From Hero to Humbug

This is the 15th in a series examining significant unpublished documents related to the Polar Controversy.

After returning from a privately financed excursion to the Arctic aboard the yacht Zeta in 1893, Dr. Frederick A. Cook conceived an American expedition to the Antarctic. At the time this was a novel idea, anticipating by four years an international push by European scientists to send out scientific expeditions to that practically unknown region.

To raise money to finance his scheme, Cook launched a series of lectures in which he exhibited two Labrador Inuit children, whom he had brought back to the United States with their parents permission, billing them as “wild Eskimos,” although their father lived in a log house and worked for Canada’s Hudson Bay Company.

When this effort fell short, he settled upon an arctic “tourist jaunt” to Greenland for the following summer. He sent out advertisements and broadsides to places likely to find takers, mostly Ivy League schools, where he succeeded in signing up a number of students and professors to see “Greenland’s Icy Mountains” at $500 a head. Five hundred dollars was no small amount in 1894; it was equivalent to about $10,000 in today’s dollar’s buying power.

He also sent invitations to individuals who he thought might have the money and incentive to go along. Probably his most unusual solicitee was Matty Verhoeff of Louisville, Kentucky.

In 1891-92 Cook had served as the surgeon on Robert E. Peary’s North Greenland Expedition. Matty’s brother, John, had answered an ad Peary had placed for volunteers to go with him, was rejected because of his diminutive size, but changed Peary’s mind with an offer of putting up $2,000 toward the cost of the expedition in return for being signed on as its “mineralogist.

Verhoeff proved to be a problematic character, who came to resent both Peary and his wife, Josephine, who went along with her husband. Just before the expedition was to return, he disappeared. After a thorough search, Peary concluded that Verhoeff had met with a fatal accident while crossing a glacier on his way back to Redcliff House, the expedition’s winter quarters. However, there were indications that Verhoeff had intentionally separated himself from the expedition, and might still be alive, and was hiding out somewhere until the rest of Peary’s party sailed home.

After Peary’s return to Philadelphia in 1892, Matty Verhoeff angrily confronted him about her brother’s loss, and accused him of abandoning him in the Arctic. Peary told her that John was most probably dead, but that he would look for him when he returned to Greenland the next year. His subsequent inquiries among the natives were negative as to his whereabouts; Verhoeff had never been seen again, and Peary sent word with his expedition’s returning ship to that effect. Peary named the glacier on which John met his fate the “Verhoeff Glacier.”

Cook knew of Verhoeff’s $2,000 payment to Peary and of his sister’s belief that her brother might still be alive somewhere in Greenland. On March 20, 1894, he sent this letter to her on the letter paper of his proposed “American Antarctic Expedition”:

My Dear Miss Verhoeff,

While I did not have the pleasure of meeting you on our return to Phila. yet I feel that I am acquainted with you and know you. During that long and seemingly endless night at Redcliff House, we all talked of our parents, our brothers, sisters, & friends. Your brother was no exception to this rule. As I sit here now writing to you, much of our conversation of that Arctic night comes vividly before me even the very words we used in our debates.

Indeed it all seems like a dream when I think of how we almost unconsciously emerged from a “night without a day into a day without a night.”

I have studiously avoided giving a public opinion on Mr. Verhoeff’s disappearance, because until I heard form the present Peary party, I thought there was a chance of his being alive.

This chance is of course lessened by the adverse reports of the second Peary party. Certainly if he remained anywhere within range of the most northern Eskimos his whereabouts would be known. He could of course have avoided them, but then his subsistence would be cut off. Without further discussing this question I herewith enclose you a circular of an “Arctic Excursion” We shall spend much of our time in the Whale Sound region, McCormick Bay, Verhoeff Glacier, and perhaps further north. This expedition is open to a few ladies and if you think the trip of sufficient interest, I should be glad to have you accompany us.

May I hear from you at an early date on this trip.

Yours very truly
F.A. Cook M.D.

Actually, there is no evidence that any other “ladies” were solicited. Everyone of his paying passengers was male, and it is curious that he made such an offer to a woman at all. He knew that she had gotten little satisfaction from Peary, who was sure her brother was dead, and when Peary’s ship in 1893 returned without finding him, this seemed to confirm it. But he also remembered Verhoeff’s $2,000.

The trip she missed aboard the steamer Miranda was a famous Arctic disaster. The ship first hit an iceberg and had to return to Newfoundland for repairs, then ultimately sunk in Davis Strait after ripping out her bottom on hidden rocks on the coast of Greenland. The party was carried home on a Gloucester fishing schooner in very tight quarters. However, there was no loss of life, and the “survivors” subsequently formed the Arctic Club of America, which eventually merged into The Explorers Club.

For details of this expedition and the convoluted reasons why John Verhoeff met his tragic fate, which are quite unexpected, see Cook and Peary, the Polar Controversy, Resolved, Chapters 8 and 27.

The original Cook letter is among the Verhoeff papers held at the Filson Club, in Louisville, KY.

This is the third of three posts covering There and Back Again; The Dr. John Goodsell Archives issued by the Mercer County Historical Society. For preliminary remarks, see the first published post.

The second volume of the Dr. John Goodsell Archives is, if anything, more disappointing than the first. It consists of “Supplementary Materials.” Despite its 780 pages, only a few of those which are not available elsewhere will be of any interest to scholars of polar history.

In the first section, there is a facsimile of a list of medical supplies taken on the expedition by Dr. Goodsell in 1908, a facsimile of a list of temperatures recorded at Cape Sheridan during the overwintering of the Roosevelt 1908-09, and antarctic temperatures compiled from secondary sources, apparently gathered secondhand to buttress an article Goodsell hoped to publish.

The next section consists of transcriptions of random newspaper clippings, which, of course, are available in their original sources. These are mostly from Pittsburgh and New Kensington, PA papers, but some are from New York and elsewhere. In one case, the exact same article that appeared in two different papers is transcribed twice.

The most important section for historians comes next. It is a transcript of Goodsell’s script for the illustrated lectures he gave after he finally got tired of waiting for Peary’s blessing. However, the value of this section is compromised by the illustrations scattered throughout the transcription. A casual reader might reasonably assume that they are the original illustrations that go with the text. However that is not the case. In a letter reproduced on p. 640 of Volume I, Goodsell says his lecture was illustrated with “150 beautifully colored, stereoopticon views.” If so, then none of the illustrations are those, as none of them are stereo views, unless only one half of the view is being reproduced. Stereo views were slides with two views of the same subject, slightly shifted, that when projected gave a 3-D effect. Without using a special camera, they had to be produced commercially, and then hand-colored from ordinary photographs at some expense.

