Great Exploration Hoaxes

Demonstrating that the qualities that brought an individual so close to his goal were often the same ones that drove him to fake success, Great Exploration Hoaxes is history at its best: entertaining, provocative, and revealing of human nature.

David Roberts is the author of thirteen books, the most recent of which are A Newer World: Kit Carson, John C. Fremont, and the Claiming of the American West and True Summit: What Really Happened on the Legendary Ascent of Annapurna. He was also responsible for the rediscovery of the lost Arctic classic In the Land of White Death, by Valerian Albanov, published in English for the first time in 2000 by The Modern Library.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Roberts led or co-led thirteen Alaskan mountaineering expeditions, making such first ascents as the west face of Mount Huntington, Shot Tower, and the direct north face of Denali.

Did Peary reach the North Pole? Was Admiral Byrd the first to fly over it? Did Frederick Cook actually make the first ascent of Mt. McKinley? Spanning 450 years of history, Great Exploration Hoaxes tells the spellbinding stories of ten men who pursued glory at any cost even the truth. Acclaimed author and explorer David Roberts delves deeply into the psychology behind the stunt and asks why these individuals, all of whom were exceptionally able, would perpetrate fraud on such a grand and public scale and defend it to their deaths, even in the face of damning evidence, and why these dubious achievements are still so hotly debated, often hundreds of years afterward.

Demonstrating that the qualities that brought an individual so close to his goal were often the same ones that drove him to fake success, Great Exploration Hoaxes is history at its best: entertaining, provocative, and revealing of human nature.

David Roberts is the author of thirteen books, the most recent of which are A Newer World: Kit Carson, John C. Fremont, and the Claiming of the American West and True Summit: What Really Happened on the Legendary Ascent of Annapurna. He was also responsible for the rediscovery of the lost Arctic classic In the Land of White Death, by Valerian Albanov, published in English for the first time in 2000 by The Modern Library.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Roberts led or co-led thirteen Alaskan mountaineering expeditions, making such first ascents as the west face of Mount Huntington, Shot Tower, and the direct north face of Denali.

Kirkus Reviews

Jon Krakauer selected this 1982 account of "breathtaking acts of deceit" by early explorers for his Modern Library Exploration series, partly because it goes far in explaining why its subjects (few of them cowards) would try so hard to convince others (or themselves) of their phony accomplishments. Well-known travel-writer Jan Morris, in her short introduction, notes the incredible pathos to Roberts's sympathetic tales of ten men who staged elaborate hoaxes in pursuit of fame and glory. The best known among them (Sebastian Cabot, Admiral Byrd, and Robert Peary) all faked exploratory achievement to satisfy both childhood frustrations and adult hunger. Kirkus (Sept. 1, 1982, p. 1051) found little new information here, but we thought that Roberts (author of more than a dozen works on exploration and mountaineering) rendered these tales "more accessible," livelier, and more "sensitive" than previous accounts. The bottom line: "good fun for exploration buffs, and entertaining enough to appeal to a wider, offbeat audience."

Walter Bonatti was born in Bergamo, Italy, in 1930. A well-known photographer and author, he received the Legion d’Honneur in 1961 for his heroic rescue of two fellow climbers on an expedition on which four other perished. He lives in Italy.