From Hero to Humbug

This is the latest in a series of posts that publish for the first time significant documents related to the Polar Controversy.

When Peary reached North Star Bay on August 23, 1909, according to Matt Henson, “The Jeanie was there waiting for us, and lay alongside until the next day. The Eskimos came out in their kayaks from shore and said a whaling ship had left some letters for us down at Cape York. Then Mr. Whitney said he guessed he’d go on the Jeanie. I guess he knew what he was doing all right. He wanted to get away before there was any trouble.

“The next day we got the box of letters at Cape York. That was the 25th. That’s when we found out that Dr. Cook said he had been at the North Pole. The captain of the whaler had written a letter to the Commander telling how he met Dr. Cook and Dr. Cook said he had been to the North Pole.”

Curiously, earlier in this interview, Henson had said “[Dr. Cook] ordered [his Eskimos] to say that they had been at the North Pole. After I had questioned them over and over again they confessed that they had not gone beyond the land ice.”

The long series on “The Eskimo Testimony” below gives a full account of what can be known of Henson’s questioning of the two Inuit who stayed with Cook after he left Cape Thomas Hubbard. This interview took place on August 17, so, Peary already had this “testimony” in hand. So it should have been no surprise to him to read that Cook had told Captain William Adams that he had been to the North Pole, just as the Inuit had first said that he had to Henson. Yet claiming to have done so to someone else was a different matter entirely. Upon reading Adams letter, Peary dropped everything and put on all speed for the nearest telegraph station, which was at Battle Harbour, Labrador, and in a short time denounced Cook by wire as having handed the world a “gold brick.”

As far as I know, however, Captain Adams letter has never been published. Here is a typed copy of it from the Peary papers held at the National Archives II:

Notice that Captain Adams says Cook said he reached the North Pole on April 22, 1908. There are several early documents, and some notes in Cook’s original diaries that cite his attainment to have taken place on this same date, whereas when he sent his telegrams announcing it to the world from Shetland Islands on September 1, 1909, he claimed he reached the Pole on April 21, not the 22nd.

Notes:

“Sammy” or Anaukaq, was Peary’s first Inuit son, born in 1898.

“Whitney” was Harry Whitney, a rich hunter who spent the winter of 1908-09 in Dr. Cook’s box house at Annoatok.

The Jeanie was the ship sent to pick up Whitney in the summer of 1909.  The Morning was Captain Adams’s Dundee whaler.

“wrought” is probably a typographical error for “fought.”

The Henson interview is cited by Andrew Freeman in The Case for Doctor Cook,  to have appeared in the New York Herald for September 22, 1909, but I was unable to find it there.

The copy of Adams’ letter is among the Peary Family Papers, Record Group XP, at NARA II, College Park, MD.

This is the latest in a series of posts that publish for the first time significant documents related to the Polar Controversy.

1914 was a climactic year in the Cook-Peary saga. Cook’s congressional lobbyist, Ernest C. Rost, had managed to get several authoritative speeches under the names of several members of Congress inserted into the Congressional Record calling into question Peary’s polar claim and have them widely distributed under their franking privileges. Those and an avalanche of pre-printed postcards sent to Congress by auditors who heard Cook at his extensive Chautauqua appearances called for an investigation into his own claim to have been first to the North Pole appeared to be heading toward achieving that end. Peary decided Cook had to be stopped at any cost.

As usual, that cost fell upon General Thomas H. Hubbard, President of the Peary Arctic Club.

Thomas H. Hubbard

To counter Cook’s appearances, Hubbard engaged the services of the William J. Burns National Detective Agency to follow Cook’s movements and obtain prior notice of his scheduled appearances, so that hecklers could be placed in his audiences to call his claims into question. Frederick A. Cook became the Burns Agency’s Special Investigation #2140 in Chicago, where The Polar Publishing Company had offices at Steinway Hall, and #5039, in New York, where he usually stayed at the Prince George Hotel when on business there.

William J. Burns

Burns’s agents kept Hubbard informed through coded messages, sent by telegram, collect:

In this manner they were able to obtain, in advance, information on where Cook would be appearing next. To counter the effect of his appearances they flooded each venue with a packet of anti-Cook material designed to undermine his credibility and introduce doubt as to the veracity of his claims both about his polar conquest and the “campaign of infamy” being waged against him by Peary’s fantastically rich and powerful backers.

The Burns Agency billed Hubbard weekly for their work, plus expenses:

When one considers that the value of the dollar today is roughly 32 times less than that of 1914, Hubbard paid an enormous sum for this surveillance. The cost of the sample half-month shown here would amount to $9,280. If typical, that would come to more than $222,000 per annum.

Added to that, the printing of more than 100,000 copies of an anti-Cook pamphlet entitled The North Pole Aftermath were distributed at a cost of $40 per 1,000, or about $128,000 in today’s dollars.

This munificence ended on May 19, 1915 when General Hubbard suddenly died of erysipelas.

Cook embarked on an expedition aimed at climbing Mt. Everest at about this time, and by the time he returned, his chances of getting his hearing before Congress had faded. Soon thereafter, Rost turned on Cook and produced a devastating anti-Cook speech for Representative Henry Helgesen to introduce into the Congressional Record, sued Cook for non-payment of his lobbying services, and won a settlement of more than $3,000 for back wages.

The Burns Agency documents are samples of scores of them that are among Peary’s papers, record group XL, at NARA II.

This is the latest in a series of posts that publish for the first time significant documents related to the Polar Controversy.

The evidence concerning “The Eskimo Testimony” was the subject of this blog for more than a year and ran to 18 parts, concluding with the post for April 2024. Since then the digitized holdings of the Archives of the American Geographical Society, which are posted by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, have yielded some interesting new evidence on this subject.

The first item is a copy of a letter from Donald MacMillan, dated January 28, 1918, sent to the editor of the Geographical Review concerning the proofs of an article eventually published in that journal under the title “New Evidence that Dr. Cook did not reach the North Pole.” (see the post for February 22, 2023 below). MacMillan makes comments on the copy and suggests changes.  Incidentally, he confirms in the letter that the cameraman, Edward S. Brooke, “was sent by Cook to watch me and get certain information of his own.” The letter encloses a colored map of “The North Polar Regions” published by R.D. Servoss of NY. This map can be dated to between 1907 and 1909 because, although it shows “Crocker Land,” which was not named until Peary’s Harper’s article was published in 1907, it does not show Peary’s alleged route to the North Pole in 1909. MacMillan has penciled this notation on the map: “Track of Dr. Cook as drawn by Ah-pellah, his companion, on April 18, 1917,” and in his letter provides this additional information:

An enlargement of Ahwelah’s penciled in route from the map is reproduced here:

For comparison, here is a copy of the map published by The Peary Arctic Club in its copyrighted story on October 13, 1909, showing the route of Dr. Cook that was penciled in by Dr. Cook’s other companion, Etukishook, under questioning fro Matt Henson at Etah on August 17, 1909.

