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.

On October 10, as part of the Archives Week Fair at the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C., a panel discussion was held on the topic of local polar records collections in the Washington metropolitan area. The speakers included Ellen Alers, of the Smithsonian Institution, who discussed the varied collections related to the polar regions to be found in the Institution’s records. Alan Walker from the National Archives and Record Administration, covered highlights of the documents held at the Archives II facility in College Park, Md, especially the papers of Robert E. Peary, who claimed to have reached the North Pole in 1909. Robert M. Bryce, author of Cook and Peary, the Polar Controversy, Resolved, spoke on how he was led to make major documentary discoveries in other collections, including the original diary kept by Frederick Cook on his attempt to reach the North Pole in 1908, through clues found in Cook’s papers at the Library of Congress. Mr. Bryce also showed the film, “The Truth about the North Pole,” made by Cook and shown in Vaudeville performances in 1912, the existence of which he uncovered during research for his book at the National Archives.

This site has changes hosts, and consequently is at a new URL on the web. All the links have been updated and a few points of the content have been corrected. The new host offers greater flexibility for adding to and updating the site and there should be more news postings in the future.

In 2005, Denali State Park erected a prominent 3×4 foot sign about Dr. Cook as part of its renovation of the viewpoint of the southern flank of the Alaska Range. The viewpoint is located in the park on Route 3, the main road that runs between Anchorage and Fairbanks, and is visited by thousands of tourists traveling to Denali National Park. It affords the closest view of the Alaska Range possible from any paved highway. The greatly expanded parking lot and tourist facilities features a panoramic sign identifying each of the main peaks visible about 30 miles distant, and the Cook sign. Entitled “Tall Mountain, Taller Tales,” the sign details Cook’s fraudulent claim to have made the first ascent of the tallest of these, Mount McKinley, in 1906. The sign features the uncropped version of Cook’s fake “summit” picture, discovered by the author of this website in 1991, and shows Belmore Browne’s picture of the same, comparatively tiny, point of rocks, 19 miles from Mount McKinley’s 20,230 foot summit and only 5,100 feet high, where Cook took his fake picture. The panel also features a picture of Ed Barrill, Cook’s climbing companion, who swore an affidavit in 1909 that neither he nor Cook had ever been near the actual summit. The background of the panel shows a picture of the Ruth Glacier apporach to the mountain with a yellow circle around the tiny “Fake Peak” where Cook took the photo.

Site updated and corrected. Links: The Library of Congress exhibit including a display of Cook artifacts can be found here; look for the section marked “At the Pole.” Ohio State Univerisity Archives collection of papers related to Cook can be found here. The Finding Aid to the personal papers of Frederick A. Cook held by the Library of Congress can be found here; look under “C”. A small collection of Cook papers is among the holdings of Dartmouth College.

Several interesting and detailed articles have appeared in this scholarly journal concerning Dr. Cook’s claim to have climbed Mt. Mckinley; they are in volume 7, #2-3. Additional articles on the counterarguments and methods of the Frederick A. Cook Society can also be found in this journal; they are in volume 9, #2-3.
Many interesting links to polar subjects can be found on the website of the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State.

The site is up!