It is a story of one of exploration’s great rivalries, of two former colleagues who turned into fierce enemies.
In this episode, we'll be talking about the race to the North Pole, and the competing claims of discovery made by explorers Frederick Cook and Robert Peary.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the race to the north pole.
[00:00:26] It's a story of one of exploration’s great rivalries, of two former colleagues who turned into fierce enemies.
[00:00:34] So, let’s not waste a minute, and get right into the story of the race to the North Pole.
[00:00:42] In August of 1909, a ship left Greenland, with Copenhagen its final destination.
[00:00:51] The journey across the north Atlantic would take several weeks. It would be cold, fierce winds blowing, and large waves crashing over the boat.
[00:01:02] Luckily, the passengers of this ship had something to keep them entertained.
[00:01:08] One of the passengers was a man named Dr Fredrick Cook.
[00:01:14] He was a doctor by training, but had become an explorer.
[00:01:19] And he had quite the story to tell.
[00:01:23] A year earlier, on April 21st, 1908, Cook had become the first person to reach the North Pole.
[00:01:33] He regaled his fellow passengers with stories of adventures in the freezing ice, narrow escapes from polar bears, almost falling down icy crevasses, being cut off from civilisation, lost on the sea ice and being forced to survive on seal meat.
[00:01:53] He had successfully managed what no human being had managed before, he had made it literally to the top of the world, and he had survived to tell the tale.
[00:02:05] And on September 1st, 1909, the ship Cook was on, made a stop in the town of Lerwick, in the Shetland Isles, right to the north of Scotland.
[00:02:18] The ship’s captain suggested to Cook that he get the word out quickly.
[00:02:23] After all, history had been made.
[00:02:28] Cook wasted no time in doing so.
[00:02:31] He sent a telegram to The New York Herald, which you might remember as being the newspaper that financed the search for the famous Dr Livingstone, from an episode a few weeks back.
[00:02:42] The next day, The New York Herald printed the headline “The North Pole Is Discovered by Dr. Frederick A. Cook”.
[00:02:52] But just a week later, readers of another newspaper, The New York Times, would wake up to the headline: “Peary Discovers the North Pole After Eight Trials in 23 Years.”
[00:03:06] Peary wasn’t just some nickname for Fredrick Cook, Peary, Robert Peary to give him his full name, was a completely different person.
[00:03:16] He was another Arctic explorer, and had been in fact Fredrick Cook’s colleague and mentor.
[00:03:24] He returned from what he said was the first expedition to successfully reach the North Pole, only to find that his great rival had got there first.
[00:03:36] Or had he?
[00:03:38] Cook, according to Peary, never reached the North Pole.
[00:03:43] He was a liar, a charlatan and a fraud.
[00:03:47] Instead, Peary should get all the credit for being the first person to reach the North Pole.
[00:03:53] So, who was right?
[00:03:56] Which of these two men actually won the race to the North Pole, Cook, Peary, or neither of them?
[00:04:06] To start this story, we should probably have a mini geographical refresher.
[00:04:11] The North Pole is, of course, the most northerly point in the world.
[00:04:16] And there was a certain mystery about what existed at The North Pole.
[00:04:21] Was it a frozen land mass? A frozen sea covered in ice? An incredibly rough, open sea? Or a mysterious new and undiscovered continent?
[00:04:34] And in the frenzy of 19th century and early 20th century exploration mania, ships and explorers set out to finally discover the truth.
[00:04:47] The first major expedition came in 1827, and was led by a British Admiral called William Edward Parry. Parry would get to 82 degrees north, which is pretty good going, but remember that the North Pole is 90 degrees north. He still had a way to go.
[00:05:09] And after Parry, almost 100 others would try, but they would all come up short.
[00:05:17] You probably need no reminder that getting to the North Pole is no mean feat.
[00:05:23] A ship needs to navigate its way through the ice, there is a high chance you will get stuck, and if your ship does manage to make it through the ice, when you have to disembark and go across the ice on foot, you’ll need to watch out for polar bears, crevasses, and snowstorms.
[00:05:41] You’ll need to survive on tinned meat and biscuits, you’ll need to make sure you don’t run out of supplies, and you’ll have to do all of this in blisteringly cold temperatures.
[00:05:53] Some people, who obviously didn’t subscribe to the view that “it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey”, some people tried to take a shortcut.
[00:06:04] In the case of some Swedish explorers, they tried to fly over the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon, but they vanished into thin air, only to be found 33 years later, very cold and, of course, very dead.
[00:06:20] After going on 100 failed attempts, towards the end of the 19th century, the expeditions were getting a little more serious.
[00:06:30] And one man who was certainly a serious explorer was Robert Peary.
[00:06:36] He was an experienced sailor, and an Admiral in the US navy.
[00:06:42] In 1886 he took a break from the navy, with the goal of crossing Greenland.
[00:06:49] He successfully did this, and became the first person to discover that Greenland was in fact a separate landmass; it didn’t go all the way to the North Pole as people had thought.
[00:07:02] On this voyage he also made another important discovery, and a discovery that made him realise that perhaps he wasn’t discovering all that much at all.
[00:07:14] He met and befriended some native Inuit people, people who lived in the Arctic Circle.
[00:07:21] It became clear to Peary that the Inuits had an incredibly sophisticated understanding of how to survive in these Arctic conditions.
[00:07:30] They knew how to hunt, what to eat, how to build an igloo, how to dress appropriately, how to work with dogs to pull a sleigh, and how to cross the icy terrain.
[00:07:43] Peary realised that there was a huge amount of knowledge that they had developed over the course of hundreds of years, knowledge that would be incredibly valuable to him.
[00:07:54] Unlike most other explorers that had come before him, Peary chose to enlist the help of indigenous Inuit people, but he also knew that he needed modern medicine and trained doctors to help him if anything went wrong.
[00:08:10] And he found a doctor in the form of a 26-year-old recent medical graduate called Fredrick Cook.
[00:08:18] Cook was initially drawn to the world of adventure as a way of escaping from the real world.
[00:08:25] A year before, in 1890, his wife and baby both died during childbirth, and the young man was looking for anything to take his mind off the trauma.