An ominous editorial note at the head of this section states: “Some slides are the best guesses of the MCHS, staff, interns, and volunteers.” As it turns out, most turn out to be just that, and it appears that among the described guessers, often times they really had no clue. Some do appear to be correct, however.

For instance, “Slide 46” is adjacent to the text: “Nearing the Labrador Coast, the Erik smashed head first against an iceberg and Captain Sam Bartlett secured the split bow with coils of anchor chain.” The slide does indeed show the bow of the Erik smashed, with Sam Bartlett sitting in the foreground. This sort of pose would be ideal for stereo reproduction, having a subject posed as a distinct foreground. Others show people or scenes at least related to the text, but many others have absolutely no relationship to the text whatsoever. Here are some examples, but to list all of them would be prohibitive as to space.

“Slides” 94 and 115 are identical, and the same illustration appears again on p. 1056 unlabeled. This is a steel plate engraving of the rescue of G.W. Greely’s Lady Franklin Bay Expedition at Cape Sabine in 1884. It has no relevance whatever to any text near where it is printed three times. It would have been appropriate positioned next to the text at “Slide 155,” however, where Greely’s rescue is mentioned. Most of the “slides” used to illustrate the lecture notes already have appeared, sometimes multiple times, in the illustration sections of Volume I, and consist of illustrations from Peary’s Hampton’s Magazine series and from his book, The North Pole, among other published sources. Many of the illustrations in this section also appear multiple times, and many times they appear in proper registration and also in reversed image form, as they did in Volume I. One, “Slide 33,” even appears as a negative image! It appeared in Volume I in positive format.

It is probably safe to say that the only illustrations in this section that were part of the original lecture slides are those with rounded corners. That would be the usual format of non-stereoscopic glass slides used in projectors of that era. So most of the “slides” have nothing to do with the lecture presentation at all. In fact, most of them are not even the work of Dr. Goodsell in 1908-09. “Slides” 15 and 29 were taken by Dr. Frederick A. Cook, and date from 1901. The Inuit pictured in the latter is not the one described in the lecture notes’ text. Others are by Joe White and Donald MacMillan. And of course the many illustrations coming from print sources such as those already cited were not produced to accompany this lecture.

After the lecture notes there next follows a number of original writings of Dr. Goodsell. Several of the articles are on medical topics, but others are not. Some of the letters in Volume I deal with his attempts to have these published. One with the sober title, “The Arctic is very different from the Antarctic,” breaks into poetry. One rejection letter noted: “Regretfully we return your manuscript. . . The article as it is, is too purely lyrical for use in GLOBE.” [p. 732].

This was not the end of Goodsell’s poetical leanings, however. There follows the largest section of this volume called “Garden of the Gods.” One is perplexed as to what to make of this. Only by turning to Goodsell’s interspersed notes [p. 1099], evidently intended for a publisher, might we get some sense of it:

“In Venus and Adonis, the ordinary reader can easily distinguish between the fiction of Venus’ tasks and the authentic Polar or World War personal reminiscence inserted by the author. Should the publishers desire, the personal authentic reminiscences in each instance could be edited apart from any fiction. In fact the polar reminiscence of a notable expedition is extracted from my contemplated book, ‘On Polar Trails,’ which I am now revising for publication”

Goodsell’s own extended title reflects the character of this curious effort: “Garden of the Gods; Love’s Old Story; A Novel; Epic Tone Poem; Fiction, Myth, Humor, Fact.” It consists of 211 printed pages of, by Goodsell’s own estimate, 5920 “poem words” couched in the mythological doings of the Greek gods. And that’s not all. It also contains excerpts from his Arctic Diary, what appear to be fantasy passages mixing the two, with such accoutrements as giant polar dirigibles 1,500 feet long, and I don’t know what else. It would be kind to say that because it is dated 1935, and mentions later dates within the text, that this was a product of Goodsell’s dotage. The poetry is all in rhymed couplets and is uniformly quite awful in both sentiment and forced rhymes:

“When the priests wield cymbals,
Zeus, but a symbol,
There’s greater God on high,
His presence, ever nigh.”

The mixing in of his personal reminisces (which mercifully are not in rhyme) makes the quite sad impression that Goodsell, despite all his experiences, including service in World War I since, never got beyond that year he spent as Peary’s surgeon, or his bitter disillusionment in Peary’s treatment of him in its wake. If this epic piece of doggerel is anything similar to what Donald Wisenhunt described as Goodsell’s “flowery” Victorian prose in the original manuscript of On Polar Trails, then he was not altogether wrong in editing it the way he did. The less said about “The Garden of the Gods” the better. It should never have seen the light of day in print.

The next major section consists of a transcription of the original diary of Ross Marvin kept on the expedition of which Goodsell was the surgeon as well as that he kept on Peary’s previous expedition in 1905-06. Marvin was originally said to have drowned after he fell through the ice on his return to land with two Inuit after he left Peary’s party going north. But in 1926 it was disclosed that Marvin had actually been murdered by one of the Inuit. Some students of the subject have suggested that he was killed on the orders of Robert Peary. The Inuit in question had been taken in by the Pearys as an orphan at an early age to act as a playmate for their daughter Marie, was proficient in English, and had spent the night previous to Marvin’s return in the same igloo as Peary, a fact that Peary deliberately skipped over while reading from his diary in testimony before Congress in 1911. Several reasons why Peary would want to eliminate Marvin, who was Peary’s private secretary and privy to many confidences, have been advanced, but so far no proof has emerged as to Peary’s direct involvement in the killing.

Goodsell and Marvin were good friends, and Goodsell maintained a life-long interest in his fate. We learn in the letters section of Volume I that Marvin’s brothers loaned his diaries to Dr. Goodsell for the explicit purpose of copying them. [Letter dated April 16, 1938 p. 727] They also granted permission to quote from them to Dr. Goodsell, but reserved their rights. Whether Goodsell suspected foul play on Peary’s part, we see no evidence in this archive, but the timing of the grant of permission to copy the diaries raises that thought, as it came only after the actual circumstances of Marvin’s death were revealed.

