[ Content | View menu ]

The Cook-Peary files: The “Eskimo Testimony” : Part 17: Tracing Cook’s actual route: Part 4: How far did he go?

March 13, 2024

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

We have now come to the penultimate installment of this series, having examined the first leg of Cook’s journey from Annoatok to Cape Thomas Hubbard and the third leg of his journey from his return to land until he again reached Annoatok. We have seen that as far as the first leg is concerned, when compared to documentary evidence, Peary’s alleged Inuit account is demonstrably incorrect in many crucial respects, whereas in the case of the third leg, compared to more limited documentary but significant circumstantial evidence, Peary’s statement is borne out to a much larger extent than the route claimed by Dr. Cook. Between these two legs lies a gap covering the period Cook was out on the sea ice north of his starting place at the tip of Axel Heiberg Island.

There is no question that Cook left land. Every witness, and even Peary, conceded that. The only questions to be settled are in what direction he went, how long he remained away from land, and how far he traveled during that time. The first of these is easily dispatched: when he left land he went to the northwest, not due north. Cook, himself, and every account that touches on this part of his journey, including Peary’s, are consistent on this point. But why?

It appears that he took this direction for several reasons. As his erroneous celestial observation sights published in My Attainment of the Pole prove, and all other relevant evidence, including his conversation with Alfred de Quervain show (see Part 6 of this series) Cook never mastered the navigational skills necessary to find the North Pole, including the use of a sextant. This seems incredible, but is evidently true, nonetheless.

He was an avid reader of anything that had to do with the polar regions, collected everything published on the subject, and even had those articles bound into books for future reference. Cook, who was described by one associate as “ingenious and impractical,” said that in these readings he had found a simple way to reach the North Pole by compass alone. After studying the data published by Nansen and Sverdrup, he surmised that near the 97th parallel there was what he termed a “magnetic meridian” (actually an isogonic line) where the needle of a magnetic compass would point 180° out of true. In other words, once on this “magnetic meridian,” the compass’s needle, instead of pointing due North, would point due South, enabling him to reach the North Pole by following his compass due South, dispensing with the need to take celestial observations with a sextant. Or so he thought.

This was an idea Cook believed the rest of his life, even mentioning it in the “Author’s Note” to his posthumous book, Return from the Pole, written in the 1930s. But it was not that simple, though Cook never understood why, because once reached, it would have been impossible to stay on his “magnetic meridian” without frequent checks of his position via a sextant. That isogonic line, if not on the 97th parallel, did lie somewhere to the northwest of Cook’s starting point. But another reason he might have chosen such a course also came from his extensive study of polar-related scientific literature.

At the time of Cook’s expedition, a large part of the Arctic basin had never been explored. There was a strong belief in some scientific circles, based on observations of natural phenomena in the high arctic, that there lay in that unexplored region above Canada and Alaska undiscovered land or possibly even an “unknown continent.” Through his reading, Cook absorbed this belief. As early as 1900 he wrote: “It seems reasonable to expect some rocky islets north of Greenland as far as the 85th parallel, surely to the 84th. If stations were placed here there would be only 360 miles to cover [to reach the pole].” Up to the moment he left Annoatok, he had this idea in mind. Before he departed, he left two letters (both dated February 20, 1908—the day after he later said he left for the pole!), one addressed to Knud Rasmussen and the other “To whom it may concern.” The one to Rasmussen mentioned that “There is also a strong possibility of our finding much land to the westward of Crocker Land,” and that he might return via them to Alaska instead of Greenland. If he could go far enough to make such a discovery in the area that many scientists believed already held unknown land, it would be a major scientific result of his expedition and also might serve as a way station to replenish supplies on his return journey from the North Pole or act as a stepping stone for some future attempt to reach it. And if an actual “unknown continent” existed, it might mitigate the generally easterly drift reported by earlier explorers, and possibly also shield his route from the extreme disruptions to the pack ice experienced by others who had tried to approach the pole from routes much farther east, including Peary’s 1906 attempt, on which he was nearly swept past the top of Greenland and out to sea. Peary’s report after that expedition that he had sighted from the heights of Cape Thomas Hubbard a new land lying about 120 miles northwest, which me called “Crocker Land,” only strengthened Cook’s belief that a course to the northwest would have many practical advantages.

We have it from Cook that the two additional natives accompanied him for three full days, but did not sleep at their camp at the end of the third day, but instead started for home. Peary’s statement is incorrect on this point, because it is confirmed by one of those Inuit, Inughito, in the notes taken down by George Borup (see Part 4 of this series). One of the many oddities of My Attainment of the Pole is that Cook doesn’t mention taking the two extra natives until after he has already gone two days from land. He does claim, however that he made two of his longest marches with their assistance.

Although MacMillan’s later accounts differ in detail from that which Peary published, he signed his name to Peary’s as a true account of what Cook’s Inuit said in 1909. So if we consider Peary’s published account the first account they gave him, and the one closest to the events being described, this contradictory evidence demands a careful reading of the rest of it, similar to that done by Captain Hall (see Part 10). Peary’s published account, although it does not say so explicitly, as Captain Hall discovered, implies Cook traveled at least four days on the ice away from land in addition to whatever time it took to return, and indeed, its vague language does not rule out an even longer stay on the ice than that. However, how far he actually traveled is difficult to determine because there is no consistent evidence in any of the subsequent reported accounts of what Cook’s Inuit companions said except that all of them claim the Inuit said they were never out of sight of land.

Of course, Cook himself said he left land on March 18 and traveled all the way to the North Pole and back between that date and June 13. So, let us be clear on this point from the very start: although how far he traveled is uncertain, Frederick Cook did not reach the North Pole. This was not, however, because, as Peary implied, he had inadequate equipment or supplies to do so, but because by the time he reached his jumping off place he had already run out of the most important commodity of all on such a trip: Time itself.

A careful analytical study of his original field diary kept on the first leg of his journey which I recovered from Denmark in 1994 (see the author’s The Lost Arctic Notebook of Dr. Frederick A. Cook), and the account written by Rudolf Franke, Cook’s only civilized companion over the winter, shows that he left Annoatok, not on February 19 as he claimed, but a week later, and that he was delayed en route to the extent that he did not reach Cape Thomas Hubbard until about April 13. Cook knew starting for the pole that late would be untenable with the advance of the season, and his claim to have attained it on April 21, just 8 days after he left land, would be, of course, impossible. His delays en route were not due to poor planning, however.

The diary he kept over his winter at Annoatok, now at the Library of Congress, shows that he fully intended to make an actual attempt to reach the pole. Many of his preparations show that he had been theorizing this attempt for years, had made careful and practical plans for his attempt, had adequate equipment and supplies, and strongly refutes any argument that his expedition was some sham from the beginning designed to cover up an already premeditated plan to make a fraudulent claim of success. Although he left a week later than he claimed in My Attainment of the Pole, his diary indicates that he nevertheless left at the earliest possible time that he could, considering weather conditions and logistical necessities. Likewise, his tardy arrival at his place of departure from land was not due to poor planning, either, but instead to two uncontrollable factors: the actual physical conditions he encountered en route, and the fact that he was traveling with a large group of Inuit.

Cook had studied Sverdrup’s book, New Land, in detail, and hoped to shortcut Sverdrup’s route to Nansen Sound by reaching the icecap of Elllesmere Island, and from there descending into Cannon Fjord. Unable to do this, he was forced to follow Sverdrup’s route and encountered all the same impediments Sverdrup had described in his crossing Ellesmere to Bay Fjord in 1899: little snow cover on the pass, and a glacier that blocked access to the route of descent into the fjord. He was delayed five days by the glacier alone. But his Inuit companions were his major source of delay. Although they were indispensable to Cook in getting him safely to his jumping off point, Inuit in those days could not be hurried. They had no concept of such things as “deadlines,” or such abstractions as “the North Pole” and the time limits on when a successful trip had to begin for one to reach it and return alive again.

As far back as Charles Francis Hall, who in the 1860s was the first explorer to adopt Inuit culture and travel with them, explorers were frustrated by their inability to impress Inuit with such abstract goals as they were pursuing. They were slowed by the Inuit propensity to keep to no time schedule, and were thus forced to travel instead at the Inuit’s own pace. As Wally Herbert found out by his experiences with Inuit in the mid-1960s, little had changed since Hall’s time: “Unlike most Europeans, they do not regard the Arctic as a setting in which to test themselves, they are the Inuit, the real men, and never in a hurry.” But Cook was in a hurry.

He knew that to have any realistic chance of reaching the North Pole every day counted. He had estimated a round trip of 80 days from Cape Thomas Hubbard, so he had no time to lose to begin his journey at the earliest possible moment. But his Inuit were not explorers; they were hunters, first and foremost, and whenever game was encountered they slaughtered it. After slaughtering it they dressed it carefully and cached what they and their dogs did not eat for future reference. These procedures took time—in the case of musk oxen kill, a full day or more. As they encountered herds of these animals as well as polar bears along their route to land’s end, they thus moved at the Inuit hunter’s unhurried, age-old pace. This caused Cook’s time schedule to continue to slip, so much so, that by the time he reached halfway up Eureka Sound he knew he would arrive too late at the shore of the Arctic Ocean to have any reasonable chance of reaching the pole.

Cook’s detour into Greely and Cannon Fjords to lay caches for his return to Greenland, instead of taking the direct route up Nansen Sound Peary mistakenly attributed to him on his map, were errands no explorer bent on reaching the pole would have gone on, and they show that it is very likely that by that point, Cook was at least considering a false claim to have reached the North Pole.

With the pole out of the picture, two questions still remain: how long and how far did Cook travel on the sea ice after leaving land, and why, if he knew he had no chance of success at the pole, did he hazard any journey away from land at all? The first question has at least some evidence we can consider; the second is one that can be only speculated on, given our knowledge of subsequent events. But it must be stated right here, before beginning, that the answer to either question cannot be given with a great degree of certainty. The answers proposed here are therefore the author’s considered opinions only, not statements of fact, because as we stated at the very outset of this series, it is impossible to “prove” an unwitnessed assertion, which is what Cook’s claim of polar attainment is. But every opinion given here is based on evidence, nonetheless. So, let’s consider the evidence bearing on the first question, first.

As we have seen (Part 13 of this series) the Inuit story about their journey with Cook changed. At first, anyone who heard Inuit gossip along the Greenland coast in 1909 from Nerke to Umanaq Fjord, consistently and without exception heard that Daagtikoorsuaq and two Inuit had reached the North Pole. That changed when Peary arrived there in August. Then the consistent story became that they had not been out of sight of land, and, therefore, Cook could not have reached the pole, which lay hundreds of miles from any known coast. That change came when Etukishuk and Ahwelah realized “what Peary’s men wanted them to say.” Henson, their interrogator himself, confirmed this: “[Dr. Cook] ordered [his Inuit] to say that they had been at the North Pole, [but] after I questioned them over and over again they confessed that they had not gone beyond the land ice.”

But the change of their story may actually represent something else, besides “ilira.” They at first probably believed that they had reached the North Pole because Cook had told them so. Why would he have turned back if he hadn’t? Furthermore, according to Rasmussen, Cook had shown signs of elation and “jumped and danced like an Angekok when he had looked at his sun glass and saw that they were only one day’s journey from the Great Nail.” (as quoted in “The Witnesses for Dr. Cook,” by the then United States Minister to Denmark, Maurice Francis Egan, which appeared in The Rosary, v. xxxv, no. 5 (November 1909)). After camping there several days he started back voluntarily, although there was “no need to turn back because the ice was good.” They understood generally that the North Pole lay out over the ice to the North, but not just how far, and Cook had gone an entirely different direction than Peary to get there.

Harry Whitney, who lived and traveled with the Polar Inuit a year, has many insightful and sympathetic things to say about them and their culture in his book, Hunting with the Eskimos. Whitney noted that Inuit, although they had a good sense of direction, were not good at judging distances, and in the light of the never-setting summer sun, divided periods of effort into “sleeps” instead of days:

“Four “sleeps” indicated nothing. It might have meant two hundred miles, or it
might have meant 50 miles. The Eskimo has no conception of distance. He is
endowed with certain artistic instincts which enable him to draw a fairly accurate map
of a coast line with which he is thoroughly familiar, but he cannot tell you, even
approximately, how far it is from one point to another. Often when they told me a
place we were bound for was very close at hand, it developed that we were far from it.
This is something they are never sure of and cannot indicate.”

Cook certainly knew this, so he knew that the Inuit had no conception of the distance to the North Pole. Abstractions like the North Pole meant nothing to them anyway, so they had no interest in the place themselves and were not eager to go far from land in any case. They probably begged Cook to return, as Pewahto would MacMillan in 1914. They would be satisfied by Cook’s mere statement that the goal had been reached, and then would happily return to the safety of land and to their families on home shores, where they would collect their pay. In 1909, Ahwelah and Etukishuk shared with other Inuit Cook’s statement to them that they had reached the “Big Navel,” but in 1914, when MacMillan had shown them on the map in My Attainment of the Pole where Cook said he had gone with them to reach it, they had a good laugh over it. Even with “no conception of distance,” they could see they had not traveled that far north. After that, the Inuit nicknamed Cook “The Big Liar.”

Peary’s statement does not attribute any estimate of the distance they went form shore at all. There were some later estimates given, ranging from 12-25 miles, but Peary’s statement only said they were never out of sight of land. Of course, this precludes that Cook actually reached the pole, but we have already ruled out that possibility by documentary evidence. If the Inuit told the truth, how far could Cook have gone and still not have been “out of sight of land”? For a definite answer to this question we must turn forward five years to MacMillan’s experiences on his attempt to reach Crocker Land in 1914 (see Part 6).

In his 1914 letter to Brainerd, MacMillan states that he lost sight of Grant Land at about 75 miles from shore, and in his book, Four Years in the White North, he said it was 78. In his original diary, now at the American Museum of Natural History, he says he was at this position on his sixth day of travel. He also states there that the next morning he thought he saw land in the morning to the west, but it proved to be only a mirage. After going on two more days he was stopped by chaotic ice. At that point MacMillan placed his party’s position at 106 miles northwest of their starting point by dead reckoning (DR), but a celestial observation gave their position as 82° 11’ N, 120 miles from shore. (In his book, MacMillan says this observed position “agreed almost exactly with out dead-reckoning,” but this is not true. Other details in his book are also at variance with his original diary.) They then attempted to go on the next day, but the ice was so impossible they made only a few miles before giving up, because they were already beyond the supposed position of Crocker Land and nothing was in sight. They had been on the ice 8 days at this point and had averaged about 15 a day by observation, not counting their last few futile miles. [all mileage figures are in Nautical Miles, 60 of which equal one degree of latitude]. However, when MacMillan published his book about the Crocker Land Expedition, he claimed his traveling companion, Ensign Green, had “recomputed” their position at the time they turned back and found that instead of 120 miles, they were actually 150 miles away from their starting point. That ups the mileage to 18.75 miles per day.

Let us now compare Cook’s various accounts of his journey on the sea ice in 1908 to Macmillan’s. There are four sources of data: #1: a Cook diary containing an incomplete circumstantial account; #2: Cook’s field diary that he kept on the first leg of his journey, which also contains a series of sequential notes covering his entire time on the ice; #3: his narrative account of his entire trip in My Attainment of the Pole and #4: his so-called “copy of the field notes” he kept on his journey, which were published as an appendix in that book. But first, a few words about the two manuscript sources.

