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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This concludes this series on “The Eskimo Testimony.”