From Hero to Humbug

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

As Cook came down the Greenland coast, word of his conquest of the Pole came with him. After arriving at Upernavik on May 21, he was invited to stay at Governor Hans Peter Kraul’s house. Over breakfast the next day, Cook recounted to him some of his recent adventures and showed the governor his route on a map. When Kraul asked Cook directly, Cook told him quietly that he had been to the North Pole. Kraul was still skeptical, however, but in the two months Cook stayed with him, Kraul read some of Cook’s notes that he left scattered around while writing a summary of his expedition; with this reading his doubts faded.

While he was staying in Upernavik, the Dundee whaler Morning, Captain William Adams, arrived with news of the outside world. Cook gave Adams in return the news of his attainment. As we have already seen, it was through a letter left by the captain on the Greenland coast that Peary first learned Cook had made a public claim of reaching the Pole. Before Cook left Upernavik on July 20, Cook gave Kraul a hand-written copy of his detailed account of his expedition, which was nearly identical to that which he would wire to the New York Herald from the Shetland Islands. Kraul agreed to send it to the address of the Explorers Club in New York City in case some accident or ill fortune befell Cook before he could reach Europe. Cook also left a letter addressed to Captain Joseph Bernier, in which he claimed to have reached the North Pole on April 22, 1908.

Although he had sworn the Inuit to silence, Cook was quite free in giving details of his polar expedition to others. The correspondent of the Illustreret Tidende of Copenhagen, who went by the sobriquet “Olrick,” was aboard the government steamer Godthaab, which regularly ran between the Danish settlements, when it reached Upernavik. There he heard news from the Greenlander pilot that “There is an Englishman walking around the colony who says that he reached the North Pole this past Winter.” Olrick could hardly believe it, so he asked the man to repeat what he had just said. “Illumut, it is true,” the pilot replied, “He, Kok has reached the North Pole.” Olrick’s intense desire to meet this man was fulfilled shortly after when Cook came on board to take passage to Egendesminde, and was introduced to the other passengers by Kraul.

“As I was fortunate enough to speak English as well as Danish,” Olrick reported, “I immediately steered Dr. Cook over in a corner where I could belabor him in peace: ‘Now, if you please, doctor, go ahead and speak freely about everything,’ I began. Then he started to relate while I listened feverishly because it was all like a fairy tale.” Cook gave many details of his entire journey in vivid detail, so much so that Orlick wondered, “How can I convey in such lively colors his interesting tale?”

Once the Godthaab sailed, Cook also talked freely of his adventures to her captain, Henning Schoubye.

Captain Schoubye

Schoubye was also of a skeptical mind, “But when I had once got the man on board in Upernavik, we soon became very good friends. One day we sat in the cabin; he brought forward his observations and showed them to me. . . . ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘these two sheets contain the observations I made on the day I discovered that I had only fourteen seconds left to reach the North Pole. Believe me, I was glad.’” Schoubye added, “He told me that he had definitely told the two Eskimos, and Panikpah (the father of one of his companions), to tell nothing whatever about the journey.”

After reaching Egedesminde, Schoubye took the Godthaab back north with Knud Rasmussen aboard. Shoubye had no opportunity to talk directly to either Ahwelah or Etukishuk, but he did speak with two families of their tribe and other Inuit at North Star Bay, about 35 in all, who all knew of their kinsmens’ journey with Dr. Cook. Despite Cook’s injunction, they related to him that “Cook jumped and danced like an Angacock (an Inuit shaman) when he had looked at his sun glass and seen that they were only one day’s journey from the ‘great nail.’ They said that they had been told to keep very quiet about their brothers’ voyage to the North Pole as well.” The captain finished by saying that Rasmussen, after his own questioning of those at Cape York, believed Cook’s story was true. This was confirmed by a Mr. Lindaas, who was manager of the Iosva Mine, who had spoken with Rasmussen after his interviews with the Inuit.

At Egedesminde, Cook gave his first lecture on his triumph to his fellow lodgers at the King’s Guest House there. And on the ensuing voyage to Denmark he expanded on his thrilling experiences with some of his fellow passengers. Among them was Professor Hans Peder Steensby, a Danish ethnographer.

H. P. Steensby

Steensby later wrote an account of his talks with Cook, which shows that Cook was very forthcoming about his experiences among the Inuit, whom he remembered in fond and respectful terms. In this account, Steensby, by way of his ethnographic acumen, made an astute comparison between the characters of Cook and Peary based on his own communications with the Inuit who knew them both well, contrasting each explorer’s methods of getting the Inuit to do what he wished to accomplish. Steensby judged Cook’s comparative likableness and his deep understanding of Inuit psychology as superior to Peary’s despotic use of fear, intimidation and forced dependence on him as the sole supplier of arms, ammunition and other necessary or desirable trade items as his means of persuasion.

That summer of 1909, a German-Swiss Expedition had been on the Greenland coast. It traveled to the Uumanaq area of west Greenland, to the same area investigated by Erich von Drygalski in 1892–1893. Its major objective was to evaluate the changes in the nearby outlet glaciers since Drygalski’s visit. The expedition was also commissioned to study the coal and graphite deposits on the island of Disko and the Nugauak peninsula, as well as to make technical and scientific studies of the Greenland icecap. Man-hauling sledges, the expedition also made a sortie into the interior of the ice cap, penetrating to a distance of about 60 miles and to a height of about 5,500 feet. It was while they were in Sermillit [Sermilik] Fjord that they heard the native gossip that “one Dr. Cook” had discovered the North Pole.

