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.

1914 was a climactic year in the Cook-Peary saga. Cook’s congressional lobbyist, Ernest C. Rost, had managed to get several authoritative speeches under the names of several members of Congress inserted into the Congressional Record calling into question Peary’s polar claim and have them widely distributed under their franking privileges. Those and an avalanche of pre-printed postcards sent to Congress by auditors who heard Cook at his extensive Chautauqua appearances called for an investigation into his own claim to have been first to the North Pole appeared to be heading toward achieving that end. Peary decided Cook had to be stopped at any cost.

As usual, that cost fell upon General Thomas H. Hubbard, President of the Peary Arctic Club.

Thomas H. Hubbard

To counter Cook’s appearances, Hubbard engaged the services of the William J. Burns National Detective Agency to follow Cook’s movements and obtain prior notice of his scheduled appearances, so that hecklers could be placed in his audiences to call his claims into question. Frederick A. Cook became the Burns Agency’s Special Investigation #2140 in Chicago, where The Polar Publishing Company had offices at Steinway Hall, and #5039, in New York, where he usually stayed at the Prince George Hotel when on business there.

William J. Burns

Burns’s agents kept Hubbard informed through coded messages, sent by telegram, collect:

In this manner they were able to obtain, in advance, information on where Cook would be appearing next. To counter the effect of his appearances they flooded each venue with a packet of anti-Cook material designed to undermine his credibility and introduce doubt as to the veracity of his claims both about his polar conquest and the “campaign of infamy” being waged against him by Peary’s fantastically rich and powerful backers.

The Burns Agency billed Hubbard weekly for their work, plus expenses:

When one considers that the value of the dollar today is roughly 32 times less than that of 1914, Hubbard paid an enormous sum for this surveillance. The cost of the sample half-month shown here would amount to $9,280. If typical, that would come to more than $222,000 per annum.

Added to that, the printing of more than 100,000 copies of an anti-Cook pamphlet entitled The North Pole Aftermath were distributed at a cost of $40 per 1,000, or about $128,000 in today’s dollars.

This munificence ended on May 19, 1915 when General Hubbard suddenly died of erysipelas.

Cook embarked on an expedition aimed at climbing Mt. Everest at about this time, and by the time he returned, his chances of getting his hearing before Congress had faded. Soon thereafter, Rost turned on Cook and produced a devastating anti-Cook speech for Representative Henry Helgesen to introduce into the Congressional Record, sued Cook for non-payment of his lobbying services, and won a settlement of more than $3,000 for back wages.

The Burns Agency documents are samples of scores of them that are among Peary’s papers, record group XP, at NARA II.

Exactly 115 years ago today, as mentioned in the last post, Frederick Cook was the first American to be offered the Freedom of the City of New York. Only the Prince of Prussia and Charles Dickens before him had been accorded this honor, and it was protested by the pro-Peary interests. General Thomas Hubbard wrote a personal letter to the President of the Board of Aldermen asking that the ceremony be postponed, as did the Explorers Club, in light of its ongoing investigation into Dr. Cook’s claim to have climbed Mt. McKinley in 1906 (see the posts for October, November 2017 and January 2018 below).

Cook arrived at City Hall in top hat and tails, fifteen minutes late and flanked by an honor guard of New York’s Finest, assigned to get him through the crowd of curious onlookers gathered outside. He appeared in the firm grip of Capt. B.S. Osbon, the Arctic Club’s Secretary, on hand for the presentation of the Arctic Club’s gold medal. Before going in, Cook asked for a meeting with the Alderman President Patrick F. McGowan.

Two-thirds of the Aldermen were assembled in the Aldermanic Chamber to receive him along with a crowd of onlookers including Cook’s two brothers and his sister, Captain Osbon, Henry Biederbeck, survivor of the Greely expedition, and Dr. Stebbins, who was to present the medal. Also present were two members of Peary’s 1909 expedition, Donald MacMillan and George Borup.

As he entered the room, two full minutes of applause greeted him. After the presentation of the gold medal, Mr. McGowan spoke. “I deem it only fair to Dr. Cook to say that he wanted this action of the Board of Alderman postponed. The Chair has absolute confidence in Dr. Cook and for that reason a postponement has been refused, although Dr. Cook, with his characteristic manliness, requested that we wait until all proofs are in.” The ceremony presenting the Freedom of the City then commenced.

Dr. Cook was then handed the mahogany box that contained a 15 by 23-inch engrossed sheet of vellum representing the honor being bestowed by President McGowan. On the illuminated scroll, designed by Malcolm and Hayes of New York, were representations of his igloo at the North Pole and a team of dogs pulling a sledge, with the schooner John R. Bradley riding at anchor in the distance. At the top rested the Seal of the City of New York upon two draped American flags. The first initial of Cook’s name held the figure of Columbia seated on a throne, holding aloft a laurel wreath about to be placed on the explorer, clad in furs and holding an American flag. The inscription o the scroll began, “Whereas the mystery of the ages has been solved. . .” It was signed by the mayor and Alderman McGowan.

