Battle of Ink and Ice, by Darrell Hartman

This is a recent release about two simultaneous and intertwined rivalries. In 1908-09, the US explorers Frederick Cook of "Belgica" fame, and Robert Peary, both journeyed in the Arctic, and returned--within a week of each other--claiming to have reached the North Pole. Cook's claim put him as the first, but Peary threw shade at him, drama ensued.

Meanwhile, among the many newspapers in New York City, the Herald and the Times were competing for market dominance. The more populist Herald had financially backed Cook, the more sedate/elitist Times supported Peary, and these newspaper battles inflamed the precedence battle.

The "alternating narratives" makes more sense here than it did for something like, say, Erik Larson's "Thunderstruck," which tries to interweave the decades-long story of Marconi's radio development with the much more zoomed-in story of a murder investigation--the timescales don't really mesh. But here, we can go back and forth between "the history of Arctic exploration" and "the history of newspapers in New York City" reasonably well.

-Fridtjof Nansen is definitely the greatest; as Hartman notes, "Tarnishing a great polar achievement by failing to record it properly was literally the stuff of Nansen's nightmares." From his diary:

I had a strange dream last night. I had got home. I can still feel something of the trembling joy, mixed with fear, with which I neared land and the first telegraph station. I had carried out my plan; we had reached the North Pole on sledges, and then got down to Franz Josef Land. I had seen nothing but drift-ice; and when people asked what it was like up there, and how we knew we had been to the Pole, I had no answer to give; I had forgotten to take accurate observations, and now began to feel that this had been stupid of me.

Foreshadowing!

-We spend plenty of time berating explorers themselves for being dumb, but sometimes their financial backers are actually the worst. James Gordon Bennett Jr., the Herald publisher, helped fund the Jeannette expedition, but deliberately misled that captain to believe that the Vega expedition was in more danger than it actually was, so he could heroically rescue them for The News. The Jeannette fell behind schedule and disaster ensued. Then the Greely expedition set out, in part to search for the Jeannette? (This is less clear, not every search result mentions a connection, but the book sort of implied one.) Anyway GUESS WHAT.

-Robert Bartlett, the hero of the Karluk, was Peary's ship captain and trekked with him to the 88th parallel.

There was also the important question of why Peary had chosen [Matthew] Henson to accompany him beyond the 88th parallel and not Bartlett, a trained navigator who could have confirmed Peary's assertion that the pole had been reached. Asked in Sydney [Nova Scotia] to shed some light on this decision of her husband's, Josephine had virtuously declared that "there is no color line in the Arctic." Aboard the Roosevelt that very morning, reporters had learned that Peary had, in fact, selected Henson against the racist objections of some of his white expedition members. But the explanation that Peary now gave for choosing Henson over Bartlett was a purely selfish one: "Because after a lifetime of effort, I dearly wanted the honor for myself." In other words, he'd brought only a black man and four Inuit to the pole in order to avoid sharing the glory with another white man. It was a startling admission, and his detractors would not forget it.

-In the early years of New York City, most of the action was clustered at the southern tip of Manhattan Island (Wall Street, Trinity Church, etc.) A bunch of the newspapers were clustered here, in the so-called "Park Row"/"Newspaper Row" area. As newspapers and the city got bigger, they expanded north. In 1894, the Herald moved to Broadway and 34th Street, and that location became known as "Herald Square," as in, "give my regards to Broadway, remember me to Herald Square." Eleven years later, the Times moved six blocks north of the Herald, also on Broadway, and you can guess what they called their new neighborhood. This is one of those things I'm sure I heard at some point but didn't necessarily know know. Like, I visited New York a couple months ago, I zigzagged through all these train stations, so...yeah. Context.

-The end of Hartman's notes in the bibliography:

I share the increasingly uncontroversial opinion that neither Cook nor Peary reached the pole. This might seem like a disappointing place to arrive at, but I'm actually heartened by the fact that it has nearly become accepted wisdom. To me, this suggests that intellectual independence can triumph in highly polarized [pun intended????] environments--even if the heat of opposition takes a long time to subside.

-TBH the height of comedy is that so much of the Terra Nova drama revolved around "oh no the Americans have already discovered the North Pole, what's left, let's go find the South Pole, noooooo curse you Amundsen" and then seventy years later it's like "oops Amundsen probably actually discovered the North Pole." In the event that I ever get around to writing fic for this fandom it will absolutely be of the pretentious "what even is historiography, man" kind.