The most damaging evidence comes from Cook’s own hands in the
form of the
diaries and notebooks he kept during his 1907-09 expedition.
They show every indication that Cook’s tale is true only
to a point, and that point lies more than 400 miles short of the North
Pole.
The rest is a fabrication, based on Cook’s real experiences
and embroidered
with his extensive knowledge of other Arctic narratives and the
scientific
opinion of his day. Even his so-called Original Field Notes,
do not match the events recorded for some of the
same days in his original diary of his polar journey, which was
recovered
from Copenhagen in 1993. At different places in his other
notebooks
he gives different latitudes for his position on specific dates,
different
dates for key events, even different dates for his arrival at the North
Pole,
all indicating that his account was a story in the making until it was
set
down in final form in the New York Herald upon his
return from the Arctic
in September 1909. 
There can be no legitimate justification
for these discrepancies,
especially the failure of dates and latitudes to match the original
field
notes, if those notes were genuine. Rather the inconsistencies of his
own
account of the events of his expedition, written in his own hand in his
contemporaneous
notebooks kept on his polar journey are the badges of fraud.
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