From Hero to Humbug

Full details appear in the October issue of Polar Record.

The unexpected recovery of the original drafts of Cook’s telegrams sent from Lerwick, Shetland Islands containing the claim that Cook had reached the North Pole on April 21, 1908, appears in full in the October number of Polar Record, a peer-reviewed scholarly journal published by Cambridge University Press, which is now available on line at its website. The news of their discovery was reported on September 2 by the New York Times‘ science writer, John Tierney, in his blog TierneyLab.

Those few pieces of torn paper might be said to embody the entire Polar Controversy itself, because Cook’s claim was untrue, and had they not been written, there would never have been any controversy at all.

Cook’s second draft.

This is the second draft of Cook’s telegram he sent to the New York Herald, written on a standard UK telegram blank in the telegraph office in Lerwick on September 1, 1909.