As the alderman handed the scroll to Cook, the flash powder in one of the camera trays set afire a huge cloth bag intended to catch the smoke of the flashlight. It blazed up, scorching the portrait of George Washington that hung on the east wall. After the commotion this caused quieted down, Cook made a brief speech:

The vellum scroll is now in the possession of the Sullivan County Historical Society Museum in Hurleyville, New York.

The photograph of the scroll is courtesy of Darrell Hartman.
The other illustrations are from the author’s collection.

In the wake of his triumphal return to New York, and despite Peary’s charges that Cook’s prior claim to the North Pole was a “gold brick,” the Arctic Club of America decided on a gala dinner in his honor to be held on September 23 at the Waldorf-Astoria. A grand assembly of 1,185 guests in formal dress who had paid anywhere from $5-$30 for the privilege, thronged the vast banquet hall of the hotel, festooned with intertwined flags of the United States and Denmark. Cook, escorted by the club’s sitting president, retired Admiral Winfield Scott Schley, shook hands with more than 600 of them at the preliminary reception in the Astor Gallery before sitting down to dinner.

Over the head table hung the huge white burgee of the Bradley Arctic Expedition. In the official photograph of the event Dr. Cook is seated just to the left of the point of the burgee, with Admiral Schley to his left and John R. Bradley, the millionaire gambler who financed the expedition, to Cook’s right.

During the meal there were speeches and numberless toasts to the explorer’s health, including one from Count Harald Moltke, representing Denmark, where Cook had been received as a hero upon his return from the Arctic earlier in the month. It was 10 o’clock before Cook was introduced to speak by Admiral Schley to thunderous applause.

He thanked all those present, many who had been to the Arctic themselves, for “one of the highest honors I ever hope to receive,” and then, when he asked, referring to the growing controversy between him and Peary, “Now, gentlemen, I appeal to you as explorers and men. Am I bound to appeal to anybody, to any man, to any body of men, for a license to look for the pole?” he received a spontaneous and rousing “NO!” from the assembled dinners. When he paid homage to his benefactor, John R. Bradley was compelled to stand on his chair to acknowledge the ovation.

After his address, Cook adjourned to the Grand Ballroom, where he shook hands with more than 2,000 until midnight. At his departure he told Arctic Club officials, “My hand is a little sore but otherwise I never felt better in my life. It has been a great night and I hardly know how to express my appreciation for the cordial reception which has been given me by my fellow explorers. It is needless to say that the memory of this occasion will ever be cherished.”

Cherished, too, was the beautiful souvenir menu given each of the attendees. Here all of the pages are reproduced followed by a few comments on each of them.

The menu consists of a fold-over cover forming its front and back, with seven one-sided pages bound in between at the upper left corner by a pair of ribbons, one white and the other red, white and blue.

The front cover has a photogravure portrait of Cook taken in 1907. Below it is a list of the expeditions he participated in. The one listed as “1904” actually occurred in 1901, and so is out of order.  This mistake is not repeated in Cook’s biography on page 3, where it is reported correctly.

The first inner page presents the dinner menu, all in French. For those who don’t read French, the main course was roast squab.

The second page lists the formal speakers. All are identified except for Job E. Hedges. He was an attorney and New York Republican political activist who would be the unsuccessful Republican nominee for Governor of New York in 1912. Dr. Cook was a Democrat.

The third page, containing Cook’s biography, also has an error. Cook was not born in Callicoon, New York, but in Hortonville, a hamlet a few miles north of that town.

The fourth page portrait of Dr. Cook’s wife, Marie Fidell Hunt, shows her wearing on a chain around her neck one of the silver medals Cook received from the city of Brussels in appreciation of his service as surgeon to the Belgian Antarctic Expedition. At the time she married Cook in 1902, Marie was the widow of Dr. Willis Hunt of Camden, NJ. Ruth Hunt (left) was her daughter by that first marriage, born in 1898. Helen, who was Dr. Cook’s only surviving natural child, was born in 1905. She was named after Helen Bridgman, wife of Herbert L. Bridgman, longtime Secretary of the Peary Arctic Club. Perhaps that is why she styled herself Helene in adulthood. The white silk gown Marie Cook wore to the dinner is preserved at the Sullivan County Historical Society in Hurleyville, NY.

The fifth page shows the committees responsible for the event. The Arctic Club was formed in 1894 by the “survivors” of the disastrous Miranda expedition organized by Cook that year. The ship was lost but there were no casualties. Many of its later members were members of various arctic expeditions. The Arctic Club was absorbed by the Explorers Club in 1913. Cook was the second president of both clubs.

The sixth page shows a list of “farthest norths” reached by various explorers.

The back cover shows the yacht John R. Bradley in Foulke Fjord, the harbor at Etah, Greenland, flanked by the Arctic Club’s flag. This was the ship that took Cook to the Arctic in 1907 for his attempt on the Pole the following Spring. This is followed by a list of the officers of the club. Professor Brewer was the first president and honorary President for Life thereafter. His papers are held at Yale University. Below the officers list is a photograph taken on the 1903 Fiala-Ziegler Expedition by Anthony Fiala on his failed attempt to reach the North Pole in 1904. The sled shown in it was built by Dr. Cook’s brother, Theodore.