#1 is an account covering the 6 days from March 18-23. The first entry is dated March 20, and summarizes that day and the two previous. This account is most similar in appearance and format to the separate diary Cook kept from the time he left Annoatok until he reached the point from which he headed out over the sea ice (#2). The size of its writing, the style of narrative, the data included and the incidental events described are all similar to the record he kept from leaving his winter base until he reached Cape Thomas Hubbard in that notebook. The “field notes” in that same book, on the other hand, contain entries for each day starting with March 19 and ending June 13, 1908, and continue that account, but the size of the writing and their format is entirely dissimilar. #1, starting on March 20, is consistent with the regular daily entries in his field diary kept on the first leg of his trip, but not with other diaries kept while Cook was not in the field. Nor is it consistent in content with either his “field notes” or the narrative account in his book. These “field notes” are in very small writing and are in the style of telegraphic phrases with little narrative content at all. And there is yet another contradictory source in the form of a “copy” of his published field notes, but, suspiciously, that also has entries for the days from February 19-March 18, not in either version of the so-called “field notes.” These additional entries do not match those in his original narrative notebook (#2).

After examining all of the diaries Cook wrote while on his expedition of 1908-09, the author concluded that the “field notes” in #2 were probably written, not during the time they describe, but during the period Cook overwintered at Cape Sparbo, or possibly even later—the period during which the Inuit remembered he “wrote and wrote.” For all of these reasons, the author is of the opinion that #1 is an actual field record of the first six days of his journey away from land, and that the other sources are after the fact or imaginary accounts. Here is a table comparing the content of the overlapping data these four sources contain, with an extra column with the relevant data from MacMillan’s original field diary:

Table 1

Table 2A couple of things to notice in this comparison: The diary (#1) mileage total is the lowest. If this was an actual record and Cook was claiming the pole, in inventing a false narrative going all the way to the pole, he naturally would want to adjust his mileages upward for these days with each successive rewrite so he could reach the pole on April 21 with a reasonable daily average mileage. Notice that this is the exact pattern of the four successive accounts (if the author’s opinion of the sequence in which they were written is correct), the highest being his eventual published narrative. This is the pattern of fudging that is clearly demonstrated in his adjustment of dates in his field diary (#2) kept on the first leg of his trip. Also, notice the conflict on March 23 in his narrative account. The first five days in his “field notes” add up to 92 miles. On March 22 he says he went 22 miles. At the end of the sixth day in his narrative he gives no mileage for the day, but he says the first 100 miles have been covered, implying 8 miles for this day, but his statement that he had two marches in a row adding 50 miles to his total gives a figure of 28 miles for that day. And later in My Attainment of the Pole he says, “The goal lay 400 miles away,” which rules out the smaller figure.

All four accounts are consistent in saying that Grant Land (the name then in use for the uppermost portion of Ellesmere Island) was still visible until the end of the fourth day out. That would be at 82 miles in the diary (#1) account, or 92 in the other three. For the fifth day, #1-3 add a further 22 miles to this. But #4 because of the conflict noted above, is ambiguous. Only #2 and #3 are in agreement for March 23. These are the kinds of inconsistencies that are the mark of invention, not the recording of actual events as they happened. Therefore, in many respects there is reason to believe that #1 is probably a genuine account of Cook’s first six days on the ice (and even it has insertions and deletions within the original text. The reader can find a complete transcription of this diary account on pages 969 to 973 of the author’s book, Cook & Peary, the Polar Controversy, resolved, which shows these changes as well).

Since Cook was not traveling due north, but slightly west of north by his own account, he would have been traveling more miles to make the distance between the two latitude readings he gives. In his book Cook describes his method of deal reckoning: “We were traveling about two and one-half miles per hour. By making due allowances for detours and halts at pressure lines, the number of hours traveled gave us a fair estimate of the day’s distance. Against this the pedometer offered a check, and the compass gave the course. Thus, over blank charts, our course was marked.” Notice that he says his course is determined by compass alone, but he never mentions any corrections for magnetic variation. If you don’t know what that is, then any course set solely by compass can’t be accurate. This implies he is acting on his untenable idea of being on his “magnetic meridian,” which he believes lies approximately along the 97th parallel. As long as one has sight of a point whose bearings are known, such as Grant Land, one can steer an approximate course, but such a “system” of navigation is pure guesswork without such a bearing, and so anyone traveling out of sight of land would lose all points of reference for direction. This alone, for any sane traveler, suggests that Cook never really would have gone out of sight of land.

No matter what MacMillan said in his book, MacMillan found his own dead reckoning was always less than his celestial observations indicated. And the difference between the two was quite significant in their initial sight and even more so in Green’s later “recomputaion” of it. MacMillan and Green possibly had reason to want to inflate the distance they traveled, however. They wanted to make sure they traveled beyond the assumed location of Peary’s Crocker Land, but reading their diaries, one feels that they were very eager, because of the failing condition of their dogs, to turn back as soon as soon as possible. Not only were their dogs were dying in the traces, the season was advancing and the Inuit were urging them to “turn back as Dr. Cook had.” In this there is the suspicion that MacMillan and Green, like Cook, were adjusting their mileages upward as well, perhaps to assure others that their trip undoubtedly covered the distance necessary to assure that Peary’s Crocker Land had no existence at its estimated position. In his published narrative, MacMillan leaves open the possibility, for instance, that it might lie farther off shore than they expected. But, intentions aside, we have, like Cook’s various accounts, only their positional data to guide us.

If we just accept the difference between their first celestial observation and their DR figure of 106 miles, their DR was out by -12%. So if MacMillan said that they were still able to see Grant Land at a distance of 75-78 miles DR, adding 12% to that means it was visible at 84-86 miles. This matches up quite well with Cook’s statements of the distance he lost sight of it in #1’s diary entries, that seem to be an actual record written in the field. If you take Green’s recomputation to be valid, their DR was off by -30%. That means they would have to add 22 ½ miles, making the distance at which Grant Land was visible 97-99 miles. This raises the possibility that Cook could have been that far from shore without being inconsistent with the Inuit statement that they were never out of sight of land.

The various estimates of Cook’s distance from shore when he turned back given by MacMillan (see Part 6 of this series) range from 12-15 miles, and Henson estimated 20-25. The Inuit gave no estimate in Peary’s statement. However, in Borup’s notes, Etukishuk gave his own estimate that the distance he traveled with Cook was not as far as he had gone with Matt Ryan in 1906 (see Part 5). On Peary’s failed attempt to reach the North Pole that year, Ryan had headed one of Peary’s support divisions that he sent back in stages as the expedition drew away from land. Ryan stopped at the so-called “Big Lead,” where Peary was delayed by open water for one week. This was by observation located at 84° 38’, 115 miles north of Point Moss. This suggests Etukishuk thought that the distance he traveled with Cook and with Ryan were similar, but that he felt Cook’s was the lesser of the two, or he would not have made such a comparison, because even though Inuit had trouble gauging distances, 12-15 miles is hardly comparable to 115. Of the totals of the three accounts in the table, only the #1 diary account is less than Ryan went—one mile less, but none of the others are hugely incomparable.

MacMillan’s attempt to reach “Crocker Land” was the nearest contemporary journey to the northwest from Cape Thomas Hubbard after Cook’s. No one had every traveled before over the route MacMillan took, unless it was Cook. MacMillan’s experiences are not in dispute, though his various accounts of it, like Cook’s, are not consistent in every detail, either. Therefore, a comparison of MacMillan’s accounts of his trip with Cook’s accounts of his, should prove enlightening. If they have nothing in common, then that would be circumstantial evidence that Cook’s account is invention, with little basis in fact, and, as MacMillan said, he turned back only a very short distance from shore. Such a comparison is very apt, too, because besides the route, the two have so much else in common.

MacMillan was in the habit of rewriting his original diaries, “improving” his story with each new version, something he also had in common with Cook. So there are several “diaries. He also wrote several published accounts of his journey toward Crocker Land, and there is also the original diary of his companion Fitzhugh Green and a detailed account of the trip that Green published in several long magazine articles as well. The author has written a comparative study of all these materials, but it has not been published as yet due to copyright restrictions. That comparison runs about 70 pages, so it would be impossible to mention all the differences between these various accounts in this short space. So, to keep things simple, MacMillan’s journey is here recounted in the earliest of these sources. It is summarized comparatively with Cook’s in the last column of the table above.

Given the plethora of accounts left by each explorer, and their numerous variants, much more so for MacMillan’s than Cook’s, it’s probably best to compare apples with apples. Therefore in equating the two trips, we will assume Cook’s diary #1 is the closest to an original source that we have for Cook, and compare it to the known original source for MacMillan, his original diary now at the American Museum, where Green’s also is held. Since we are simplifying things, and we have only DR figures for Cook, we will use MacMillan’s DR figures as well.

MacMillan’s forces were similar to Cook’s: himself, Fitzhugh Green, and the two Inuit, Pewahto and Etukishuk, the same Inuit who had been with Cook in 1908. They left Cape Thomas Hubbard on April 16th, 1914, three days later than Cook’s apparent start date of April 13th from exactly the same location. Both went northwest. Macmillan’s trip over it’s first six days went 74 miles by DR at a rate of nearly 12.33 miles per day, Cook’s went 114 at a pace of 19 miles per day.

The descriptions of the ice over which they traveled is very similar. In My Attainment of the Pole, Cook described the ice near shore as “slowly forced downward by strong currents from the north, and pounded and piled in jagged mountainous heaps for miles about the land.” MacMillan described it as “hard, rough ice all around us and as far as the eye can see.” Perhaps the fact that MacMillan was held up by open water the second day out, when he estimated he had traveled 13 miles from shore, was the basis of his later estimate that Cook turned back 12-15 miles from shore, because Peary’s statement said (erroneously) that Cook and his Inuit had turned back after two days of travel when they hit the first open water.

Once past this rough ice, Cook characterized the going as good: “For several hours we seemed to soar over the white spaces” before the ice changed to “thick fields of glacier-like ice giving way to floes of moderate size and thickness. These were separated by zones of troublesome crushed ice thrown into high-pressure lines, which offered serious barriers.” In his book, Macmillan said after the rough ice onshore, that four four days he traveled “over a rolling plain of old ice covered with low mounds and compacted drift.” But then the ice abruptly changed to “a perfect chaos of pressure ridge crossing and crisscrossing in all directions,” according to MacMillan. Cook also encountered this abrupt change: “We reached a line of high-pressure ridges. Beyond these the ice was cut into smaller floes and thrown together into ugly irregularities. . . hummocks and pressure lines which seemed impossible from a distance.” He took this to be “The Big Lead,” previously described by Peary in 1906.

On the eighth day out, MacMillan was turned back when he hit those chaotic ice conditions, which he placed at 106 miles out by DR. In Cook’s statement refuting Rasmussen’s second version of Cook’s journey told to him by the Inuit missionaries (see Part 9), Cook said he did not experience any open water until he reached “The Big Lead,” which he estimated was 100 miles out. In diary #1, Cook says he encountered chaotic ice conditions on his fifth day out at 104 miles DR. The original celestial observation at this point put MacMillan at 82° 11’ N, 108° 22’at which the compass variation was 178° out of true—nearly on Cook’s “magnetic meridian” of 180°. In this comparison (and remember, Cook claimed to be only person to have traveled over this route prior to 1914), the specific ice conditions each describes, although they can vary from year to year, are very similar. So, again, the two trips show extremely close correlation. But has any information come to light to show that the area over which MacMillan traveled has relatively consistent ice conditions, year to year, such as those we have seen exist between the Queen Elizabeth Islands?

Beyond a comparison of the original written accounts, as we did in the case of the third leg of Cook’s journey (see Part 16), more circumstantial evidence can be gleaned from an examination of environmental conditions and factors in the area under consideration. Here is a chart showing the major currents in the Arctic Ocean:

Arctic currents

Along the course MacMillan took, the ice is relatively undisturbed by tides and currents. In a paper delivered at Ohio State University in 1993, Captain Brian Shoemaker attempted to match Cook’s reports bearing on what is now know of these factors along his alleged route. The result was mixed, in that some factors north of 84°, especially drift data, didn’t match up with Cook’s reports, but Shoemaker contended conditions closer to shore did. For instance, he explained that over the route Cook claimed there was what he called a “current null area,” resulting in very little drift.

This is because of low tidal currents in the Queen Elizabeth Islands, due to their relative geographical locations to one another and the multi-year ice between them. Furthermore, the predominant current that flows from from the Behring Sea, west to east in the summer, is practically non-existent during the winter and early spring months due to the increased salinity of the water due to the freezing of freshwater rivers flowing into the sea from the northern coasts of Alaska and arctic Canada (the dashed line on the chart).

In Cook’s published narrative he noted an area beyond the initial rough onshore ice where there were a number of icebergs visible, some of which he judged to be grounded. From this observation he concluded that “the sea was very shallow for a long distance from land.” But in the same area, at 17 miles from shore DR, MacMillan made a sounding finding no bottom at 2000 fathoms, though he attributed some of this apparent depth to his axe, which he was using as a weight, being swept away laterally by a strong current. MacMillan was right. The sea is not that deep where he made his sounding, but it is not shallow a long way out, either, dropping off sharply to about 1500 feet along MacMillan’s route. But Cook’s observation may have been correct, nonetheless, though his conclusions were wrong. In Captain Shoemaker’s paper he noted that due to the lack of current, icebergs tended to congregate in the “current null area.”

In the early spring, during which both Cook and MacMillan traveled, Shoemaker wrote, the ice would not have been disturbed greatly until about 100 miles out on MacMillan’s known course. This disturbance is caused by the Beaufort Gyre, which flows strongly clockwise to the west at that point (see the chart). The Gyre apparently is caused by an upwelling of freshwater of unknown origin. As the climate has warmed in recent years, the strength of the Gyre seems to be weakening, boding possibly radical climate shifts for Europe, but its dynamics are still not well understood. MacMillan’s route would go right between the southwest shear zone caused by the strong clockwise circulation of the Beaufort Gyre and that of weaker counterclockwise easterly currents, spawned by remnants of the warm North Atlantic current, shown in red on the chart, leaving the area between the two with hardly any current at all. On the basis of this analysis, Captain Shoemaker said Cook’s narrative was consistent with then environmental conditions as far as 84° N, although these conditions were totally unknown in 1908, but were unconfirmed until MacMillan experienced their effects in 1914. It was MacMillan’s encounter with the southwest shear zone caused by the Beaufort Gyre, which MacMillan misattributed to the action of currents over shoal ground, that made further progress so difficult that he gave up his quest for Crocker Land and turned back to land. The fact that Cook first described this unknown western current and that MacMillan coming after him confirmed its existence, and also that each estimated it at precisely the same place, is evidence that both of them must have traveled about 100 miles to the northwest of the tip of Axel Heiberg Island, the place where it would be first observed along their respective routes.

As noted, in Cook’s reply to Rasmussen’s contention (see Part 9) that he was stopped by open water near land, Cook said, “if so, the returning Eskimos would have reported it. The nearest water to land was at the big lead 100 miles off, where land was but a blue haze on the horizon.” Furthermore, this contention seems to be preserved in Inuit folk memory.

