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.

Frederick A. Stokes

Peary’s book about his 1909 expedition, The North Pole, was published in September 1910. Near the end of the month, its publisher, Frederick A. Stokes, received a night letter from Peary at Eagle Island, his summer home in Casco Bay. Peary was furious.

On the big colored map produced by the J.H. Matthews Co. of Buffalo, NY, which was tipped into the back of each book, in the otherwise blank section of the Arctic Ocean, right above Peary’s 1906 discovery, “Crocker Land,” appeared “Bradley Land,” the new land Dr. Frederick A. Cook said he had sighted on his own journey to the North Pole in 1908.  

Stokes was appalled at this situation, and wrote to Peary as soon as he had taken steps to correct it. Here is his letter, here published in full for the first time.  

Due to Stokes efforts, copies of The North Pole with the original map showing “Bradley Land” are very scarce, comparatively, to those showing the erasure.

However, the same map appeared in the 1910 edition of Adolphus W. Greely’s book, Handbook of Polar Discoveries, published by Little, Brown in Boston. What’s more, that version of the map not only showed “Bradley Land,” but included among the routes taken by various polar explorers, that claimed to have been taken by Cook to the North Pole.

Peary despised Greely, and came to believe he was supplying anti-Peary material to Congress to provoke an investigation of Peary’s own claim to have reached the pole. The publication of this map surely did nothing to discourage that belief.

The Stokes letter is among the Peary papers in Record Group XP, at NARA II.