The Arctic Club authorized the striking of a gold medal to be presented to Cook at the banquet.  For many years the whereabouts of this medal were not known. About 2005 it was disclosed to be in the collections of the Missouri Historical Society of St. Louis. It was donated to the society in 1914 by an unrecorded benefactor.

Here is its official description from the society’s website:

“Commemorative Polar Exploration Medal Presented to Dr. Frederick A. Cook
The Arctic Club of America honored Dr. Frederick A. Cook by presenting this medal to him at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, September 23, 1909. Cook claimed to have discovered the North Pole just days before Admiral Robert E. Peary announced he had also reached the pole. When Cook failed to prove that he had beaten Peary, the Arctic Club of America revoked his membership.”
The item identifier is 1914-029-0001 and can be viewed at:
https://mohistory.org/collections/item/1914-029-0001

This description is not quite correct. The medal was was not ready in time for the Arctic Club dinner. On October 15 Cook was scheduled to receive the unprecedented honor for an American citizen of the Freedom of the City of New York at the Aldermans’ Chamber in City Hall. Before he received the illuminated vellum scroll signifying this honor, he was presented with the Arctic Club’s gold medal by Dr. Roswell Stebbins, a doctor of dentistry, as its representative. In handing it to Cook the medal dropped to the floor, rolled away and had to be chased down.

Cook’s membership in the Arctic Club was not “revoked” when he failed to prove his claim. The official reason given for dropping him from its rolls was for “non-payment of dues.”

The medal is 2 ½ inches in diameter. On the obverse Cook is shown, standing within the rings of latitude culminating in the North Pole, holding an American flag. Around the edges can be seen the lands bordering on the Arctic Ocean. It bears the inscriptions “April 21, 1908,” the date Cook claimed to have been at the Pole, and within that “F.A. Cook.” A copyright notice and the artist’s name are in incurse letters at the bottom edge.

The reverse bears the inscription: “APPROVED BY / THE / ARCTIC CLUB / OF / AMERICA / SEPT. 23 / 1909.”, the date being engraved in incurse letters after the medal was struck.

The photo of the banquet is in the photographic collections of the Library of Congress.

The photos of the menu are all courtesy of Keith Thompson.

The photos of the medal are courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society of St. Louis, MO.

Not long after returning to the United States from nearly a year of “exile,” in December 1910, Dr. Cook went to Chicago, then the center of the film industry.

The result was the formation of the North Pole Picture Co. Its production, The Truth about the North Pole, in which Cook played himself, was designed to be shown along with planned personal appearances, reasserting that he was the first man to reach the North Pole.

A publicity photo for Cook’s film

Once finished, Cook took out a full page ad in the trade publication, Moving Picture World to promote it.

In this same issue the film was featured in a two page spread critiquing and publicizing the film.

When I was writing Cook & Peary in the early 1990s, Cook’s film had been completely forgotten. I learned of it first from an ad that appeared in the New York Herald advertising Cook’s appearance in which he first showed the film at Oscar Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera House on February 12, 1911. Then while studying the Peary papers at the National Archives I came across a stenographic report of Cook’s performance and a blow by blow description of the film, commissioned by Herbert L. Bridgman, Secretary of the Peary Arctic Club and sent to Peary.

At that time, I then searched for a copy of the film, but failed to find it in any of the archival film libraries in the US. However, when I was  collaborating with BBC producer Tim Jordan on the BBC film Icemen in 1998, I was able to obtain a copy from a film footage dealer in California, whose catalog listed it, when the company’s search for it at the BBC’s request came up empty.

Since then, that copy has appeared on the internet, thus entering the public domain. Now, a slightly different, but superior copy has been located in the British Pathe film library, and is available on YouTube. You can view that copy at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cliewW_-4s8

Although this film is now available to anyone, a copy of Cook’s other film, To the Antipodes, has yet to emerge. It was the only issue of Cook’s Orient Film Co.,  which he organized in Maine, and was put together from footage shot on Cook’s ‘round the world trip in 1915, which was originally aimed at an attempt to climb Mt. Everest. But because of wartime tensions, Cook, who was of German descent, was suspected of being a possible German agent, and the British refused to give Cook’s party passage through India to  enter Nepal, so he never got near the tallest mountain on earth. As a result, Cook was forced to fall back on a trip to Borneo, instead, where he filmed scenes of local color, including some among the Dyaks, the so-called “Wildmen of Borneo.”

As can be seen from this letter to Cook from John W. Ruskin, a then popular lecturer on natural history subjects who appeared in the southern states to narrate the silent film, the movie was a financial flop and quickly faded as a commercial enterprise. But its promotion had all the elements of Cook’s penchant for advertising aplomb which landed him in Leavenworth Penitentiary ten years later, including the flamboyant letter head of his company’s stationary on which Ruskin broke the bad news to Dr. Cook. 

The ad and article appeared in Moving Picture World, Volume 8, no. 8, February 25, 1911.

The letter is in the Papers of Frederick A. Cook held in the manuscript division of the Library of Congress.

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

This is how I portrayed Dr. Cook’s stop at Lerwick in the Shetland Islands to announce his claim to have attained the North Pole on September 1, 1909 in my book, Cook & Peary, the Polar Controversy, resolved.