If we turn again to the account based on Inuit folk memory recounted by Inuutersuaq (see Part 12), it seems to be describing precisely such a journey as Cook and MacMillan each described. Points of congruence are given in bold print. It says “[Cook’s party] travelled a long time towards the north on the two dog sledges with the leader out in front on his skis as usual. The whole time they could make out faintly some of the coast of Grant Land [the north coast of Ellesmere Island] . . . Presently they came to large expanses of drift ice and after having travelled through this for some time ice packs came into sight. The leader stopped then and wanted to go no further. . . . They stopped for a long time in an area where there was enormous drift ice and pack ice which had broken loose from the polar ice. They reached the place in the middle of their most hopeless struggle and camped there. Their leader said nothing to them about having reached the North Pole. . . They said they were not so far from land. They of course meant that they could see some of Cape Columbia on the north coast of Ellesmere Land the whole time. It was moreover the place which [Peary] used as a depot and starting point for his [trip in] 1909, when he was on his way to the North Pole.” Only the details previously pointed out (that Cook didn’t use skis, and that Cook said nothing of reaching the pole) conflict with a description of either MacMillan’s or Cook’s narratives. Its description of conditions experienced while on the sea is very similar to what would have actually been experienced on a journey along their routes to about 100 miles offshore.

Counterbalancing this, however, is the statement of Inughito, who said that Cook’s marches were short while he was with him, and not as long as those he had made while working with Peary in 1906 (see part 5). Cook’s first three marches away from land, on which Inughito would have been with him, as can be seen from the chart, totaled 84 miles in #1, an average of 28 miles a day. Peary’s early marches to the Big Lead, where Inughito turned back on Peary’s polar attempt in 1906, averaged far less than this—under 10 miles per day. Peary took most of a month to reach that point, only 115 miles out. However, it is not at all clear that Inughito’s statement is referring only to the time he was out on the Arctic Ocean with Cook, or instead to Cook’s overall progress from his start from Annoatok. Cook took 48 days to reach Cape Thomas Hubbard, a distance by Cook’s own records of 735 miles including detours, for an average of 15.3 miles per day, though to be accurate, he did not travel at all because delays on some of these days.

If Cook and MacMillan actually reached the same place before turning back, as we have already noted, and if we compare MacMillan’s DR average to Cook’s, it will be seen that even the report that looks most likely to be a true account (#1) would work out to an average of 19 miles per day vs MacMillan’s of only a bit over 13. And indeed, Cook took only five days to reach the chaos of ice he describes in #1, while MacMillan took eight. However, Cook left land with the pick of the dogs from a large pack that had been fed on fresh meat during the whole outward journey to that point, whereas from the first day of his journey MacMillan continually complained in his diary that his dogs were in very poor condition because they had diarrhea from being fed on pemmican which contained an excessive amount of salt. Some of them actually dropped dead, and although the Inuit rode the sleds whenever possible, both MacMillan and Green walked the whole way to spare their teams the added weight, so much did they fear them giving out.

Anyone familiar with the early Antarctic journeys using dogs will be familiar with the vast difference in strength and stamina of dogs fed on fresh meat compared to dog pemmican—even saltless dog pemmican. Also, for the first three days of his journey away from land, Cook had four natives with him to help him get forward, whereas MacMillan and Green had just two. It is reasonable, therefore, to expect that Cook’s party would travel more miles per day against MacMillan’s poor performing teams, and would have reached the same place quicker than he.

Another possible source of evidence is the photographs taken during Cook’s alleged journey to the North Pole, vs MacMillan’s journey towards Crocker Land. Cook and Peary doubter, the astronomer Dennis Rawlins, finds it suspicious, especially considering Cook’s proven record of misrepresenting photographs, that few of Cook’s show him in the vicinity of any rough ice. Only one published picture, the one opposite Page 172 in My Attainment of the Pole, shows such ice.igloo shadow

There is another, unpublished one, in the Library of Congress, which was probably taken at the same place (see page 338 of the author’s book, The Lost Polar Notebook of Dr. Frederick A. Cook). However, the same might be said of the pictures MacMillan published. Only three of his show such ice in his book or in any of the articles he published before the book came out. Two of those (the one opposite page 76 and the lower of the two opposite page 78) are explicitly identified as having been taken at the location of the chaotic ice MacMillan encountered near his turnaround position; the other one is implicitly so. And beyond the ice pressed against Axel Heiberg Island, neither Cook nor MacMillan describe daunting ice impediments along their entire journey until they suddenly encountered chaotic ice, each about 100 miles from shore, the position known today as that where on such a course as MacMillan took they would have encountered the southwesterly shear zone caused by the Beaufort Gyre.

Initially, Rawlins considered as plausible my suggestion that Cook’s only published picture of rough ice might have been taken at his last camp before he turned back toward land. To test this possibility, he did a thorough photogrammetric analysis of it, using both the picture as published in his book and also a lantern slide of this image now in the Photographic Division of the Library of Congress, using shadows visible in the picture and other parameters derived from it. In December 2013 he sent me the results of his analysis. Here they are exactly as I received them:

Rawlins report

This said, it must also be said clearly, that recently, Rawlins has disowned this analysis. He has instead accepted MacMillan’s story that Cook never went more than 12 miles (although MacMillan’s three different estimates ranged between 12 and 15 miles) as true. He has never furnished me with any other analysis or counter evidence for this other than Cook’s lack of photographs of rough ice, although I made him aware of some of the circumstantial evidence recounted in this series, and asked him to consider it in light of the many points of convergence with known physical conditions along Cook’s route, along with the many points of congruence with MacMillan’s similar journey in 1914, as described above. Rawlins has made it clear on numerous occasions that he despises Frederick Cook, and apparently on that basis alone is unwilling to give him credit for even a trip that fell more than 400 miles short of the North Pole.

We have already examined the physical conditions that existed between the Queen Elizabeth Island in Cook’s time, and by a comparison of the route outlined by the Inuit to Peary and that of Dr. Cook, have concluded that the Inuit version is supported by those conditions to a far greater degree than Cook’s. The limited documentary evidence available about that final leg of Cook’s journey also strongly favors their version as more trustworthy than Cook’s. In the case of his trip away from land, there is little documentary evidence, but what there is leans toward the author’s contention that #1 represents a circumstantial account of what actually happened, as does a comparison of it with MacMillan’s journey over the same area at the same time of year. So do all the then unknown physical conditions in the area the two expeditions traversed. Finally, Rawlins photographic analysis does not rule out the author’s approximate location for the position of Cook’s last camp, and there are no other Cook photographs that support him going any farther. In fact, his photographs of phenomena he experienced farther along his route, including those of “Bradley Land,” supposed to lie just north of Peary’s “Crocker Land,” and that of a “Glacial Island” within two degrees of the pole, have all been proven fakes.

The author contends that the numerous points of congruence described above are too many to represent mere coincidences. So, on the basis of the evidence discussed here, he remains of the opinion that Frederick Cook made a journey of 6 to 8 days to the northwest of Cape Thomas Hubbard and was turned back at about the same latitude MacMillan was forced to do the same by the impossible ice conditions caused by the southwest shear zone related to the Beaufort Gyre, approximately 100 miles northwest of Cape Thomas Hubbard.

This does not mean that Cook was 100 miles nearer the pole when he turned back, because he was not going, and did not intend to go, due north. Assuming both encountered the southwest shear zone at about the same latitude, 82° 30’ N, from Cook’s mileage in #1 he would have been at about 102° W longitude. So his journey put him only about 65 nautical miles nearer the pole than the location of Cape Thomas Hubbard, or 462 miles short of it.

MacMillan’s DR calculations are nearly identical to Cook’s #1. Green’s “recomputation” put MacMillan at 82° 30’ N, 108° 22’ W. at which position MacMillan reported the magnetic declination, 178° W, not far from Cook’s “magnetic meridian.” We have no recomputation for Cook. But, of course, if Cook’s DR was in error to the same extent as MacMillan’s DR was, he would have ended up in almost exactly the same place Green’s figures showed. But working on just the best data we have, which in Cook’s case is sketchy at best, Cook’s DR position and Green’s result are about 48 miles apart, the distance between parallels of longitude at 82° 30’ N being only 8 miles apart. These positions have another implication for authenticity of Cook’s account: MacMillan’s course being farther to the west, it is reasonable to assume that MacMillan would have lost sight of land earlier than Cook, since Grant Land lay to the east.

This amazingly close positioning of the hypothesized turn about positions of Cook and MacMillan, again seems more than mere coincidence, just as does the congruence between Cook’s story of his journey in #1 and the Inuit folk memory of it. Even more interesting are the conclusions the Inuit drew about Cook’s intentions: “Ulloriaq theorized that [Cook] ‘was clear in his mind that he could not reach the North Pole. He therefore concentrated persistently on the trip to the large drift ice instead.’” As we shall see in the last installment of this series, that appears to be a fairly good description of what Cook actually did.

Sources not specifically mentioned in the text:

Bryce, Robert M., The Lost Polar Notebook of Dr. Frederick A. Cook, 2023.

Shoemaker, Brian, “Oceanographic Currents in the Arctic Ocean: Did Cook Discover an Unknown Drift,” Byrd Polar Research Center Report No. 18, 1998.

Uncategorized

The Cook-Peary files: The “Eskimo Testimony” : Part 16: Tracing Cook’s actual route: Part 3: Testing the two accounts.

February 19, 2024

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

Immediately upon the publication of Peary’s statement about what Cook’s Inuit said appeared, partisans of both sides noticed the extreme differences in the route on Peary’s map compared to the one published by Cook in his New York Herald narrative.  Along with its publication of Peary’s statement, it ran the arguments and counter-arguments of partisans on both sides.  Cook’s supporters contended that “Even if Dr. Cook’s story of his polar dash were false, he would not be expected to give an incorrect report of his travels after he returned to regions where his trail might be followed and his camping places visited for verification of his story.” Peary’s supporters countered, “That Dr. Cook naturally would wish his route southward supposed to lie to the west of that which the Esquimaus described. He said in his narrative that he was pushing for Lancaster Sound where he hoped to find a whaling ship. The route which he gave was the most direct on to reach Lancaster Sound. If he had, as the Esquimaus say, reached the southern point of Heiberg Land and pushed thence [east]ward, he would have been within easy reaching distance of his caches and the trail by which he had gone west, and so might have returned to Etah in the early summer of 1908.”

When the testimony of the eyewitnesses is in direct conflict, then one must fall back on circumstantial evidence to see which of the stories is more likely. This evidence comes from comparing each of the descriptions given by the conflicting witnesses to see how well they match up with the experiences of others who traveled over the same area and the patterns of environmental conditions now known to exist in the area described in the conflicting narratives.

As we have already seen (see Part 11) the arguments over whether Cook visited Meighen Island are irrelevant because he could have actually been at the position he gave for June 13, 1908 on a return journey from the North Pole and not have seen it. The Sverdrup expedition’s parties traveled extensively over the area between 1898-1902 and never saw it. In fact, it was among the very few significant pieces of land that his expedition failed to discover. Here is a map showing the routes of Sverdrup’s travels, showing that on several occasions his journeys brought him as close to Meighen Island as Cook’s reported position without him seeing it. This might be explained by the fact that in summer, when Sverdrup’s parties were in the field, the island is often covered by fog. If the Inuit narrative is true, Cook would have been in the area earlier than that. So the fact that Cook saw it and Sverdrup did not, weights in the favor of the Inuit version. Sverdrup's routes

So, although he denied it, Cook probably did discover and visit the island. The Inuit say they saw it from Cape Northwest, a distance of about 25 miles away, and crossed over the ice to it, traveling around the top point of the island and then down its west coast. The shape of the island on Peary’s map and its very accurate placement there—even better than that of its “discoverer,” Stefansson, in 1916–argues strongly for the accuracy of the Inuit version. If Cook did discover the island, it would have been his first discovery of unknown land, so why, then, did he not report it? As mentioned before, his failure to do so is probably linked to his ignorance of the use of a sextant. Any report of new land would have to include fixing its geographical coordinates. Not being able to do so with any accuracy would have given away Cook’s inability with a sextant, and without that critical skill no journey to the North Pole would have been possible in Cook’s time.

Before Cook, the only parties to travel over the area where Cook next claimed to have gone were those of Sverdrup. They noted that the pull of the moon had no effect on the ice between the Ringnes Islands and Axel Heiberg Land, which remained intact throughout the summers they traveled there. Peary had never been over that area himself, but from Sverdrup’s descriptions and his own observations from the heights of Cape Thomas Hubbard in June 1906, he had formed the opinion that the ice between those islands never broke up. In a statement he sent to General Hubbard as a supplement to the Inuit statement he planned to publish concerning what they had told his interrogators of Cook’s movements, he had this to say:

Peary notes 3

Peary notes 4

Not only Sverdrup, but all those who traveled that way in the 20 years after 1908 confirmed that the ice never broke up even in late summer. Stefansson journeyed extensively over the area in 1915-16, for instance, and said that, although the surface melted into slush that impeded travel and deep ravines developed in the ice from run off, it never broke up. Stefansson was able to cross over to Amund Ringnes Island from Axel Heiberg Island in late July 1915. The Inuit told Rasmussen (see Part 7) that the reason they were unable to reach Axel Heiberg was due to “cracks in the ice,” not because it was adrift, closely conforming with Stefansson’s description. Yet Cook described “open water and impossible small ice as a barrier between us and Heiberg Island” in June 1908, and that those same conditions prevailed in Norwegian Bay, preventing him from crossing from Amund Ringnes Island to Axel Heiberg Island shortly thereafter. Further evidence indicates that this could not be due merely to chance seasonal differences from year to year.

Regular aerial ice surveys carried out by the Canadian government between 1961-1974 showed that the ice is solid between these islands at least until August and starts to break, if at all, even in the extreme south, only in September. Other than that, every year of these ice surveys showed that the ice between them was totally consolidated, with no open water. Moreover this was shown to be multi-year ice, meaning it never melted in an average year. And climatic records and the oral traditions of the Inuit, who have infallible memories in such matters, indicate that, if anything, arctic winters were far colder prior to 1920.

Here’s a sample map from the Sea-Ice Atlas of Arctic Canada 1961-1968.  This map shows ice condition in the area through which Cook passed in June 1961, the same month Cook claimed to have been there.  The small cross-hatching represents multi-year ice, the larger cross-hatching one to two year old ice.  The route the Inuit say Cook took is shown in red.  The one Cook said he took is shown in blue.  Notice that Cook’s route reaches a large area of open water of Penny Strait, between Bathurst Island and Grinnel Peninsula (marked on his route by yellow hashmarks) that would have stopped his progress via sledge, whereas, the Inuit route is all over fully consolidated ice until he reaches the open water caused by the northern end of Hell Gate, indicated by the blue dot.

ice route map 2

Therefore, if Cook was actually at the position he claimed on June 13, 1908, it is extremely unlikely that he would not have been able to return to his caches on Heiberg Island by either route and make his way back to Greenland that same year. It is a near certainty that he could have easily crossed Norwegian Bay to do so if he had wanted to reach Axel Heiberg land from his claimed route. So all evidence indicates that by June 13 Cook was far south of his reported location and simply guessed at the ice conditions where he claimed to have been, based on his experience with the ice in Smith Sound and Melville Bay. Open water and drifting ice in June did not occur in the region through which he traveled well into the 1990s. Again, the Inuit version is a far better match for the conditions that would most likely prevail over this area.