Because the original Marvin diaries are available at the Chemung Historical Society in Elmira, NY, the Goodsell transcriptions don’t add anything to scholarly sources, but they might prove more convenient (assuming the transcription is accurate) than visiting Elmira, as they are not yet available online. Reading them, I found a few tidbits of interesting information, but they actually added little to my knowledge of the 1908-09 Peary expedition not to be found elsewhere. Unfortunately, there are no revelations about the “confidential” aspects concerning “The Cook affair” that Marvin hinted at, but could not disclose in letters sent from Greenland to a friend. [see Cook and Peary pp. 331-332]

The volume ends with a selection of newspaper clippings and articles about Marvin’s murder, and another section of like materials about Donald B. McMillan, another of Peary’s assistants, and the last of them to die. A reproduction of the article “A Clash of Egos,” by Wisenhunt and Anita Genger that appeared in The Historian in 1980 ends the volume.

The same errant Glossary and incomplete and inaccurate Index described in the last post conclude Volume II.

The biggest disappointment, in a myriad of disappointments in this work, is that it does not include either a transcript or a facsimile of the original 600+ page manuscript of On Polar Trails. That would have been a far greater service to polar scholars than anything else, save, perhaps a facsimile reproduction of Goodsell’s original handwritten diary. We get to see exactly one page of it, the title page, in facsimile. In this day and age of simple means to publish books at a very low cost, such as Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform, the MCHS could scan the manuscript and publish it with scholarly introductory remarks and annotations at a very modest cost. Such a publication would be far more useful than anything in these two large, expensive, hardbound volumes.

Sad to say, for all the evident time and good intentions spent on this project, The Dr. John Goodsell Archives is largely worthless. Most of what it contains is available elsewhere. Confidence in the accuracy of the transcriptions it contains is compromised by the blatant mistakes, lacunae, inaccuracies, and the nearly complete lack of competent professional editing the original materials have received. Any serious polar scholar could only quote from it with cautionary notes to his reader. Despite its existence, anyone seriously interested in an accurate reading of Goodsell’s materials will still have to journey to Mercer County to access the originals in person.

This is the second of three posts covering There and Back Again; The Dr. John Goodsell Archives issued by the Mercer County Historical Society. For preliminary remarks, see the last published post.

Each of the volumes will be taken up in turn, this post being devoted to Volume I. But first some general remarks. As we have seen, it was the opinion of Donald Whisenhunt that the high probability of low interest by “today’s reader” in Goodsell’s “On Polar Trails” as written made it “impossible” to publish. This opinion was implicitly endorsed by Mercer County Historical Society by their publication of his “emasculation” of it. Now, the same organization publishes, verbatim, not only Goodsell’s original diary of his polar experiences, but two epic poems written in just the “stilted, flowery, Victorian” manner that Whisenhunt ruled out for publication as “unfamiliar and of little interest.” Not only that, but a number of other documents, letters and ephemera kept by Goodsell have been reproduced either in facsimile or transcribed from the originals.

The result is a hodge-podge that “today’s reader” will not only find uninteresting, but one that has been done in such a way as to be of little use to those scholars interested in Goodsell and his activities in connection to Peary’s polar expedition. Even for them, it is unlikely many will spend much time with these books, because there is little of any importance unavailable elsewhere in a more reliable form. What is unique to them has been rendered largely unusable by the books’ lack of competent editorial guidance or standards, and any meaningful documentation. That being the case, only a very few scholars will be well enough versed in the primary document resources that will enable them to understand and recognize those few parts that add to those resources in any significant way.

Much of the fault for this goes directly to the editor of the project, William C. Philson, Executive Director of the Mercer County Historical Society, who in his opening comments accepts full responsibility for its content, including any errors. According to his remarks, the contents were put together by various volunteers and interns working from the original Goodsell materials. Philson regrets that he did not have time to read the manuscript “through one more time” before it went to press, but even that would not have been enough to put it in what could be considered professional shape, as it scarcely appears to have been read even once. In its published form is comes off as a distinctly amateur effort, lacking any real scholarly rigor at all. It is, in short, a document dump, the wheat still mixed with the chaff, a ton of coal with a few small diamonds to be found by those few diligent enough and knowledgeable enough to recognize them.

These shortcomings go beyond the ordinary errors that creep into or fail to be eliminated from any printed work, even ones far less massive than this. This one has its share of those just in the few pages of original writing not part of the archival material. For instance, the book is dedicated to “The Explorer’s Club” when the proper name of the organization is “The Explorers Club.” And throughout the date of Peary’s purported arrival at the North Pole is given as April 7, 1909, rather than the correct April 6. The transcriptions the books contain have numerous typos and obvious mistranscriptions of words as well.

Volume I consists of three sections, with a short preliminary section which contains a record of Goodsell’s impressions of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. These are given some historical context by the transcribing intern, practically the only competent editorial note in the entire production, but Goodsell’s notes are probably little different than hundreds of such journals of visitors to Chicago to see the fair’s wonders and curiosities.

Next comes a few facsimiles of autographs of no relation to Peary’s expeditions including a post card signed by Jack London. Another is an “unknown and unreadable autograph” reproduced in facsimile, but it is noted as “important enough for Goodsell to keep it the rest of his life.” While the note gives the first two names of the autograph as“Newell Dwight,” the last, it says, can’t be made out. In the age of Google, this autograph is easily known and identified. “Newell Dwight” is a fairly uncommon pair of names, and if one merely “googles” the combination one finds that the autograph is that of Newell Dwight Hillis. Hillis has a Wikipedia article devoted to him. According to that, he was a Presbyterian minister who lectured widely against immorality. He was also a prominent eugenicist who helped organize two National Race Betterment Conferences in 1914-15. Ironically, his campaigns against “immorality” did not prevent him from calling for such measures as the sterilization of Germans because of atrocities committed by the German Army during World War I. Anyone with a computer could probably have found all this out. This does not give much confidence in the research abilities of anyone who was involved in assembling these volumes.

Next comes Section I, consisting of letters dealing with Goodsell’s selection as the physician on Peary’s 1908 Peary Arctic Club’s North Pole Expedition. These are of some interest, but probably most of them are duplicated in the voluminous papers of Robert E. Peary [RG 101] held at the National Archives II in College Park, Md.