But it took a couple of days for rumors to spread through Lerwick about Cook’s claims. Here’s how the local papers in the Shetland Islands reported Cook’s visit; first the Shetland News for September 4, 1909: 

Cook sent his cables  from the second floor of the Post Office on Commerce Street (photo by author)

Here’s the story from the Shetland Times for the same day, which was far more creative in its accounts of Cook’s journey:

Finally, here is a letter that appeared on September 11 in that same newspaper, foreshadowing the great controversy to come:

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

Peary had given his longtime expedition member, Matthew A. Henson, the cold shoulder ever since their “arrival” at what Peary claimed was the North Pole. Henson reported Peary practically said nothing to him on the return journey and kept his distance once back aboard the Roosevelt. The silence continued upon the expedition’s return to the US in September 1909.

Once back in New York, Henson had an offer for a series of lectures from the well-known promoter William A. Brady. Brady had previously tried to land the lecture rights from Dr. Cook and then Peary without success. As a result of Brady’s offer, Henson wrote to Peary asking his permission to accept, and also for copies of some of Peary’s photographs and a lantern slide map of the Arctic to be shown at his appearances. Peary turned him down flat. This prompted Henson to tell Peary why he had decided to accept Brady’s offer anyway, saying, “I have been with you a good many years on these trips and have never derived any material benefits. I am not getting any younger, and it has come to an issue where I have to look out for myself.”

Brady broke Matt in with a lecture at Middletown, Connecticut. It was an awkward performance. Henson had a prepared text, but because he was functionally illiterate*, his hesitations in attempting to read it had to be constantly prompted from the wings. Finally, he just abandoned his script and simply talked about his 70 stereooptican slides as they were flashed on the screen, including one he claimed to be “the only photograph of the pole in existence,” after which he answered questions from the sparse audience. The receipts in Middletown amounted to less than $37 for two performances. But the appearance still made news.

There were rumors that Henson had challenged Dr. Cook to a public debate. Peary wanted this to be avoided at all costs and seemed to fear what Henson might inadvertently say. He wrote to Herbert L. Bridgman, Secretary of the Peary Arctic Club:

(”I have not happened to come across the so called Henson challenge to Cook, though I note references to it in the papers

“While I can only infer from these references what the challenge really is, it strikes me that anything of the kind would be unwise for three reasons. It is likely to make a fool of Henson by giving him pronounce megalomania; it will put him in a position to be tangled up and made to say anything by emissaries of the [New York] Herald [which was backing Cook’s claim], and it will introduce into this matter the race issue.

“All this, it seems to me, without the least possible chance of there being any possible gain to balance.”)

Peary also strenuously objected to Henson showing photographs made on the journey to the North Pole, claiming that Henson by contract was bound to turn over all of the photographs he had taken to him. He was so concerned about the picture of the Pole itself, that he wired, “If Henson, as newspapers say, has picture of NP, or the sledge journey he has lied to me, and these pictures must on no account be shown by him I doubt the papers.” The dispute with Peary was just the publicity Brady dreamed of, and he was now so sure that Henson’s lecture tour would be a success that he booked him at the Hippodrome for the evening of October 17.

The Hippodrome was billed as the largest theater in the world; certainly it was the largest in the United States. Occupying an entire block on 6th Avenue between 43rd and 44th Streets, it was host to full-fledged three-ring circuses and other monster extravaganzas.

Henson must have been awed to step onto the stage of this cavernous house, which sat up to 5,300. But the paying audience amounted to only about 500 scattered among a vast sea of empty seats.

One of them was occupied by Herbert L. Bridgman, who Peary had dispatched to get a look at Henson’s photographs and generally do damage control if necessary. Bridgman didn’t seem too concerned by Henson’s performance, though he did say some unsettling things, including that Cook’s Eskimos, when they had first come aboard at Etah, had said that Cook had told them they had arrived at the North Pole [see the series “The ‘Eskimo Testimony’” below.]   After this fiasco Brady immediately canceled the two nights he had booked at Carnegie Hall, the turnout at the Hippodrome not justifying any hope for recovering the high overhead of that booking. Instead, he took Henson to Pittsburgh. But there and the farther west Henson went, the receipts continued to dwindle until Brady had to compromise his contract and pay him off.

Matt Henson ready for the stage: Henson’s publicity photograph by White Studio, theatrical photographers

Nevertheless, Henson’s appearances had led to a number of revealing statements that became fodder in the ongoing Polar Controversy, and the building case against Peary actually having attained the North Pole, himself. Henson related that on the trip to the North Pole, Peary, because of his crippled feet, had been little more than baggage on the sledges, and that because Peary rode most of the way, Henson was in the lead when they arrived at the North Pole, technically making him the first man to have reached that fabled spot.

Peary was outraged, and assured General Thomas Hubbard, President of the Peary Arctic Club, that these and other reported statements were “all lies.” He complained to Benjamin Hampton, owner of Hampton’s Magazine, who paid Peary a record per-word fee for the magazine rights to his narrative, that “Henson, after my looking after him for years, after giving him a position in the advance party with me on all of my expeditions, and after permitting him to go with me to the pole this time, has now for the sake of few dollars deliberately and intentionally broken faith with me.” And to Herbert Bridgman Peary was unequivocal about what such “disloyalty” meant: “He has deliberately and premeditatedly deceived me and broken his explicit and thoroughly understood word and promise to me and I am done with him absolutely.”