Etukishook’s route is show on the map in black. Dr. Cook’s actual route up to the time he reached Cape Thomas Hubbard, as indicated in his original 1908 notebook kept on his polar attempt, is shown on this map in purple. Ahwelah’s route, where it differs from the Peary map’s route has been indicated in orange. A comparison of the three routes brings up some interesting points.

Notice these differences in relation to the routes: First of all, each of the two Inuit routes show the same route as far as reaching the east coast of Axel Heiberg Island. This is notable because Dr. Cook did not follow this route. According to his original notebook he did not travel through “Flat Sound” to reach Nansen Sound, but took a detour into Greely Fjord and then Cannon Fjord to lay caches for his return and then went straight across from Greely Fjord to the northern tip of Shei Island, later found to be a peninsula, then down its west coast to reach Flat Sound. Although this is made quite definite in his notebook, and Cook even admitted that he had laid caches so he could return via Cannon Fjord in his book, My Attainment of the Pole, (page 203), neither Inuit map shows this diversion. The Peary map then shows him going up the east coast of Axel Heiberg Island to reach Cape Thomas Hubbard, from which Cook departed on his attempt to reach the North Pole. However, Ahwelah’s route shows something quite different in this regard from Etukishuk’s.

It shows Cook crossing over Nansen Sound and going up the west coast of Ellesmere Island instead, which is what Cook’s notebook indicates he did, but it does not show him crossing back to Axel Heiberg Island’s east coast, even though he published a picture of the distinctive cliffs below which he camped there.  Instead, Ahwelah shows him continuing all the way to the end of the Kleybolte Peninsula, then thought to be an island, which lies at about 81° 75’ N before turning west and rounding the entire tip of Axel Heiberg Island without touching land again until he reaches Cape Northwest. Neither Cook’s actual route, nor Peary’s map confirms this. In fact, it is in direct contradiction to what Peary said Cook did in the statement that accompanied the map published on October 13, 1909.

From Cape Northwest, Ahwelah’s penciled route diverges: one line (dotted in orange) goes straight down the west coast of Axel Heiberg, the other bulges out slightly in the direction of Meighen Island, which is not shown on the colored map. However, the “bulge” does not go nearly far enough to the west to reach the location of the then unknown Meighen Island, which appeared on the Peary map and which lies just inside the intersection of the first longitudinal and latitudinal lines to the left of the bulge at about the head of the arrow drawn by MacMillan on the colored map. On the Peary map, the route goes all the way around Meighen Island, then straight down to the top of the east coast of Amund Ringnes Island to the south, and then along its east coast before turning east to cross over to Ellesmere Island again. However Ahwelah’s route, as MacMillan admits above, shows something quite different. It goes right down the west coast of Axel Heiberg before crossing over to the middle of the east coast of Amund Ringnes Island. The rest of the route from there to where Cook wintered at Cape Sparbo in 1908-09 is very similar on both the Inuit maps, and again from Cape Sparbo until the return course reaches Cape Sabine the next spring. Peary’s map shows a straight line crossing of Smith Sound from there to reach Annoatok, whereas Ahwelah’s shows a significant northern diversion before reaching Cook’s winter base, mirroring Cook’s actual route as accounted for in his notebook.

So, like the other accounts attributed to Cook’s two Inuit companions, Ahwelah’s route map is itself inconsistent in many details with these other accounts. It confirms Cook’s route after reaching the east coast of Amund Ringnes Island as depicted on Peary’s map, and also Cook’s northern diversion from Cape Sabine to arrive again at Annoatok in 1909, but it contradicts Cook’s actual route up to that point he reached Cape Thomas Hubbard, and it also fails to coincide with Peary’s map from the time Cook reached the east coast of Axel Heiberg Island until he landed on Amund Ringnes Island. It also fails to confirm the diversion from Cape Northwest to Meighen Island, as shown on Peary’s map, or the route from there to Amund Ringnes. Being confirmatory in some respects but contradictory in others does not make the Ahwelah map positive or negative evidence toward deducing the exact truth, and it adds nothing at all to the question of how far Dr. Cook was from land at the time he turned back from his failed attempt to reach the North Pole.

However, Ahwelah’s route, drawn eight years after the Etukishuk’s may account for the later oral tradition accounts of Cook going up the coast of Ellesmere Island and reaching about 82° N there (see post for September 14, 2023 below). It being the “last” oral account given by one of Cook’s companions, it may have then been the one enshrined in the tribe’s folk memory. However, the discrepancies shown on Ahwelah’s route might be attributed to an eyewitness’s statement that the Inuit could be quite confused as to where they were and in what direction they had traveled once out on the drifting pack ice.

This suggestion comes in the form of several letters and newspaper interviews contained in the AGS Archives from Dr. Thomas Dedrick. They were given in 1926 in the wake of the disclosure of the murder of Ross Marvin by Kudlooktoo on his way back to shore as part of one of Peary’s advance relay teams on his attempt to reach the North Pole in 1909. Dedrick was no friend of Peary’s. They had gotten into a bitter dispute on Peary’s 1898-02 expedition, on which Dedrick had been Peary’s surgeon. But his opinion does not seem to be in spite of Peary, and he makes no accusations against Peary, as some have, in regard to the murder.  His statement is based on his own experience with Inuit he accumulated during his five-year stay in the Arctic. It was common knowledge, Dedrick said, that once on the drifting pack the Inuit were easily disoriented as to direction. In fact, he said he believed that the Inuit had murdered Marvin because they were convinced that he was leading them in the wrong direction, away for land instead of toward it. This, however, does not account for Marvin’s two Inuit companions safely making landfall after he was killed.

Other relevant evidence in the Archives comes in the form of the entry for August 17, 1909 in George Borup’s diary, also among the holdings of the AGS.

The relevant part of the entry at the top of page 119 reads: “The Commander at once got busy finding out about that S.O.B. Cook & what he did & Matt with me present examined Itookishoe, Arpellar, Panikpah as to his journeyings.”  There the entry ends, picking up after a long blank space with an entry dated August 20. The small words “The men who took Cook” written below the August 17 entry are the first words from that entry, written in Borup’s regular sized handwriting on the following page. This entry confirms our supposition that it was Matt Henson, alone, who interviewed Cook’s Inuit companions in 1909, with Borup there to write down what they said (see the post for January 27, 2023 below).

Finally, the AGS Archives also contains the logbook of Bob Bartlett. However, he makes no mention of the Inuit interrogation under the appropriate dates.

The AGS Archive may be viewed at https://uwm.edu/lib-collections/ags-ny/

Exactly 115 years ago today, as mentioned in the last post, Frederick Cook was the first American to be offered the Freedom of the City of New York. Only the Prince of Prussia and Charles Dickens before him had been accorded this honor, and it was protested by the pro-Peary interests. General Thomas Hubbard wrote a personal letter to the President of the Board of Aldermen asking that the ceremony be postponed, as did the Explorers Club, in light of its ongoing investigation into Dr. Cook’s claim to have climbed Mt. McKinley in 1906 (see the posts for October, November 2017 and January 2018 below).