Section II, which forms the bulk of the volume, is devoted to a transcription of Goodsell’s diary kept during that expedition. A typed copy of the diary is also among Peary’s papers in College Park. Philson remarks at length on the “versions” of this diary held in the Mercer County collection. He says, “there are at least three versions of this typewritten journal to the Pole, as well as the handwritten journal. . . each version slightly different from the others. I made an executive decision, and had the transcription compared to the original handwritten journals—twice. To the best of my ability, this archive is a copy of Goodsell’s handwritten journal.” This statement raises a red flag to the concerned scholar as to just what the printed text in Volume I truly represents. “Executive Decisions” are implicitly made by one individual, and are almost always inappropriate in scholarly matters, especially when the “executive” making them is clearly not an expert in the subject he is dealing with. Expert advice should have been sought as to the standards of handling primary documentation. No scholar would have advised relying on any transcript in the presence of the original. As an example, a recent examination of Donald B. MacMillan’s diaries from the Crocker Land Expedition revealed very significant “revisions” from his original entries. So, Philson’s procedures have clouded the reliability of Goodsell’s diary entries as printed, just as Whisenhunt’s editing made the quotation of the published On Polar Trails cautionary.

The diary as printed calls attention to the importance of exact reproduction of primary documents. For instance, in the published On Polar Trails Goodsell (or Whisenhunt) incorrectly quotes from his diary. And on one critical point Goodsell discusses how he was not allowed to interview the two Inuit who had accompanied Frederick Cook on his journey toward the North Pole in 1908, saying “Were the reader permitted to examine my original journal, he would see two blank pages between the records of August 17 and 18, 1909, which I left hoping that Peary would reconsider and permit me to question the two Eskimos. The two pages still remain blank—a mute white protest.” However there is no note from the editor of the “original journal” that there are indeed two blank pages at this point. With Goodsell on record as making a point of this, no editor should have failed to confirm or deny it who was in possession of Goodsell’s original. To scholars, even blank pages can be of critical interest, as they are in Peary’s 1909 diary of his attempt to reach the North Pole. So, the scholar is left to wonder just how accurate the transcription (or the transcription of one of the three typed transcriptions) is. It would have been far better to just have scanned the original journal and reproduced it as such.

Not many of “today’s readers” are going to read it as printed, and even if they do, nothing in the transcription is footnoted for explanation of the unfamiliar names, places or other obscure points it mentions, nor given the slightest annotation to guide them in understanding what is being reported beyond the obvious. While it is good to have a handy version of Goodsell’s diary to refer to, this transcription is compromised by all of these shortcomings and cannot be considered definitive.

Interspersed among the diary entries, which are sometimes mis-dated, are a number of photographs and illustrations. These are often reproduced with (presumably) Goodsell’s original typed captions. Between various “chapters” of the diary are several pages devoted to just photographs and illustrations. These pages have no captions or editorial comments to identify their diverse subjects. Not all of these are photographs, either, Goodsell’s or otherwise, but are illustrations previously published in various periodicals or books. To a student of the subject, many of these will be familiar, even as to the source. Others can be identified because they are identical to some of the photos scattered throughout the diary that bear Goodsell’s typed captions. In fact, there are many, many duplications of illustrations throughout this publication. Some are reproduced multiple times, and a number of them are reproduced more than once in reversed image. In many cases there is no way to distinguish which registration is correct and which is reversed. This situation makes these photographs’ value minimal, as they are given no identification or context. Many are photographs of just of things like random icebergs, and have no research value at all. Others peak the scholar’s curiosity as to just who is portrayed in the picture, where the photo was taken, and when. All of these questions go unanswered. Many of the illustrations clearly have nothing to do with the specific Peary expedition in which Goodsell participated, but for others this is not clear in the least, and for “today’s reader,” they would have no clue to any of this.

I could probably identify half the illustrations as to who, when and where, either through personal familiarity with the subject or from captions within this work itself. For instance, most of the illustrations that appeared in Peary’s serialized narrative that appeared in Hampton’s Magazine in 1910 are reproduced without any indication as to their source. The editor should have made an effort to do this by his own means of comparing the captioned pictures with the uncaptioned ones, or by asking for expert help, and he should have taken care to at least eliminate all of the useless duplication and determine the correct image registration. Even with glass slides, this is easy to do. In fact, this is just the kind of thing the numerous interns and volunteers listed as contributing to this publication should have been able to do, given proper instructions. However, looking at the acknowledgments, it is clear that this publication was put together “by committee,” and it looks like it.

The rest of the volume consists of mainly correspondence to and from Dr. Goodsell divided by years. The bulk of this is prior to 1917, when Goodsell volunteered for duty in WW I. Many of the letters up to that time deal with the aftermath of his service on Peary’s expedition, and include many letters detailing his unsatisfactory attempts to get Peary’s permission it lecture and publish, or his efforts to get Peary to return materials loaned to him to aid Peary in writing his own narrative. Undoubtedly, many of these letters were already available to scholars in RG 101, however. In fact, one of my previous blog posts is about one of the letters included here. [see January 24, 2016 below]

The letter section suffers from many of the same lapses of scholarly rigor that the rest of the volume does. None of the correspondents are identified beyond their name; none of the content of the letters are put into context for the reader to understand many things being mentioned or discussed. Reading them is equivalent to listening to one side of a telephone conversation between two people you know nothing about. That is not to say there is nothing here that is of no interest to scholars who are very familiar with the people involved and the incidents being discussed. For instance, there is an exchange of letters between Goodsell and Rudolph Franke, who was Cook’s sole civilized companion over the winter of 1907-1908. It reveals Peary’s underhanded dealings with Goodsell, including the non-return of his book manuscript and illustrations a year after he had promised to write an introduction to Goodsell’s prospective book so that he could get hold of them, and Goodsell’s resulting animosity toward him. Fortunately, Goodsell kept a copy of his manuscript, but never received all of his pictures back. He also tells about his desire to verify Cook’s sighting of Bradley Land, a mythical land Cook said he saw on the way to the Pole, and to interview the two Inuit who were with Cook, whom Peary forbid him to speak to when Peary’s expedition visited the Inuit settlement of Etah in August 1909. But Franke’s letters are compromised by the transcriber’s apparent difficulty with Franke’s lack of mastery of English (he was German), or with his handwriting, and there are many empty brackets, which one must assume represent illegible words or passages (the editor does not say what they mean) from the transcriptions—a nother case of something better reproduced in facsimile.

There is a short glossary of Inuit language-Engish terms. These are not in alphabetical order, nor are there cross-language references for each term. For instance, the “B” section runs: “Brother; Brown Bread; Bring; Because; Back to several days; Bun-Nali; Bowel Movement; Breathe; Back,” etc. etc. And there is the term “Ah-tingah: Name,” a term I’m familiar with from a passage in Dr. Cook’s writings, but no “Name: Ah-tingah.” Now that may be the way this section is entered by Goodsell, but it should have been alphabetized and crossed indexed by the editor.