[00:08:38] He joined Peary’s 1891 expedition as a volunteer, and he would later write "It was as if a door to a prison cell had been opened".
[00:08:49] It was lucky he was there, as his medical services were soon called upon after the expedition leader, Peary, broke his leg in a shipyard accident. The young doctor set two broken bones, and Peary was able to be on his way once the bones had healed.
[00:09:07] Peary was, understandably, grateful for the young doctor’s services, but after the expedition returned to the United States, there were signs of a split between the pair.
[00:09:20] Cook wanted to publish the results of a study he had completed, but Peary said no.
[00:09:28] Peary was the leader of the expedition, and his account needed to be published first.
[00:09:34] In other words, Peary was the boss, Cook was merely the doctor.
[00:09:40] Cook wasn’t best pleased about this, and when the opportunity to go on another expedition with Peary came up a year later, he refused.
[00:09:50] Peary was without his preferred doctor, but this wasn’t going to stop him.
[00:09:55] He now had his sights firmly set on the North Pole, and there was nothing that was going to get in his way.
[00:10:02] He made multiple trips during the 1890s, each time failing to reach his intended destination.
[00:10:10] He knew that if he became the first person to set foot on the North Pole, fame and glory awaited him. This isn’t an exaggeration; he literally admitted as much in a letter to his mother in 1897.
[00:10:26] And I'm quoting directly: "My last trip brought my name before the world; my next will give me a standing in the world....I will be foremost in the highest circles in the capital, and make powerful friends with whom I can shape my future instead of letting it come as it will....Remember, mother, I must have fame." End quote.
[00:10:50] Cook, on the other hand, seemed to have got a taste for the explorer’s life.
[00:10:56] He went on an expedition to the Antarctic in 1897, where he worked closely with the Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen.
[00:11:06] And a few years later, in 1903, he led the first expedition to reach the top of Denali, or Mt McKinley, the tallest mountain in North America, successfully summitting it and taking a picture of himself at the top.
[00:11:21] Well, remember this as we’ll return to this point in a little bit.
[00:11:25] Anyway, the point is that Cook was fast becoming a household name, and in 1907, a year after returning from the top of the highest mountain in North America, he set off to plant his flag on the top of the world, the North Pole.
[00:11:43] Cook’s party arrived in Greenland, and then set off north in February of 1908. The expedition party was initially made up of Cook, nine indigenous Inuit people, and 11 sledges that would be pulled by 103 dogs.
[00:12:01] The journey was, as you might imagine, incredibly tough.
[00:12:07] They had to fight their way through snowstorms and severe winds and mountains of ice. As they neared what Cook believed to be the North Pole, most of the party turned back, and Cook was left with two Inuit guides, Etukishook and Ahwelah.
[00:12:26] They managed to cross almost 600 kilometres in 24 days, so 25 kilometres per day, through the most hellish of conditions.
[00:12:37] Eventually, so Cook would recall, on April 21st, 1908, they arrived at a tall flat-topped ice island. Cook took out his sextant, took several measurements, and concluded that they were at, and I'm quoting directly, "a spot which was as near as possible" to the North Pole.
[00:13:00] They had finally arrived!
[00:13:03] The group stayed there for two days, taking more measurements to confirm that they were indeed at the top of the world, then Cook wrote a note, put it in a small brass tube, and pushed it into the ice.
[00:13:18] The hard work was done, now it was the “easy bit”, getting home and telling the world.
[00:13:24] Apart from as soon as Cook and his two companions started the return journey, it was clear that they had made an important miscalculation.
[00:13:35] The ice flowed in a different direction to what they had assumed, so that they found themselves in a completely different position, separated from the supplies that they had left behind on their return journey.
[00:13:49] This had taken several months, which meant that winter would soon be approaching. To make matters worse, they had run out of ammunition, bullets, both to defend themselves from polar bears and as a means of hunting.
[00:14:05] They had to hibernate, essentially, in a small igloo for four months, and hunt seals with spears. Luckily Cook had the two Inuit guides with him, otherwise one imagines he might not have fared so well.
[00:14:22] The group survived the winter, and the men eventually made their way back to Greenland, where they arrived in April 1909, fourteen months after setting off on their expedition. And of course, they had no radio or means of communication with the outside world. Nobody had seen or heard from them since they had set off a year before.
[00:14:46] Now, as you heard at the start of the episode, Cook got on a ship to Denmark, and sent that famous telegram announcing his achievement, that he had become the first person to reach the North Pole.
[00:14:59] But while this was all happening, his ex boss, essentially, Robert Peary, was also en route to the pole, desperate to try to finally plant his flag and claim this achievement for himself.
[00:15:14] And Peary’s group was significantly larger and better equipped than Cook’s.
[00:15:20] This would be Peary’s eighth attempt, and failure was not an option.
[00:15:25] The group included 50 men, almost 50 sledges and a whopping 246 dogs. They were most certainly prepared.
[00:15:36] Peary knew the direction he needed to go in, and when the group was around 200 kilometres away from the pole, he sent the rest of the group back, going ahead with four Inuit guides and another fellow American, an African-American man named Matthew Henson.
[00:15:55] On April 6th, 1909, Henson told Peary that he had a feeling that they were there, they had reached the North Pole.
[00:16:06] So the story goes, Henson turned to Peary and said, "we are now at the Pole, are we not?".
[00:16:13] To which Peary replied, "I do not suppose that we can swear we are exactly at the Pole".
[00:16:20] It was the end of a long day, so the men set up camp, deciding that they would go about the business of taking measurements the following morning.
[00:16:30] Then they turned in for the evening, but not before Peary in true patriot style took out an American flag and put it on a pole outside their igloo.
[00:16:42] The following morning the group rose, took some measurements to confirm that, yes, they were indeed at the North Pole, and then they headed back south. Of course, if they were truly at the North Pole, the only direction they could have gone was south.
[00:16:59] Clearly, the journey south was no stroll in the park, but they made it back.
[00:17:06] When Peary arrived in Greenland, he discovered that Cook had recently returned from a trip to “the North”.
[00:17:14] He interrogated some Inuits who had heard about Cook’s trip, and it emerged that Cook had claimed that he had reached the North Pole a year before Peary.
