Book Review: ‘Battle of Ink and Ice,’ by Darrell Hartman

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"Battle of Ink and Ice" revives the headline-grabbing debate over which explorer reached the North Pole soonest — and which newspaper broke the news.

By Joe Pompeo

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BATTLE OF INK AND ICE: A Sensational Story of News Barons, North Pole Explorers, and the Making of Modern Media, by Darrell Hartman

It began with a cable. "REACHED NORTH POLE," the American explorer Frederick Cook wired on Sept. 1, 1909, to James Gorden Bennett Jr., the Paris-based publisher of The New York Herald, which teed up Cook's 2,000-word "EXCLUSIVE ACCOUNT" of his discovery.

Days later, a telegram to news agencies rained on Cook's parade. "Stars and Stripes Nailed to the Pole," declared the rival explorer Robert Peary, who had hitched his star to The New York Times, then owned by Adolph Ochs. "We are the exclusive publishers of Peary's story," Ochs gushed to his wife. "Every newspaper in New York is in a panic about our stupendous scoop."

These opposing claims from more than a century ago come roaring back to life in Darrell Hartman's "Battle of Ink and Ice," a tale of polar adventure and newspaper warfare that will interest readers of Hampton Sides and Gay Talese alike. (Think "In the Kingdom of Ice" meets "The Kingdom and the Power.")

Diligently researched and crafted in prose that rarely turns purple, "Battle of Ink and Ice" reads more like a literary history than a suspenseful page-turner. It covers a wide berth: the history of polar disasters; the rise of popular journalism; the advent of transcontinental telecommunications; the finding in 1872 of one Dr. Livingstone, famously tracked down by a Herald correspondent in the wilds of what is now Tanzania. But at the heart of the book lies a juicy yarn about two towering egos and their race to the ends of the earth.

Cook, a physician before he began pursuing his own daredevil exploits, had made his name saving lives on the ill-fated Belgica expedition to Antarctica a decade earlier. He had also been a surgeon on an expedition helmed by Peary, an inveterate adventurer who began his career in the U.S. Navy. Now the two men had become bitter adversaries, thrust into an international scandal.

New York's circulation-hungry broadsheets feasted on the great North Pole Controversy of 1909. Cook had the backing of Bennett's Herald, a groundbreaking "penny paper" that opened the floodgates of mass readership when Bennett's father founded it in 1835. By the turn of the century, Hartman notes, The Herald was the most profitable newspaper in America, helping to subsidize its expatriate owner's extravagant lifestyle: $625,000 superyacht, Stanford White-designed business headquarters, opulent properties from New York and Newport to Versailles and the Champs-Élysées. The Herald championed polar exploration more enthusiastically than any other American newspaper. It had previously purchased the rights to Peary's expeditions, but this time it placed its money on Cook.

Peary, short of money and missing eight toes from a bout of frostbite several years earlier, struck a deal with The Times, where Ochs — a transplant from Tennessee who had elbowed his way into the cutthroat New York news market in 1896 — had established himself as a formidable rival to Bennett: self-made journeyman versus gilded scion.

Cook didn't wait for an official judgment from the scientific authorities to celebrate. Instead, capitalizing on the attendant media frenzy, he embarked on a lecture tour to supplement the $30,000 he had received for his exclusive Herald series. Peary went on the offensive, according to Hartman, laundering scurrilous allegations against Cook through the pages of The Times, the most damaging of which arrived in an exposé accusing Cook of doctoring astronomical data. The Herald dutifully countered Peary's propaganda — a bloody "war of words," as The Nation put it, that also functioned as a sort of proxy battle between Ochs and Bennett.

None of it cast either explorer in a particularly flattering light. Cook appeared to be cashing in on an unproven victory, Peary had the air of a petulant child and their respective periodicals subjected themselves to well-earned backlash. Life magazine sneered, "The only thing at the North Pole that anyone wants is newspaper headlines."

The controversy reached a critical juncture when the National Geographic Society endorsed Peary's claim — never mind his close association with the society, which convened a sympathetic panel to assess his evidence. But the book's climax arrives when a group of scientists in Denmark render their judgment on Cook, forcing the narrative tension to a surprising finale. I won't spoil it for you here, but I will note that a cloud of skepticism hangs over both expeditions to this day. (As for the competition between The Times and The Herald, well, the victor is pretty obvious.)

Hartman, a freelance journalist who knows his way around an adventure article, paid his dues in the relevant archives and has a real knack for the material; he shares with his protagonists a membership in the New York-based Explorers Club, founded in 1904.

But his structural choices sometimes warrant a scratch of the head. Short chapters keep the story moving, but 52 is perhaps too many. Some chapters seem as if they end before they even lift off, pulling you out of a particular arc right as you’re being drawn in. Windy detours on the earlier combat between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst help set the stage for the coming Times-Herald showdown — as well as presaging the real-time 24/7 news cycle of today — but at times feel disconnected from the story at hand.

Given how large Ochs looms in "Battle of Ink and Ice," it's a shame he didn't endow the historical record with more of his thinking on the fiasco that "elevated The Times head and shoulders above its peers," as Hartman writes. He doesn't let that stop Ochs from having the final word, which comes in a quote from the publisher's last will and testament: "I trust its news columns may continue fairly to present, without recognizing friend or foe, the news of the day — ‘all the news that's fit to print.’ "

Joe Pompeo is a Vanity Fair correspondent and the author of "Blood & Ink: The Scandalous Jazz Age Double Murder That Hooked America on True Crime."

BATTLE OF INK AND ICE: A Sensational Story of News Barons, North Pole Explorers, and the Making of Modern Media BATTLE OF INK AND ICE: A Sensational Story of News Barons, North Pole Explorers, and the Making of Modern Media