Those words do not ring true. Cook was either extraordinarily naïve or his remarks were hypocritical. He knew very well that other attempts on the Pole had caused a series of public sensations. Kane, Nansen, and Peary had become legendary heroes just by trying to get there. All had benefited financially. Surely Cook must have known what awaited him. After the controversy over his polar claims, he wrote, “I desire to emphasize the fact that every movement I had made disproves the allegation that I planned to perpetuate a gigantic fraud upon the world.” But it can just as easily be said that by affecting such a casual attitude to his apparent triumph, Cook was disarming his critics.
In late May he reached Upernavik, the home of some three hundred Eskimos living in box-shaped huts built of turf. He spent a month there, at the home of the Danish governor. Then, on June 20, he took a ship as far as Unanak, where he enjoyed an enthusiastic reception, and boarded a second vessel bound for Denmark. En route, he stopped off at Lerwick, in the Shetland Islands, where he sent a cable to James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald, announcing that he had left a two-thousand-word message with the Danish consul there. “If you want it, send for it,” the telegram read. He expected three thousand dollars, a trifling sum considering the import of his news. The Herald, which had turned down Peary, grabbed at the offer.
From this point on Cook could scarcely deny the impact of his story. Off the Skaw, at the northernmost tip of Denmark, half a dozen seasick reporters, “looking like wet cats,” climbed over the rail and told him that all of Fleet Street had moved to Copenhagen. But here Cook encountered some scepticism. He declined to answer reporters’ questions, insisting that he could not elaborate because of prior commitments to a newspaper syndicate.
At Elsinore, a blizzard of cables and letters engulfed him. “I became a helpless leaf on a whirlwind of excitement,” he recalled. He was, he wrote, utterly bewildered by the clamour of the ovation that followed when he docked at Copenhagen. The Danish cabinet had met and decided that, as he was a reputable public figure, they had no option but to accept his word that he had reached the Pole and tender him a reception that would be headed by the Crown Prince himself.
The great English editor W.T. Stead was one of those in the dense crowd that pressed forward to greet Cook when he arrived on Saturday morning, September 4. Stead noticed that the explorer looked a little dazed. As the multitude cheered, a woman thrust a bunch of red roses into his hand. Then, unrestrained by the police, the mob swept forward, forcing Cook back. Stead, standing directly behind him, and seeing that Cook was unprepared for the onslaught, flung his arms around him under his armpits and pressed backward with all his weight to ease the pressure of the crowd. Three or four others came to the rescue and, struggling and staggering, bore the explorer through the throng. The roses had long since vanished, and before Cook could reach the safety of his carriage one of his cuffs had been torn off by a souvenir hunter.
In the days that followed, Stead had a chance to assess the explorer. “I think that almost all of us who went to Copenhagen would agree … that he does not strike us as a man, but rather as a child – a naive, inexperienced child, who sorely needed someone to look after him,” Stead wrote in the American Review of Reviews. “… his inability to protect his own interests, even in matters of pounds, shillings and pence, it was almost pitiful.” Stead’s comments appear to support Cook’s later insistence that he had no idea of the importance of his polar revelations. “Everything a clever rogue would do instinctively, if he wished to hoax the public, Dr. Cook did not do,” said Stead. But it can also be argued that Cook, having casually tossed off a comment about reaching the Pole, had at that time no idea of the furore he would cause. He seemed unaware that every statement he made would be questioned, and every apparent contradiction submitted to meticulous examination.
One experienced journalist certainly had doubts. Philip Gibbs of the London Daily Chronicle, then on the threshold of a brilliant career that would, after his Great War reporting, lead to a knighthood, interviewed Cook and was profoundly disturbed. The explorer did not look him in the eye, and Gibbs thought his answers to his questions both contradictory and hesitant. He was shocked when, on asking to see Cook’s diary, Cook gave him “a strange defensive look” and replied that he had none; everything was at Etah with Whitney.
Gibbs had difficulty swallowing this. “But surely you have brought your journal with you? The essential papers?” Cook replied that he had brought nothing and then turned on Gibbs with a sudden violence that startled him. “You believed Nansen and Amundsen and Sverdrup,” he rasped. “They had only their story to tell. Why don’t you believe me?” (Cook glossed over the fact that all three had been accompanied by witnesses.)
“This man protests too much,” Gibbs told himself. He pressed Cook again and again. Surely he wasn’t coming to Europe to announce the greatest prize of exploration without a scrap of his notes or any of his observations? Cook grew more and more angry, Gibbs more and more sceptical.
Cook claimed that Sverdrup had heard his story and “pledged his own honour in proof of his achievements.” Gibbs promptly interviewed Sverdrup and learned that Cook had provided the explorer with no proof of any kind. Cook intimated to reporters that he had handed a written narrative and astronomical observations to the University of Copenhagen. Gibbs dragged a reluctant statement from the head of the university (which was about to grant the explorer an honorary degree) that Cook had submitted nothing.
With Peter Freuchen, another Arctic traveller and journalistic sceptic, Gibbs analysed Cook’s statements regarding distances, sledge weights, timetable, and food carried. These he and Freuchen found to be absurd and contradictory. But the public was on Cook’s side, and when Gibbs’s reports were published, the journalist found himself vilified in public and even challenged to a duel. As for Freuchen, his own editor at the Danish periodical Politiken refused to publish his case against Cook. “We cannot wine and dine a man one day and call him a fraud the next,” was the way he put it.