Cook arrived at City Hall in top hat and tails, fifteen minutes late and flanked by an honor guard of New York’s Finest, assigned to get him through the crowd of curious onlookers gathered outside. He appeared in the firm grip of Capt. B.S. Osbon, the Arctic Club’s Secretary, on hand for the presentation of the Arctic Club’s gold medal. Before going in, Cook asked for a meeting with the Alderman President Patrick F. McGowan.

Two-thirds of the Aldermen were assembled in the Aldermanic Chamber to receive him along with a crowd of onlookers including Cook’s two brothers and his sister, Captain Osbon, Henry Biederbeck, survivor of the Greely expedition, and Dr. Stebbins, who was to present the medal. Also present were two members of Peary’s 1909 expedition, Donald MacMillan and George Borup.

As he entered the room, two full minutes of applause greeted him. After the presentation of the gold medal, Mr. McGowan spoke. “I deem it only fair to Dr. Cook to say that he wanted this action of the Board of Alderman postponed. The Chair has absolute confidence in Dr. Cook and for that reason a postponement has been refused, although Dr. Cook, with his characteristic manliness, requested that we wait until all proofs are in.” The ceremony presenting the Freedom of the City then commenced.

Dr. Cook was then handed the mahogany box that contained a 15 by 23-inch engrossed sheet of vellum representing the honor being bestowed by President McGowan. On the illuminated scroll, designed by Malcolm and Hayes of New York, were representations of his igloo at the North Pole and a team of dogs pulling a sledge, with the schooner John R. Bradley riding at anchor in the distance. At the top rested the Seal of the City of New York upon two draped American flags. The first initial of Cook’s name held the figure of Columbia seated on a throne, holding aloft a laurel wreath about to be placed on the explorer, clad in furs and holding an American flag. The inscription o the scroll began, “Whereas the mystery of the ages has been solved. . .” It was signed by the mayor and Alderman McGowan.

As the alderman handed the scroll to Cook, the flash powder in one of the camera trays set afire a huge cloth bag intended to catch the smoke of the flashlight. It blazed up, scorching the portrait of George Washington that hung on the east wall. After the commotion this caused quieted down, Cook made a brief speech:

The vellum scroll is now in the possession of the Sullivan County Historical Society Museum in Hurleyville, New York.

The photograph of the scroll is courtesy of Darrell Hartman.
The other illustrations are from the author’s collection.

In the wake of his triumphal return to New York, and despite Peary’s charges that Cook’s prior claim to the North Pole was a “gold brick,” the Arctic Club of America decided on a gala dinner in his honor to be held on September 23 at the Waldorf-Astoria. A grand assembly of 1,185 guests in formal dress who had paid anywhere from $5-$30 for the privilege, thronged the vast banquet hall of the hotel, festooned with intertwined flags of the United States and Denmark. Cook, escorted by the club’s sitting president, retired Admiral Winfield Scott Schley, shook hands with more than 600 of them at the preliminary reception in the Astor Gallery before sitting down to dinner.

Over the head table hung the huge white burgee of the Bradley Arctic Expedition. In the official photograph of the event Dr. Cook is seated just to the left of the point of the burgee, with Admiral Schley to his left and John R. Bradley, the millionaire gambler who financed the expedition, to Cook’s right.

During the meal there were speeches and numberless toasts to the explorer’s health, including one from Count Harald Moltke, representing Denmark, where Cook had been received as a hero upon his return from the Arctic earlier in the month. It was 10 o’clock before Cook was introduced to speak by Admiral Schley to thunderous applause.

He thanked all those present, many who had been to the Arctic themselves, for “one of the highest honors I ever hope to receive,” and then, when he asked, referring to the growing controversy between him and Peary, “Now, gentlemen, I appeal to you as explorers and men. Am I bound to appeal to anybody, to any man, to any body of men, for a license to look for the pole?” he received a spontaneous and rousing “NO!” from the assembled dinners. When he paid homage to his benefactor, John R. Bradley was compelled to stand on his chair to acknowledge the ovation.

After his address, Cook adjourned to the Grand Ballroom, where he shook hands with more than 2,000 until midnight. At his departure he told Arctic Club officials, “My hand is a little sore but otherwise I never felt better in my life. It has been a great night and I hardly know how to express my appreciation for the cordial reception which has been given me by my fellow explorers. It is needless to say that the memory of this occasion will ever be cherished.”

Cherished, too, was the beautiful souvenir menu given each of the attendees. Here all of the pages are reproduced followed by a few comments on each of them.

The menu consists of a fold-over cover forming its front and back, with seven one-sided pages bound in between at the upper left corner by a pair of ribbons, one white and the other red, white and blue.

The front cover has a photogravure portrait of Cook taken in 1907. Below it is a list of the expeditions he participated in. The one listed as “1904” actually occurred in 1901, and so is out of order.  This mistake is not repeated in Cook’s biography on page 3, where it is reported correctly.

The first inner page presents the dinner menu, all in French. For those who don’t read French, the main course was roast squab.

The second page lists the formal speakers. All are identified except for Job E. Hedges. He was an attorney and New York Republican political activist who would be the unsuccessful Republican nominee for Governor of New York in 1912. Dr. Cook was a Democrat.

The third page, containing Cook’s biography, also has an error. Cook was not born in Callicoon, New York, but in Hortonville, a hamlet a few miles north of that town.

The fourth page portrait of Dr. Cook’s wife, Marie Fidell Hunt, shows her wearing on a chain around her neck one of the silver medals Cook received from the city of Brussels in appreciation of his service as surgeon to the Belgian Antarctic Expedition. At the time she married Cook in 1902, Marie was the widow of Dr. Willis Hunt of Camden, NJ. Ruth Hunt (left) was her daughter by that first marriage, born in 1898. Helen, who was Dr. Cook’s only surviving natural child, was born in 1905. She was named after Helen Bridgman, wife of Herbert L. Bridgman, longtime Secretary of the Peary Arctic Club. Perhaps that is why she styled herself Helene in adulthood. The white silk gown Marie Cook wore to the dinner is preserved at the Sullivan County Historical Society in Hurleyville, NY.

The fifth page shows the committees responsible for the event. The Arctic Club was formed in 1894 by the “survivors” of the disastrous Miranda expedition organized by Cook that year. The ship was lost but there were no casualties. Many of its later members were members of various arctic expeditions. The Arctic Club was absorbed by the Explorers Club in 1913. Cook was the second president of both clubs.

The sixth page shows a list of “farthest norths” reached by various explorers.

The back cover shows the yacht John R. Bradley in Foulke Fjord, the harbor at Etah, Greenland, flanked by the Arctic Club’s flag. This was the ship that took Cook to the Arctic in 1907 for his attempt on the Pole the following Spring. This is followed by a list of the officers of the club. Professor Brewer was the first president and honorary President for Life thereafter. His papers are held at Yale University. Below the officers list is a photograph taken on the 1903 Fiala-Ziegler Expedition by Anthony Fiala on his failed attempt to reach the North Pole in 1904. The sled shown in it was built by Dr. Cook’s brother, Theodore.