[00:17:26] And if you thought that Peary might have thought, “ok, that’s a shame, but I guess Cook got there first”, well, things didn’t quite go like that.
[00:17:37] Peary did everything he could to publicly discredit Cook and cast doubt on whether his former colleague had ever actually got to the North Pole.
[00:17:48] It turned out that there was quite a lot to question.
[00:17:52] The first thing to mention is that it was very difficult for anyone at this point to be able to say for sure that they had reached The North Pole. There was no sign, of course, and the location of the Pole was constantly changing. Or rather, the Pole was static but the ice above it was moving.
[00:18:14] And if you are wondering how both Cook and Peary figured out that they were at The North Pole, what measurements they actually took, they used something called a sextant, which is the measuring device that looks a little bit like a combination of a telescope and a ruler.
[00:18:33] The problem is that sextants don’t work particularly well at the poles, especially the North Pole, given the consistently moving nature of the ice, so they simply weren't very accurate.
[00:18:47] The second point that Peary questioned was the duration of Cook’s trip. If you recall, Cook claimed that he went 600 kilometres in 24 days, so 25 kilometres a day. That’s quite good going even if you’re walking in normal conditions, along a road, let’s say, but this expedition involved dragging supplies over snow and ice, avoiding crevasses, under incredibly difficult conditions, literally travelling to the top of the world.
[00:19:20] It was amazingly fast. Too fast for it to be credible, Peary said.
[00:19:27] Well, the truth would come out in Cook’s journals and records, in which he would have recorded exactly where they had gone every day, and this could be checked and verified.
[00:19:38] But it would later transpire that these records were nowhere to be found. Cook had left them with a man he had befriended in Greenland, with orders for them to be sent to America on the first ship.
[00:19:53] But the first ship back was the SS Roosevelt, a ship built specifically for Peary’s expedition. When Cook’s new friend asked Peary to take Cook’s belongings back with him, Peary refused, and the belongings were never seen or heard of ever again.
[00:20:13] With no way of proving what he had done, increasing scrutiny was placed on Cook’s claims, which he had no way of proving.
[00:20:23] And even his previous claims of exploration and derring do were more closely examined.
[00:20:31] Unfortunately for Cook, it turned out that he had a weakness for exaggeration.
[00:20:37] In other words, he was a liar.
[00:20:40] When his famous conquest of the tallest peak in North America was examined, it was revealed that he never actually got to the top. The picture that he took and publicised of himself “at the top” of Denali, or Mount McKinley, this turned out to be a fake. It was taken from an angle that made it look like he was at the top, but he was most certainly not.
[00:21:06] What’s more, the indigenous people that Cook claimed were with him when he reached the North Pole were questioned. Under pressure, they admitted that they hadn’t gone nearly as far north as Cook had said they had.
[00:21:20] They didn’t know exactly where they had got to, but it certainly didn’t seem like it was the North Pole.
[00:21:27] Cook’s claims were rubbished, and he was cast as a fraud. Although to his dying day I should say that he would maintain that he was not, and that he was truthfully the first person to reach The North Pole.
[00:21:42] So, how about Peary?
[00:21:45] Well, there are plenty of people who have claimed that he also might never have made it to the North Pole, or at least, even if he did, it might well have been his fellow explorer, Matthew Henson, an African-American, who set foot on the pole before Peary did.
[00:22:02] But if neither Cook nor Peary nor Henson did, who was the first person to reach the North Pole?
[00:22:11] The first person to reach The North Pole for sure was the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen in 1926, although he cheated somewhat by going by airship, so he didn’t actually set foot on the pole, he only flew over it.
[00:22:27] This happened in 1926, and Amundsen made sure to take all of the proper documentation to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that he had indeed reached the top of the world.
[00:22:39] So, as to the question of “the race to the north pole”, let me leave you with this perhaps philosophical question.
[00:22:48] If the participants didn’t know that there was a race, if there was no winner, and if in fact none of the participants ever actually reached the finish line, was there ever really a race after all?
[00:23:04] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The Race to The North Pole.
[00:23:08] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:23:12] And if you like stories about races to a pole, I have some good news for you, as we are going to be following up this episode with another one about the race to the South Pole.
[00:23:22] It does involve Roald Amundsen, snow, ice and freezing temperatures, but it is a very different story and it’s wonderful in its own way. So I hope you’ll enjoy it.
[00:23:34] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:23:39] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the race to the north pole.
[00:00:26] It's a story of one of exploration’s great rivalries, of two former colleagues who turned into fierce enemies.
[00:00:34] So, let’s not waste a minute, and get right into the story of the race to the North Pole.
[00:00:42] In August of 1909, a ship left Greenland, with Copenhagen its final destination.
[00:00:51] The journey across the north Atlantic would take several weeks. It would be cold, fierce winds blowing, and large waves crashing over the boat.
[00:01:02] Luckily, the passengers of this ship had something to keep them entertained.
[00:01:08] One of the passengers was a man named Dr Fredrick Cook.
[00:01:14] He was a doctor by training, but had become an explorer.
[00:01:19] And he had quite the story to tell.
[00:01:23] A year earlier, on April 21st, 1908, Cook had become the first person to reach the North Pole.
[00:01:33] He regaled his fellow passengers with stories of adventures in the freezing ice, narrow escapes from polar bears, almost falling down icy crevasses, being cut off from civilisation, lost on the sea ice and being forced to survive on seal meat.
[00:01:53] He had successfully managed what no human being had managed before, he had made it literally to the top of the world, and he had survived to tell the tale.
[00:02:05] And on September 1st, 1909, the ship Cook was on, made a stop in the town of Lerwick, in the Shetland Isles, right to the north of Scotland.
[00:02:18] The ship’s captain suggested to Cook that he get the word out quickly.
[00:02:23] After all, history had been made.
[00:02:28] Cook wasted no time in doing so.
[00:02:31] He sent a telegram to The New York Herald, which you might remember as being the newspaper that financed the search for the famous Dr Livingstone, from an episode a few weeks back.
[00:02:42] The next day, The New York Herald printed the headline “The North Pole Is Discovered by Dr. Frederick A. Cook”.
[00:02:52] But just a week later, readers of another newspaper, The New York Times, would wake up to the headline: “Peary Discovers the North Pole After Eight Trials in 23 Years.”