*For those interested in the documentary evidence of this statement, see the Introduction to the Cooper Square Press edition of Henson’s book, A Negro Explorer at the North Pole, published in 2001.

All of the quoted correspondence, including the one published here for the first time, can be found among the Peary Family Collection, Record group XP, at NARA II.

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

In the latest book on the Polar Controversy, author Darrell Hartman focuses on the Press’ role in making the 1909 dispute between Cook and Peary a national obsession. He agrees with me that the resultant recognition of Robert E. Peary as the true discoverer of the North Pole, and the demise of Frederick Cook’s prior claim, was a watershed event in the history of New York newspaper publishing. Peary was backed by the New York Times, Cook by the then much more influential New York Herald. As I put it in my book, “the downfall of Dr. Cook marked the beginning of the rise of the Times to the powerful institution it was to become, and the decline of the once preeminent Herald into oblivion.”

Among the questions I was not able to answer in my book, Cook and Peary, the Polar Controversy, resolved, was whether or not Dunkle and Loose acted on their own, or were someone’s paid agents, hired to place the doctor in a compromising position (see my post for May 21, 2022 below). I was able to speculate from the evidence I saw, however, that if they were someone’s agents, as I wrote in my book, “The principal suspect would have to be William C. Reick,” an editor at the New York Times, the paper in which appeared their extensive affidavits about how they concocted fake observations at Cook’s request to serve as proof of his polar attainment. The affidavits were spread over nearly three full pages—by far the largest amount of space given a single story on a single day during all of 1909.

To many who read the Dunkle and Loose affidavits, the whole idea that Cook would enter so casually into so dangerous and risky an arrangement with total strangers seemed preposterous, the alternative monstrous and the conclusion obvious. As one newspaper editorialized; “Dr. Cook is either the greatest and at the same time the stupidest charlatan who ever attempted to impose upon a skeptical world, or he is the victim of the most malignant and devilishly ingenious persecution that hatred and envy could devise.”

Reick had a motive: he wanted to get even with James Gordon Bennett, the flamboyant owner of the Herald, where Reick had once been the powerful City Editor. But Bennett, ever wary of competitors for his absolute power over the Herald, kicked him upstairs by making him President of the New York Herald Company. Reick eventually quit and joined the Times. Among the many resources Hartman consulted for his book, were those in the New York Public Library, among them the papers of Adolph S. Ochs, long time owner of the Times. There he may have found at least a partial answer to whether Dunkle and Loose acted alone, or they were part of a larger plot.

General Thomas H. Hubbard (via a brevet commission from the Civil War), was the owner of the New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser, as well as the president of Western Union and a powerful corporate lawyer. He was also an alumnus of Bowdoin College in Maine, Robert E. Peary’s alma mater, and had been since 1908 president of the Peary Arctic Club, a group of millionaires formed in 1898 to bankroll Peary’s attempts to reach the North Pole. When the dispute between Peary and Cook over priority at the Pole broke out, Hubbard quickly grasped that Peary was not capable of managing the situation and became Peary’s official spokesman. He also financed a massive anti-Cook campaign, paying for such things as the Barrrill Affidavit, the Parker-Browne expedition to Mt. McKinley (see my post for July 17, 2017 below), and later, an extensive mail campaign to discredit Cook’s attempts to rehabilitate his claim to have reached the North Pole a year ahead of Peary. It now develops that he apparently also paid for the Dunkle and Loose Affidavits as well, though it does not seem to have initiated the scheme that led up to them.

That Cook had dealings with Dunkle and Loose there can be no question. Several close associates, including his private secretary, Walter Lonsdale, attested to that as a fact, but considered Cook’s dealings with them essentially innocent. But whether this scheme was the sole initiative of Dunkle and Loose, or that they were put up to it by a third party as a plot to destroy Cook’s claim by raising doubts in the minds of the panel just about to sit in judgment of the authenticity of his claim, as many newspaper editorials of the time suggested, is possibly answered by two documents Darrell Hartman recovered. Though not definitive, they strongly suggest that Dunkle and Loose initiated the plot themselves, figuring whichever way events might fall out, they would come out ahead.

I first learned of these documents during consultations Darrell Hartman had with me while in the final stages of preparing his book for publication.

The first document is a letter from George W. Dunkle to William C. Reick. Here is that letter, published for the first time with the permission of the New York Public Library:

Although unsigned, the handwriting is Dunkle’s. The content also confirms he is the author. In it he states “My business has been absolutely paralyzed and I am unable to move until this business is settled.” Dunkle was an insurance agent who lost his job due to the publicity surrounding his sensational affidavit.

