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.
«- Cook's Photographs