The Arctic Club authorized the striking of a gold medal to be presented to Cook at the banquet.  For many years the whereabouts of this medal were not known. About 2005 it was disclosed to be in the collections of the Missouri Historical Society of St. Louis. It was donated to the society in 1914 by an unrecorded benefactor.

Here is its official description from the society’s website:

“Commemorative Polar Exploration Medal Presented to Dr. Frederick A. Cook
The Arctic Club of America honored Dr. Frederick A. Cook by presenting this medal to him at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, September 23, 1909. Cook claimed to have discovered the North Pole just days before Admiral Robert E. Peary announced he had also reached the pole. When Cook failed to prove that he had beaten Peary, the Arctic Club of America revoked his membership.”
The item identifier is 1914-029-0001 and can be viewed at:
https://mohistory.org/collections/item/1914-029-0001

This description is not quite correct. The medal was was not ready in time for the Arctic Club dinner. On October 15 Cook was scheduled to receive the unprecedented honor for an American citizen of the Freedom of the City of New York at the Aldermans’ Chamber in City Hall. Before he received the illuminated vellum scroll signifying this honor, he was presented with the Arctic Club’s gold medal by Dr. Roswell Stebbins, a doctor of dentistry, as its representative. In handing it to Cook the medal dropped to the floor, rolled away and had to be chased down.

Cook’s membership in the Arctic Club was not “revoked” when he failed to prove his claim. The official reason given for dropping him from its rolls was for “non-payment of dues.”

The medal is 2 ½ inches in diameter. On the obverse Cook is shown, standing within the rings of latitude culminating in the North Pole, holding an American flag. Around the edges can be seen the lands bordering on the Arctic Ocean. It bears the inscriptions “April 21, 1908,” the date Cook claimed to have been at the Pole, and within that “F.A. Cook.” A copyright notice and the artist’s name are in incurse letters at the bottom edge.

The reverse bears the inscription: “APPROVED BY / THE / ARCTIC CLUB / OF / AMERICA / SEPT. 23 / 1909.”, the date being engraved in incurse letters after the medal was struck.

The photo of the banquet is in the photographic collections of the Library of Congress.

The photos of the menu are all courtesy of Keith Thompson.

The photos of the medal are courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society of St. Louis, MO.

Not long after returning to the United States from nearly a year of “exile,” in December 1910, Dr. Cook went to Chicago, then the center of the film industry.

The result was the formation of the North Pole Picture Co. Its production, The Truth about the North Pole, in which Cook played himself, was designed to be shown along with planned personal appearances, reasserting that he was the first man to reach the North Pole.

A publicity photo for Cook’s film

Once finished, Cook took out a full page ad in the trade publication, Moving Picture World to promote it.

In this same issue the film was featured in a two page spread critiquing and publicizing the film.

When I was writing Cook & Peary in the early 1990s, Cook’s film had been completely forgotten. I learned of it first from an ad that appeared in the New York Herald advertising Cook’s appearance in which he first showed the film at Oscar Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera House on February 12, 1911. Then while studying the Peary papers at the National Archives I came across a stenographic report of Cook’s performance and a blow by blow description of the film, commissioned by Herbert L. Bridgman, Secretary of the Peary Arctic Club and sent to Peary.

At that time, I then searched for a copy of the film, but failed to find it in any of the archival film libraries in the US. However, when I was  collaborating with BBC producer Tim Jordan on the BBC film Icemen in 1998, I was able to obtain a copy from a film footage dealer in California, whose catalog listed it, when the company’s search for it at the BBC’s request came up empty.

Since then, that copy has appeared on the internet, thus entering the public domain. Now, a slightly different, but superior copy has been located in the British Pathe film library, and is available on YouTube. You can view that copy at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cliewW_-4s8

Although this film is now available to anyone, a copy of Cook’s other film, To the Antipodes, has yet to emerge. It was the only issue of Cook’s Orient Film Co.,  which he organized in Maine, and was put together from footage shot on Cook’s ‘round the world trip in 1915, which was originally aimed at an attempt to climb Mt. Everest. But because of wartime tensions, Cook, who was of German descent, was suspected of being a possible German agent, and the British refused to give Cook’s party passage through India to  enter Nepal, so he never got near the tallest mountain on earth. As a result, Cook was forced to fall back on a trip to Borneo, instead, where he filmed scenes of local color, including some among the Dyaks, the so-called “Wildmen of Borneo.”

As can be seen from this letter to Cook from John W. Ruskin, a then popular lecturer on natural history subjects who appeared in the southern states to narrate the silent film, the movie was a financial flop and quickly faded as a commercial enterprise. But its promotion had all the elements of Cook’s penchant for advertising aplomb which landed him in Leavenworth Penitentiary ten years later, including the flamboyant letter head of his company’s stationary on which Ruskin broke the bad news to Dr. Cook. 

The ad and article appeared in Moving Picture World, Volume 8, no. 8, February 25, 1911.

The letter is in the Papers of Frederick A. Cook held in the manuscript division of the Library of Congress.

This is the latest in a series of posts that publish for the first time significant documents related to the Polar Controversy.

This is how I portrayed Dr. Cook’s stop at Lerwick in the Shetland Islands to announce his claim to have attained the North Pole on September 1, 1909 in my book, Cook & Peary, the Polar Controversy, resolved.

But it took a couple of days for rumors to spread through Lerwick about Cook’s claims. Here’s how the local papers in the Shetland Islands reported Cook’s visit; first the Shetland News for September 4, 1909: 

Cook sent his cables  from the second floor of the Post Office on Commerce Street (photo by author)

Here’s the story from the Shetland Times for the same day, which was far more creative in its accounts of Cook’s journey:

Finally, here is a letter that appeared on September 11 in that same newspaper, foreshadowing the great controversy to come:

This is the latest in a series of posts that publish for the first time significant documents related to the Polar Controversy.

Peary had given his longtime expedition member, Matthew A. Henson, the cold shoulder ever since their “arrival” at what Peary claimed was the North Pole. Henson reported Peary practically said nothing to him on the return journey and kept his distance once back aboard the Roosevelt. The silence continued upon the expedition’s return to the US in September 1909.

Once back in New York, Henson had an offer for a series of lectures from the well-known promoter William A. Brady. Brady had previously tried to land the lecture rights from Dr. Cook and then Peary without success. As a result of Brady’s offer, Henson wrote to Peary asking his permission to accept, and also for copies of some of Peary’s photographs and a lantern slide map of the Arctic to be shown at his appearances. Peary turned him down flat. This prompted Henson to tell Peary why he had decided to accept Brady’s offer anyway, saying, “I have been with you a good many years on these trips and have never derived any material benefits. I am not getting any younger, and it has come to an issue where I have to look out for myself.”