According to his affidavit that appeared in full in the New York Times on December 9, 1909, Cook entered into an arrangement with Dunkle to pay him $2,500 for a set of fake celestial observations, to be provided by an indigent Norwegian sea captain named August Loose, “proving” that Cook had been at the North Pole on April 21, 1908, as he had claimed. Another $1,500 was to go to the pair if Loose’s calculations convinced the board of scientists of the University of Copenhagen, to which Cook had promised his data, and which was about to sit in judgment of his “proofs,” that his claim was authenticated by the evidence provided them.

In his affidavit, Dunkle said Cook reneged on his agreement and only paid him $260 before he broke off negotiations and checked out of his hotel without leaving a forwarding address. When his “proofs” were presented to the Consistory in Copenhagen by Cook’s private secretary in late December, they did not contain the observations Loose allegedly provided, however. In fact, they contained no observations whatever, and on that basis, the Danes rejected what Cook submitted as proof of his attainment of the North Pole.

Dunkle certainly must have seen that once he had broached his offer to Cook and Cook had entered into dealings with him, that he was in a can’t-lose position. If Cook went trough with the arrangement, and the Copenhagen panel was convinced by Loose’s calculations, he and Loose stood to make $4,000. If Cook backed out or refused to pay, they still had valuable evidence that they could peddle to the New York newspapers, the obvious first choice being the New York Times, which had exclusive rights to Peary’s first account of his North Pole journey and an editor who had a visceral hatred of his former boss at the Herald, which had the exclusive right’s to Cook’s account. Still, that does not preclude that this scheme was not part of a larger plot.

However, while the two documents don’t disprove Reick’s prior knowledge of Dunkle and Loose’s scheme, they strongly imply that once Reick was approached by Dunkle with his story after Cook reneged, that Reick then went to Thomas Hubbard, and it was his guiding hand, as it had been in all matters concerning the Cook-Peary dispute, that resulted in the eventual appearance of their affidavit in the Times’ columns. That Reick did not have prior knowledge of the scheme is also suggested by a letter I recovered from the Peary Family Papers at the National Archives, asking Peary for a sample of Dr. Cook’s handwriting, apparently to compare with what Dunkle claimed was Dr. Cook’s instructions to Loose as to what he needed in the way of fake observations, which was published in facsimile along with the Dunkle and Loose affidavits. This note to Peary was dated December 6, 1909, which would have been after Cook had checked out of the Hotel Gramatan, where his dealings with Dunkle and Loose were alleged to have taken place. Reick had previously cabled Peary on December 3 that he had “what I consider most important development yet,” suggesting that was when he was first contacted by Dunkle.

It is not stated in Dunkle’s letter to Reick who did the “grilling” it mentions. It’s true that many other newspapers noted with suspicion that this “scoop” appeared in the most anti-Cook of all newspapers, which had a vested interest in seeing Peary declared the victor in the ongoing dispute, but Dunkle’s statement that the Times also “grilled” him and Loose is certainly not applicable to what the Times printed. It is also doubtful that William Reick did any personal grilling, because the person to be satisfied that the story the Times was given by Dunkle was truthful in every respect was the “third man” paying for it, which the two documents Hartmann recovered together certainly point to as Thomas H. Hubbard. This is most forcefully implied by the content of the second document, a receipt and legal release, which states that the details of the affidavits that appeared in the Times were “made originally to Thomas H. Hubbard.” The “grilling” was undoubtedly administered on this occasion.

Hubbard had similarly “grilled” Edward Barrill, Cook’s sole witness to his claim to have been the first to ascent Mt. McKinley in 1906, before he published Barrill’s affidavit in the pages of his own newspaper, which stated that Cook’s McKinley climb was a hoax (see my series of posts on the Barrill Affidavit, beginning on June 13, 2022 below). Barrill had come to New York for that very purpose—to meet with Hubbard personally—and Hubbard managed Barrill’s stay in the city completely, ending it by sending Barrill back to Montana without him ever testifying before a panel appointed by the Explorers Club to look into Cook’s 1906 claim, where he might have said something that would contradict the affidavit Hubbard published.

The letter to Reick, although it bears no date, can be approximately dated from its content. Two weeks after the publication would have been December 23, and it is clear from the letter’s content that the Danes had already made their decision by the time it was written, which was announced on December 21. The letter must therefore have been written after December 23, but before they were paid.

Although the letter still leaves some details hanging, the second document supplies others. It’s a receipt and legal release, dated December 31, 1909, here published for the first time:

(Note: Brown Brothers & Co. was a private investment bank in NYC. It merged in 1931 to form Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.)

Its content definitely places the date of the letter before the last day of 1909 and leaves no doubt that they were paid well for their scheme, but perhaps not as well as they might have been. It’s interesting that the letter implies that Hubbard told Reick to withhold payment until the Danes decided on Cook’s proofs, suggesting that the amount Dunkle said he had “a gentleman’s agreement” –$2,000–might have been adjusted, depending on Copenhagen’s decision.

All along, Dunkle and Loose might have intended to play both sides of the street. Even if Cook had paid them a significant amount, or especially if the Danes had accepted Loose’s calculations as Cook’s originals and certified his claim to the Pole, the value of the story would have only increased, because revealing that the calculations that won their approval were Loose’s, not Cook’s, would have been iron-clad proof of Cook’s fakery. They might have then turned around and sold their story to the Times for an additional big payday. But Cook never used Loose’s calculations, and, in fact, no one to this day claims to have ever seen them after the face. But neither did he include them, or anything similar to them in the material he sent to Copenhagen in proof of his claim. Therefore, the value of their affidavits to Hubbard was severely diminished, and the final price they received was less than the amount Cook was originally to pay them, according to their affidavit. What they received is equivalent to about $76,500 today.