From his stated position, Cook claimed to have made landfall on a small island above Amund Ringnes Island, then traveled with the moving ice down Hassel Sound which separates the two Ringnes Islands. There is a small island off the NW tip of that island at about 78°50N/98°W that is in line with Cook’s reported route through Hassel Sound, but there is also one in Geologist’s Bay that is in line with the rout shown on Peary’s map. Sverdrup reported that Hassel Sound was but three miles wide, but this was but a guess. As can be seen from the above map of Sverdrup’s travels, none of his parties ever actually passed though Hassel Sound, only approaching each of its entrances. The sound is actually 16 miles across, not three. Cook was a meticulous observer of what he actually saw. A case in point is Sverdrup’s “Shei Island,” which Cook reported was actually a peninsula, which later surveys confirmed. If he had actually passed down Hassel Sound, he surely would have reported Sverdrup’s error there as well. So, again, the Inuit version of passing along the east coast of Amund Ringnes seems the more likely, as is their claim to have killed reindeer there. Amund Ringnes is known to be inhabited by reindeer, whereas they are absent from much of the surrounding area.

The Inuit version stated that they encountered no open water between the place from where they turned back on the Polar Sea until they reached the northern entrance to Hell Gate. Again, this is far more plausible than Cook’s account of ice conditions. It is known today that a polynya (an upwelling of warm water) at that location keeps the water open there even in winter. It was at that point, the Inuit version says, that they “spent considerable time,” perhaps waiting for the water to freeze over, so they could continue sledging south along the coast. Since the water never froze, they then crossed Simmons Peninsula to Gaase (Goose) Fjord by way of a broad glacial valley. The Fram had been frozen in near the head of this fjord in 1900-1901, and had not been able to escape, being frozen in about half way down the fjord for the next winter, breaking free only on August 6, 1902. While the Fram was frozen in, Sverdrup used this valley to gain access to the areas west of his winter quarters, so it would have been known to Cook that the frozen waters of the fjord would provide good sledging to Jones Sound. Notice that in 1961, Goose Fjord was ice free, as it was when Sverdrup sailed the Fram almost to its head in 1900 before being frozen in; in 1908, according to the Inuit, it was frozen over, allowing Cook to sledge down its length.  Sverdrup during his stay there found the latter case to be the predominate one.

That Cook took this route is not readily apparent from reading Peary’s published account, which does not mention it at all. But the crossing of Simmons Peninsula and the subsequent journey down the length of the fjord are shown on the map that accompanied it. These details were only explicitly mentioned in Donald MacMillan’s letter to the American Geographical Society in 1917. There he also mentions that Cook, after exiting the fjord, went west, then north to North Kent Island, as Peary’s statement had said. There, according to MacMillan’s 1917 letter (see Part 3) Cook’s party again met open water and had to abandon its dogs and take to the folding boat, in which they proceeded across Hell Gate and into Norfolk Inlet. From this point they followed the coastline past Cape Vera, where the Inuit said he arrived in time to gather eider duck eggs, which would have been about the first week in July, according to Sverdrup’s accounts of his own experiences.

Cook’s story of being blown back down half the length of Jones Sound after taking refuge on a passing iceberg as they approached Cape Sparbo, is surely a fantasy to thrill the readers of My Attainment of the Pole, as any such incident would surely have been recounted by his Inuit companions. Yet in no instance did anyone who heard Inuit gossip of the journey hear anything about it. Both accounts coincide fairly well from the point they reach Cape Sparbo the first time. Both say they turned back near Belcher Point to return to Cape Sparbo for the winter. It might be noted here that Cook did not camp at the point on modern maps that is now labeled “Cape Sparbo.” There are twin headlands there, the more westerly one is today is called Cape Sparbo. But Cook wintered at the more easterly one, today called Cape Hardy. In Cook’s time, the westerly cape was called Cape Skogn.

Cook’s tale of spending a “stone age” winter, bereft of most civilized means, greatly impressed many, including Knud Rasmussen. But Cook’s enchanting survival saga of this overwintering, we now know is as untrue as his wild ride down Jones Sound on an iceberg. The proof comes from his own hand, in the form of a sketchy diary he kept over the winter of 1908-09, now at the Library of Congress. It shows that they constructed a comfortable house, which he describes in much detail in another of his diaries, similar to those used in that time to overwinter in Greenland. Using the stone foundation of a similar ancient structure, they dug it out, then used some washed up whale bones for rafters, which they covered with turf. The inside was lined with the skins of musk oxen which they slaughtered at will. These kills are documented from the day of their arrival at the site, killing a walrus on their first day there, September 1, and three musk oxen the next day. The house was visited in 1910 by Bob Bartlett, who found it still snugly lined with furs, though the roof had fallen in. Cook records in his diary that several of the animals were taken with “lines and stones,” so the Inuit folk memory account (see Part 13) may be true. Given unlimited ammunition, the Inuit would likely have slaughtered all of the musk ox in the area. So to restrain this temptation, Cook, according to Ulloruq, restrained this urge by withholding it. Cook also confirms the story about the polar bear that bothered them in his diary. Rather than half the sledge being sacrificed to make new weapons for the hung, in his diary Cook recounts how they found a washed up hatch cover, the wood of which was used to fashion harpoon handles, leaving aside the real reason for shortening the sledge because it was simply “awkward to carry in the boat.” Indeed, Cook’s diary confirms the Inuit account of a comfortable winter, with plenty of food and fuel and ample ammunition. As his entry for October 4, notes: “Slept 10 hours; wonderful dreams. 4 hours eating & exercising together 6 hours; writing 4 hours.”

Cook’s narrative account of his “Stone Age winter” spent at Cape Sparbo was his master stroke.  Captain Schoubye said when he heard about it that he could understand why a man like Cook could have reached the North Pole.  Rasmussen was so impressed by it that he said “This man who practically alone has gone through and endured the winter at Cape Sparbo and the terrible march up to Anonitok through deep snow and violent ice-crushings, in darkness and bitter cold, has deserved to be the first man at the North Pole.”  And Captain Hall just couldn’t think of a reason why any sane man would chose to spend such a winter under such conditions if he had had the choice to return to Annoatok that same year.  But the Peary partisans had a simple answer to why Cook would have made such a choice.  “He wished, however, to spend the winter away from Etah, in order to avoid Commander Peary, and to prepare his account of the journey.” (New York Daily Tribune, October 13, 1909).   All evidence shows that that is exactly what he wished.

The Inuit account of making new clothing from musk ox skins is confirmed by a number of pictures in My Attainment of the Pole. There he describes their outfits before they left for the pole, saying they wore blue fox kapitahs (jackets) and seal skin boots.  The pictures taken early in Cook journey, when they were on their way to Cape Thomas Hubbard, show the Inuit thus attired.  But some of just Etukishuk or Ahwelah (see Part 8 of this series) show them wearing jackets and boots made of the distinctive long-haired fur of musk oxen, including the one of Etukishuk and Ahwelah standing next to the igloo “at the North Pole.” Therefore, these had to have been taken in 1909, not 1908. This supports MacMillan’s claim in his 1917 letter that those pictures, including the one of the “North Pole” were taken at Cape Faraday on the spring journey home in 1909.

The two versions of the spring journey back to Annoatok coincide with each other in almost every important detail, including the sighting of two uncharted islands off Cape Tennyson, which Cook named after his two companions, today known as the Stewart Islands, which, unlike Meighen Island, there is no doubt Cook discovered.

So we can see that the Inuit version of the story is supported in nearly every detail, whereas Cook’s is very short on corroborating points. Only one exception to this pattern occurs in MacMillan’s letter account. In it he says that “Two low islands were discovered in about latitude 79°, very low and about five miles from land.” Captain Hall attempted to chart these islands to show that this conflicted with the Peary account, placing them along the shore south of Cape Levvel (see Part 9 of this series). What MacMillan was referring to is unclear and may just be a simple mistake. In any case, there are no small islands on Axel Heiberg’s west coast anywhere near 79° and none below Cape Levvel all the way to Cape Southwest, where MacMillan says they landed after crossing from the east coast of Amund Ringnes Island.

On the basis of this comparison of the two stories with circumstantial geographical evidence about their respective routes, as well as documentary evidence in the form of Cook’s own winter sketch diary, we can safely conclude that the Inuit version is far closer to the truth than Cook’s.

The Peary notes on ice conditions are now in NARA II

Uncategorized

The Cook-Peary files: The “Eskimo Testimony”: Part 15: Tracing Cook’s actual route: Part 2: Two irreconcilable accounts.

January 29, 2024

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

A further assurance that the Inuit did not draw the first leg of the journey from Annoatok to Cape Thomas Hubbard on Peary’s map is that nowhere along that route do they indicate any specific kills of game. Peary’s statement simply stated that they killed polar bears and musk oxen along the way. However, on the rest of the route game kills are specifically noted. Hunting was an Inuk’s life, and knowing where game could be found meant his very survival, making it always uppermost in his mind.  So the notation of specific game kills would naturally be something Cook’s Inuit would remember in detail.

There were only three witnesses to this third leg of the journey, from when Cook reached land again until he arrived back at his winter base in Greenland: Cook, Etukishuk and Ahwelah. Unlike the first leg, there is no original diary by Cook of this portion known to exist. Nor do the “field notes” appended to My Attainment of the Pole cover this period.  The only detailed sequential description Cook ever gave was in his book’s narrative. Peary alleged that the Inuit described the return journey to his interrogators in some detail and traced their route on the map he published showing the route of their travels from the Polar Sea until they regained Annoatok in April 1909. The two versions, Cook’s and the Inuit’s, of where they went and what they did are markedly different, and so cannot be reconciled with one another before a certain point. It is Cook’s word against what Peary says the Inuit reported to his men. So we must review what each account claimed before we consider each of these versions to see which one is the more plausible.

This map shows many of the places mentioned in the two accounts which follow:

Sverdrup map

Cook’s version

Cook stated that for an extended period as he approached land from the Polar Sea, he was enveloped by fog and was unable to get his bearings. He was only able to get a navigational sight to determine his position on June 13, 1908. That sight placed him at latitude 79°32’, longitude 101°22’ in the Crown Prince Gustav Sea. Therefore he had unaccountably drifted much farther west than he expected. Although he could see the cliffs of Axel Heiberg Island about 50 miles to the east, he couldn’t hope to reach them because of the condition of the ice, which at this point, he said, was much broken and drifting south; he therefore had no choice but to drift with the ice southward.

• The drift was S-SW, and he could see what appeared to be the Ringnes Islands in that direction separated by Hassel Sound.
• He reached the ice foot surrounding the islands and made land fall on a small island just above Amund Ringnes Island, where he camped.
• He then passed through Hassel Sound, killing a bear, the first game they had killed since leaving land. More bears were killed as they progressed south through the sound.
• After clearing the sound, he was unable to go to the east because the ice conditions in Norwegian Bay were the same as those that had prevented him from reaching Axel Heiberg Island from his initial position—small ice drifting southward.
• So he set off across the ice into Wellington Channel with the southerly drift with the idea of reaching Lancaster Sound, where Scottish whalers visited every year. He was now west of North Cornwall Island and he could see King Christian Island in the distance.
• They now drifted into Penny Strait, midway between Bathurst Island and the Grinnell Peninsula of North Devon Island.
• At Dundas Island the drifting ice stopped, and they made for the Grinnell Peninsula hoping to follow the smoother ice foot there along the shore of North Devon to reach Lancaster Sound.
• They went along the shore of Wellington Channel as far as Pioneer Bay, where they were stopped by a jam of small ice impossible for sledging. Here they were able to kill some seals and also some caribou.
• Unable to proceed farther south, on July 4, 1908 they turned east to cross the peninsula. At first, going was difficult because of bare ground, but a provident 2-day snowstorm soon covered it and made for good going. It took four days to reach Sverdrup’s Eidsbotn on Jones Sound on July 7.
• Because the southern shores of Jones Sound were packed with raftered ice, they abandoned their dogs near Cape Vera and took to a folding canvas boat they had carried with them for crossing leads.
• They progressed east two weeks in the boat and were approaching Cape Sparbo, when they were caught in open water by a sudden storm. With the drift ice threatening to crush the boat, they hauled it out onto a passing ice floe, but even this didn’t guarantee safety. They managed to scramble with their boat onto a low passing iceberg, but the berg was blown by the gale back across the sound nearly to Hell Gate.
• The berg was being wind-driven toward Cardigan Strait, where it grounded about 10 miles off Cape Vera, which they now attempted to reach. After nearly sinking after the boat was holed by ice during an attempt to reach shore, the boat was hauled out and patched with a boot before they reached land again north of the cape. They were about back where they had been three weeks before.
• Traveling from there along the southern shores of Jones Sound by sledge, when practical, and by boat across patches of open water, they made an average of about 15 miles a day, finally clearing the land-packed ice about 25 miles west of Cape Sparbo early in August.
• Here they killed an oogzuk seal. East of Sparbo the boat was holed by a walrus, but was hauled out and patched again.
• About August 7 they reached Belcher Point, and turned south into the unnamed bay beyond it. After a run of ten miles to the east they were driven into the pack that filled the bay to seek shelter from another storm. There they remained imprisoned for most of the rest of the month, drifting slowly back toward Belcher Point again.
• Further progress east was futile, so they turned back for Cape Sparbo, where they had noted an abundance of game in passing east, reaching it again in early September. There they found an old subterranean Inuit dwelling and after digging it out fitted it up for the winter, killing musk oxen to provide winter stores of meat and fat for fuel.
• Cook wrote a long account of the winter they spent there, saying they were reduced to the level of Stone Age hunters to eke out their survival, as they had almost no ammunition left and had to create new weapons from what materials they had on hand, using parts of their remaining sledge.
• On February 18, 1909, when the sun returned, they started for Annoatok. It took eight days to reached Cape Tennyson, discovering two new islands to the east of it, which Cook named for his two Inuit companions.
• From there they crossed the ice to Cape Isabella. They next reached Clarence Head after being delayed by storms, and finally landed at Cape Faraday on the 35th day out from their winter camp. On March 20 they were able to kill a bear with one of their final cartridges, saving themselves from starvation.
• During the final 100 miles to Cape Sabine, food ran out, and they were saved by shooting another bear. But that was gone before they reached their destination, but there they discovered a cache containing a seal that left by Panikpa that saved them from starvation. After resting at Peary’s caboose at Payer Harbour, they had to make a long detour north before finding ice stable enough to cross Smith Sound, reaching Annoatok again on about April 15, 1909.

peary map2

This portion of Peary’s published map shows the route allegedly traced by Cook’s  Inuit in black; Cook’s claimed route is shown in brown.

The Inuit version

The story told by Cook’s Inuit was related in Peary’s published statement of October 13, 1909, accompanied by a copy of Sverdrup’s chart, upon which Peary said they traced their route. (See Part 2 of this series). This was supplemented by further details contained in Donald MacMillan’s 1917 letter to the American Geographical Society, which they published in 1918. (See Part 5 of this series). The folk memory account adds only the Inuit opinion of the winter at Cape Sparbo and a few slight details to these two accounts. (See Part 12).

Returning from the Polar Sea, they gained land again west of the point where they had left the cache on the shore of Axel Heiberg Island. Here they camped four or five days. During that time Etukishuk returned to the cache to get a gun he had left there and only a few other articles, because the sledges were still loaded with supplies. They then turned south.

