island it is.
Oh, you want to visit the island?
Ummm...well…why would you want to do that?
You know what, why don’t I pencil you in for February 31st of next year?
Oooh, that date doesn’t work?
Hmm, you know what, how about this: instead of letting you visit the island, I’ll tell
you a story that’s not at all relevant to this situation at all, of course.
In 1907, Robert Peary was the most famous, and most experienced Arctic explorer in the
world, but he had a problem—he hadn’t yet managed to become the first to visit the
most arctic of arctic places, the North Pole, and his cash reserves were becoming nonexistent.
The previous year, he had almost made it—supposedly getting within 175 miles or 280 kilometers—but
was turned around by a combination of storms and depleting supplies, but Robert Peary was
sure he could get there if he just had another try.
He possessed the kind of confidence that only a man with a Lorax level mustache can have.
All he needed to make another journey was money.
However, the arctic adventure capital market was a bit reluctant to give him more after
the previous failures, so, Peary hatched a plan.
The key to that plan was a wealthy San Francisco financier named George Crocker, who had previously
donated $50,000 to Peary’s failed 1906 voyage.
This was, of course, a time when 50k bought you more than two buckets of movie theatre
popcorn and a calculus textbook.
Peary wanted Crocker to help fund his new voyage but, considering the previous trip
he financed achieved diddly squat, this could be tough.
But what if, and hear me out, the previous voyage wasn’t a colossal failure.
Peary thought of a way to not only convince Crocker that the previous voyage hadn’t
been a failure, but also to butter him up a little bit by doing the one thing that rich
people love more than anything else—naming things after them.
And so, Peary revealed that on his 1906 voyage, though he hadn’t made it to the North Pole,
he had seen, from a distance, an enormous, previously undiscovered land mass.
He wrote that he spotted, “faint white summits,” 130 miles northwest of Cape Thomas Hubbard,
and that once he got closer, he could make out, “the snow-clad summits of the distant
land in the northwest, above the ice horizon.”
In honor of George Crocker, the San Francisco financier, Peary named this beautiful, snow-peaked
land mass, “Crocker Land.”
But then Robert Peary had two problems.
The first problem?
George Crocker had already given most of his money to boring causes like rebuilding San
Francisco after the earthquake of 1906, and so as flattered as he may have been, there
wasn’t money left for funding Peary’s arctic antics.
The second problem?
The island was totally, 100%, made up.
Now normally, this might not be such a big deal.
Guy makes up an imaginary island, who cares?
Captain James Cook did so three centuries ago and still nobody’s called him out, but
this fake island ended up mattering a lot.
You see, eventually, Robert Peary did manage to secure funding for another voyage, mostly
from the National Geographic Society.
On April 6, 1909, he finally made it to the North Pole, or at least, he said he did.
He had a picture, but this could be any old pile of snow.
He returned home proudly proclaiming that he was the first man ever to reach the North
Pole, to which a guy named Frederick Cook, another Arctic explorer, replied, “um…I
was there, like, a year ago,” but, Cook said that he’d sailed through where this
giant land mass called Crocker’s Land was supposedly located.
If I know anything about boats, it’s that they don’t work well on land and, since
Cook hadn’t found a thing except for cold water and walrus farts, someone’s lying
here.
But, because of this, the existence of Crocker Land became crucially important as it would
prove who had really gone to the North Pole first.
If it did exist, then Frederick Cook must be lying about going to the North Pole.
If it didn’t exist, Frederick Cook did go to the North Pole, and Robert Peary was the
liar.
Of course, at that time you couldn’t just fire up your handy household satellite to
check and so, to settle it, a man named Donald McMillian decided to go on another expedition
to find the land.
Not only would this prove who was telling the truth, but it would possibly give McMillan
the opportunity to be the first to step onto what was considered, “the last great unknown
place in the world.”
That voyage was, incredibly, a failure.
In addition to their ship getting stuck in the ice for three years before they could
return home, the only bright spot came when a crew member saw what looked to be the island—a
beautiful, snowy-peaked landmass—but it turned out to be a mirage.
In light of that fact, some have suggested that Peary didn’t lie about the island,
but was actually just seeing a mirage, but unfortunately for Peary’s reputation, it
looks like that’s letting him off too easy.
Historians looked at Peary’s original notes and logs for the date that Crocker’s Land
was supposedly discovered, and they found that he doesn’t mention anything about it.
All he says happened that day was that he climbed up some rocks, and then climbed down
the rocks.
Plus, the early drafts of his book even didn’t include anything about it, but then three
paragraphs about Crocker Land mysteriously showed up just before the book was published—just
when Peary needed to get more money.
In other words, Crocker Land was a load of crock.
One of Peary’s major issues, aside from inventing an island, was that, when he supposedly
went to this north pole, his crew did not include a single navigator who could make
their own independent observations as to whether or not they were truly at the pole, or just
some pile of ice, and so people didn’t believe him.
Instead, his crew should have learned to navigate starting by gaining a fundamental understanding
of geometry through the course on brilliant.org.
This would give them the skills needed to use a sextant, for example, which measures
the angle between the horizon and the sun, or another object in the sky, in order to
calculate a ship’s position.
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