The volume concludes with an index, which at first glance looks like the best thing in the book, but turns out to also be fatally compromised. Apparently the pagination was changed after the index was completed, shifting all the page references in it up to a point (or maybe at numerous points!). For instance, an attempt to look up the index’s listings for “Cook, Dr., Frederick A.” found that the first entry that correctly cited an item about Cook was page 675. All the other references had nothing about Dr. Cook on the pages cited, making it a chore to try to find how far and in which direction the pagination was shifted. A similar check of the entries for “Franke/Francke, Rudolph” showed the same situation. The index is also not in strict alphabetical order, nor is it complete, by any means. I found a number of references to Cook or Franke that are not cited at all, even as page shifts.

The next post will review the second volume and sum up the work’s overall value.

Dr. John W. Goodsell was the surgeon to Robert E. Peary’s 1908-09 expedition aimed at the North Pole. Unlike Peary’s previous expedition physicians, Goodsell participated in the field in Peary’s attempt to reach it, but in the end, like all the others but one, Peary fell out with him after the expedition returned. The differences between the men arose over Peary’s restrictions on Goodsell’s ability to lecture and publish his own account of the expedition based on his diary, even after Peary had released all other members of the expedition from their contractual obligations to wait until Peary’s own account was in print.

During the course of my research for Cook and Peary, the Polar Controversy, Resolved, I did not visit the Goodsell collection in Mercer, PA, although I was aware of it. This was due to the fact that Goodsell was a peripheral figure in the controversy, and because the Peary Family Papers preserved at the National Archives had at least a partial copy of Goodsell’s diary that covered the incidents and dates it contained that were of most interest to me.

In 1981, the Mercer County Historical Society had published an edited version of On Polar Trails, which was an elaboration by Dr. Goodsell’s experiences with the Peary expedition, which he worked on actively until 1915 and revised several times long after that, at least into the mid-1930s. The book had never found a publisher in Goodsell’s lifetime.  Unfortunately, Mercer County did not publish the book as Goodsell had written it.

One might ask, why Mercer County? Mercer County, Pennsylvania, lies east of Cleveland. Goodsell’s hometown was New Kensington, just east of greater Pittsburgh, but some distance south of Mercer County. The reason for it being the repository of many of Goodsell’s papers is because Dr. Goodsell lived out the last years of his life there, and his widow, who lived to 104, resided there in her old age. She eventually, in exchange for an “honorarium,” deposited what papers she had not previously donated elsewhere at the Mercer County Historical Society. As such, they do not represent a complete set of Goodsell’s personal papers, but they do contain many important items, including the original manuscript of “On Polar Trails,” and his original Peary expedition diary and the revisions he made of it, along with a considerable number of photographs taken by Goodsell on the expedition.

To bring Goodsell’s manuscript to publication, the society hired Donald W. Whisenhunt, a college professor at Wayne State University in Nebraska, who had earlier examined it and pronounced its publication “impossible.” Would that Whisenhunt’s initial opinion had been taken as the final word, because the way he eventually found to do the impossible proved he was a most unfortunate choice. In his introduction Whisenhunt detailed his methods.

Goodsell’s original typed manuscript was more than 600 pages. Whisenhunt judged this to be far too long and uninteresting “to today’s reader.” So he jettisoned Goodsell’s historical accounts of earlier polar expeditions and all of the scientific and technical material it included. He then rearranged what was left so that all the subject matter on various topics would appear together, losing the context in which Goodsell presented them. By this process, whole chapters were discarded, and in Whisenhunt’s own word, others were “emasculated.” The original 34 chapters were reduced to 12, and the 600+ typed pages became 178 small printed ones.

But even this was not enough for Whisenhunt. He then reviewed what remained for style and decided that Goodsell’s prose had to be modified because it was too “stilted, flowery, Victorian” and verging on the romantic and so would be “unfamiliar and probably of little interest,” and that his sentence structure was not up to “contemporary rules of good usage,” and so he rewrote them to be so.

“The reader may well conclude that the manuscript is no longer Goodsell’s,” Whisenhunt tellingly wrote. “That is a perfectly reasonable conclusion. Another editor may well have chosen to do the job much differently than I have. Someone else may have done it better and made it a better story. I would like to believe, however naively, that if Goodsell were alive and writing his story today he would have done it much as I have. I think it is important to note that the manuscript couldn’t not have been published without major revisions. For better or worse, I am the one who was chosen for the task.”

That’s small comfort, especially after such frank acknowledgment of the abuse of the original material. And Whisenhunt was wrong on almost all counts to take such liberties. What he produced from Goodsell’s finished book is a disservice to the scholarly community, if not “to today’s reader.” Worst, this being so, there is no way from Whisenhunt’s version to tell what is Goodsell’s and what is his in any given passage. Scholars want to see the words of eyewitnesses unvarnished by niceties such as “contemporary rules of good usage.” That’s the very point of primary source material: it is the authentic thoughts of the person who witnessed the events being described in his own words.

Having read Whisenhunt’s frank confession of gross tampering, I was very cautious in using anything quoted from On Polar Trails in writing my own book. What material I used from Goodsell came almost exclusively from the Peary papers, although, when I had no alternative, I quoted some crucial passages from the published book, while always cautioning my readers that they might not have been an accurate portrayal of Goodsell’s own words.

When Mercer County announced the publication of the so-called Dr. John Goodsell Archives, published under the title There and Back Again, in 2009, I contemplated purchasing a copy. It was massive—1,622 pages in two large volumes—so perhaps it justified the cost of $140 postpaid. Still, having had the experience of what they allowed Whisenhunt to do to On Polar Trails, I hesitated. Years passed, and of the thousands of libraries that make up OCLC’s union catalog WorldCat, only five libraries ever acquired a copy, so there was little possibility of loaning it.

Finally, I decided to just take the plunge. After all, “There and Back Again” had been Goodsell’s original title for his book about the Peary Expedition, so at least, I imagined, 600 of those 1,620 pages would be the original typed manuscript of it as Goodsell had written it, finally making amends for Whisenhunt’s misguided editing. The check was written and the books duly arrived. Included at no charge was the second massive disappointment foisted on the world of polar history scholarship by Mercer County Historical Society.

As for the first, on one of the preliminary pages was an advertisement offering leftover copies of On Polar Trails at $5 a copy, “while supplies last.” So much for Goodsell’s story as retold by Donald W. Whisenhunt having appeal “to today’s reader,” or those of the last 38 years for that matter!