The documents shown here can be found at the New York Public Library in the New York Times Company Records / Adolph S. Ochs Papers, Box 77, Folder 3. Darrell Hartman’s book, Battle of Ink and Ice, is published by Viking.

The ongoing series on the “Eskimo Testimony” will resume next month.

In early 1997 I was asked to submit a paper for a symposium to be held at Ohio State University in Columbus. The aim of the symposium was to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the Belgian Antarctic Expedition, led by Adrien de Gerlache. The symposium was jointly sponsored by The Frederick A. Cook Society and the Byrd Polar Research Center at OSU.

In 1993 the Cook Society and OSU had held a symposium on Dr. Frederick A. Cook as an explorer which attracted a number of distinguished presenters, including the polar explorer Wally Herbert and the French anthropologist Jean Malaurie. This venture resulted in the decision of the Cook Society to deposit most of their collection of materials related to Frederick Cook in OSU’s Archives.

The Cook Society’s interest in sponsoring the 1997 symposium was that Frederick Cook was the physician and anthropologist of the Belgica expedition, and they saw another opportunity to boost their namesake’s reputation by recounting his positive role in the expedition’s safe return after it became the first expedition to winter inside the Antarctic Circle.

I was invited to be a presenter because the Cook Society had convinced itself that the book I had been writing on Cook since 1989 would vindicate him and establish his later claims to have been the first to climb Alaska’s Mt. McKinley in 1906 and to have attained the North Pole in 1908. There expectations proved unfounded. When my book appeared on February 17, 1997, it did neither of those things. Indeed, it soundly refuted both of those claims after a careful examination of many key original sources that had never been examined before, which showed each to have been a knowing fraud.

If the society had known my conclusions in advance, I would not have been invited, but the invitation had been extended before the book’s publication and could not be withdrawn. Although the society published the proceedings of the earlier 1993 symposium, none of the papers from the 1997 symposium were ever published, possibly because it would have had to include my paper. So now, on the 125th Anniversary, I take this opportunity to publish that unpublished paper for the first time anywhere.

July saw the publication of the third edition of The Lost Notebook of Dr. Frederick A. Cook. Originally published in 2013, it had one previous major revision done to it in 2018. The new edition has been a year in preparation.

A number of small errors have been corrected, some sections revised to include new information that has come to light since 2018, and the illustrations have been improved and a few new ones added. For instance, at the author’s request digital scans of the letters Cook left at his winter base in 1908 before starting on his polar attempt were obtained from NARA II. These, along with a number of other items in the papers of Robert E. Peary, were restricted and the holographs were not allowed to be handled. The old illustrations, which were made from microfilm copies, have been replaced by these new digital scans. The probable route map of where Cook actually went instead of the North Pole has been revised in light of a study of a number of sources related to the various stories Cook’s two Inuit companions told of their travels with him in 1908-09. Also, all the indexes have been checked for accuracy, as have all of the internal cross references in the book.

The book contains a transcription of every word in a photographic copy of a now lost notebook I discovered in 1993, which had lain hidden away in an astronomical library in Copenhagen, Denmark for nearly a century. It proved to be the actual field diary Cook kept on his 1908 polar attempt. Besides the transcription, the book contains a careful, detailed and documented analysis and annotation of each page, which proves, absolutely, that Cook could not possibly have attained the North Pole in 1908, as he claimed. The detailed annotations also provide many hidden connections and insights into the notebook’s context and significance that were only possible after the author’s decades of study of this subject.

Cambridge University’s prestigious journal, The Polar Record, published pre-publication extracts from this book in 2013, and The International Journal of Maritime History had this to say of it the finished book: “The meticulous transcription of Cook’s often virtually unreadable handwriting, and the careful analysis of the order of the various layers of text included in the notebook are achievements in themselves, and serve to make this invaluable source readily available to the researcher for the first time.”

The book, which is 425 pages long and contains 200 illustrations, including images of all of the notebook’s pages, is a must for all serious students of the Polar Controversy. It is available on Amazon.com, but the least expensive way to obtain a copy is on eBay. Recently, the cost of printing the book, like everything else, increased, causing the price of the copies available on eBay to go up in response. A copy can be obtained there for $44.95 postpaid.

This is the 21st in a series examining significant unpublished documents related to the Polar Controversy.

As we have already seen, the newspapers carried an account saying Ed Barrill had been bribed with $5,000 to make his affidavit against Cook, but that General Hubbard was quoted several times as denying he had received anything for his signature. James Ashton’s only known public comment appeared in the New York Times on October 30, 1909. There he was quoted as saying that Barrill had received $100-$200 for expenses, but that he would have to look it up in his expense books to be sure.

