Good morning, class. Before we begin today, I would like to address an issue that one of you reminded me of after the last lecture. As you may recall, last time I mentioned that Robert E. Peary was the first person to reach the North Pole. What I neglected to mention was the controversy around Peary’s pioneering accomplishment. In 1910, a committee of the national geographical society examined Commodore Peary’s claim to have reached the North Pole on April 6th’ 1909 and found no reason to doubt him. This judgment was actually confirmed by a committee of the US congress in 1911. Nevertheless, Peary’s claim was surrounded by controversy. Tins was largely due to the competing claim of Doctor Frederic Cook who told the world he had reached the Pole a four-year earlier. Over the decades Peary was given the benefit of the doubt, but critics persisted in raising questions about his navigation and the distances he claimed to have covered. So the Navigation Foundation spent an additional 12 months of exhaustive examination of documents relating to Peary’s polar expedition. The documents supposed Peary’s claims about the distances he covered. After also conducting an extensive computer analysis of photos taken by Peary at the pole, they concluded that Pierre and his companions did in fact reach the near vicinity of the North Pole on April 6th. 1909. OK, today we’re going to talk about exploration of the opposite end of the world, I assume you all read chapter 3 in our text and are now familiar with the names: Emerson and Scott.
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