In my next two blog posts I will give an analysis of what this publication contains, the good, the bad and the ugly, but—spoiler alert—for those with $140 to spare, I’d say save your money.

Edward N. Barrill

This is the 14th in a series examining significant unpublished documents related to the Polar Controversy.

In early October of 1909, rumors flew that Edward N. Barrill, who had been Dr. Cook’s only companion on his claimed climb of Mt. McKinley in 1906 was being solicited to swear an affidavit that not only had Cook and he never been to the top of the mountain, but also that the account of the climb was a premeditated fraud. This was important because, if true, it would set a precedent for what Robert E. Peary and his powerful backers had been saying for some time: That Cook’s claim to have reached the North Pole on April 21, 1908 was completely false.

In fact, an agent of General Thomas H. Hubbard, the President of the Peary Arctic Club, which had backed Peary’s attempts to reach the North Pole since 1898, had been seeking affidavits from various parties in relation to the 1906 climb with just that purpose in mind. Of course, chief among the affidavits sought was that of Ed Barrill, since he was Cook’s only witness to the events of the alleged climb. The newspapers varied in their estimates of what Barrill had been offered for his sworn testimony as between $5,000 and $10,000 (that amount in 1909 had the buying power of about $125,000-250,000 today).

On October 14, 1909, Barrill’s affidavit was published in Hubbard’s New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser, and it swore that Cook’s account of the climb was indeed a hoax. In the wake of the publication a reporter asked Hubbard, “How about $5,000 being offered to Barrill for an affidavit attacking Dr. Cook?” Hubbard dismissed this as “all bosh.” “No money was given to him for his signature,” Hubbard said.

But Hubbard had indeed paid $5,000 to cover the “expenses” of his agent obtaining Barrill’s and other sworn statements. A check drawn on Hubbard’s account for that amount is among Peary’s papers now preserved at the National Archives II.

If not $5,000, what did Barrill himself actually receive? The answer may be found in a letter mailed from Kennewick, WA, on October 25, 1909, by O.C. Anderson, a lawyer residing there:

The document was in an envelope marked “Mount McKinley Material,” forwarded to Cook by his lawyer, H. Wellington Wack. At the time the author saw it, it was in the possession of the Frederick A. Cook Society at the Sullivan County Historical Society in Hurleyville, NY. Presumably, the original of the letter is now among the papers of Frederick A. Cook now held at the Ohio State University Archives.

John R. Bradley

This is the 13th in a series examining significant unpublished documents related to the Polar Controversy.

It all began with an interview with John Bradley, Dr. Frederick Cook’s financial backer. Exasperated by endless and often ridiculous questioning, the gambler put his tongue in his cheek when asked by a New York Times reporter how Cook had persuaded the Eskimos to venture onto the dangerous sea ice. “An Eskimo will travel 30 miles for a gumdrop, for his is the sweetest tooth in the world,” Bradley replied, adding that his yacht had gone north with two barrels of them among her stores.  Instantly, there appeared bags of “Cook Gumdrops” in the windows of all the candy stores along with the slogan “A little gumdrop now and then is relished by the Eskimen.”

When Andrew Freeman was doing research in the 1930’s for his biography of Cook that only emerged in very truncated form as The Case for Dr. Cook in 1961, he sought information from many who were still living then, and who had first-hand knowledge of the events of the Polar Controversy. He was very thorough, even in seeking small details. One of them was Rudolph Franke, who had been Bradley’s chef on his yacht and who stayed with Cook at Annoatok the winter before his attempt to reach the North Pole in 1908.

Freeman asked about the “Gumdrop Story,” and received this reply from Franke. 

After Cook’s After Cook’s downfall, some recalled the story and used it to ridicule him as “The Gumdrop Explorer.”

As for Dr. Cook, he denied he had any gumdrops along on the trip.  He said that the only prepackaged sweets he took with him were boxes of Nabisco Wafers, which in those days were a plain shortbread cookie similar to those marketed today under the trade name of Lorna Doone.

This is the 12th in a series examining significant unpublished documents related to the Polar Controversy.

The Victor Talking Machine Company of Camden, NJ, was desirous of getting an exclusive contract with Dr. Cook for a record of his voice telling how he discovered the North Pole.

On October 6th they offered him $1,000 for this record, enclosing a check and sending it via the offices of the New York Herald in New York, which had exclusive rights to Cook’s serial narrative, then running every other day in that paper.

Apparently, his telegram in reply to this offer was not clear on the exclusivity of their rights. So they wrote to him again on October 20, clarifying exactly what they wanted and sweetening the deal by adding 10% of the price of each record sold to be added to the $1,000 originally offered.

It should be understood that $1,000 in 1909 had the approximate buying power of $27,000 dollars today. Not bad for 4 minutes and 20 seconds of work!

Cook agreed to this proposal and cut his record in the Victor laboratory later that month. The record was a black seal record priced at $1.00. You can hear the result by going to the “Artifacts” section of this website and clicking on the link there, and you can also see the record’s label there as well.

The ad referred to in the letter can also be seen in the artifacts section.

The record was not on sale for long, less than two months. Dr. Cook’s failure to win approval of his North Pole claim from the University of Copenhagen pretty much quashed all sales, and it was allowed to drop from Victor’s catalogue without being repressed.

The letter can be found among the papers of Frederick A. Cook now held at the Library of Congress.

This is the 11th in a series examining significant unpublished documents related to the Polar Controversy.

In anticipation of Dr. Cook’s imminent arrival in New York aboard the Oscar II, his hometown sought to give him a grand welcome. The aldermen of the Borough of Brooklyn decided a committee to plan the official welcome for the Conqueror of the North Pole was in order. The Borough President, Bird S. Coler, sought the input of prominent citizens to participate in the planning. Among them was Herbert L. Bridgman, Editor of The Brooklyn Standard Union, himself a veteran of a trip to the Arctic on the 1901 relief ship for Peary. To this end, Coler wrote to Bridgman on October 15, 1909:

Bridgman was the Secretary of The Peary Arctic Club, an organization of millionaires formed in 1898 to aide Peary materially in his plans to capture the North Pole for the United States, and was sometimes called “Peary’s Press Agent,” because of the favorable publicity he gave Peary in the pages of his newspaper. He was more than that. He had been involved with Peary as early as 1891 and in 1892 had scotched a feature article written by Dr. Cook that he was about to publish after he learned from Peary that he considered it a breach of contract of the agreement Cook had signed before joining Peary’s North Greenland Expedition. In the Polar Controversy Bridgman managed the overall campaign to destroy Cook’s credibility and skillfully gathered information detrimental to Cook’s credibility on topics as variable as his previous claim to have climbed Mt. McKinley and his connection with the publication of a dictionary of the Yahgan language, which he was alleged to have stolen from a South American missionary. Bridgman was the first to raise doubts concerning various aspect of Cook’s polar narrative.