[00:03:06] Peary wasn’t just some nickname for Fredrick Cook, Peary, Robert Peary to give him his full name, was a completely different person.
[00:03:16] He was another Arctic explorer, and had been in fact Fredrick Cook’s colleague and mentor.
[00:03:24] He returned from what he said was the first expedition to successfully reach the North Pole, only to find that his great rival had got there first.
[00:03:36] Or had he?
[00:03:38] Cook, according to Peary, never reached the North Pole.
[00:03:43] He was a liar, a charlatan and a fraud.
[00:03:47] Instead, Peary should get all the credit for being the first person to reach the North Pole.
[00:03:53] So, who was right?
[00:03:56] Which of these two men actually won the race to the North Pole, Cook, Peary, or neither of them?
[00:04:06] To start this story, we should probably have a mini geographical refresher.
[00:04:11] The North Pole is, of course, the most northerly point in the world.
[00:04:16] And there was a certain mystery about what existed at The North Pole.
[00:04:21] Was it a frozen land mass? A frozen sea covered in ice? An incredibly rough, open sea? Or a mysterious new and undiscovered continent?
[00:04:34] And in the frenzy of 19th century and early 20th century exploration mania, ships and explorers set out to finally discover the truth.
[00:04:47] The first major expedition came in 1827, and was led by a British Admiral called William Edward Parry. Parry would get to 82 degrees north, which is pretty good going, but remember that the North Pole is 90 degrees north. He still had a way to go.
[00:05:09] And after Parry, almost 100 others would try, but they would all come up short.
[00:05:17] You probably need no reminder that getting to the North Pole is no mean feat.
[00:05:23] A ship needs to navigate its way through the ice, there is a high chance you will get stuck, and if your ship does manage to make it through the ice, when you have to disembark and go across the ice on foot, you’ll need to watch out for polar bears, crevasses, and snowstorms.
[00:05:41] You’ll need to survive on tinned meat and biscuits, you’ll need to make sure you don’t run out of supplies, and you’ll have to do all of this in blisteringly cold temperatures.
[00:05:53] Some people, who obviously didn’t subscribe to the view that “it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey”, some people tried to take a shortcut.
[00:06:04] In the case of some Swedish explorers, they tried to fly over the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon, but they vanished into thin air, only to be found 33 years later, very cold and, of course, very dead.
[00:06:20] After going on 100 failed attempts, towards the end of the 19th century, the expeditions were getting a little more serious.
[00:06:30] And one man who was certainly a serious explorer was Robert Peary.
[00:06:36] He was an experienced sailor, and an Admiral in the US navy.
[00:06:42] In 1886 he took a break from the navy, with the goal of crossing Greenland.
[00:06:49] He successfully did this, and became the first person to discover that Greenland was in fact a separate landmass; it didn’t go all the way to the North Pole as people had thought.
[00:07:02] On this voyage he also made another important discovery, and a discovery that made him realise that perhaps he wasn’t discovering all that much at all.
[00:07:14] He met and befriended some native Inuit people, people who lived in the Arctic Circle.
[00:07:21] It became clear to Peary that the Inuits had an incredibly sophisticated understanding of how to survive in these Arctic conditions.
[00:07:30] They knew how to hunt, what to eat, how to build an igloo, how to dress appropriately, how to work with dogs to pull a sleigh, and how to cross the icy terrain.
[00:07:43] Peary realised that there was a huge amount of knowledge that they had developed over the course of hundreds of years, knowledge that would be incredibly valuable to him.
[00:07:54] Unlike most other explorers that had come before him, Peary chose to enlist the help of indigenous Inuit people, but he also knew that he needed modern medicine and trained doctors to help him if anything went wrong.
[00:08:10] And he found a doctor in the form of a 26-year-old recent medical graduate called Fredrick Cook.
[00:08:18] Cook was initially drawn to the world of adventure as a way of escaping from the real world.
[00:08:25] A year before, in 1890, his wife and baby both died during childbirth, and the young man was looking for anything to take his mind off the trauma.
[00:08:38] He joined Peary’s 1891 expedition as a volunteer, and he would later write "It was as if a door to a prison cell had been opened".
[00:08:49] It was lucky he was there, as his medical services were soon called upon after the expedition leader, Peary, broke his leg in a shipyard accident. The young doctor set two broken bones, and Peary was able to be on his way once the bones had healed.
[00:09:07] Peary was, understandably, grateful for the young doctor’s services, but after the expedition returned to the United States, there were signs of a split between the pair.
[00:09:20] Cook wanted to publish the results of a study he had completed, but Peary said no.
[00:09:28] Peary was the leader of the expedition, and his account needed to be published first.
[00:09:34] In other words, Peary was the boss, Cook was merely the doctor.
[00:09:40] Cook wasn’t best pleased about this, and when the opportunity to go on another expedition with Peary came up a year later, he refused.
[00:09:50] Peary was without his preferred doctor, but this wasn’t going to stop him.
[00:09:55] He now had his sights firmly set on the North Pole, and there was nothing that was going to get in his way.
[00:10:02] He made multiple trips during the 1890s, each time failing to reach his intended destination.
[00:10:10] He knew that if he became the first person to set foot on the North Pole, fame and glory awaited him. This isn’t an exaggeration; he literally admitted as much in a letter to his mother in 1897.
[00:10:26] And I'm quoting directly: "My last trip brought my name before the world; my next will give me a standing in the world....I will be foremost in the highest circles in the capital, and make powerful friends with whom I can shape my future instead of letting it come as it will....Remember, mother, I must have fame." End quote.
[00:10:50] Cook, on the other hand, seemed to have got a taste for the explorer’s life.
[00:10:56] He went on an expedition to the Antarctic in 1897, where he worked closely with the Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen.
[00:11:06] And a few years later, in 1903, he led the first expedition to reach the top of Denali, or Mt McKinley, the tallest mountain in North America, successfully summitting it and taking a picture of himself at the top.
[00:11:21] Well, remember this as we’ll return to this point in a little bit.
[00:11:25] Anyway, the point is that Cook was fast becoming a household name, and in 1907, a year after returning from the top of the highest mountain in North America, he set off to plant his flag on the top of the world, the North Pole.