Brady broke Matt in with a lecture at Middletown, Connecticut. It was an awkward performance. Henson had a prepared text, but because he was functionally illiterate*, his hesitations in attempting to read it had to be constantly prompted from the wings. Finally, he just abandoned his script and simply talked about his 70 stereooptican slides as they were flashed on the screen, including one he claimed to be “the only photograph of the pole in existence,” after which he answered questions from the sparse audience. The receipts in Middletown amounted to less than $37 for two performances. But the appearance still made news.

There were rumors that Henson had challenged Dr. Cook to a public debate. Peary wanted this to be avoided at all costs and seemed to fear what Henson might inadvertently say. He wrote to Herbert L. Bridgman, Secretary of the Peary Arctic Club:

(”I have not happened to come across the so called Henson challenge to Cook, though I note references to it in the papers

“While I can only infer from these references what the challenge really is, it strikes me that anything of the kind would be unwise for three reasons. It is likely to make a fool of Henson by giving him pronounce megalomania; it will put him in a position to be tangled up and made to say anything by emissaries of the [New York] Herald [which was backing Cook’s claim], and it will introduce into this matter the race issue.

“All this, it seems to me, without the least possible chance of there being any possible gain to balance.”)

Peary also strenuously objected to Henson showing photographs made on the journey to the North Pole, claiming that Henson by contract was bound to turn over all of the photographs he had taken to him. He was so concerned about the picture of the Pole itself, that he wired, “If Henson, as newspapers say, has picture of NP, or the sledge journey he has lied to me, and these pictures must on no account be shown by him I doubt the papers.” The dispute with Peary was just the publicity Brady dreamed of, and he was now so sure that Henson’s lecture tour would be a success that he booked him at the Hippodrome for the evening of October 17.

The Hippodrome was billed as the largest theater in the world; certainly it was the largest in the United States. Occupying an entire block on 6th Avenue between 43rd and 44th Streets, it was host to full-fledged three-ring circuses and other monster extravaganzas.

Henson must have been awed to step onto the stage of this cavernous house, which sat up to 5,300. But the paying audience amounted to only about 500 scattered among a vast sea of empty seats.

One of them was occupied by Herbert L. Bridgman, who Peary had dispatched to get a look at Henson’s photographs and generally do damage control if necessary. Bridgman didn’t seem too concerned by Henson’s performance, though he did say some unsettling things, including that Cook’s Eskimos, when they had first come aboard at Etah, had said that Cook had told them they had arrived at the North Pole [see the series “The ‘Eskimo Testimony’” below.]   After this fiasco Brady immediately canceled the two nights he had booked at Carnegie Hall, the turnout at the Hippodrome not justifying any hope for recovering the high overhead of that booking. Instead, he took Henson to Pittsburgh. But there and the farther west Henson went, the receipts continued to dwindle until Brady had to compromise his contract and pay him off.

Matt Henson ready for the stage: Henson’s publicity photograph by White Studio, theatrical photographers

Nevertheless, Henson’s appearances had led to a number of revealing statements that became fodder in the ongoing Polar Controversy, and the building case against Peary actually having attained the North Pole, himself. Henson related that on the trip to the North Pole, Peary, because of his crippled feet, had been little more than baggage on the sledges, and that because Peary rode most of the way, Henson was in the lead when they arrived at the North Pole, technically making him the first man to have reached that fabled spot.

Peary was outraged, and assured General Thomas Hubbard, President of the Peary Arctic Club, that these and other reported statements were “all lies.” He complained to Benjamin Hampton, owner of Hampton’s Magazine, who paid Peary a record per-word fee for the magazine rights to his narrative, that “Henson, after my looking after him for years, after giving him a position in the advance party with me on all of my expeditions, and after permitting him to go with me to the pole this time, has now for the sake of few dollars deliberately and intentionally broken faith with me.” And to Herbert Bridgman Peary was unequivocal about what such “disloyalty” meant: “He has deliberately and premeditatedly deceived me and broken his explicit and thoroughly understood word and promise to me and I am done with him absolutely.”

*For those interested in the documentary evidence of this statement, see the Introduction to the Cooper Square Press edition of Henson’s book, A Negro Explorer at the North Pole, published in 2001.

All of the quoted correspondence, including the one published here for the first time, can be found among the Peary Family Collection, Record group XP, at NARA II.

This is the latest in a series of posts that publish for the first time significant documents related to the Polar Controversy.

In the latest book on the Polar Controversy, author Darrell Hartman focuses on the Press’ role in making the 1909 dispute between Cook and Peary a national obsession. He agrees with me that the resultant recognition of Robert E. Peary as the true discoverer of the North Pole, and the demise of Frederick Cook’s prior claim, was a watershed event in the history of New York newspaper publishing. Peary was backed by the New York Times, Cook by the then much more influential New York Herald. As I put it in my book, “the downfall of Dr. Cook marked the beginning of the rise of the Times to the powerful institution it was to become, and the decline of the once preeminent Herald into oblivion.”

Among the questions I was not able to answer in my book, Cook and Peary, the Polar Controversy, resolved, was whether or not Dunkle and Loose acted on their own, or were someone’s paid agents, hired to place the doctor in a compromising position (see my post for May 21, 2022 below). I was able to speculate from the evidence I saw, however, that if they were someone’s agents, as I wrote in my book, “The principal suspect would have to be William C. Reick,” an editor at the New York Times, the paper in which appeared their extensive affidavits about how they concocted fake observations at Cook’s request to serve as proof of his polar attainment. The affidavits were spread over nearly three full pages—by far the largest amount of space given a single story on a single day during all of 1909.

To many who read the Dunkle and Loose affidavits, the whole idea that Cook would enter so casually into so dangerous and risky an arrangement with total strangers seemed preposterous, the alternative monstrous and the conclusion obvious. As one newspaper editorialized; “Dr. Cook is either the greatest and at the same time the stupidest charlatan who ever attempted to impose upon a skeptical world, or he is the victim of the most malignant and devilishly ingenious persecution that hatred and envy could devise.”

Reick had a motive: he wanted to get even with James Gordon Bennett, the flamboyant owner of the Herald, where Reick had once been the powerful City Editor. But Bennett, ever wary of competitors for his absolute power over the Herald, kicked him upstairs by making him President of the New York Herald Company. Reick eventually quit and joined the Times. Among the many resources Hartman consulted for his book, were those in the New York Public Library, among them the papers of Adolph S. Ochs, long time owner of the Times. There he may have found at least a partial answer to whether Dunkle and Loose acted alone, or they were part of a larger plot.

General Thomas H. Hubbard (via a brevet commission from the Civil War), was the owner of the New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser, as well as the president of Western Union and a powerful corporate lawyer. He was also an alumnus of Bowdoin College in Maine, Robert E. Peary’s alma mater, and had been since 1908 president of the Peary Arctic Club, a group of millionaires formed in 1898 to bankroll Peary’s attempts to reach the North Pole. When the dispute between Peary and Cook over priority at the Pole broke out, Hubbard quickly grasped that Peary was not capable of managing the situation and became Peary’s official spokesman. He also financed a massive anti-Cook campaign, paying for such things as the Barrrill Affidavit, the Parker-Browne expedition to Mt. McKinley (see my post for July 17, 2017 below), and later, an extensive mail campaign to discredit Cook’s attempts to rehabilitate his claim to have reached the North Pole a year ahead of Peary. It now develops that he apparently also paid for the Dunkle and Loose Affidavits as well, though it does not seem to have initiated the scheme that led up to them.