On the first day Cook’s claim was made public he was interviewed, he had this to say:

“Dr. Cook will, of course, recognize the moral and honorable obligation and insist that his claims to the highest geographical distinction be irrefutably established. The word of the Eskimos who went with him will be of use in getting at at the proof. . . . The Eskimos cannot write, but Mr. Peary has told me that they can draw a map of the north pole and the regions surrounding that is remarkable for its accuracy. With this skill, the Eskimos ought to be in position to help Dr. Cook establish beyond doubt his claim. . . . If Dr. Cook has reasonable proofs the credit for having discovered the north pole must go to him.”

After Peary reappeared, claiming the pole for himself, Bridgman qualified this:

“Cook’s word must be taken the same as any other man’s I have not the slightest doubt that Dr. Cook believes implicitly that he has reached the North Pole and that he made his observations with the utmost care, but I do believe that he has made mistakes in the reading of his instruments that will rob him of the glory. I think that when the records are submitted to scientists there will be flaws.
I think when Mr. Peary gives to the world his account of the stories told by the two Eskimo boys who accompanied Dr. Cook their narrations will do much to prove or disprove Dr. Cook’s claim. They are simple minded people, but they have a strange and wonderful intelligence regarding geography.”

This is eerily prophetic of the means by which Peary attempted to discredit Cook’s claim, and the basis on which that claim was ultimately rejected. It is so accurate that it indicates he was aware of Peary’s intended tactics before Peary left for the Arctic in 1908, because when Bridgman made the first statement, Peary had not been heard from at all, and when he made the second statement, Peary had said nothing specific about any interviews with Cook’s Inuit companions. Yet it was just these interviews that Peary advanced to discredit Cook, along with a detailed route of where Cook had actually allegedly traced on a map of the Arctic by them, due to their “wonderful intelligence regarding geography,”.

Herbert Bridgman aboard the Erik in 1901

It was most unlikely indeed that Bridgman would have any interest in planning ceremonies to honor Peary’s rival, and Bridgman declined. He forwarded Coler’s letter to Peary with the comment, “No later developments on this. Sept 16 HLB.”

The letter is among Peary’s papers now at the National Archives II in College Park, MD.

This is the 10th in a series examining significant unpublished documents related to the Polar Controversy.

Here is a transcription of the above letter:

1700 Summer Street

Phila. October 15. ‘02

Dear Mr. Bridgman;

Mr. Peary wants me to tell you that the operation was successfully performed today & tonight he is as comfortable as could be expected.

He has asked Dr. Keen to send you a report covering three points

1^st The simplicity & perfect success of the operation.

2^nd That his recovery will be speedy & <successf> complete.

3^rd That the Dr. has examined him & found him in perfect health & physique.

I am also commanded by the Commander to suggest to you that you give this report to the Associated Press, (minus any irrelevant matter such as “Mr. Peary wishes you to send this report to the Assoc. Press” &c. &c.) a la Mrs. Ded. He thinks it might read something as follows:

“H. L. Bridgman, Sec’y of the Peary Arctic Club has received the following report from Dr. W. W. Keen the eminent Phila. surgeon in regard to the explorer’s condition & gives it to the Press in order to forestall any exaggerated accounts of the operation.”

Of course I don’t know how to say it but you will get the idea. In regard to the Ziegler-Cook expedition, I say let the good work go on but let me keep my old man at home.

Very Sincerely

Josephine D. Peary.

Recently, a book about the two expeditions William Ziegler financed to reach the North Pole was published. On p. 241 of P.J Capelotti’s The Greatest Show in the Arctic, Univ. Oklahoma Press, 2016 it has this to say:

“One man who could have helped the expedition immeasurably, both with his genial disposition and polar experience, was Dr. Frederick Cook. There were hints in late May 1901 that Cook might join the expedition, but in the end he elected to stay in Brooklyn and write up the results of the Belgica expedition to Antarctica.” The reference given for this statement is “Four of Baldwin’s Party Sail on the St. Paul,” Brooklyn Eagle for May 29, 1901.

However, this must have been a different proposition than the one Mrs. Peary refers to. Evelyn Briggs Baldwin had already been named as the leader of Ziegler’s expedition, and it is likely that Cook was merely offered the position of surgeon, only. Mrs. Peary’s letter was written in 1902, at the time Baldwin had already failed, and Ziegler was looking for someone to return to the Arctic and pick up the effort he had lavishly financed to reach the North Pole from Franz Josef Land. And in 1901, Cook would have been working “on the results of the expedition stated.

But that Mrs. Peary refers to a “Ziegler-Cook” expedition indicates that in 1902 it was abroad in the New York polar explorer’s community that Cook was likely to be offered the leadership. This was the very time Ziegler was searching for a candidate. In 1909 Anthony Fiala, a member of Ziegler’s expedition, said he had recommended Cook to Ziegler. Why Cook was not chosen is unknown. Eventually Ziegler settled on the equally incompetent Fiala, himself.

The operation Josephine Peary refers to was done on Peary’s feet after his return from his five-year “Siege of the Pole” lasting from 1898-1902. He had lost seven toes to frostbite in January 1899 attempting to reach Fort Conger. His physician, Dr. Dedrick, removed those toes in the Arctic, leaving painful stubs. The Dr. Keen mentioned was William W. Keen (below), one of the elite surgeons of his day, who was called upon to assist in the secret operation on President Grover Cleveland when he was found to have cancer of the palette in 1893. It was he who operated on Peary to remove one remaining good toe, leaving him with only his two smallest toes, and evening up the stubs. He then pulled the skin of the sole of Peary’s foot over them, making a cushion for the shortened digits.

Mrs. Peary’s reference to “Mrs. Ded” is a reference to Cora Dedrick, wife of Peary’s expedition doctor. The two of them had a falling out during the winter of 1900 and hardly spoke to one another the rest of the expedition. Dedrick knew of Peary’s infidelity with Inuit women, and Peary was deathly afraid it would get back to Morris K. Jesup, President of the Peary Arctic Club and his chief benefactor. Jesup was a straight-laced founder of the New York YMCA and ally of Anthony Comstock, such information would have been devastating to Peary’s interests and future financing.