[00:11:43] Cook’s party arrived in Greenland, and then set off north in February of 1908. The expedition party was initially made up of Cook, nine indigenous Inuit people, and 11 sledges that would be pulled by 103 dogs.
[00:12:01] The journey was, as you might imagine, incredibly tough.
[00:12:07] They had to fight their way through snowstorms and severe winds and mountains of ice. As they neared what Cook believed to be the North Pole, most of the party turned back, and Cook was left with two Inuit guides, Etukishook and Ahwelah.
[00:12:26] They managed to cross almost 600 kilometres in 24 days, so 25 kilometres per day, through the most hellish of conditions.
[00:12:37] Eventually, so Cook would recall, on April 21st, 1908, they arrived at a tall flat-topped ice island. Cook took out his sextant, took several measurements, and concluded that they were at, and I'm quoting directly, "a spot which was as near as possible" to the North Pole.
[00:13:00] They had finally arrived!
[00:13:03] The group stayed there for two days, taking more measurements to confirm that they were indeed at the top of the world, then Cook wrote a note, put it in a small brass tube, and pushed it into the ice.
[00:13:18] The hard work was done, now it was the “easy bit”, getting home and telling the world.
[00:13:24] Apart from as soon as Cook and his two companions started the return journey, it was clear that they had made an important miscalculation.
[00:13:35] The ice flowed in a different direction to what they had assumed, so that they found themselves in a completely different position, separated from the supplies that they had left behind on their return journey.
[00:13:49] This had taken several months, which meant that winter would soon be approaching. To make matters worse, they had run out of ammunition, bullets, both to defend themselves from polar bears and as a means of hunting.
[00:14:05] They had to hibernate, essentially, in a small igloo for four months, and hunt seals with spears. Luckily Cook had the two Inuit guides with him, otherwise one imagines he might not have fared so well.
[00:14:22] The group survived the winter, and the men eventually made their way back to Greenland, where they arrived in April 1909, fourteen months after setting off on their expedition. And of course, they had no radio or means of communication with the outside world. Nobody had seen or heard from them since they had set off a year before.
[00:14:46] Now, as you heard at the start of the episode, Cook got on a ship to Denmark, and sent that famous telegram announcing his achievement, that he had become the first person to reach the North Pole.
[00:14:59] But while this was all happening, his ex boss, essentially, Robert Peary, was also en route to the pole, desperate to try to finally plant his flag and claim this achievement for himself.
[00:15:14] And Peary’s group was significantly larger and better equipped than Cook’s.
[00:15:20] This would be Peary’s eighth attempt, and failure was not an option.
[00:15:25] The group included 50 men, almost 50 sledges and a whopping 246 dogs. They were most certainly prepared.
[00:15:36] Peary knew the direction he needed to go in, and when the group was around 200 kilometres away from the pole, he sent the rest of the group back, going ahead with four Inuit guides and another fellow American, an African-American man named Matthew Henson.
[00:15:55] On April 6th, 1909, Henson told Peary that he had a feeling that they were there, they had reached the North Pole.
[00:16:06] So the story goes, Henson turned to Peary and said, "we are now at the Pole, are we not?".
[00:16:13] To which Peary replied, "I do not suppose that we can swear we are exactly at the Pole".
[00:16:20] It was the end of a long day, so the men set up camp, deciding that they would go about the business of taking measurements the following morning.
[00:16:30] Then they turned in for the evening, but not before Peary in true patriot style took out an American flag and put it on a pole outside their igloo.
[00:16:42] The following morning the group rose, took some measurements to confirm that, yes, they were indeed at the North Pole, and then they headed back south. Of course, if they were truly at the North Pole, the only direction they could have gone was south.
[00:16:59] Clearly, the journey south was no stroll in the park, but they made it back.
[00:17:06] When Peary arrived in Greenland, he discovered that Cook had recently returned from a trip to “the North”.
[00:17:14] He interrogated some Inuits who had heard about Cook’s trip, and it emerged that Cook had claimed that he had reached the North Pole a year before Peary.
[00:17:26] And if you thought that Peary might have thought, “ok, that’s a shame, but I guess Cook got there first”, well, things didn’t quite go like that.
[00:17:37] Peary did everything he could to publicly discredit Cook and cast doubt on whether his former colleague had ever actually got to the North Pole.
[00:17:48] It turned out that there was quite a lot to question.
[00:17:52] The first thing to mention is that it was very difficult for anyone at this point to be able to say for sure that they had reached The North Pole. There was no sign, of course, and the location of the Pole was constantly changing. Or rather, the Pole was static but the ice above it was moving.
[00:18:14] And if you are wondering how both Cook and Peary figured out that they were at The North Pole, what measurements they actually took, they used something called a sextant, which is the measuring device that looks a little bit like a combination of a telescope and a ruler.
[00:18:33] The problem is that sextants don’t work particularly well at the poles, especially the North Pole, given the consistently moving nature of the ice, so they simply weren't very accurate.
[00:18:47] The second point that Peary questioned was the duration of Cook’s trip. If you recall, Cook claimed that he went 600 kilometres in 24 days, so 25 kilometres a day. That’s quite good going even if you’re walking in normal conditions, along a road, let’s say, but this expedition involved dragging supplies over snow and ice, avoiding crevasses, under incredibly difficult conditions, literally travelling to the top of the world.
[00:19:20] It was amazingly fast. Too fast for it to be credible, Peary said.
[00:19:27] Well, the truth would come out in Cook’s journals and records, in which he would have recorded exactly where they had gone every day, and this could be checked and verified.
[00:19:38] But it would later transpire that these records were nowhere to be found. Cook had left them with a man he had befriended in Greenland, with orders for them to be sent to America on the first ship.
[00:19:53] But the first ship back was the SS Roosevelt, a ship built specifically for Peary’s expedition. When Cook’s new friend asked Peary to take Cook’s belongings back with him, Peary refused, and the belongings were never seen or heard of ever again.
[00:20:13] With no way of proving what he had done, increasing scrutiny was placed on Cook’s claims, which he had no way of proving.
[00:20:23] And even his previous claims of exploration and derring do were more closely examined.
[00:20:31] Unfortunately for Cook, it turned out that he had a weakness for exaggeration.