That Cook had dealings with Dunkle and Loose there can be no question. Several close associates, including his private secretary, Walter Lonsdale, attested to that as a fact, but considered Cook’s dealings with them essentially innocent. But whether this scheme was the sole initiative of Dunkle and Loose, or that they were put up to it by a third party as a plot to destroy Cook’s claim by raising doubts in the minds of the panel just about to sit in judgment of the authenticity of his claim, as many newspaper editorials of the time suggested, is possibly answered by two documents Darrell Hartman recovered. Though not definitive, they strongly suggest that Dunkle and Loose initiated the plot themselves, figuring whichever way events might fall out, they would come out ahead.

I first learned of these documents during consultations Darrell Hartman had with me while in the final stages of preparing his book for publication.

The first document is a letter from George W. Dunkle to William C. Reick. Here is that letter, published for the first time with the permission of the New York Public Library:

Although unsigned, the handwriting is Dunkle’s. The content also confirms he is the author. In it he states “My business has been absolutely paralyzed and I am unable to move until this business is settled.” Dunkle was an insurance agent who lost his job due to the publicity surrounding his sensational affidavit.

According to his affidavit that appeared in full in the New York Times on December 9, 1909, Cook entered into an arrangement with Dunkle to pay him $2,500 for a set of fake celestial observations, to be provided by an indigent Norwegian sea captain named August Loose, “proving” that Cook had been at the North Pole on April 21, 1908, as he had claimed. Another $1,500 was to go to the pair if Loose’s calculations convinced the board of scientists of the University of Copenhagen, to which Cook had promised his data, and which was about to sit in judgment of his “proofs,” that his claim was authenticated by the evidence provided them.

In his affidavit, Dunkle said Cook reneged on his agreement and only paid him $260 before he broke off negotiations and checked out of his hotel without leaving a forwarding address. When his “proofs” were presented to the Consistory in Copenhagen by Cook’s private secretary in late December, they did not contain the observations Loose allegedly provided, however. In fact, they contained no observations whatever, and on that basis, the Danes rejected what Cook submitted as proof of his attainment of the North Pole.

Dunkle certainly must have seen that once he had broached his offer to Cook and Cook had entered into dealings with him, that he was in a can’t-lose position. If Cook went trough with the arrangement, and the Copenhagen panel was convinced by Loose’s calculations, he and Loose stood to make $4,000. If Cook backed out or refused to pay, they still had valuable evidence that they could peddle to the New York newspapers, the obvious first choice being the New York Times, which had exclusive rights to Peary’s first account of his North Pole journey and an editor who had a visceral hatred of his former boss at the Herald, which had the exclusive right’s to Cook’s account. Still, that does not preclude that this scheme was not part of a larger plot.

However, while the two documents don’t disprove Reick’s prior knowledge of Dunkle and Loose’s scheme, they strongly imply that once Reick was approached by Dunkle with his story after Cook reneged, that Reick then went to Thomas Hubbard, and it was his guiding hand, as it had been in all matters concerning the Cook-Peary dispute, that resulted in the eventual appearance of their affidavit in the Times’ columns. That Reick did not have prior knowledge of the scheme is also suggested by a letter I recovered from the Peary Family Papers at the National Archives, asking Peary for a sample of Dr. Cook’s handwriting, apparently to compare with what Dunkle claimed was Dr. Cook’s instructions to Loose as to what he needed in the way of fake observations, which was published in facsimile along with the Dunkle and Loose affidavits. This note to Peary was dated December 6, 1909, which would have been after Cook had checked out of the Hotel Gramatan, where his dealings with Dunkle and Loose were alleged to have taken place. Reick had previously cabled Peary on December 3 that he had “what I consider most important development yet,” suggesting that was when he was first contacted by Dunkle.

It is not stated in Dunkle’s letter to Reick who did the “grilling” it mentions. It’s true that many other newspapers noted with suspicion that this “scoop” appeared in the most anti-Cook of all newspapers, which had a vested interest in seeing Peary declared the victor in the ongoing dispute, but Dunkle’s statement that the Times also “grilled” him and Loose is certainly not applicable to what the Times printed. It is also doubtful that William Reick did any personal grilling, because the person to be satisfied that the story the Times was given by Dunkle was truthful in every respect was the “third man” paying for it, which the two documents Hartmann recovered together certainly point to as Thomas H. Hubbard. This is most forcefully implied by the content of the second document, a receipt and legal release, which states that the details of the affidavits that appeared in the Times were “made originally to Thomas H. Hubbard.” The “grilling” was undoubtedly administered on this occasion.

Hubbard had similarly “grilled” Edward Barrill, Cook’s sole witness to his claim to have been the first to ascent Mt. McKinley in 1906, before he published Barrill’s affidavit in the pages of his own newspaper, which stated that Cook’s McKinley climb was a hoax (see my series of posts on the Barrill Affidavit, beginning on June 13, 2022 below). Barrill had come to New York for that very purpose—to meet with Hubbard personally—and Hubbard managed Barrill’s stay in the city completely, ending it by sending Barrill back to Montana without him ever testifying before a panel appointed by the Explorers Club to look into Cook’s 1906 claim, where he might have said something that would contradict the affidavit Hubbard published.

The letter to Reick, although it bears no date, can be approximately dated from its content. Two weeks after the publication would have been December 23, and it is clear from the letter’s content that the Danes had already made their decision by the time it was written, which was announced on December 21. The letter must therefore have been written after December 23, but before they were paid.

Although the letter still leaves some details hanging, the second document supplies others. It’s a receipt and legal release, dated December 31, 1909, here published for the first time:

(Note: Brown Brothers & Co. was a private investment bank in NYC. It merged in 1931 to form Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.)

Its content definitely places the date of the letter before the last day of 1909 and leaves no doubt that they were paid well for their scheme, but perhaps not as well as they might have been. It’s interesting that the letter implies that Hubbard told Reick to withhold payment until the Danes decided on Cook’s proofs, suggesting that the amount Dunkle said he had “a gentleman’s agreement” –$2,000–might have been adjusted, depending on Copenhagen’s decision.

All along, Dunkle and Loose might have intended to play both sides of the street. Even if Cook had paid them a significant amount, or especially if the Danes had accepted Loose’s calculations as Cook’s originals and certified his claim to the Pole, the value of the story would have only increased, because revealing that the calculations that won their approval were Loose’s, not Cook’s, would have been iron-clad proof of Cook’s fakery. They might have then turned around and sold their story to the Times for an additional big payday. But Cook never used Loose’s calculations, and, in fact, no one to this day claims to have ever seen them after the face. But neither did he include them, or anything similar to them in the material he sent to Copenhagen in proof of his claim. Therefore, the value of their affidavits to Hubbard was severely diminished, and the final price they received was less than the amount Cook was originally to pay them, according to their affidavit. What they received is equivalent to about $76,500 today.