• They went down the west coast of Axel Heiberg Island as far a Cape Northwest.
• From there they set out west across the snow-covered ice to a low island they had seen from Cape Northwest.
• They went down the west coast of this island, then headed southeast toward Amund Ringnes Island, passing another smaller island that lay to the southeast of the larger one they had visited.
• When they reached Amund Ringnes Island, they traveled the length of its east coast, where they secured two reindeer.
• From there they crossed Norwegian Bay, and after killing some of their dogs, they reached the southern shore of Axel Heiberg Land, where they killed a bear.
• Continuing south they passed by the east side of Graham Island.
• From there they reached Eid’s Fiord (Isthmus Fjord on the first map), a small bay marked on Sverdrup’s chart.
• From this bay they continued southwest to Hell Gate’s north entrance near Simmons Peninsula. It was here that they encountered the first open water they had seen since they had turned back form the Polar Sea. They spent “a good deal of time in this area,” before moving on.
• Unable to proceed along the coast to the south because of the open water, they crossed Simmons Peninsula and sledged down the length of the frozen-over Gaase Fiord (Goose Fjord).
• When they reached its entrance, they turned west, then north into the channel of Hell Gate. They crossed Hell Gate to North Kent Island, then went up into Norfolk Inlet, where they again encountered open water and could proceed no farther by sledge. So they abandoned their dogs and took to their collapsible boat. One of the sledges was also abandoned.
• Using the boat, they traveled along the northern coast of Colin Archer Peninsula to Cape Vera, where they secured the eggs of nesting eider ducks. Here they shortened the remaining sledge because if was too awkward to carry in the boat. Near here they killed a walrus, and at the southwest angle of Jones Sound they killed a seal.
• Following the south shore of Jones Sound eastward they killed three bears.
• When they reached Cape Sparbo, they killed several Musk Oxen, and east of it they killed several more.
• They were stopped by ice packed against the shore as they approached the mouth of Jones Sound and turned back toward Cape Sparbo again. There they made a comfortable shelter using an ancient Inuit stone igloo as its base. They had plenty of ammunition and killed musk oxen and bears at will, providing them with a wealth of meat and fat for fuel for the winter. They settled into their comfortable dwelling to pass the winter, the Inuit spending the time curing musk ox skins and from them creating new clothing, including pants and boots, to replace their worn out garments. Cook spent his time writing endlessly in his little notebooks.
• When the sun returned in February 1909, they crossed Jones Sound to Cape Tennyson, passing inside two small uncharted islands, where they killed a bear.
• From there they continued north to Clarence Head.
• Then then crossed the frozen inner bight to reach Cape Isabella, killing another bear, and then went on to Payer Harbor, where they stayed in Peary’s house there. At Cape Sabine they found a cache containing a seal left for them by Etukishuk’s father, Panikpa.
• From Cape Sabine they crossed Smith Sound to reach Annoatok once more.

In the next post we will take up the question of which of these stories is the more plausible.

Uncategorized

The Cook-Peary files: The “Eskimo Testimony”: Part 14: Tracing Cook’s actual route: Part 1.

December 27, 2023

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


Because, as we have seen, the existing evidence of what the Inuit said to others about their journey with Dr. Cook varies, and is sometimes contradictory, we will now examine how these accounts compare with Peary’s published map on which he said they allegedly traced the route of their journey, and what they say about the accuracy of the route outlined there.

Peary’s map was based on Otto Sverdrup’s map of his explorations of the Queen Elizabeth Islands during the years 1898-1902, and therefore, though not nearly as detailed or accurate as modern maps of the area, it was at the time the best map then available. Using an enlargement of Peary’s published map, we will divide the journey into three parts in an attempt to come as close as possible to a recounting of Cook’s actual journey.

The first leg of the journey is the route Cook took from his winter quarters at Annoatok to reach Cape Thomas Hubbard, where he left land and started out across the ice of the Arctic Ocean. For this part of the journey there is nearly nothing bearing on it in any of the Inuit testimony, either in Peary’s statement or from hearsay from Inuit sources as recounted by third parties, or even in folk memory accounts, for that matter. In fact, it is clear from the route shown on Peary’s map that Cook’s companions were not questioned about this part of their journey in any detail.

Peary knew for sure that Cook had actually reached Cape Thomas Hubbard because one of the Inuit in his party who turned back, Egingwah, had been with Peary, himself, when he had reached the cape in 1906, and was able to verify that Cook had reached the same place. Therefore Peary was not concerned about grilling Cook’s Inuit companions on this segment of the journey, but evidently simply filled in the most direct and logical route any explorer would have taken to get there. In so doing, however, he outlined a route that is inaccurate in many respects.

We know this from an examination of the detailed notebook Cook kept on this leg of his journey and from the eyewitness testimony as recounted by his only civilized witness, Rudolph Franke. Those interested in reading the full account contained in this notebook are referred to the author’s annotated transcription of it (see the post for July 11, 2023). Here we will only note the important points of difference between the route it describes and Peary’s map. We will also note here any points relevant to the folk memory account of Ulloriaq, recounted in Part 12 of this series.

Cook’s notebook, although written during the leg of the journey in question, was later modified by erasures, changes in dates and other means of obfuscation to bring it into line with his eventual narrative, but much of the detail it contains is unaltered and so, along with Franke’s testimony, allows an accurate reconstruction of his actual route. For instance, in My Attainment of the Pole, Cook gave his starting date from Annoatok as February 19, 1908, but from Franke’s account and internal evidence from Cook’s notebook, the actual date he left his winter base was very likely February 26. He was, therefore, already a week behind his published schedule at the very start, and therefore his entire timetable described in his published narrative is incorrect. This is critical because Cook claimed to arrive at the Pole on April 21, and so his timetable being off by even a day rules against the truth of his narrative.

Peary’s map shows him crossing directly across Smith Sound from Annoatok to Cape Sabine. Actually, Cook was diverted north by open water in the middle of the sound and approached Pim Island from the north. This portion of Peary’s original map shows the route allegedly drawn by the Inuit in black. Cook’s actual route is shown in purple where it differs.

Peary Map6

Peary’s map shows Cook going around the northern end of Pim Island, while he actually went up Rice Straight, between Pim Island and the mainland of Ellesmere Island, though in the Peary statement’s text, the correct route is stated. Peary’s map is generally accurate from there until he reaches Slidre Fjord on the western coast of Ellesmere Island and turns northwest. Here, it leaves out a significant diversion Cook made to lay caches for his anticipated return through Greely Fjord, Canon Fjord and overland to reach Flagler Fjord as a shortcut to regain his winter quarters. Had Peary gotten an actual description of Cook’s route from the Inuit showing this diversion, he would have obtained convincing evidence that Cook could not possibly have reached the North Pole in 1908.

Cook had read Sverdrup’s account of his crossing of Ellesmere Island via Sverdrup Pass closely and wanted to avoid the delays the Norwegian had encountered there in 1899. He planned to go instead from Flagler Fjord onto the icecap of the island and descend into Canon Fjord and then reach Nansen Sound by way of Greely Fjord, but was unable to find a way onto the icecap because of scant snow cover, and so had to follow Sverdrup’s route. Consequently, he was much delayed in his crossing of Ellesmere, throwing his timetable even farther behind, which ultimately led to him being unable to reach his jumping off place for the North Pole in time to have any chance to reach his goal.

Cook wanted to lay the caches for his return so that he might make use the shortcut to Flagler Fjord on his return to his winter base anyway. By returning by a different route than the supporting party he planned to send back at the edge of the Arctic Ocean, he could avoid running into any witnesses to his movements after separation and thus lock him into a timetable incompatible with any story he might choose tell of polar attainment, and still allow him to remain away from his winter base long enough to have reached the North Pole and returned. Thus the detour into Canon Fjord. This detour, that Peary missed, was one no explorer intent of getting away to the Pole as soon as possible would have taken, and the fact that Cook made it shows that by the time he reached Slidre Fjord he knew he had no chance of actually reaching the North Pole and was contemplating a false claim to have done so.

Instead of the route shown on Peary’s map, Cook continued instead up Eurkea Sound to Greely Fjord, turned east into it, then southeast into Canon Fjord, laid his cache and returned to the entrance of Greely Fjord by reversing his route back to Eureka Sound. From there he crossed to the northern tip of Schei Island, went down its western coast and laid a cache for his supporting party at the base of what was then called Flat Sound, to be picked up by it on its way back to Greenland, thus insuring he would not run into them on his own way back to his base. There he discovered that Shei Island was really a peninsula before resuming his journey toward Cape Thomas Hubbard via Nansen Sound.

It appears from Cook’s notebook, though it is not certain because of changes he made to it, that he crossed Nansen Sound in hopes of finding game on the shore of Grant Land, then crossed back again to Axel Heiberg Island just below the cliffs Sverdrup had called Svartevoeg. He then continued north to Cape Stallworthy, and mistaking it for Cape Thomas Hubbard, tried to locate the cache Peary said he had left there in 1906. Unable to find it, he moved northwestward across a bay to the true Cape Thomas Hubbard and reconnoitered a short distance south from it, looking for the best route to take out over the jumbled ice against the coast. It was from here that the bulk of his supporting party started back to Greenland over their outward route. But to get over this rough ice he took along two extra Inuit and headed out across the sea ice in a northwesterly direction. They remained with him three days before starting for home, catching the others at the big cache in Flat Sound.

That Cook left from Cape Thomas Hubbard and not Cape Stallworthy, seems certain. However, from what he wrote in My Attainment of the Pole, Cook believed Cape Stallworthy, which he called by Sverdrup’s name, Svartevoeg, was Cape Thomas Hubbard. Cook wanted to retrieve Peary’s cairn message to prove he’d been there, and that’s where he says he looked for it, confirming his confusion. This same mistake was made by Donald MacMillan in 1914 when he did the same thing at Cape Stallworthy, and was unable to find Peary’s cairn. MacMillan’s goal was reaching Peary’s mythical Crocker Land, which Peary said lay to the northwest, so it was natural that he travel along the ice foot from Cape Stallworthy to the real Cape Thomas Hubbard before leaving land, and only realized the two places were not the same when he recognized the latter as the actual Cape Thomas Hubbard from Peary’s picture of it in his book, Nearest the Pole.

It’s very possible that Cook also intended to try to reach Crocker Land, viewing it as a way station on the way to the North Pole, either intending to camp there or get the supposed benefits of traveling along its east coast, where its location might be expected to mitigate the prevailing general eastern drift of the pack ice other explorers, including Peary, had previously described. So both MacMillan and Cook would be drawn to Cape Thomas Hubbard as a jumping off place, though neither of them initially realized that they had mistaken Cape Stallworthy for Cape Thomas Hubbard, and Cook probably never realized his mistake. Incidentally, although Peary didn’t realize it, Cape Stallworthy is actually slightly farther north than Cape Thomas Hubbard.

Ulloriaq’s folk memory testimony adds very little to our knowledge of this first leg of Cook’s journey. In fact, it is incorrect in several aspects when compared with Cook’s journal. It does note the presence of open water in Smith Sound, however, but it says that in crossing Ellesmere they had to camp “two or three times on the way.” According to Cook’s notebook, from the head of Flagler Fjord, the party camped six times before reaching Bay Fjord on the west coast of Ellesmere Island.

In summary, we can conclude that, for this leg of Cook’s route, what Peary claimed was told to him by the Inuit, as evidenced by the route outlined on his published map, is a poor match to Cook’s actual route in many important ways.

Here is a modern map of Cook’s actual route showing his camps along the way as circled dots, the last at Cape Thomas Hubbard being #31, taken from The Lost Notebook of Dr. Frederick A. Cook.

route map final

This map is copyright © Jerry Kobalenko and used by permission in that book.

Where Cook went after he left Cape Thomas Hubbard until he returned to land again is the most uncertain leg of his journey and has the least evidence to come to any definite conclusion. Therefore we will leave that aside for the present, and next examine the third leg: from the time he said he returned from his successful attainment of the North Pole until the time he regained Annoatok in the Spring of 1909.

Uncategorized

The Cook-Peary files: The “Eskimo Testimony”: Part 13: So what did the Inuit really say?

November 28, 2023

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

We have now examined all the known relevant testimony surrounding what Dr. Cook’s two Inuit companions had to say to others concerning the journey on which they accompanied him. The various versions as reported by these witnesses being in conflict, we could, like Captain Hall, just dismiss this body of evidence as worthless in getting at the truth of where exactly Cook went and what he did during the time he was away. However, a careful reading of all of this testimony reveals several points that prevents it from being dismissed out of hand, as we shall eventually see. But what can account for the most extreme conflict in this body of evidence?

Before the Peary expedition returned in August 1909, all of the witnesses who were on the coast of Greenland from Nerke down to Umiak Fjord after Cook’s return in April 1909, without variance, heard Inuit gossip that Cook had reached the North Pole in April 1908 (see Part 6 of this series). Even Peary heard this gossip from the first Inuit he met where his ship first called heading south. But once Peary was on the scene again, the story began to change to one that Cook had never been out of sight of land, and therefore, could not have been within hundreds of miles of the North Pole.

For instance, when Henson first questioned Cook’s companions, they said they had been to the Pole, but Henson explained this away by saying “[Dr. Cook] ordered [his Inuit] to say that they had been at the North Pole, [but] after I questioned them over and over again they confessed that they had not gone beyond the land ice.” And Cook’s companions at first had told Billy Pritchard they had gone “way, way north” and had said the same to Harry Whitney, but then, after Peary’s crew started questioning them, they came to Whitney and asked him “what Peary’s men were trying to get them to say.” Indeed, it was not until Whitney reached Newfoundland that he heard anything about Cook’s Eskimos retracting their statements to him or saying they never went out of sight of land. (see Part 3 of this series). Clearly, the story published by the Peary Arctic Club did not match up with the gossip on the coast of Greenland before Peary returned, or with what Etukishuk and Ahwelah told Whitney and Pritchard before the Roosevelt arrived, or even Henson’s of their first statements to him when it had.

Although these conflicting stories cannot be reconciled, one thing seems certain from reading all of this testimony: Dr. Cook clearly told his companions that they had reached the North Pole. Dr. Cook said that he had told them, Matt Henson said that he had told them, and the gossip on the Greenland coast said that he had, as well, because the Inuit would have had no other way of “knowing” he had reached the Pole otherwise.

Cook told Whitney and Pritchard he had reached the Pole, but swore them to secrecy. He also claims he swore his Inuit companions to secrecy, but Cook surely knew that was futile. It was culturally forbidden to the Inuit of that time to keep a secret, so we must assume that although Cook told his companions not to tell anyone they had reached the Pole, he knew the word to get out, and so wanted the word to get out. In Ulloriaq’s story (see the previous post), he claims Cook never told Etukishuk and Ahwelah that he had reached the Pole; he implies that after he reached Annoatok again, it was from Cook directly that the Inuit learned he had. This is illogical. Why would he withhold this news from the two witnesses he had with him and then tell others after his return if it was his desire to have the news spread? Such news would be far more convincing coming from their tribesmen, than from Cook. No, it seems certain that Cook told his two companions they had reached the North Pole on their journey and that they told their relatives, and word spread from there. If this is true, and it surely must be, then until Peary arrived in August, the Innit believed what their tribesmen told them: Dr. Cook had reached the North Pole.