[00:20:37] In other words, he was a liar.
[00:20:40] When his famous conquest of the tallest peak in North America was examined, it was revealed that he never actually got to the top. The picture that he took and publicised of himself “at the top” of Denali, or Mount McKinley, this turned out to be a fake. It was taken from an angle that made it look like he was at the top, but he was most certainly not.
[00:21:06] What’s more, the indigenous people that Cook claimed were with him when he reached the North Pole were questioned. Under pressure, they admitted that they hadn’t gone nearly as far north as Cook had said they had.
[00:21:20] They didn’t know exactly where they had got to, but it certainly didn’t seem like it was the North Pole.
[00:21:27] Cook’s claims were rubbished, and he was cast as a fraud. Although to his dying day I should say that he would maintain that he was not, and that he was truthfully the first person to reach The North Pole.
[00:21:42] So, how about Peary?
[00:21:45] Well, there are plenty of people who have claimed that he also might never have made it to the North Pole, or at least, even if he did, it might well have been his fellow explorer, Matthew Henson, an African-American, who set foot on the pole before Peary did.
[00:22:02] But if neither Cook nor Peary nor Henson did, who was the first person to reach the North Pole?
[00:22:11] The first person to reach The North Pole for sure was the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen in 1926, although he cheated somewhat by going by airship, so he didn’t actually set foot on the pole, he only flew over it.
[00:22:27] This happened in 1926, and Amundsen made sure to take all of the proper documentation to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that he had indeed reached the top of the world.
[00:22:39] So, as to the question of “the race to the north pole”, let me leave you with this perhaps philosophical question.
[00:22:48] If the participants didn’t know that there was a race, if there was no winner, and if in fact none of the participants ever actually reached the finish line, was there ever really a race after all?
[00:23:04] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The Race to The North Pole.
[00:23:08] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:23:12] And if you like stories about races to a pole, I have some good news for you, as we are going to be following up this episode with another one about the race to the South Pole.
[00:23:22] It does involve Roald Amundsen, snow, ice and freezing temperatures, but it is a very different story and it’s wonderful in its own way. So I hope you’ll enjoy it.
[00:23:34] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:23:39] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the race to the north pole.
[00:00:26] It's a story of one of exploration’s great rivalries, of two former colleagues who turned into fierce enemies.
[00:00:34] So, let’s not waste a minute, and get right into the story of the race to the North Pole.
[00:00:42] In August of 1909, a ship left Greenland, with Copenhagen its final destination.
[00:00:51] The journey across the north Atlantic would take several weeks. It would be cold, fierce winds blowing, and large waves crashing over the boat.
[00:01:02] Luckily, the passengers of this ship had something to keep them entertained.
[00:01:08] One of the passengers was a man named Dr Fredrick Cook.
[00:01:14] He was a doctor by training, but had become an explorer.
[00:01:19] And he had quite the story to tell.
[00:01:23] A year earlier, on April 21st, 1908, Cook had become the first person to reach the North Pole.
[00:01:33] He regaled his fellow passengers with stories of adventures in the freezing ice, narrow escapes from polar bears, almost falling down icy crevasses, being cut off from civilisation, lost on the sea ice and being forced to survive on seal meat.
[00:01:53] He had successfully managed what no human being had managed before, he had made it literally to the top of the world, and he had survived to tell the tale.
[00:02:05] And on September 1st, 1909, the ship Cook was on, made a stop in the town of Lerwick, in the Shetland Isles, right to the north of Scotland.
[00:02:18] The ship’s captain suggested to Cook that he get the word out quickly.
[00:02:23] After all, history had been made.
[00:02:28] Cook wasted no time in doing so.
[00:02:31] He sent a telegram to The New York Herald, which you might remember as being the newspaper that financed the search for the famous Dr Livingstone, from an episode a few weeks back.
[00:02:42] The next day, The New York Herald printed the headline “The North Pole Is Discovered by Dr. Frederick A. Cook”.
[00:02:52] But just a week later, readers of another newspaper, The New York Times, would wake up to the headline: “Peary Discovers the North Pole After Eight Trials in 23 Years.”
[00:03:06] Peary wasn’t just some nickname for Fredrick Cook, Peary, Robert Peary to give him his full name, was a completely different person.
[00:03:16] He was another Arctic explorer, and had been in fact Fredrick Cook’s colleague and mentor.
[00:03:24] He returned from what he said was the first expedition to successfully reach the North Pole, only to find that his great rival had got there first.
[00:03:36] Or had he?
[00:03:38] Cook, according to Peary, never reached the North Pole.
[00:03:43] He was a liar, a charlatan and a fraud.
[00:03:47] Instead, Peary should get all the credit for being the first person to reach the North Pole.
[00:03:53] So, who was right?
[00:03:56] Which of these two men actually won the race to the North Pole, Cook, Peary, or neither of them?
[00:04:06] To start this story, we should probably have a mini geographical refresher.
[00:04:11] The North Pole is, of course, the most northerly point in the world.
[00:04:16] And there was a certain mystery about what existed at The North Pole.
[00:04:21] Was it a frozen land mass? A frozen sea covered in ice? An incredibly rough, open sea? Or a mysterious new and undiscovered continent?
[00:04:34] And in the frenzy of 19th century and early 20th century exploration mania, ships and explorers set out to finally discover the truth.
[00:04:47] The first major expedition came in 1827, and was led by a British Admiral called William Edward Parry. Parry would get to 82 degrees north, which is pretty good going, but remember that the North Pole is 90 degrees north. He still had a way to go.
[00:05:09] And after Parry, almost 100 others would try, but they would all come up short.
[00:05:17] You probably need no reminder that getting to the North Pole is no mean feat.
[00:05:23] A ship needs to navigate its way through the ice, there is a high chance you will get stuck, and if your ship does manage to make it through the ice, when you have to disembark and go across the ice on foot, you’ll need to watch out for polar bears, crevasses, and snowstorms.
[00:05:41] You’ll need to survive on tinned meat and biscuits, you’ll need to make sure you don’t run out of supplies, and you’ll have to do all of this in blisteringly cold temperatures.
[00:05:53] Some people, who obviously didn’t subscribe to the view that “it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey”, some people tried to take a shortcut.