The documents shown here can be found at the New York Public Library in the New York Times Company Records / Adolph S. Ochs Papers, Box 77, Folder 3. Darrell Hartman’s book, Battle of Ink and Ice, is published by Viking.

This is the latest in a series of posts that publish for the first time significant documents related to the Polar Controversy.

There can be no doubt that Frederick Cook intended to make a real attempt to reach the North Pole. Numerous accounts by others recall him saying it was his “life’s ambition.” When not on an expedition, he devoted much of his spare time studying everything written about the polar regions and kept bound volumes of articles on the subject that he gathered from journals and magazines. While in Antarctica with Roald Amundsen in 1898 as members of Adrien de Gerlache’s expedition, he invented ingenious gear designed to be used in the polar regions and continued to do so, collaborating with his brother Theodore to build and test strong and resilient sledges made of second growth hickory, and experimenting with a motorized vehicle he hoped to use to reach the South Pole. The sledges were used with outstanding success by members of both Ziegler Polar Expeditions between 1903-05. And from his backer, John R. Bradley, he received carte blanche to equip his 1907 expedition with everything Cook thought necessary for an attempt on the pole in 1908.

Unlike Peary, who spent the winters before both of his last two attempts to reach the North Pole in his private, heated cabin of his specially built ship, Roosevelt, listening to its player piano, sampling his generously supplied cellarette, lounging in its full bathtub and enjoying the favors of his Inuit concubine, Allakasingwah, on demand, Cook, like Amundsen would do in Antarctica three years later, spent the winter in his house made of packing boxes, perfecting his equipment for his polar attempt. His very full diary that he kept during this time is replete with his preparations, experiments and trial runs seeking such perfection. He had also carefully worked out the route he would take onto the icecap of Ellesmere Island to descend into Cannon Fjord as a shortcut to reaching the Arctic Ocean via Nansen Straight, thus capitalizing on the abundant game encountered by Sverdrup on Ellesmere, but avoiding the obstacles Sverdrup encountered in crossing the island via Sverdrup Pass and Bay Fjord.

Unfortunately, all of Cook’s careful planning was upset by his inability to find an alternative route to Sverdrup’s, and he encountered not only the same delays, but the slaughter of game by his Inuit enroute further held him up to the extent that by the time he reached Eureka Sound he realized he could never get out onto the arctic pack ice soon enough to be able to reach the North Pole and safely return.

Cook was no fool. Upon his return, when a reporter informed him that John Bradley, a professional gambler himself, put the odds on Cook returning from his polar try at 100 to 1, Cook reportedly said that had he shared that view he would never have gone. “A man has no right to take such chances as that,” he said. So if Cook knew it was hopeless to go forward without any chance of actually reaching the pole even before he left Cape Thomas Hubbard, why would he have taken along two extra witnesses to begin with, and why would he have gone even an extra step farther after these two witnesses departed?

It must be remembered that although Cook was already a veteran explorer in both polar zones, he had never once even laid eyes on the polar pack of the Arctic Ocean before he arrived at Cape Thomas Hubbard. He had only read about it. True, he had made several short sledge journeys on the Antarctic pack of the Bellinghausen Sea while on the Belgica expedition, but he knew from his reading that the pack ice on the open Antarctic Ocean was much different in character from that in the largely land-locked arctic basin. He also knew from reading of the toils of Nansen and others who tried to reach the pole by dog sledge, the rigors of pack ice travel and therefore expected to be able to average no more than ten miles per day on such a journey. But he had never been on the arctic pack ice himself, so he needed to make a trip long enough to give him the real experience he would need to accurately describe the conditions he would encounter and get a practical estimate of how fast he could actually travel over the pack ice with the equipment and personnel at his disposal.

He could see from Cape Thomas Hubbard that he was in for some difficult traveling. It was only expedient that he take along two extra men to help him get through the jumbled ice pressed against the coast, two of whom had experience with Peary on the sea ice that Cook, himself, lacked. Even so, he found the first days he traveled from land with the four Inuit “difficult beyond any ice conditions which I have before experienced. Great paleocrystic floes interrupted by wide areas of young ice and miles of huge boulders and small ice the result of the grinding pack against the land.” Difficult or not, he needed more experience than that; he needed to experience the ice conditions on the “circumpolar sea” away from the influence of land. Although he knew the North Pole was beyond his reach, that is why he would be willing to continue to the northwest after Inugito and Koolootingwah had helped get him over this rough stretch. He also might have hoped to reach “Crocker Land” and explore part of it, cache supplies there for a future attempt, or make a discovery that confirmed the “unknown Arctic Continent” scientists hypothesized lay in the vast unexplored region to the northwest.

Unfortunately for him, once over the rough ice thrown up against the shore, Cook traveled over a most atypical stretch of ice lying over a “current null” zone, which in spring made the ice unusually stable. This allowed him to make excellent progress until he encountered the shear zone caused by the then-unknown Beaufort Gyre about 100 miles to the northwest of Axel Heiberg Island. There he, and MacMillan after him, encountered the chaotic ice that stopped such progress and sent them back to land, in MacMillan’s case because he had already proved Crocker Land did not exist, and in Cook’s because he had obtained the experience in ice travel he had sought, and because to go further would take him out of sight of landmarks he needed to guide him safely back to shore. He, like MacMillan, saw no reason to go on. The ice conditions were too difficult and the season too late. So Cook took his experience and turned back for the bank of clouds still visible over Grant Land.

That experience paid big dividends in making his eventual description of his polar journey vividly realistic to many readers of My Attainment of the Pole, and consequently his claim to have reached the North Pole plausible. Even the book’s critics recognized this. As one hostile reviewer wrote of his descriptions of his journey as presented in the pages of Hampton’s Magazine in 1911, “This is vivid and real. It is not imaginative literature. It is obviously descriptive of actual and unusual experience. As such the record is worth preserving, irrespective of the writer’s reputation of veracity, which as the newspaper comment seems to indicate, is irremediably lost.” And when Cook’s book was published in Germany, one reviewer wrote, “It can be no lie what this man lets us experience, and even if it is a lie, it has earned a place in every library.”

But Cook’s experience, being atypical of general ice conditions on the Arctic Ocean, actually led him to underestimate the difficult character of the ice between the land-adhering ice and the pole and to assume that a greater rate of progress could be made than had been reported by other travelers. He may have believed, given the accepted scientific theories of his day, that along his chosen route, far west of other attempts, the supposed “Arctic Continent” that caused him to postulate the position of the non-existent “Bradley Land” and his “Glacial Island” would have a moderating effect on the easterly drift reported by others and, consequently, on the ice disruption that those explorers who traveled farther to the east experienced. This is supported by Cook’s statement on page 96 of My Attainment of the Pole, as he looked out across the pack from Cape Thomas Hubbard:

“I viewed for the first time the rough and heavy ice of the untracked Polar sea, over which, knowing the conditions of the sea ice, I anticipated the most difficult part of our journey lay. . . . Beyond this difficult ice, as I knew, lay more even fields, over which traveling, saving the delays of storms and open leads, would be comparatively easy.”