So how can the change of their story be accounted for? a change so radical that Rasmussen’s first report (see Part 7 of this series) of what he heard in Umiak fjord supported Cook’s story in all ways, only to become one a few months later that fell in line nearly exactly with what Peary said Cook’s companions told his men, as published on October 13, 1909. (see Part 8 of this series)

Like Wally Herbert, there is much evidence from earlier explorers who had contact with the Polar Inuit that they had a tendency to tell Qallunaat (white people) what they thought they wanted to hear.  In his 1888 book, Esquimaux Life, Nansen noted, “He is very loath to contradict another, even should he be saying what he knows to be false; should he do so he takes care to word his remonstrance in the mildest possible form.”  As Dr. Cook himself stated, “There is . . . an innate desire on the part of these simple people to answer any question in a manner which they think will please . . . This desire to please is notoriously stronger than a sense of truth.” The Canadian explorer, Captain Joseph Bernier agreed with this in an interview he gave after the publication of Peary’s version of the Inuit testimony: “Capt. Bernier said he took no stock in Eskimo evidence. They desired to please and would tell any story which they thought would be agreeable to their listeners.” In the same newspaper story, a fellow countryman of Bernier’s, A. P. Low, said, “The Eskimos . . . are not quite truthful. When the source of a lie is traced, it is found to be due to a mistaken politeness, the native intention to please by answering in a manner which he thinks will be agreeable to the questioner.” (New York Times October 15, 1909). Even Roald Amundsen in his stay among the Netsiliks on his traversal of the Northwest Passage in 1903-1905 noted this same tendency among them. But if is was just something said to please, why is it that the Peary version has been enshrined in Inuit folk memory as the true version?

In his paper already quoted (see the previous post) Kenn Harper had this to say: “I would like to put forward a hypothesis on the nature of Eskimo folk memory. Eskimo or Inuit folk memory serves well in many instances. Indeed, it is phenomenally accurate over periods of centuries. . . Yet, I can provide [a] list of things that Inuit believe strongly, which are erroneous or impossible. . . . I would sum up the differences . . . in this way. When there is no controversy, when [the events are] straightforward, unambiguous, and have a clear and well-defined ending, Eskimo folk memory will generally prove accurate. When there is controversy, confusion, or no clear-cut ending, imagination will take over and folk memory will be more inclined to be inaccurate. The case of the Eskimo memories of Dr. Cook’s journey fit the latter category well.”

Harper goes on to explain the enshrinement of Peary’s version by an Inuit concept called “ilira,” quoting an Inuit who explained, “Inuit use ilira to refer to a great fear or awe, such as the awe a strong father inspires in his children or the fear of the Qallunaat white people previously held by Inuit. This fear, or ilira, developed very early in our initial encounters with explorers, missionaries and traders. We quickly became subject to the overwhelming power and fabulous wealth of these Qallunaat. . . . This relationship, and the feeling of ilira to which it gave rise, meant that whatever the Qallunaat suggested or wanted was likely to be done. . . In this cultural setting, a challenge to the authority of the Qallunaat or defiance of their requests was almost unthinkable.”

That the Polar Inuit felt ilira when dealing with Peary is clear. They were completely in awe of him. As late as the 1950s, Jean Malaurie reported one as saying, “You always had the feeling that if you didn’t do what he wanted, he would condemn you to death,” and before his interview, the Inuit in question insisted on going outside to make sure Peary’s shade was not listening in. And far earlier Rasmussen had summed up the Inuit feeling toward Peary as, “He asked with so strong a will to gain his wish, that it was impossible to say no.”

So what did the Inuit really say? The evidence indicates that the answer is that they said both: after Cook’s return in April 1909, they said Cook had been to the Pole, and after Peary’s arrival and questioning of Cook’s two companions was done, that Cook had never been out of sight of land and that he had lied that he had been there, because that is what the Inuit concluded was what Peary wanted them to say.

Because of ilira, Inuit folk memory remembers Dr. Cook as a nice guy who was a big liar when it came to his claim to the Pole, and Peary as “The Great Tormentor,” whose will was impossible to resist. With this in mind, our conclusion that the Inuit story changed, and why it changed is readily explained. Our next problem is less easily solved. That is to decide what the existing testimony can tell us about Cook’s actual polar attempt.

References:

Harper, Kenn, “Liars and Gentlemen,” BPRC Report No. 18, 1998.

Kuptana, Rosemary, “Ilira, or why it was unthinkable for Inuit to challenge Qallunaat Authority.” Inuit Art Quarterly, 1993.

Malaurie, Jean. The Last Kings of Thule, Dutton, 1982.

Rasmussen, Knud. Greenand by the Polar Sea, Stokes, 1910.

Uncategorized

The 125th Anniversary of the Belgian Antarctic Expedition: An unpublished paper.

October 26, 2023

The ongoing series on the “Eskimo Testimony” will resume next month.

In early 1997 I was asked to submit a paper for a symposium to be held at Ohio State University in Columbus. The aim of the symposium was to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the Belgian Antarctic Expedition, led by Adrien de Gerlache. The symposium was jointly sponsored by The Frederick A. Cook Society and the Byrd Polar Research Center at OSU.

In 1993 the Cook Society and OSU had held a symposium on Dr. Frederick A. Cook as an explorer which attracted a number of distinguished presenters, including the polar explorer Wally Herbert and the French anthropologist Jean Malaurie. This venture resulted in the decision of the Cook Society to deposit most of their collection of materials related to Frederick Cook in OSU’s Archives.

The Cook Society’s interest in sponsoring the 1997 symposium was that Frederick Cook was the physician and anthropologist of the Belgica expedition, and they saw another opportunity to boost their namesake’s reputation by recounting his positive role in the expedition’s safe return after it became the first expedition to winter inside the Antarctic Circle.

I was invited to be a presenter because the Cook Society had convinced itself that the book I had been writing on Cook since 1989 would vindicate him and establish his later claims to have been the first to climb Alaska’s Mt. McKinley in 1906 and to have attained the North Pole in 1908. There expectations proved unfounded. When my book appeared on February 17, 1997, it did neither of those things. Indeed, it soundly refuted both of those claims after a careful examination of many key original sources that had never been examined before, which showed each to have been a knowing fraud.

If the society had known my conclusions in advance, I would not have been invited, but the invitation had been extended before the book’s publication and could not be withdrawn. Although the society published the proceedings of the earlier 1993 symposium, none of the papers from the 1997 symposium were ever published, possibly because it would have had to include my paper. So now, on the 125th Anniversary, I take this opportunity to publish that unpublished paper for the first time anywhere.

1997-1

1997-21997-31997-41997-51997-61997-71997-81997-9

Uncategorized

The Cook-Peary files: The “Eskimo Testimony”: Part 12: Inuit Folk Memory

September 14, 2023

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

There are four other miscellaneous accounts that do not fit into the narrative up to now, but I will now mention for the sake of completeness.   The first is that of Paul Rainey, who in 1910 went with Harry Whitney aboard the icebreaker Beothic, captained by Bob Bartlett, on a supposed “hunting trip,” but many speculated that the game was Cook’s records Peary forced Whitney to cache at Etah.  The Beothic party visited Etah, picked up Etukishuk there as a guide, then sailed to Cape Sparbo, where they inspected Cook’s winter igloo.  Although Rainey said he wanted to avoid getting mixed up in the controversy between the two explorers, in an article he published subsequent to the voyage he volunteered that while on the Beothic Etukishuk had told him that Cook had never been out of sight of land or had ever seen “Bradley Land.”

The second was Mene Wallace’s, the Inuit Peary had brought to the US as a boy, then abandoned.  He had been returned to Greenland in 1909.  In 1910 he wrote to a friend:  “I know you will expect something about Cook.  Well, Dob, I have gone to the bottom of the matter. No one up here believes that Peary got much farther than when he left his party.  His name up here is hated for his cruelty.  Cook made a great trip North.  He has nothing in the way of proofs here that I can find.  I believe he went as near as anyone, but the pole has yet to be found.  Cook is loved by all, and every Eskimo speaks well of him and hopes that he has the honor over Peary–has he?”  Mene eventually returned to the US and announced he had “a big story about Cook and Peary,” and offered to sell it to the highest bidder.  When asked if he had resolved the Polar Controversy, he said: “No, I don’t know who discovered the North Pole, I don’t know that it was ever discovered by anybody.  What I know is what the Eskimos who accompanied Cook and Peary tell me. . . . I’ve been living with Ootah, Eginguah, Seegloo and Ooqueah, who were with Peary.  They know just how many days passed during the journey.  Wouldn’t it be interesting to compare their record with Admiral Peary’s proofs of his discovery?  I’ve also talked with Etukishuk and Ahwelah, the men who accompanied Dr. Cook on his expedition in 1908.”  Unfortunately, Mene found no takers for his “big story,” and died in the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918 without ever telling more of what he “knew.”

The third of our miscellaneous witnesses is Edward Brooke, who was the motion picture cameraman who was on MacMillan’s Crocker Land Expedition.  In 1915 he sent a letter to Senator Miles Poindexter, who was investigating Cook’s claim, saying that Cook’s two Inuit told him while he was in Greenland that “they went far from land for a long time.”

The last was also part of the Crocker Land Expedition.  He was the expedition’s surgeon, Dr. Harrison Hunt.  In his book, North to the Horizon, he quotes his diary for October 14, 1913:  “We had a session last night with Etookashoo and Ahpelliah, the map of Sverdrup and [My Attainment of the Pole].  .  .  . Etookashoo agrees absolutely with Ahpellah as to the course they too, and resolutely denies that they were ever out of sight of land.  Each of these two men traced the same course on the map, at different times, and without knowing the others had done so. . . .”They had no hardship whatever until nearly home.  The picture that Dr. Cook claimed was taken at the North Pole was located by them on the map, near Ellesmere Land, some 400 miles from the Pole. . . The frank, open-faced manner with which these men answered our questions convinced us of the truth of their story.  We tried in vain to break down their testimony but could not budge them.”

The last account by either of Cook’s two Inuit companions was given after Captain Hall’s last analysis was published. In 1932 Sargent Major Henry W. Stallworthy of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police mounted a search for the missing Krueger Expedition. He left Bache Peninsula on March 20 with Constable R.W. Hamilton, accompanied by seven Inuit, eight sleds, and 125 dogs. Splitting into two search parties once they crossed Ellesmere Island, Hamilton and four Inuit returned on May 7, after a 900-mile trip to Amund Ringnes and Cornwall Islands. Stallworthy, with three Inuit, traveled along Eureka Sound to the northern tip of Axel Heiberg Island, where he found a record indicating that Krueger was heading for Cape Sverre on the northern tip of Amund Ringnes Island.

Even though delayed by poor ice conditions and hampered by a shortage of food, Stallworthy completed his journey around Axel Heiberg Island and returned to Bache Peninsula on May 23, having covered 1400 miles. During his journey, he confirmed that Schei “Island” was a peninsula, just as Frederick Cook had said it was, and learned from his chief guide, Etukishook, that Dr. Cook had actually taken his photographs of the “North Pole” at about 82º North, within sight of land. Stallworthy’s party faced starvation on this journey and had to kill some sled dogs to survive. As Edward Shackleton later commented, Stallworthy “would be the first to admit, if it had not been for the skill of his Eskimos, he might never have returned.”

Both Etukishook and Ahwelah died in 1935, ending any possibility of further eyewitness accounts. However, the story of their journey with Dr. Cook in 1908-09 lived on in tribal memory.

In an appendix to his 1988 book, The Noose of Laurels, Wally Herbert published a substantial portion of a narrative drawn from folk memory by Inuutersuaq Ulloriaq. It had previously been published in full as “What has been heard about the first two North Pole Explorers” by the Greenland Society in 1984 in a Danish translation by Rolf Gilberg.

In his introduction to this appendix, Herbert wrote:

“What [Etukishuk and Ahwelah] told their own people is therefore the story that needs to be told, and I do not refer to the story given second-hand to Rasmussen which was published in the New York Times on October 21, 1909, but the story handed down by word of mouth among the polar Eskimos themselves. The oral tradition is the voice of their past and the Eskimos respect their past. Stories are always retold exactly as heard, not deviating by a single phrase or word, and one of the great exponents of that art of handing history on was my old friend Inuutersuaq Ulloriaq.”

Of course this is certainly not true. Folk memory is not an unchanging, stable thing; it depends upon both individual memory and the understanding by the hearer of what the last teller said. As it passes from one to the next it inevitably is altered, if only subtly, as it goes. Over long periods of time, it can even become Legend. Probably even such epics as the Odyssey are rooted in folk memory of real events, but can’t possibly be taken as literally true today. Each succeeding hearer adds or subtracts depending on his absorption and understanding of what he remembers of what he heard, and the temptation to embellish or alter a story for personal or cultural purposes is always present. So in examining the version of Cook’s journey as told by Ulloriaq, one need not accept it as not deviating by a single phrase or word.

Like all historical narrative accounts, comparison of its details with known facts establishes this beyond doubt. A few examples of this from Herbert’s appendix should suffice to prove this point:

• “As usual, Daagitkoorsuaq [Dr. Cook] went ahead on skis.” Dr. Cook took no skis on his 1908-09 attempt to reach the North Pole.
• “When they reached the northern tip of Axel Heiberg Land, the accompanying sledges turned around . . . only three people remained, and they spent many days at the northern tip of Axel Heiberg Land.” As we have seen, Inughito and Koolootingwah also remained with Cook, Etukishook and Ahwelah when the others returned. That the polar party could not have remained “many days” at the camp at the northern tip of Axel Heiberg Island is proven by the fact that these two additional Inuit, after traveling northwest with the others for three days, returned to land and were able to catch up with the seven that had initially turned back from Cook’s camp, overtaking them at the depot set up on Shei Peninsula on the outward journey, and from there the whole group took only until May 7 to return to Annoatok.
• “[Cook] had been along as doctor and ethnographer during [Peary’s] winter stay in Cape Cleveland 1881-2.” The expedition on which Cook was the doctor occurred in 1891-2.
• “They eventually reached the headland at Cape Sparbo in early September 1908. . . [Cook instructed them not to take too many Musk Oxen]. It was mid-summer. The meat had no suet which could be used to make tallow for fuel.” September is not “mid-summer” anywhere, especially in the Arctic.
• “Before very long the sun returned. They stayed put a long time as it was stormy for many days. But they knew the storms would stop when March came . . . . At the end of April 1909 the people of Anoritooq saw a small dot appear o the coast of Canada.” None of this matches Cook’s verifiable timetable. According to his autograph diary, Cook left Cape Sparbo on February 18, 1909 and arrived, according to witnesses, in Annoatok about April 15. Therefore, he left long before “March” and arrived in Annoatok long before “the end of April.”
• “They of course meant that they could see some of Cape Columbia and the north coast of Ellesmere Land the whole time. It was moreover the place which [Peary] used as a depot and starting point for his trips in 1907 and 1909, when he was on his may to the North Pole.” Peary was not in the Arctic at all in 1907, and he only used Cape Columbia as a depot in 1909. In 1906 he departed for the Pole from Cape Hecla.
• “Their leader said nothing to them about having reached the North Pole.,” yet later he says that while they were at Cape Sparbo, which they reached in September, they saw Cook’s map which made them decided “how much he had lied” about reaching the North Pole.