[00:06:04] In the case of some Swedish explorers, they tried to fly over the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon, but they vanished into thin air, only to be found 33 years later, very cold and, of course, very dead.
[00:06:20] After going on 100 failed attempts, towards the end of the 19th century, the expeditions were getting a little more serious.
[00:06:30] And one man who was certainly a serious explorer was Robert Peary.
[00:06:36] He was an experienced sailor, and an Admiral in the US navy.
[00:06:42] In 1886 he took a break from the navy, with the goal of crossing Greenland.
[00:06:49] He successfully did this, and became the first person to discover that Greenland was in fact a separate landmass; it didn’t go all the way to the North Pole as people had thought.
[00:07:02] On this voyage he also made another important discovery, and a discovery that made him realise that perhaps he wasn’t discovering all that much at all.
[00:07:14] He met and befriended some native Inuit people, people who lived in the Arctic Circle.
[00:07:21] It became clear to Peary that the Inuits had an incredibly sophisticated understanding of how to survive in these Arctic conditions.
[00:07:30] They knew how to hunt, what to eat, how to build an igloo, how to dress appropriately, how to work with dogs to pull a sleigh, and how to cross the icy terrain.
[00:07:43] Peary realised that there was a huge amount of knowledge that they had developed over the course of hundreds of years, knowledge that would be incredibly valuable to him.
[00:07:54] Unlike most other explorers that had come before him, Peary chose to enlist the help of indigenous Inuit people, but he also knew that he needed modern medicine and trained doctors to help him if anything went wrong.
[00:08:10] And he found a doctor in the form of a 26-year-old recent medical graduate called Fredrick Cook.
[00:08:18] Cook was initially drawn to the world of adventure as a way of escaping from the real world.
[00:08:25] A year before, in 1890, his wife and baby both died during childbirth, and the young man was looking for anything to take his mind off the trauma.
[00:08:38] He joined Peary’s 1891 expedition as a volunteer, and he would later write "It was as if a door to a prison cell had been opened".
[00:08:49] It was lucky he was there, as his medical services were soon called upon after the expedition leader, Peary, broke his leg in a shipyard accident. The young doctor set two broken bones, and Peary was able to be on his way once the bones had healed.
[00:09:07] Peary was, understandably, grateful for the young doctor’s services, but after the expedition returned to the United States, there were signs of a split between the pair.
[00:09:20] Cook wanted to publish the results of a study he had completed, but Peary said no.
[00:09:28] Peary was the leader of the expedition, and his account needed to be published first.
[00:09:34] In other words, Peary was the boss, Cook was merely the doctor.
[00:09:40] Cook wasn’t best pleased about this, and when the opportunity to go on another expedition with Peary came up a year later, he refused.
[00:09:50] Peary was without his preferred doctor, but this wasn’t going to stop him.
[00:09:55] He now had his sights firmly set on the North Pole, and there was nothing that was going to get in his way.
[00:10:02] He made multiple trips during the 1890s, each time failing to reach his intended destination.
[00:10:10] He knew that if he became the first person to set foot on the North Pole, fame and glory awaited him. This isn’t an exaggeration; he literally admitted as much in a letter to his mother in 1897.
[00:10:26] And I'm quoting directly: "My last trip brought my name before the world; my next will give me a standing in the world....I will be foremost in the highest circles in the capital, and make powerful friends with whom I can shape my future instead of letting it come as it will....Remember, mother, I must have fame." End quote.
[00:10:50] Cook, on the other hand, seemed to have got a taste for the explorer’s life.
[00:10:56] He went on an expedition to the Antarctic in 1897, where he worked closely with the Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen.
[00:11:06] And a few years later, in 1903, he led the first expedition to reach the top of Denali, or Mt McKinley, the tallest mountain in North America, successfully summitting it and taking a picture of himself at the top.
[00:11:21] Well, remember this as we’ll return to this point in a little bit.
[00:11:25] Anyway, the point is that Cook was fast becoming a household name, and in 1907, a year after returning from the top of the highest mountain in North America, he set off to plant his flag on the top of the world, the North Pole.
[00:11:43] Cook’s party arrived in Greenland, and then set off north in February of 1908. The expedition party was initially made up of Cook, nine indigenous Inuit people, and 11 sledges that would be pulled by 103 dogs.
[00:12:01] The journey was, as you might imagine, incredibly tough.
[00:12:07] They had to fight their way through snowstorms and severe winds and mountains of ice. As they neared what Cook believed to be the North Pole, most of the party turned back, and Cook was left with two Inuit guides, Etukishook and Ahwelah.
[00:12:26] They managed to cross almost 600 kilometres in 24 days, so 25 kilometres per day, through the most hellish of conditions.
[00:12:37] Eventually, so Cook would recall, on April 21st, 1908, they arrived at a tall flat-topped ice island. Cook took out his sextant, took several measurements, and concluded that they were at, and I'm quoting directly, "a spot which was as near as possible" to the North Pole.
[00:13:00] They had finally arrived!
[00:13:03] The group stayed there for two days, taking more measurements to confirm that they were indeed at the top of the world, then Cook wrote a note, put it in a small brass tube, and pushed it into the ice.
[00:13:18] The hard work was done, now it was the “easy bit”, getting home and telling the world.
[00:13:24] Apart from as soon as Cook and his two companions started the return journey, it was clear that they had made an important miscalculation.
[00:13:35] The ice flowed in a different direction to what they had assumed, so that they found themselves in a completely different position, separated from the supplies that they had left behind on their return journey.
[00:13:49] This had taken several months, which meant that winter would soon be approaching. To make matters worse, they had run out of ammunition, bullets, both to defend themselves from polar bears and as a means of hunting.
[00:14:05] They had to hibernate, essentially, in a small igloo for four months, and hunt seals with spears. Luckily Cook had the two Inuit guides with him, otherwise one imagines he might not have fared so well.
[00:14:22] The group survived the winter, and the men eventually made their way back to Greenland, where they arrived in April 1909, fourteen months after setting off on their expedition. And of course, they had no radio or means of communication with the outside world. Nobody had seen or heard from them since they had set off a year before.
