From Hero to Humbug

Cook started out in the petroleum industry in Wyoming in 1917, but quickly moved on to Texas with news of the fabulous oil strikes there in 1918. He established his first petroleum company that year as The Texas Eagle Oil Co. The company was capitalized at $300,000 in February 1919. It issued 10,000 public shares of stock at $10 a share. That was small money for such an enterprise, so to raise more, in August, a subsidiary company, the Texas Eagle Producing and Refining Co. was created with additional stock amounting to $2.5 million.

Letters soliciting investors were soon sent out:

A third company, The Texas Eagle Oil and Refining Co., was formed from the assets of the first two in February 1920 and incorporated under the liberal laws of Delaware as a Trust Estate. The company was capitalized at $5 million and issued at least two varieties of stock certificates. The first bore a small eagle vignette to the left. Each of the certificates is hand-signed as “F. A. Cook,”  President.

The second variety has a larger eagle vignette at the top center. These are also hand-signed by Cook.

But that company failed, going into receivership, and out of existence on December 5, 1921. But Cook wasn’t finished with oil yet. The next year he organized the Petroleum Producers Association. It issued “Receipt Certificates” for the PPA shares it exchanged for the shares of stock of numerous bankrupt oil companies sent in by their shareholders along with one dollar for each PPA share. These were issued in nearly unlimited quantities as it “merged” 313 defunct oil companies, capitalizing them at $380 million.

PPA shares come in only one variety. The basic certificate with the “Lone Star” vignette at the center, was used by many of the numerous oil companies formed in Texas during the 1920s oil boom there, and is not unique to PPA’s. These certificates do not bear Cook’s signature, but only the hand stamped signature of F. P. Smith, PPA’s Secretary.

Cooks aggressive promotions of this company resulted in his arrest in April 1923, and his subsequent show trial. Overwhelming evidence convinced the jury that PPA’s “mergers” plan was an elaborate ponzi scheme, which, as a result, found him guilty on 12 counts of using the U.S. mails to defraud, and Cook was sentenced to 14 years, nine months in Leavenworth Penitentiary and given a fine of $12,000.

These colorful stock certificates serve as souvenirs of Dr. Cook’s disastrous dip into the Texas Oil Boom.

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

In February 1910, a bill, eventually known as the Bates Bill, was introduced in Congress proposing that Robert E. Peary be given the Thanks of Congress and retired with the rank of Rear Admiral in the Civil Engineer Corps for his discovery of the North Pole. The bill passed the Senate without opposition, but not so in the House. The recent demise of Dr. Cook’s claim and objections by many line officers in the Navy, who pointed out that only the Chief of the Bureau of Docks and Yards was allowed that rank-equivalency for protocol purposes in the Engineer Corps, caused the bill to be sent for consideration to the House Committee on Naval Affairs.

In March, Peary was summoned to testify, but instead sent a personal representative in his place to say that the request of the Committee to see his original records could not be granted because it would compromise his contract with his publisher, to whom he had sold the exclusive rights to his book-length narrative of his polar conquest, and who now had in preparation. This request had been occasioned by the testimony before the Committee of Henry Gannett, one of the select committee members appointed by the National Geographic Society to examine Peary’s records. After that examination, the Society, of which Gannett was now the President, unanimously certified that Peary’s records, including his original notebook kept on his journey toward the Pole, proved he had reached the North Pole on April 6, 1909. Gannett’s testimony, however, indicated that the Society’s examination had been perfunctory, at best, before they rendered this judgment. So, the Committee members wanted to see Peary’s “proofs” for themselves. Without Peary’s personal testimony and an examination of his original records, the Bates Bill was tabled, and the Committee adjourned.

Therefore, Peary had no choice, so he personally appeared before the Committee in January 1911. His testimony included a number of statements that skeptical committee members felt raised doubt regarding his polar claim. Peary had been compelled to turn over the polar notebook that he said was the original he had kept on his successful journey to the North Pole, but some of its physical features made one committee member skeptical of its authenticity.

As I described them in my book, Cook & Peary, the Polar Controversy Resolved:

Once out of committee, the Bates Bill was bitterly opposed by Representative Robert B. Macon of Arkansas, who said in a speech from the floor during the bill’s debate that he had devoted many hours of study to the matter and believed Peary’s claim to be “a fake pure and simple.” One of the factors that convinced him of this was the immaculate condition of Peary’s alleged original notebook:

Many imminent explorers who had experience with keeping records under polar conditions would have agreed with Macon. As I explained in Cook & Peary:

Peary was prone to keep personal memoranda of any criticisms made of him. The questions concerning his notebook’s condition were no exceptions. In response to the doubts raised, he wrote a statement that sought to justify why it was undeserving of the doubts of Macon and Roberts. I came across this memorandum while doing hundreds of hours of research in Peary’s papers preserved at the National Archives in the 1990s. I noted it in my book, where I described it as “not very convincing.” Here it is in full, published for the first time anywhere:

In 1989, Arthur T. Anthony, a expert document examiner with the Division of Forensic Sciences, Georgia Bureau of Investigation, made a limited examination of Peary’s notebook in May 1989. He concluded that the notebook could not have been written under the conditions described by Peary and was “not a chronicling of events that were happening when the journal was written.” The most interesting thing Anthony noted was that the two loose sheets inserted in the diary, one containing Peary’s famous entry on his arrival at the pole, “The Pole at Last!”, were consecutive pages out of single signature because the halves of the single watermark on the two sheets matched perfectly, yet they were placed in two different signatures in the bound notebook, leading him to conclude that they were not original entries, but were placed there after the fact.

Furthermore, Peary, who was right-handed, was in the draftsman’s habit of holding his pen between his index finger and middle finger. Wearing mittens would therefore have made writing with his normal grip impossible, yet the notebook is in his characteristic hand, slanted left, and is, in fact, far neater than many of his ordinary letters, presumably written at his leisure in comfortable surroundings.

After bitter remarks by Representative Macon from the floor of the House, the Bates Bill passed, and Peary was retired with the rank of Rear Admiral in the Engineer Corps. He also received the Thanks of Congress, but curiously, it was given for “Arctic Explorations resulting in reaching the North Pole,” not for discovering it.

Congress also failed to award him the gold medal proposed in the original bill that passed the Senate in 1910. This may have been due to the many doubts raised by Peary’s own testimony and the peculiarities of the notebook he said proved that he had. Indeed, his testimony in 1911 was the beginning of the increasing doubts about his claim that have today denied him the unequivocal title, Discoverer of the North Pole.

Peary’s memorandum is among the Peary Family Papers, Record Group XP, at NARA II, College Park, MD.

Anthony’s analysis of Peary’s notebook was published in:  Journal of Forensic Sciences, vol. 36 [1991] 1614-24

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.