Another test of a narrative’s truth is its internal consistency. Ulloriaq’s account contains many self-contradictions. For instance, it says that before they left, the two Inuit “were very clear about the fact that the trip was to go to the North Pole, as Cook had shown them a map in Anoritooq and explained to them where it lay.” Yet he later says that Dr. Cook probably relied on his belief that “The two ignorant young men did not know where the North Pole lay,” and that “[Cook] never let the two young men . . . know anything of his lie about them reaching the North Pole. He was able to do this because they did not know where the North Pole lay, or so he thought then.” If he had shown them on the map where it was before leaving, how could this be? And this was after saying that “when summer eventually arrived . . .when [Cook] went out walking they saw a map in his papers, on which he had drawn a route all the way to the North Pole. The first time they saw it they had a good laugh because they knew there was no question of anything of the sort.” If they really had been shown a map before they left of where the Pole lay, they would have known they had not been to the Pole no matter what Cook had told them; if they hadn’t had this explained to them, then they would not know the route they “saw” on his map was “all the way to the North Pole.” Such variances with known facts and internal inconsistencies, put finished to the question of the infallibility of Inuit folk memory suggested by Herbert, at least in this case.

Kenn Harper specifically addressed this point in a paper delivered at Ohio State University in 1993. Harper had written an account of the tragic history of Minik Wallace, an Inuit, who as a boy had been brought to the United States by Peary.  Harper who, himself, had married into the Polar Inuit community and lived there a number of years, vouched for the amazing fidelity of Inuit folk memory in many instances, but questioned Herbert’s insistence on absolute faith in it as reliably truthful to the point of “not deviating by a single phrase or word.”

“If this correct,” wrote Harper, “why would the ‘second-hand’ version told to Rasmussen [the one published in the New York Times on October 21, 1909, which Herbert specifically rejects (see Part 2 of this series)] differ in any way from the version handed down by word of mouth over the years? Would not the story told to Rasmussen, as one of the earliest retellings of the story, be as accurate as any later retelling? Herbert has not adequately explained why the initial version given to Rasmussen should be inaccurate while later versions were considered to be accurate.”

This is not to say that because it can be proven inaccurate in some of its stated details, that such folk memories can be safely disregarded as evidence, however, but it should be borne in mind that many human and cultural factors can influence oral traditions and how and why they may vary over time.

Nevertheless, there are some relevant details in the narrative of Ulloriaq that are of interest when comparing it with the various conflicting versions, either by eyewitnesses or parties who retold the story as allegedly gotten from these eyewitnesses, that have already been detailed in this series. Here in italics is a paraphrase of those details derived from Ulloriaq’s narrative and direct quotations from it of points of comparison especially relevant to Dr. Cook’s journey on which he claimed to have attained the North Pole:

According to Ulloriaq, Cook party set out from Annoatok and crossed Smith Sound to Ellesmere Island, following its coast to Bache Peninsula. They went up Flagler Fjord and then up a valley on Ellesmere Island at the fjord’s end in an attempt to reach Bay Fjord, which lay on the other side of the island. They then took a course northwards, skirting Axel Heiberg Island. Along the way they were well provided with food from the many musk oxen they encountered and killed along this route. At one point along the way the Inuit saved Cook during a near fatal encounter with a polar bear.

They reached the tip of Axel Heiberg Island and eventually set out over the sea ice. They knew that they were trying for the North Pole because Cook had, before they set out from Annoatok, shown them on a map where it lay. “They travelled for a long time towards the north on the two dog sledges with the leader out in front on his skis as usual. The whole time they could make out faintly some of the coast of Grand Land [the north coast of Ellesmere Island] . . . Presently they came to large expanses of drift ice and after having travelled through this for some time ice packs came into sight. The leader stopped then and wanted to go no further. . . . They stopped for a long time in an area where there was enormous drift ice and pack ice which had broken loose from the polar ice. They reached the place in the middle of their most hopeless struggle and camped there. Their leader said nothing to them about having reached the North Pole. . . They said they were not so far from land. They of course meant that they could see some of Cape Columbia on the north coast of Ellesmere Land the whole time. It was moreover the place which [Peary] used as a depot and starting point for his [trip in] 1909, when he was on his way to the North Pole. Eventually they turned around and travelled south through the enormous ice packs between which there were large holes in the ice with tracts of open water. They continued down alongside Axel Heiberg Land directly towards [Hassel Sound] before the shady side of Ellesmere Land. . . . Gradually they came to Hell Gate between Ellesmere Land and Devon Island. . . This sound seldom freezes over, especially when the sea currents are stronger than usual. They could go no farther [by sledge]”

They stopped at Hell Gate a long time before taking to the collapsible boat they carried. Because they could not take their dogs with them in the boat, at Hell Gate they abandoned all of them and one of their two sledges. After crossing Jones Sound in the boat they reached the ice fringing the shore of Devon Island and man-hauled their remaining sledge and supplies along its coast. Eventually they reached Cape Sparbo, which they found to be a suitable overwintering place. This was in September 1908. They spent the remaining months of daylight gathering in meat and skins to tide them over the winter and building an underground igloo using wood from the boat and musk ox skin to cover the house’s roof. The result was a warm and comfortable dwelling for the winter.

The Inuit spent the winter in the igloo dressing musk-ox skins and fashioning them into clothing and boots, while Dr. Cook wrote and wrote. Here they decided that Cook had lied to them about reaching the North Pole because they found map among his papers on which he had drawn a route all the way to the North Pole. “Although they believed he was lying they did not change their attitude towards him. They thought a lot of him and they knew he thought a lot of them.”

When the light of the sun began to return they set out for Greenland, “hunting along the way with rifles, harpoons and other weapons with them,” reaching Annoatok again in April 1909. After they arrived “they were interrogated thoroughly as to what the North Pole looked like and whether they had actually reached the North Pole. The polar Eskimos had of course been given to understand by Daagtikoorsuaq that he had reached the North Pole! But when the two young men were asked whether they had really reached the North Pole, they just laughed, perhaps because it made them think of the route which had been drawn to the North Pole but also perhaps because they knew that nothing of the sort had happened. They thought it would be a sin if their leader were to have an inkling of what they had seen. . . . They never dreamed of going along with the joke. I am saying this because I know that later they were interrogated very thoroughly about the North Pole by [Peary] himself. They of course admitted that he had lied. . . . [Cook ] never let the two young men . . . know anything of his lie about them reaching the North Pole. He was able to do this because they did not know where the North Pole lay, or so he thought then.”

Ulloriaq theorized that [Cook] “was clear in his mind that he could not reach the North Pole. He therefore concentrated persistently on the trip to the large drift ice instead. Ulloriaq concluded by saying that although he wasn’t sure whether Cook had adequately rewarded Etukishuk and Ahwelah for their efforts, “I know that the polar Eskimos have nothing bad to say about Daagtikoorsuaq.”

Jean Malaurie, a French geomorphologist turned anthropologist, lived with the Polar Inuit for a time in the early 1950s. In his book, The Last Kings of Thule, he had little to say about what the older members of the tribe told him about any specifics of Cook’s 1908 Journey. Being partial to Cook, he contented himself to repeat the report Rasmussen had given in Cook’s favor in October 1909. Malaurie was more interested in trying to find out what happened to Cook’s belongings that Peary ordered buried at Etah, perhaps believing they contained proof of Cook’s claims, and searched for them without success. But he did expound on what the Inuit said about the personalities of the two rival explorers.

He confirmed that the tribe still held a high opinion of Cook. “Cook was so pleasant, always smiling and eager to help,” one of the Inuit told him. “He could have gotten everything he wanted from us by his charm.” But their attitude toward Peary was a different matter. Even as late as nearly fifty years after his death, it was clear they still held him in awe. In 1967 an old member of the tribe talked with Malaurie about Peary, but only after first carefully checking to see if Peary’s shade might not be listening outside the door. He called Peary “the Great Tormentor.” “People were afraid of him . . . really afraid, like I am this evening. . . . You always had the feeling that if you didn’t do what he wanted, he would condemn you to death.”

After Cook and Peary, the Polar Controversy, resolved was published in 1997, I got more than a few letters regarding it, some from relatives of some of the people mentioned in its pages, and some who wanted to tell me about experiences they had had they thought were relevant to it. One of these letters came from Donald Taub, a retired US Coast Guard captain.

As a junior officer, Taub had spent a year’s tour of duty at a station in Greenland in 1959-60, during which he was in contact with Ere Danielsen and a group of 6-8 older polar Inuit. Danielsen’s father was Puadluna, one of the nine Inuit who had accompanied Dr. Cook as far as the northern tip of Axel Heiberg Island in 1908. At the time, Taub had not studied the Polar Controversy in detail and was of the general belief that both Cook and Peary had reached the North Pole. Danielsen, according to Taub, was a fixture at the station and had been for some time before he came, and was found of telling tales. One evening Taub attempted to show his knowledge of the two explorers’ expeditions by tracing their routes on a navigational chart. When he traced Cook’s route all the way to the North Pole, thinking Ere would be pleased because of his father’s association with it, he got an unexpected reaction. “’No, no no; Here!’ he objected at once, putting his finger tip on my chart, with hand motions etc. of Cook’s ‘turn-around place,’ and ‘everyone’ agreed with him. It came as a surprise. Hence I well remembered it.” Taub spent 12 ½ months with the Inuit, traveled with them by dog sledge, but never learned enough of their dialect to converse with them directly. Most of his understanding came through non-verbal cues, such as hand gestures and facial expressions, though he did sometimes converse using English speaking Danish go-betweens. (letter May 14, 2002, possession of author)

Taub's map

Taub sent me a chart showing the area where Ere put his finger, which was well up the coast of Grant Land, but at about the same latitude Stallworthy reported Etukishook had reported as the site of Cook’s “North Pole” pictures—82º North. But this location is unique among all the reports of Cook’s turn around, either by “eyewitnesses” or secondary sources, demonstrating once more that Inuit folk memory is not always strictly consistent or reliable.

As for Wally Herbert himself, he heard something about Cook’s route from elders of the Polar Inuit, but doubted what he heard.  Here’s what he said in his book, Across the Top of the World, of his experiences with them in the 1960s:  “Most of the Eskimos with whom we discussed Cook’s claims in sign language believe that the doctor and his two Eskimo companions, after having crossed Ellesmere Island, went southwest instead of northwest; and instead of sledging up Nansen Sound to the northern tip of Axel Heiberg Island (from where he set out across the polar-pack ice toward the North Pole), spent the summer of 1908 hunting in the region of Hell Gate off the southeast coast of Ellesmere Island.  The Eskimos are excellent map readers–we could see this from the way they ran their grubby fingers over the map on the inner door of our hut as they vividly described some hunting anecdote, or traced the route we planned on taking, up to the point where they predicted we would perish.  They must have known Cook and his Eskimo companions had sledged northwest–the stories handed down over the years could not have been so far distorted.  We can only assume, therefore, that the Eskimos told us (as their fathers had told Peary and MacMillan) what they thought we wanted to hear.”  Yet twenty years later he insisted “Stories are always retold exactly as heard, not deviating by a single phrase or word.”

The Brooke letter is in the Cook Papers at the Library of Congress.

Uncategorized

The Cook-Peary files: The “Eskimo Testimony”: Part 11: Analysis of the “Eskimo Testimony”: Has the North Pole Been Discovered?; Volume 2

August 26, 2023

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

The publication of Hall’s monumental study of the Polar Controversy in 1917, although flawed by his severe animus against Peary, was a turning point in the history of this long-lasting geographical dispute. But Hall was not willing to let the subject go, even then. In 1920 he published a 62-page paperbound supplement to it, which he styled “Volume II” of Has the North Pole been Discovered? Despite its slightness, which he termed on its title page a “review of allegations of facts, which have come to light since Volume I was printed,.” Hall claimed “these interesting allegations supply the links, which complete the chain of evidence, regarding the alleged testimony of Cook’s Eskimos.”Hall3

The book consisted of two chapters and an epilogue. The first was devoted to MacMillan’s article published in the February 1918 number of The American Geographical Review already referred to in Part 5 of this series. Hall noticed all of the discrepancies in MacMillan’s article and the statement allegedly made by Cook’s companions and published by the Peary Arctic Club in October 1909, which was signed by MacMillan and other members of Peary’s expedition, attesting that it was a true representation of the statements of Etukishook, Ahwelah and Etukishook’s father, Panikpa. After comparing that statement with that published in 1918, Hall concluded that it was impossible to reconcile the contradictions between the testimony of 1909 and that of 1918 as competent or consistent evidence.

The second chapter was concerned with an article entitled “Solving the Problem of the Arctic,” published by Vilhjalmur Stefansson in the October 1919 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Although he never stated it outright as his intent, the “problem” Stefansson apparently referred to was whether or not Frederick Cook actually went to the North Pole in 1908. Stefansson was always the master of innuendo when the facts were insufficient or in doubt. A reading of his vast papers at Dartmouth reveals many instances of his oblique techniques at insinuation and his indefatigable efforts to influence anyone interested in writing about the Polar Controversy, all the way into the mid-1960s, to minimize damage to Peary’s legacy and simultaneously to raise doubts about Cook’s truthfulness.

In 1919 Stefansson was only lately returned from the Canadian Arctic Expedition during which he traveled widely in the islands discovered by Sverdrup during the Second Fram Expedition of 1898-1902. On his expedition Stefansson discovered and mapped the few scraps of land Sverdrup had missed. The largest of these was an island he called “Second Land.” He placed the southwestern corner of this island at latitude 79º 50’ N and at longitude 101º 15’ W on a line between Cape Isachson on Ellef Ringnes Island and Cape Northwest on Axel Heiberg Island. He described the island as roughly pear shaped and about 800 feet high. This discovery of “the island which Doctor Cook did not see, although his plotted route as published in his book lies right across it,” Stefansson wrote in Harpers’, showed that “contrary to Doctor Cook’s observation, we found that the spot of latitude and longitude given by him did not show any moving sea ice nor any sea ice at all, and is instead near the center of the island which we have named ‘Second Land’.” As a result, he concluded that “there has been a good deal of cumulative evidence before. No single fact has been conclusive, but in the aggregate they have given a clear verdict. BUT HERE AT LAST WE HAVE AN INCONTROVERTIBLE PROOF.” Of what, Stefansson leaves the reader to decide, but the obvious inference is that Cook’s reports of his movements in My Attainment of the Pole were not factual, with the implication that his claim to have been to the North Pole was therefore equally false.

Hall goes on to demolish Stefansson’s innuendo by showing that the “spot of latitude and longitude given by [Cook]” (79º 32’ latitude, longitude 101º 22’) was not within 32 miles of the alleged location of “Second Land,” nor did his claimed route lie “right across it.” In much belabored prose and a diagrammatic map representing the various positions reported, he dismissed Stefansson’s claim of “incontrovertible proof,” as no proof of anything other than that Stefansson was willing to manipulate figures to support his ends of discrediting Cook’s polar claim, or at least his truthfulness in reporting the facts of his route.

Interestingly, in 1938, Stefansson, without saying so specifically, admitted that Hall was correct. He had planned as part of his book entitled Unsolved Mysteries of the Arctic to include a chapter entitled “The Problem of Meighen Island,” which was the name eventually given to “Second Land.” This article was suppressed because of fears of legal action threatened by Dr. Cook’s lawyers, but it was published privately in an edition of 300 copies by Stefansson in 1939. In it he states that his initial location of “Second Land” as reported in his article of 1919 was erroneous due to “a difference between longitude criteria which [Stefansson] used in the field and those later adopted for his maps by an official of the Canadian Government,” and as a result its location was actually farther East. As a result, in his typical oblique way, he attempted to correct his Harper’s Magazine account without removing the doubts he had put on Cook’s veracity by saying “Stefansson said in the magazine article it was strange Cook thought he was on moving ice when really he was on land. This should now be changed to read that it is strange Cook was able to look either trough or right past Meighen Island, with its dark westward cliffs facing him only ten or fifteen miles away, and see Heiberg Island fifty to eighty miles away without at the same time seeing Meighen.”