[00:14:46] Now, as you heard at the start of the episode, Cook got on a ship to Denmark, and sent that famous telegram announcing his achievement, that he had become the first person to reach the North Pole.
[00:14:59] But while this was all happening, his ex boss, essentially, Robert Peary, was also en route to the pole, desperate to try to finally plant his flag and claim this achievement for himself.
[00:15:14] And Peary’s group was significantly larger and better equipped than Cook’s.
[00:15:20] This would be Peary’s eighth attempt, and failure was not an option.
[00:15:25] The group included 50 men, almost 50 sledges and a whopping 246 dogs. They were most certainly prepared.
[00:15:36] Peary knew the direction he needed to go in, and when the group was around 200 kilometres away from the pole, he sent the rest of the group back, going ahead with four Inuit guides and another fellow American, an African-American man named Matthew Henson.
[00:15:55] On April 6th, 1909, Henson told Peary that he had a feeling that they were there, they had reached the North Pole.
[00:16:06] So the story goes, Henson turned to Peary and said, "we are now at the Pole, are we not?".
[00:16:13] To which Peary replied, "I do not suppose that we can swear we are exactly at the Pole".
[00:16:20] It was the end of a long day, so the men set up camp, deciding that they would go about the business of taking measurements the following morning.
[00:16:30] Then they turned in for the evening, but not before Peary in true patriot style took out an American flag and put it on a pole outside their igloo.
[00:16:42] The following morning the group rose, took some measurements to confirm that, yes, they were indeed at the North Pole, and then they headed back south. Of course, if they were truly at the North Pole, the only direction they could have gone was south.
[00:16:59] Clearly, the journey south was no stroll in the park, but they made it back.
[00:17:06] When Peary arrived in Greenland, he discovered that Cook had recently returned from a trip to “the North”.
[00:17:14] He interrogated some Inuits who had heard about Cook’s trip, and it emerged that Cook had claimed that he had reached the North Pole a year before Peary.
[00:17:26] And if you thought that Peary might have thought, “ok, that’s a shame, but I guess Cook got there first”, well, things didn’t quite go like that.
[00:17:37] Peary did everything he could to publicly discredit Cook and cast doubt on whether his former colleague had ever actually got to the North Pole.
[00:17:48] It turned out that there was quite a lot to question.
[00:17:52] The first thing to mention is that it was very difficult for anyone at this point to be able to say for sure that they had reached The North Pole. There was no sign, of course, and the location of the Pole was constantly changing. Or rather, the Pole was static but the ice above it was moving.
[00:18:14] And if you are wondering how both Cook and Peary figured out that they were at The North Pole, what measurements they actually took, they used something called a sextant, which is the measuring device that looks a little bit like a combination of a telescope and a ruler.
[00:18:33] The problem is that sextants don’t work particularly well at the poles, especially the North Pole, given the consistently moving nature of the ice, so they simply weren't very accurate.
[00:18:47] The second point that Peary questioned was the duration of Cook’s trip. If you recall, Cook claimed that he went 600 kilometres in 24 days, so 25 kilometres a day. That’s quite good going even if you’re walking in normal conditions, along a road, let’s say, but this expedition involved dragging supplies over snow and ice, avoiding crevasses, under incredibly difficult conditions, literally travelling to the top of the world.
[00:19:20] It was amazingly fast. Too fast for it to be credible, Peary said.
[00:19:27] Well, the truth would come out in Cook’s journals and records, in which he would have recorded exactly where they had gone every day, and this could be checked and verified.
[00:19:38] But it would later transpire that these records were nowhere to be found. Cook had left them with a man he had befriended in Greenland, with orders for them to be sent to America on the first ship.
[00:19:53] But the first ship back was the SS Roosevelt, a ship built specifically for Peary’s expedition. When Cook’s new friend asked Peary to take Cook’s belongings back with him, Peary refused, and the belongings were never seen or heard of ever again.
[00:20:13] With no way of proving what he had done, increasing scrutiny was placed on Cook’s claims, which he had no way of proving.
[00:20:23] And even his previous claims of exploration and derring do were more closely examined.
[00:20:31] Unfortunately for Cook, it turned out that he had a weakness for exaggeration.
[00:20:37] In other words, he was a liar.
[00:20:40] When his famous conquest of the tallest peak in North America was examined, it was revealed that he never actually got to the top. The picture that he took and publicised of himself “at the top” of Denali, or Mount McKinley, this turned out to be a fake. It was taken from an angle that made it look like he was at the top, but he was most certainly not.
[00:21:06] What’s more, the indigenous people that Cook claimed were with him when he reached the North Pole were questioned. Under pressure, they admitted that they hadn’t gone nearly as far north as Cook had said they had.
[00:21:20] They didn’t know exactly where they had got to, but it certainly didn’t seem like it was the North Pole.
[00:21:27] Cook’s claims were rubbished, and he was cast as a fraud. Although to his dying day I should say that he would maintain that he was not, and that he was truthfully the first person to reach The North Pole.
[00:21:42] So, how about Peary?
[00:21:45] Well, there are plenty of people who have claimed that he also might never have made it to the North Pole, or at least, even if he did, it might well have been his fellow explorer, Matthew Henson, an African-American, who set foot on the pole before Peary did.
[00:22:02] But if neither Cook nor Peary nor Henson did, who was the first person to reach the North Pole?
[00:22:11] The first person to reach The North Pole for sure was the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen in 1926, although he cheated somewhat by going by airship, so he didn’t actually set foot on the pole, he only flew over it.
[00:22:27] This happened in 1926, and Amundsen made sure to take all of the proper documentation to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that he had indeed reached the top of the world.
[00:22:39] So, as to the question of “the race to the north pole”, let me leave you with this perhaps philosophical question.
[00:22:48] If the participants didn’t know that there was a race, if there was no winner, and if in fact none of the participants ever actually reached the finish line, was there ever really a race after all?
[00:23:04] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The Race to The North Pole.
[00:23:08] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:23:12] And if you like stories about races to a pole, I have some good news for you, as we are going to be following up this episode with another one about the race to the South Pole.
[00:23:22] It does involve Roald Amundsen, snow, ice and freezing temperatures, but it is a very different story and it’s wonderful in its own way. So I hope you’ll enjoy it.
[00:23:34] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:23:39] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