In his chapter “The Mt. McKinley Bribery” in My Attainment of the Pole, Cook contended that Barrill visited Seattle, and in the presence of Seattle Times editor, Joe Blethen, dickered for sums ranging up to $10,000 for an affidavit that would discredit him. Eventually, Cook said, Barrill failed in this attempt, and decamped to Tacoma to meet with James Ashton. Soon after, Cook alleged, he was seen at a Tacoma bank by a witness who claimed he had been passed $1,500 in large bills. For this and “other considerations,” Cook claimed, Barrill had signed the affidavit published in the Globe.

These statements were based on solid evidence. It came in the form of a long letter from one C. O. Anderson, an attorney in Kennewick, WA, who claimed to have interviewed the witness to the Barrill payoff:

H. Wellington Wack, Cook’s lawyer, followed up by visiting this witness in Indiana. He forwarded a summary of what he had found to assist Cook as he was finishing up the text of his book in early 1911:

The affidavits Wack mentions here have as yet not come to light.

Early in October 1909, rumors of plans to bribe Barrill had already induced Cook to take countermeasures. He wrote Barrill enclosing $200 and asking him to meet him in St. Louis on October 6, cautioning him to “Kindly give no press interviews whatsoever.” He also sent Printz $500, paying him his full back wages.

When Cook’s serial story of his conquest of the North Pole had begun to appear in the New York Herald, Roscoe C. Mitchell, one of the paper’s reporters, had been assigned to accompany Cook as his “confidential agent” to watch over the Herald’s interests. Cook now dispatched him, under the direction of his attorney to Missoula, Montana.

At the new Savoy Hotel there, two local lawyers, Col. Tom Marshall of Missoula, and “General” Elbert D. Weed, of Helena, assisted Mittchell in finding witnesses to counter any potential statements made by Barrill.  The lawyers took affidavits from Barrill’s real estate business partner, C. G. Bridgeford and several others. Fred Printz, who reportedly was doing some dickering himself for as much as $1,000, also was interviewed by Cook’s lawyers at the Savoy.  Mitchell was later joined there by Cook and his private secretary, Walter Lonsdale.

Statements by Bridgeford had been published in the New York Herald on October 12. He claimed that Barrill had shown him his Alaskan diary a number of times, and that the story it contained corroborated Cook’s account. When Barrill’s diary was published in the Globe, this proved to be the case, as was Bridgeford’s physical description of the diary, which was completely accurate, giving evidence that he had indeed seen it. He also testified that Barrill had held forth on the climb a number of times and that his story had been consistently the same: that he and Cook had reached the summit of Mt. McKinley. Others in the community verified this was true as well.

These moves did not go unnoticed by Ashton, who had his own agents working the ground in Montana. He wrote to General Hubbard about what he found out and also sought to discredit Bridgeford.

In the copy of My Attainment of the Pole that Cook gave to Weed in 1912, the lawyer made a number of annotations in red ink throughout. On page 534 he confirmed Ashton’s statements, but made the Freudian slip of writing “Bridgman” for “Bridgeford” as one of the men from whom Cook’s contingent obtained affidavits.

“In October 1909, Col. Tom Marshall and myself, at Missoula, Montana, took the affidavits of a number of men – among others of Printz and Bridgman – fully sustaining Dr. Cook in the matter.
(signed) E. D. Weed”

Some have assumed, based on press reports and the discovery of the $5,000 Hubbard bank draft drawn by Ashton among Peary’s papers, that Barrill received the full $5,000 (about $150,000 today), but it should be remembered that Ashton had told Hubbard the amount was to cover “everything.” Everything would include paying off not only Barrill, but also the other four persons whose affidavits the Globe eventually published. It also would include the expenses of various parties, including Walter Miller, who sought out and brought the various wintnesses to Ashton, or arranged the taking of their affidavits. Then there was the cost of having Barrill’s lengthy diary accurately deciphered and transcribed, paying for Barrill and his wife’s trip to New York City, and other expenses such as transportation, lodging and meals for the various sworn witnesses, etc. And this is assuming that none of Ashton’s fees were included in the sum, which well they might have been.

It’s probably accurate then, based on the witness, that Barrill actually received only $1,500, but still a substantial sum. Cook claimed that Printz eventually got $500, after being promised more, and that both Miller and Beecher “were promised large amounts, but were cheated at the ‘showdown.’” Just exactly what the others got is unknown. Cook also claimed Printz tried to sell Roscoe Mitchell an affidavit supporting him for $1,000, was turned down, and later solicited $350 in a letter dated October 12. The letter, which is quoted in Cook’s book on page 525, was among the holdings of the Frederick Cook Society before they were transferred to Ohio State, and presumably is there now.

However, it’s curious that it says it is a “copy” and is on the stationary of the Chittendon Hotel in Columbus, OH, when it is said to have been written at the Savoy in Missoula. For Printz’s part, he denied ever having written such a letter. Because he ended up signing an affidavit for Ashton, we can assume he got nothing from Cook’s side.

The Anderson and Wack letters were in the collection of the Frederick A. Cook Society, presumably now at Ohio State. The undated letter from Cook to Barrill enclosing $200 and the Ashton letter are at NARA II. Weed’s copy of My Attainment of the Pole is the possession of the author.