Stefansson

At the time he wrote in Harper’s, Stefansson claims he was not aware of the map that had appeared with Peary’s “Proof” in October 1909. He says this was only brought to his attention in July 1937 when he got a letter from Hugo Levin, an advocate of Cook claim, enclosing a clipping of a map from a Chicago paper in which it had appeared along with Peary’s 1909 account of the “Eskimo Testimony.” Frankly, I find this hard to believe. Stefansson was an ardent collector of all writings dealing with the Arctic and assembled a massive archive of polar related materials, now at Dartmouth College. To believe he had never seen a copy of the Peary Arctic Club statement with its accompanying map until nearly 30 years after it was published in hundreds of newspapers across the country seems incredible in light of this.

Of course, that map does show an island very near the size and shape of Meighen Island at exactly the location it now appears on modern maps—more accurately than Stefansson had placed it in 1916. And many has been the argument over how it appeared there 17 years before its official discovery. Hall wrongly assumes that it was already known from Sverdrup’s explorations, but Sverdrup missed Meighen Island along with its small northern companion, Perley Island, as well as the small islands scattered to the southwest of it, now known as the Fay Islands. Peary’s map not only placed Meighen Island accurately, but also mentioned the sighting of a second island at about the position of the Fay group. These facts strengthen the credibility of the Inuit’s alleged statement on that portion of Cook’s journey, but they have no bearing whatever on the truth of Cook’s claim to have reached the North Pole.

This is because Cook could have discovered Meighen Island either as the Inuit are alleged by Peary to have said—after a trip north of Cape Thomas Hubbard on which he never lost sight of land—or as Cook said, along the route he was compelled to take on his return after his attainment of the Pole due to an unknown westerly drift. Yet Cook denied as late as 1937 that he had ever seen Meighen Island at all. Since such a discovery would not have jeopardized his polar claim, if Cook did discover Meighen Island, why then would he not have reported it? After all, Sverdrup had left only a few scraps of new land in the Canadian Arctic undiscovered, Meighen Island being the largest of them. It would have been a feather in Cook’s cap to have discovered such significant new island, and would in fact have been his first such discovery.

We cannot know the answer to this question, but as I speculated in Cook and Peary, the Polar Controversy, resolved, Cook’s failure to report his discovery may have been due to his inability to take accurate navigational sights with a sextant. When such a new discovery is made, an explorer is expected to make such observations to fix its exact locality for future explorers and map makers. If Cook reported his discovery yet badly misplaced it, that would have grave negative implications for his ability to know when he had reached the North Pole, which at that time required careful celestial observations to verify his position on the featureless drifting ice of the Arctic Ocean.

Hall map

On a map showing graphically the falsity of the claims about Cook made by Stefansson, Hall also drew in a route for Cook that he felt corresponded to MacMillan’s 1918 report, but was completely different from the one that appeared on the map allegedly drawn by the same two Inuit in 1909. Instead of traveling out to, and then down the western coast of Meighen Island, as they had shown there, MacMillan’s statement seemed to indicate that they had continued down the western coast of Axel Heiberg Island to Cape Levvel before crossing over to the east coast of Amund Ringnes Island. Off what appears to be Cape Levvel on Hall’s map, he places the “very low island” described in MacMillan’s 1918 text as lying at the 79th parallel. No such islands are shown on modern maps. However, Hall’s map is very sketchy and lacking in detail, being based on Sverdrup’s field maps. This small low island can’t be Meighen Island; it lies a full degree (60 nautical miles) farther north than the island sketched in by Hall on his diagrammatic map, and 25 miles across the Sverdrup Channel at its nearest point to Axel Heiberg Island, whereas MacMillan’s 1918 statement describes his island as only 5 miles from it. These facts minimize the chances of these inconsistencies between the two reports being typographical errors on MacMillan’s part.

Since whether or not Cook saw Meighen Island is irrelevant to Cook’s actual attainment of the Pole, Hall’s arguments about this point in both his chapters on MacMillan and Stefansson are not all that important. However, his main point in each chapter is that the stories allegedly attributed by MacMillan to the same Inuit witnesses in 1909 and 1918 have important irrevocable differences, and the manipulation of figures and the misplacement of Meighen Island by Stefansson invalidates his insinuations against the validity of Cook claim of polar attainment, weak at it was to begin with, on its face. As a result, Hall justly dismissed the various statements made by Cook’s Inuit as conflictual, and therefore without merit as evidence of the truth of the matter one way or the other. In Stefansson’s case, Hall rightfully recognized his 1919 article as a cunning attempt to undermine Cook’s credibility, which Stefansson continued to attempt to do in the suppressed chapter of his book and in his ongoing correspondence with any author who took up the matter for decades to come, despite his continual claims throughout as being one of fair-minded neutrality.

In the Epilogue to Volume II, Hall declared it would be the last he would write on the polar subjects, but he was not quite true to his word. In 1935 an essay dealing with the murder of Ross Marvin was included in W. Henry Lewin’s book, The Great North Pole Fraud, but it had no bearing on the present discussion. Hall used this epilogue to sum up his conclusions on the matter: “I have shown in this work that the stories of Peary and of others about Cook, are apparently impositions and forgeries, and I leave the evidence I have produced in proof of it, to be refuted, if anyone can do it. . . . Eliminating the alleged eskimo testimony eliminates the only charge ever made against Cook and leaves his claim undisputed.”

That of course did not prove to be the case. I’m sure Hall would be quite astonished to learn that, in the end, Cook’s claim to have been the first to attain the geographical north pole would be proved a fraud by documentary evidence from his own hand. Even though this has been the case, there will always be True Believers who can never be convinced, nor do they want to be for that matter. Their private fantasies about Frederick Cook are more important to them than Truth.

Uncategorized

New edition of The Lost Notebook of Dr. Frederick A. Cook published

July 11, 2023

cover

July saw the publication of the third edition of The Lost Notebook of Dr. Frederick A. Cook. Originally published in 2013, it had one previous major revision done to it in 2018. The new edition has been a year in preparation.

A number of small errors have been corrected, some sections revised to include new information that has come to light since 2018, and the illustrations have been improved and a few new ones added. For instance, at the author’s request digital scans of the letters Cook left at his winter base in 1908 before starting on his polar attempt were obtained from NARA II. These, along with a number of other items in the papers of Robert E. Peary, were restricted and the holographs were not allowed to be handled. The old illustrations, which were made from microfilm copies, have been replaced by these new digital scans. The probable route map of where Cook actually went instead of the North Pole has been revised in light of a study of a number of sources related to the various stories Cook’s two Inuit companions told of their travels with him in 1908-09. Also, all the indexes have been checked for accuracy, as have all of the internal cross references in the book.

The book contains a transcription of every word in a photographic copy of a now lost notebook I discovered in 1993, which had lain hidden away in an astronomical library in Copenhagen, Denmark for nearly a century. It proved to be the actual field diary Cook kept on his 1908 polar attempt. Besides the transcription, the book contains a careful, detailed and documented analysis and annotation of each page, which proves, absolutely, that Cook could not possibly have attained the North Pole in 1908, as he claimed. The detailed annotations also provide many hidden connections and insights into the notebook’s context and significance that were only possible after the author’s decades of study of this subject.

Cambridge University’s prestigious journal, The Polar Record, published pre-publication extracts from this book in 2013, and The International Journal of Maritime History had this to say of it the finished book: “The meticulous transcription of Cook’s often virtually unreadable handwriting, and the careful analysis of the order of the various layers of text included in the notebook are achievements in themselves, and serve to make this invaluable source readily available to the researcher for the first time.”

The book, which is 425 pages long and contains 200 illustrations, including images of all of the notebook’s pages, is a must for all serious students of the Polar Controversy. It is available on Amazon.com, but the least expensive way to obtain a copy is on eBay. Recently, the cost of printing the book, like everything else, increased, causing the price of the copies available on eBay to go up in response. A copy can be obtained there for $44.95 postpaid. Backcover

News

The Cook-Peary files: The “Eskimo Testimony”: Part 10: Analyses of the “Eskimo Testimony”: Has the North Pole Been Discovered?, Volume 1

July 6, 2023

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

In the wake of the polar controversy, early on, those who followed it closely noticed inconsistencies and impossibilities that led several of them to publish studies aimed at showing there was room to doubt anyone had yet reached the North Pole. As early as 1911 a small book appeared in England by W. Henry Lewin entitled Did Peary Reach the Pole? The topic became a life-long interest of Lewin’s, who often published anti-Peary arguments in his private intellectual journal, The Individualist. He later gathered this material together as The Great North Pole Fraud in 1935. In all of these writings, Lewin never uttered the name of Cook, it only appearing in them if someone else was quoted as uttering it. Clearly, to Lewin, Cook was beneath contempt, and his claims beneath consideration.

Even Ernest C. Rost’s anti-Cook speech published under the name of Representative Henry Helgesen, in the Appendix to the Congressional Record for September 4, 1916, which attempted to dismember Cook’s claim through comparative analysis of his own various writings and those of others, did not devote any space to any account of the “Eskimo Testimony” from any source. Having already blasted Peary’s credibility in several devastating “Extension of Remarks” speeches Rost/Helgesen could hardly bring his “evidence” against Cook to bear.

Thomas F. Hall

Captain Hall

The only one to take the topic up was Thomas F. Hall, a former sea captain and president of the Hall Distributor Co. of Omaha, Nebraska, a manufacturer of feed grain equipment.

HNPBD

His remarkably exhaustive study, Has the North Pole Been Discovered?, purported to be an impartial analysis of both Peary’s and Cook’s claims.

However, anyone who reads Hall’s entire book will not believe that it was impartial. Clearly, Hall favored Cook, if only because establishing Cook’s priority at the North Pole would deprive Peary of the honor, because Hall’s obvious loathing of Peary was at the heart of his obsession with the Polar Controversy. In fact, Hall had contributed material used by Rost in his speeches against Peary, and, as shown by this letter now in the Cook Papers at the Library of Congress, personally met with Cook and solicited material from him to include in his book before it was published.Hall 1

Hall 2Hall takes up the “Eskimo Testimony” in his chapter entitled “How Peary Discredited Cook.” For anyone but a devotee of the subject, Has the North Pole been Discovered? is a laborious read, with it’s numerous rhetorical questions, repetitive digressions and involved theoretical suppositions. But for those willing to wade through its acres of rhetoric, it does contain a number of salient points on the topic at hand.

Hall points out the peculiarities of Peary’s “proof” against Cook, which ultimately undermined its force as “evidence” and explains it’s failure to impress either the Press or the Public. For instance, although various trivial questions were recorded as specifically posed to the Inuit, all of which were designed to elicit answers that would imply that Cook never traveled very far north of Cape Thomas Hubbard, the supreme question, “Did you go to the North Pole?” was apparently not asked. Hall contends that the question was asked, but because Peary already knew the answer he refrained from giving it; as he said at Sydney, “I heard at Etah . . .” before clamming up. But the rest of his sentence was finished by Henson, who said in his World interview, “[Dr. Cook] ordered [his Inuit] to say that they had been at the North Pole, [but] after I questioned them over and over again they confessed that they had not gone beyond the land ice.”

While these questions about dogs, killing game on the ice, and the amount of supplies they had upon return were meant to imply Cook could not have made the epic journey he claimed, Peary’s “proof” was very indefinite about just how far north they had actually gone, its most concrete statement being that the Inuit said they were never out of sight of land, without giving any specific estimate of distance, though Henson thought it was no more than 25 miles. Hall attributes this evasiveness to the fact that the published “Eskimo testimony” conflicted with Peary’s earlier statements about the extent of Cook’s journey north. First, he had wired that “his Eskimos say he did not go far from land.” A second telegram gave the distance as “two sleeps from land,” or the indefinite distance covered in two days of travel. Another further refined this to “two sleeps from Heiberg Land.” However, Hall deduces, once Peary had reached Battle Harbour and had had the opportunity to read Cook’s first published account as wired from Lerwick, he found these earliest statements contradicted by Cook’s account, which would ordinarily be unimportant had Cook not had two witnesses in the form of his support party of Koolootingwah and Inughito, who had left him after THREE days travel from land. So when the statement was eventually released after a delay of more than a month, and in that time had passed through the hands of several members of the Peary Arctic Club before being so issued, it said that Cook had gone one more march to the northwest the day after his supporting party left him, or by Cook’s account, FOUR days out on the ice. What’s more, Peary knew this to be true even when he sent the earlier telegrams, because MacMillan’s notes on the interviews include Inughito’s statement that they had gone with Cook three days north before turning back without sleeping at the third camp (see Part 3 of this series). Obviously, Peary, wishing to minimize Cook’s northern journey, however, had suppressed this knowledge.

The Peary Arctic Club’s version, rather than making a clear statement one way or the other, tries to obscure these conflicts. It does not actually say that Cook went four days away from land. What it does say is that he went one day beyond the camp where the support party turned back, but never makes clear just how many days were involved in getting to that point. Hall surmises, not without logic, that this obfuscation was the result of Peary’s original statement, which he handed to General Hubbard on the train platform in Portland, having been rewritten by members of the Peary Arctic Club. Many of them, like General Hubbard, were lawyers, and the final statement was an attempt to cover these conflicts and to present a technically true statement that, while it could not be refuted by witnesses, did not say outright what Peary’s original statement may have said, and especially, did not mention what Cook’s two Inuits’ answered to the ultimate question that they surely must have been asked: “Have you been to the Pole?” Hall, always ready to give Cook the benefit of the doubt where he denied it to Peary, therefore concluded that Cook then must have gone at least 92 miles away from land, since this is the distance Cook records as being covered in his first four days of travel in his “field notes” at the end of My Attainment of the Pole.

Although Hall spends considerable time trying to answer the question of, if not the North Pole, where Cook might have been between the time his support party left him and he went into winter quarters at Cape Sparbo, which fact was not questioned even in Peary’s statement. However, he does not take up in any detail Peary’s alleged route for him as shown on the explicit map that accompanied the Peary Arctic Club’s obfuscacious printed statement. To Hall, the only element of it even touched on implicitly, or worth considering, was why would Cook, if not in extremis, as he claimed, have taken such a route as he claimed to have taken, or even the one the Inuit were alleged to have drawn on Peary’s map when, if he returned to land after only a short trip north on the Arctic Ocean, the way was then open to him to merely return along his outward route and reach civilization to enjoy the glory and gain he would realize from a false claim a year before Peary could possibly return and put in his own claim, true or false.

Therefore, Hall does not consider any of the significant points that might be made by a comparison of the route shown on the Peary map to that claimed by Cook, with the idea of establishing which is the more plausible and, if the Eskimo Map wins out, what distance that goes toward answering Hall’s question about where Cook had been, if not the North Pole. Although Hall missed this opportunity, we shall attempt to take up consideration of these points at the end of this series of articles.

But Has the North Pole been Discovered? was not Hall’s last word on the subject. In 1920 he published a supplement to the book which attempted to account for developments since it’s publication. In it he devoted 52 of its 62 pages to subjects related to the “Eskimo Testimony.”

Captain Hall’s photograph is in the photograph division of the Library of Congress.

Uncategorized