Thus he felt safe in claiming more progress per day than he had expected before he had made a journey onto the sea ice himself, because his passage over the atypical current null zone seemed to confirm what he “knew.” However, there is no “Arctic Continent,” no “Crocker Land,” no “Bradley Land,” and other travelers since 1908 have found that there is little consistency to conditions encountered on the Arctic Ocean. Some reported areas of relatively smooth ice, while others at the very same latitude years later reported a chaos of impassible pressure ridges and hummocks.

Another reason for going on was purely practical; he had to make some attempt to convince his witnesses, the Inuit who accompanied him, that they had reached what they called the “Big Navel.” Cook certainly knew, as Whitney discovered, that the Inuit had difficulties estimating distance, a concept they did not need to consider because they never willingly made journeys that took them out of sight of landmarks or beyond the game haunts which were central to their way of life. Therefore they couldn’t conceive the distance to the North Pole, or where exactly it lay, nor did they care about reaching it. But they knew from Peary’s several attempts that it lay to the North, out over the frozen sea. So Cook had to make a journey north over the sea ice if he wanted to claim to his witnesses that he had reached the North Pole.

A third reason to go on was that Cook needed to get some photographs of his two sleds traveling alone over the pack ice and igloos built on the ice pack for his future lectures. Most of the pictures taken after his support party left do not show very rough ice, either confirming the relatively easy traveling conditions he had over the null zone or that they had been taken elsewhere.

But the final reason was the most crucial: Cook needed to stay out on the ice long enough to allow Koolootingwah and Inugito to get on their way back to Greenland. They were in a hurry to get home but might linger at the cache at Cape Thomas Hubbard to feed their dogs and themselves before going on. As Cook states in his original notebooks, he planned to return by a “shortcut” across Arthur Land, via Cannon Fjord, and so had laid a cache in Greely Fjord. This would also minimize the chances of running into any of his Inuit helpers before he returned to Greenland, because in laying that cache in “Flat Sound,” he assured that they would not return by another route. In doing so, he discovered that Shei Island was actually a peninsula. None of these were actions that an explorer intent on reaching Cape Thomas Hubbard as quickly as possible would have taken. Rather, all these caches were aimed at separating his return route from that of his support party on the way back to Greenland. This was critical in a hoax, as any premature sighting of the polar party by others would lock him into a known timetable and limit what he might claim later. Therefore they indicate that he had in mind the idea of perpetrating a hoax as soon as he saw it would be impossible to reach Cape Thomas Hubbard in time to give him any chance of actually reaching the North Pole and returning safely. In fact, his original notebook itself supports this notion, because it is exactly as Cook turns into Cannon Fjord that the original entries are most tampered with and many even destroyed to obscure the true sequence of events thereafter.

Unlike other explorers, Cook had taken care not to leave any dated records along his route to the same purpose. He must stay away long enough to give the illusion that enough time had passed for him to have been to the pole and back. He left just one dated record—the letter he sent back with the Inuit to Franke, which he dated March 17. His statements in this letter that he expected to be back by the end of May, or June 5th at the latest, and his stated anxiousness to go to the Danish settlements immediately upon his return indicate that at the time he wrote the letter (probably about April 15) he hoped to do just that. But after his brief experience on the polar pack ice, he must have reconsidered. On page 203 of My Attainment of the Pole, he said as much:

“Although we had left caches of supplies with the object of returning along Nansen Sound, into Cannon Fjord and over Arthur Land, I entertained grave doubts of our ability to return this way. I knew that if the ice should drift strongly to the east we might not be given the choice of working out our own return.”

This is an amazing revelation in itself, in that Cook does not mention or even hint at his plan to return via Cannon Fjord and Arthur Land elsewhere in any of his published writings, though he makes this quite explicit in his notebook’s narrative, and states there that he laid a cache in Greely Fjord, far off his published route, to this purpose. It also hints that he saw that to claim that he could reach the pole from the position stated in his letter dated March 17 and get back to Greenland by June 5 would have been absolutely incredible. So he decided upon an alternate plan: He would not go back to Greenland at all.

Instead, he would go south, along the uninhabited western coast of Axel Heiberg Island and by a roundabout route attempt to reach Lancaster Sound. There, Cook knew, whalers from Dundee, Scotland, visited every year without fail. Everyone who followed arctic explorers, and many who didn’t, were familiar with Nansen’s dramatic chance meeting with Frederick Jackson on the desolate shores of Franz Josef Land in the spring of 1896. It caused an absolute press sensation. What better way to maximize interest and lend authenticity to his own tale than to have a similar “chance” meeting with a whaler and be taken back to Europe in the fall of 1908, a full year before Peary could possibly return and put in a claim? In preparation for such a meeting, Cook, against his Inuits’ vigorous objections, even abandoned his dogs and one of his sledges and took to his folding boat once he reached Jones Sound so as to look as though he had been on an arduous journey. But his plan failed. He got only as far as the end of Jones Sound by late August, and so never could make his planned “accidental” rendezvous. By then, he also could not hope to return to Annoatok before winter set in.

Having noted the rich game lands near Cape Sparbo, he backtracked along his outward route and settled down for the winter in a comfortable underground shelter after shooting all the game he needed with the ample ammunition he had taken with him from Cape Thomas Hubbard. Once settled, in retrospect, he probably was just as happy that he had to overwinter. What could be more convincing than that? What faker would spend a “Stone Age” winter with only a couple of “savages” as companions, when he could have perpetrated his hoax much more easily by returning along his outward route to comparative civilization? Since Cook had a rich inner life and an infinite capacity for self-expression and embellishment of his already extraordinary experiences, he no doubt was content to have the winter to try out his story in his five unused notebooks and with each successive version, perfect the details he would tell the world upon his return. Such a course of self-isolation, and such a fabrication as his notebooks show evolving in meticulous detail in tiny writing, sometimes several lines to the rule, might not have been possible for an ordinary man, but Frederick Albert Cook was no ordinary man.

Cook had an amazing capacity for work, which was evident during any enterprise he undertook. This can be seen in his toils in several occupations as a youth, in his estimable medical service on Peary’s and de Gerlache’s expeditions, in his voluminous studies of polar literature, in his endless travels on the lecture and vaudeville circuits, in his work as an oil promoter and in his almost single-handed writing of the prison newspaper at Leavenworth. Cook’s polar notebooks show that same amazing capacity, as he put version after version of his journey down on paper in minute writing by the light of a blubber lamp in his winter igloo at Cape Sparbo, and as he made a draft of the book he would write asserting his attainment of the North Pole. In addition to all his talents, Cook had a very high degree of self-confidence that led him to feel he could actually attain the mythical spot that so many had failed to attain, and when he himself failed in his well-planned, genuine attempt to do so, to believe he could convince the world that he had through his experienced-based, but imaginative writings.

This concludes this series on “The Eskimo Testimony.”