From Hero to Humbug

Today is the official centennial of Dr. Frederick A. Cook’s claim to have discovered the North Pole. But the date doesn’t really matter. Any date would be equally valid, because an event that never happened can’t really have an anniversary, let alone a centennial. And Dr. Cook himself wasn’t quite sure when he made his “discovery.” Although Cook didn’t announce the news to the world until he telegraphed it from the Shetland Islands on September 1, 1909, his earliest written report came in a letter he left for Canadian Captain Joseph Bernier, dated at Upernavik, Greenland, May 23, 1909. In it Cook wrote, “We have pushed into the boreal center and picked the polar prize, but the effort was dangerous beyond all conception. . . . The pole was reached on Aprill 22, 1908.” Only later was the date normalized to April 21. An innocent slip of the memory? After his return the the United States in 1909 and a nationwide lecture tour consisting of scores of stops, at each of which Cook always asserted he had reached the pole on April 21, he disappeared for nearly a year. Soon his “proofs” were rejected by the judges of his choice at the University of Copenhagen. When he finally reappeared in 1910, he gave an exclusive interview to a reporter in London affiliated with the New York World, and assured him that we would “have a full answer to everything, and I will deliver it in my own time.” The discovery of the North Pole was also on its own timetable. In that interview he said, “The North Pole was discovered exactly when I said it was–April 23, 1908.” However, if you return to the ur-documents of Cook’s claim, the diaries and notebooks he kept while in the Arctic, one contains an outline of the book he planned about his conquest of the pole. Next to the heading of the projected chapter he titled “At the Pole,” he wrote the date “April 28.” That’s because he first planned to claim that date for his arrival, but set it back after he realized it would place him at the pole too late to reasonably return to land before the polar ice became unstable. So, take your pick. From the hand of the “discoverer” there are four dates he at one time claimed to have been at the North Pole. Captain Thomas Hall, that remarkable amateur scholar of the Polar Controversy, wrote of Peary’s claim: “But is was not the falsehood itself that was significant; it would not have been significant even if he had falsified every sentence in his story. But the significance rested in the FACT that the falsehood proved INVENTION, and proving invention, SOLVED THE PROBLEM. When anyone can catch Cook at business of that character it will be Cook’s undoing.” By the inconsistency of his own accounts of events of his expedition (and the date of his alleged discovery is only one of many) written in his own hand in the contemporaneous records kept by him on his polar journey, Dr. Cook has been undone. Happy Anniversary, Dr. Cook: Today, tomorrow, next week, or anytime. It really doesn’t matter.