Peary’s strategy against Dedrick was to portray him as “practically insane,” and to disregard any “insane” charges he might bring. Not only this, but Dedrick, being Peary’s doctor, not only knew that Peary was crippled by his frostbite injuries, but had developed a hernia serious enough to require a truss. Peary didn’t want any news of these conditions to be made public lest it reflect on the claims he would make regarding his achievements on his last expedition or impair his ability to gain financing for another one. Mrs. Dedrick was visited by Herbert Bridgman in an effort to influence her husband to avoid any rash statements long before Peary returned, having learned of the dispute when he led a relief expedition to check on Peary in the summer of 1901. When her husband got back, she and he were indignant at Peary’s attempted portrayal of his former doctor, and she may be referring to a statement about Peary’s physical condition published by the Associated Press. In the end, Dr. Dedrick decided not to speak publicly about the dispute, probably because he had also engaged in sexual indiscretions with an Inuit woman, and suffered from extreme guilt over it. The complex details of these incidents can be found in Cook and Peary, the Polar Controversy, Resolved.

Mrs. Peary’s letter is now in the Peary Family Papers at the National Archives II.

On September 4, 1909, Frederick Cook arrived at Copenhagen aboard the Danish ship Hans Egede. His telegrams sent from Lerwick in the Shetland Islands on September 1 claiming he had reached the North Pole on April 21 of the previous year electrified the world. Every press organization within range sent representatives to the Danish capital to cover his arrival. The event was even captured on film.

The Danish Film Institute has posted the most complete footage yet seen of Cook’s arrival on YouTube at this URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyQhwosY688

Here is a guide to the footage as posted. It is broken down by scenes; the start of each sequence is indicated by the time cues before the annotations, which can be followed while viewing the film. The viewer should note that the film as posted is not in strict chronological order. It is, in fact, a series of short clips. This will be pointed out as appropriate.

0:14 In the opening scene, Cook is seen standing on the deck of the Hans Egede. Notice that he is missing several of his front teeth. These were knocked out in a fall during his expedition. Soon after his arrival, he was taken in hand by Danish barbers, tailors and dentists, and when he reappeared in public he was faultlessly attired and had regained his missing teeth.
0:25 The Hans Egede is seen in various clips, approaching Copenhagen from the sea, decked out in all her flags, passing the Trekroner Fortress at the entrance to the harbor, and at anchor in the harbor itself. These clips are the product of several different cameras and not in sequence. She made regular runs to the Danish settlements in Greenland. This was her last run from Greenland in 1909, and Cook only secured a berth on her at the intervention of Jens Daugaard-Jensen, Inspector of Danish Greenland, who sent official word to Denmark from Lerwick verifying Cook’s claims.
1:11 This scene is of Copenhagen’s harbor showing the crowds and watercraft, many filled with reporters, awaiting the ship’s arrival.
1:19 Cook is seen on the bridge talking to the ship’s captain and officers.
1:50 Cook is seen waving his hat to the boats filled with reporters and curiosity seekers. Notice the reporter taking notes with pad and pencil.
1:55 Cook is seen pacing the deck, talking to an unknown man and then letting himself down to the main deck. The sign says “No Access” in Danish.
2:15 The greeting party of dignitaries, including the Crown Prince of Denmark and the American Minister to Denmark enter the launch, and it leaves for the Hans Egede.
2:23 Aboard the ship, Cook is waiting by the taffrail to receive the greeting party. Notice that a reporter with a pad appears taking notes below the boat. His arrival is obscured in the first clip by people in the way, but in the next his arrival at this position is clearly visible. This shows that these clips are the product of several cameras simultaneously filming the same scene.
2:59 When the officers salute, they signify the arrival of the Crown Prince aboard.
3:02 The tall man in the top hat and mustache is the Crown Prince of Denmark, later Christian X.
3:05 The man with the wavy hair seen behind the rope talking to Dr. Cook is Commodore Andreas Peter Hovgaard, a naval officer and arctic explorer.
3:06 Cook and the greeting party enter the launch to go ashore.
3:08 The man who takes off his straw hat might be the English reporter Philip Gibbs, who interviewed Cook en route and early on denounced Cook as a fraud, but this isn’t certain. Cook seems to be talking directly to him, and he has a resemblance to Gibbs, but his hair is parted on the wrong side. That he is not part of the official party is shown by the fact that he does not enter the launch. Other reporters can also be seen on deck as the launch departs, as well as in the boats standing alongside.
3:26 The launch leaves the Hans Egede’s side.
3:36 The launch arrives at the dock and the party steps ashore.
3:49 The man who first steps ashore with the stick and who assists Cook is Commodore Hovgaard. The next to debark is the crown prince, followed by American Minister Maurice Francis Egan. The representatives of the Royal Geographical Society follow him, and they make their way through the crowd into the grounds of the Meteorological Department.
4:26 Here you get a brief glimpse of William T. Stead, William Randolph Hearst’s man on the spot, who wrote a colorful account of Cook’s arrival. He’s the man with the white beard and slouch hat.
4:33 This shows a motor car, attempting to leave the Meteorological Department’s grounds. Steed’s account tells how the press of the crowd made it impossible for the party to enter the waiting carriages that were to take them to their destination and that they had to take refuge in the the department’s building. The car was a decoy; Commodore Hovgaard spirited Cook out a back door and into his own carriage for a ride to the Hotel Phoenix. So this is likely out of sequence and should come behind the next sequence of Cook on the balcony waving.
4:45 Cook is seen on the balcony of the Meteorological Department waving his cap to the crowd below. At one point he speaks briefly to those who had been calling for a speech. He allegedly said,
“My friends, I have had too hard a time getting here to make a speech. I can only say that I consider it an honor to be able to put my foot first on Danish soil.”
4:59 This is a brief repeat of the first scene, but a distinctly different clip.
5:05 These two men are Danish Inuits from Greenland, perhaps part of the Hans Egede’s crew. The film camera was so new, the two don’t seem to know what to do.
5:43 This gentleman is C. M. Norman-Hansen, a Danish optometrist and poet, who was also returning from Greenland aboard the ship. Likewise, he seems camera shy. He was at first a staunch defender of Cook’s controversial claims, but turned on him in 1911 and publicly denounced him at his lecture at the Palais Concert Hall in Copenhagen in 1911. After Norman-Hansen disappears, the rest of the footage is a repeat of earlier scenes.