It may be hard for us to appreciate the chest-beating American expansionism of the time. The Panama Canal Zone was under our thumb, and construction was under way; Teddy Roosevelt had just left office and was writing action-packed accounts of big game hunting and exploration; and in the Treaty of Paris of 1898, we had wrested Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico from Spain. Looking around for new worlds to conquer, the public imagination somehow fixed on attaining the North Pole as a significant thing to do. Never mind that, as Gertrude Stein famously once said of Oakland, California, there is no there there; it's in fact under water, and the ice that covers it is constantly moving. The attainment of the Pole would be another jewel in our crown.

Keep in mind that nobody had ever seen it. Nowadays we fly over it routinely on the Great Circle Route from Europe to North America. But one hundred years ago no ships had even come close, no aircraft were yet capable of reaching it and returning, and an abortive attempt to fly across it in a hydrogen balloon in 1897 had ended in mystery. One theory held there was an open polar sea, which ships could sail across if they could reach it. But nobody knew, and the world waited for the emergence of a national hero whose navigation records would prove he had been to the Pole.

One of the greatest difficulties of exploration, from the days of Columbus to the present, has nothing to do with blizzards, gales, freezing, swamps, leeches, or altitude. It's money: where to get it, from whom; and what to give away in exchange for it. The British Admiralty was good as gold, but its politics and protocols were so complicated that it took a Machiavelli even to begin a successful expedition. The United States government was friendly, but financially unforthcoming, so its explorers were forced to shake the bushes at the Explorers Club and salons of the wealthy to find funds. The Norwegian Roald Amundsen, who beat the British to the South Pole by a couple of weeks, and beat everybody through the Northwest Passage, was known to slip out of port for his expeditions only a few hours ahead of creditors' bailiffs armed with liens and warrants.

A canoeing partner of mine recently tipped me off to a fascinating book on the subject. True North (Bruce Henderson, W.W. Norton, 2005) describes the race to the Pole by two American explorers, one of them long regarded a national hero and the other, in his later life, publicly reviled as a charlatan. Henderson, with access to personal materials and expedition data kept secret for 75 years, spins a fascinating story of two quite different individuals, originally congenial shipmates on an early Arctic expedition, who ended up on opposite ends of public opinion, and one of whom quite clearly set out to discredit and destroy the other.

Hard as it may be to believe, there are many aficionados of exploration and mountaineering (I know a few) to whom this controversy is still important. The problem is that the events occurred so long ago, so many important records have been lost or destroyed, and the characters involved were so complicated that the truth is literally unknowable.

The two protagonists were Robert E. Peary, a Navy Department engineer, and Dr. Frederick A. Cook, a Brooklyn physician in general practice (when he wasn't roaming the frigid ends of the earth). Here's where Henderson's tale gets personal. Peary, raised by and utterly devoted to his mother (she accompanied him and his bride on their honeymoon), nurtured a burning desire to gain fame through exploration. Cook, on the other hand, seemed captivated by the beauty of unexplored territory, the native people he met there, and the treatment of diseases likely to strike men during long, sunless winters under stress – scurvy, depression, aggression, and anemia.

I'm tipping my hand here, but that's because Henderson tips his, too, fairly early in the book. Peary takes shape as an imperious autocrat, jealous of his prerogatives, occasionally a thief, and obsessed with reaching (or more importantly, being known for having reached) ninety degrees north. On his last epic sledge trip north, during which he could hardly walk because of toes lost earlier to frostbite, he sent back support sledges driven by competent men, one by one, until he was alone with his "negro assistant," Matthew Henson, and a few Inuit – none of whom could compute latitude with the sextant he carried. He returned triumphantly, only to find that Cook, on a different course and with only two Inuit as company, was claiming to have reached the Pole a year earlier.

At this point the book takes a deeply depressing turn; you can see it coming. Peary and his wealthy friends in the Peary Arctic Club, began systematically to destroy Cook's reputation – which was defended by, among others, Amundsen, with whom Cook had wintered in the Antarctic. A horse packer who had long claimed to have reached the summit of Mt. McKinley with Cook suddenly changed his story, and was shortly afterward able to purchase property and the first automobile in his remote Montana village.

Peary's sealed records were finally opened in 1988 and indicate (as even his supporters admit) that he probably faked it. Cook was disgraced and eventually even imprisoned. Peary died at 63 of a pernicious anemia Cook had diagnosed years earlier. How did he live even that long under the burden of what he had to know was fraudulent fame? Again, no one knows.