Members of the Swiss expedition: August Stolberg is at the far right, de Quervain is standing next to him

A Swiss journalist who had been sent to Greenland to cover the progress of the Swiss expedition found himself in position to report a major scoop when he found that Frederick Cook would be sailing from Egedesminde to Denmark aboard the Hans Egede, on which the members of the Swiss expedition would also return to Europe. “Cook has told of his dangerous adventures and starvation periods to only a small circle of friends,” he reported. “It was on the homeward journey from Greenland on the steamer Hans Egede where he lectured for the first time about his polar trip. We listened (in English) for hours in the cabin or on deck to the descriptions until we almost pictured them as our own. I take the liberty of repeating some of his remarks, which are necessary for the correct judgement of his trip. Also if I cannot give every detail [it is] because of its having been spoken (not written). The soon-to-appear book ‘The North Pole Reached’ – the finished manuscript of which Dr. Cook showed us on the trip, will tell everything clearly.”

Two of the Swiss scientists aboard, Alfred de Quervain and August Stolberg, also listened with much interest to Cook’s recounting of his experiences. De Quervain took the opportunity of questioning the doctor in detail when the ship was off Cape Farewell. Here is a free translation from the relevant passage in de Quervain’s 1911 book, Durch Gronlands Eiswuste, Reise der Deutsch-Schweizerischen Gronland-expediton 1909 auf das Inlandeis, in which he recounted a fateful conversation with Cook concerning the apparent movements of the sun at the North Pole:

“I had scarcely been able to get him away from his assertion that even at the Pole the sun should be at very different heights in the sky at ‘midnight’ and ‘midday.’ Then I presumed to come to the conclusion, scarcely to be expressed in precise language, that the place of the observation in question therefore was not at the Pole, and I said that certainly this was not his intention. Was he really at the Pole? It was certainly not possible that he could be talking without thinking, since he himself had said that the observation was based on exact measurements, so now, as a result of so may hardships, I thought his memory must be deceiving him. I explained at the time, to myself and to him, that this problem’s implications, because of its impossibility, were so monstrous as to leave open to him a fault of his memory [for the discrepancy] rather than a conscious effort at deception.

“Only a degree or two south of the pole the behavior of the sun was really such as he asserted, and so I suggested that that impression might have become fixed with him. After Cook had looked into the force of my observations, he heartily accepted that my psychological explanation for his incorrect statement was indeed plausible. Moreover, that same day, I said to Dr. Stolberg that I found it scarcely comprehensible how one who had been so taken up with the attainment of the pole, later, even after the worst hardships, should not have actually recognized the one foremost criteria of an actual attainment, entirely without regard to what he pictured in his memory.

“Indeed, we otherwise had a good impression of him. . . but since that discussion about the sun I had always in the back of my mind the persistent barking of the true hound of doubt.

“But after I, myself, had constructed an escape route for him though my own explanation, and so had in a certain measure somewhat too quickly given him a vote of confidence, I could not later with decency throw his fatal original statements at Cape Farewell into the raging polar dispute, although it might have made enough effect to perhaps have settled the contest. Now, when that episode already belongs to history, it is different.”

That de Quervain’s memory of his conversation with Cook was accurate was confirmed in a letter dated December 20, 1936, to Herbert Hobbs, an ardent Peary supporter, who was just then fighting a liable suit filed against him by Frederick Cook for statements Hobbs made made about him in his biography, Peary. In that letter, the German oceanographer Gerhard Schott, reported: “On September 11, 1909, on the return from Greenland (with Cook) to Copenhagen, De Quervain was in my house and reported to me the conversation with Cook about the course of the sun at the North Pole, the same as Stolberg verbatim after a writing of De Quervain’s had made [it] public in the popular book . . . . Durch Gr0nlands Eiswuste . . . . enough according to my opinion to completely expose Cook as a swindler; and today one can only deplore that De Quervain did not decide in the general tumult [of the Polar Controversy] to publish the conversation at once.”

When the Hans Egede arrived at Lerwick in the Shetland Islands, on September 1, 1909, to allow Cook to send the telegrams in which he first announced to the world at large that he had been to the Pole, Inspector Jens Daugaard-Jensen, director of the Greenland Board of Trade and Administration, took the opportunity to send this wire to Copenhagen as well:

We have on board the American traveler, Dr. Cook, who reached the north pole April 21, 1908. Dr. Cook arrived at Upernavik in May of 1909 from Cape York. The Eskimos of Cape York confirm to Knud Rasmussen Dr. Cook’s story of his journey.

It was Rasmussen’s belief in Dr. Cook’s story, as referred to above, as much as anything else, that fueled the Danes initial faith in him. So we will next examine in detail Rasmussen’s testimony about what the Inuit told him that convinced him that Cook was telling the truth, and his subsequent reversal.

Sources:
Olrick’s account is from a story entitled “From Upernivik to Skagen; Something about the North Pole: A Greenland interview with Dr. Cook in the month of May,” which appeared in the Illustreret Tidende, Copenhagen, September 12, 1909.

The Swiss correspondent’s account is taken from the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Zurich, September 30, 1909.

Shoubye’s comments are from “The Witnesses for Dr. Cook,” by Maurice Francis Egan, United States Minister to Denmark, which appeared in the The Rosary Magazine, November 1909.

Professor Steensby’s comments appeared in “The Polar Eskimos and the Polar Expeditions,” published in the Fortnightly Review, November 1909.

The handwritten copy of his initial polar narrative that Dr. Cook gave to Governor Kraul is now in the Royal Library in Copenhagen. For those who wish to see the full text, the author owns a complete photocopy of this document and published a full transcription of it in his book, The Lost Polar Notebook of Dr. Frederick A. Cook (2013).

The letter from Schott to Hobbs is in the papers of Herbert H. Hobbs, University of Michigan.