For Cook was the man of the hour, caught up in a whirl of banquets and receptions. There were presentations, speeches, medals, royal congratulations, and, of course, the honorary degree. It was during a banquet for journalists at the Tivoli that the real sensation evolved. Suddenly attendants appeared carrying sheafs of cables, which were placed under the plates of all the journalists in the room. Cook received one too. As he opened it, he sensed a lull falling over the assembly. Stead, the senior journalist present, stood up and read his copy. It contained a single, blunt sentence: “In a wire from Indian Harbour, Labrador, dated September 6, 1909, Peary says: Stars and Stripes nailed to the Pole.”
Cook’s expression gave no hint of any inner turbulence as he rose to his feet to congratulate Peary. “There is glory enough for us all,” he declared; and at that the affair broke up as the journalists rushed off to duty.
4 Cook versus Peary
Cook took passage from Copenhagen for New York that week, but not before a second cable arrived from Peary. This claimed that Cook’s two Eskimo companions, under cross-examination by Borup and MacMillan, had revealed that Cook hadn’t got out of sight of land after leaving Axel Heiberg Island. Cook’s response seemed plausible enough. He said that because all Eskimos were fearful of leaving the sight of land and venturing into the unknown, he had repeatedly encouraged “the delusion that mirages and low lying clouds which appeared almost daily were signs of land. In their ignorance and their eagerness to be near land they believed this, and by this innocent deception I prevented the panic which seizes nearly every Arctic savage when he finds himself upon the circumpolar sea.…”
Peary’s own Eskimos, in fact, had on reaching the Big Lead shown a similar panic, which Peary stifled only by threatening to abandon them on the ice. Cook’s critics were to use this interview as proof that the explorer didn’t get near the Pole. On the other hand, the natives often told white men what they wanted to hear, and Cook had instructed his two companions to tell Pe
ary and his men nothing about the trip. As evidence, the natives’ denial under pressure was inconclusive.
Peary, meanwhile, had wired the New York Times: “Do not trouble about Cook’s story. I have him nailed.” This provoked a newspaper battle between the Times and its bitter rival, the Herald, which had scooped it neatly by splashing Cook’s account of his adventures day after day across its front page.
The Times could only struggle to stay even until Peary’s exclusive tale of his own triumphs exploded in its September 7 edition. The paper, which had shown some scepticism about Cook’s revelations, boldly declared that day that “no other proof of his [Peary’s] verified statement from Indian Harbour, Labrador … will be required by the scientific world.” Sir George Nares, now an admiral, sent a message to Peary through the Times the following day: “Owing to your well known veracity, all will accept your statement that you have reached the north pole.”
But a majority of the scientific world was at least outwardly on Cook’s side. While Admiral George Melville branded Cook’s statement a fake, most leading explorers, no matter what their private opinions, held their tongues or issued non-committal congratulations to both men. In fact, Peary was seen as mean-spirited for his attacks on Cook’s integrity, especially his claim that Cook had gone north “sub rosa for the admitted purpose of forestalling me.”
There was considerable eyebrow-raising over Cook’s statement that he had averaged fifteen nautical miles (seventeen statute miles) a day on his polar journey. Ernest Shackleton, the British Antarctic explorer, pointed out that “no other expedition has been able to do anything near this.” Peary’s supporters insisted that such speeds were impossible. Cyrus Adams of the American Geographical Society declared that “four miles a day is considered a fair average over polar ice.” This carping ended when Peary’s own story in the Times claimed twenty-five nautical miles a day.
Once the Times had Peary’s story locked up – it threatened court action against any other paper that appropriated its copy – it leaned heavily toward Peary. The Herald took the other tack:
DR COOK WINS FRIENDS
BY HERALD STORY
DR. COOK’S NARRATIVE
PLEASED SCIENTISTS
SUSPECT DEEP PLOT
TO DISCREDIT DR. COOK
WASHINGTON PRAISES
DR. COOK’S STORY
GERMAN PRESS LEANS
TOWARD DR. COOK
Cook arrived in New York on September 21 to be greeted by a cheering crowd of either fifty thousand (Times) or “hundreds of thousands” (Herald). The reception both amazed him and filled him with dismay, he said later. From that moment on “my life was a kaleidoscopic whirl of excitement for which I found no reason.” He likened it to a child’s first ride on a carousel. The world, he said, “seemed engaged in some frantic revel.” He needed a secretary to deal with the letters and invitations, which all but swamped him, and persuaded Walter Lonsdale, who had been on the staff of the American consul in Copenhagen, to handle that task.
Peary and his supporters continued to demand that Cook produce proofs of his feat. Cook hedged. He would engage in no controversy, he said, until Peary reached New York. But he then announced that he had “brought irrefutable proof of his right to the title of discoverer of the North Pole.” This was the kind of rash statement that would help, in the long run, to doom him. In Copenhagen he had impulsively announced that he would go north and bring back his two Eskimo companions to prove that he’d been to the Pole. Hours later he retracted the statement. It was too late in the season to go north again, he told the press. Besides, what would be the use? These lame evasions did little to help his cause and would be remembered later when the controversy grew warmer.
But if Cook was required to produce proofs, then surely, he argued, so must Peary: “Commander Peary has as yet given to the world no proof of his own case. My claim has been fully recognized by Denmark and by the King of Sweden.… A specific record of my journey is accessible to all, and everyone who reads can decide for himself. When Peary publishes a similar report then our cases are parallel. Why should Peary be allowed to make himself a self appointed dictator of my affairs?”
But, of course, Peary had published a report in the Times comparable to Cook’s in the Herald. Both were “accessible to all,” both were narratives of adventure, neither constituted proof that its hero had been to the North Pole. Indeed, Peary and his supporters, in urging that Cook produce proofs, had, perhaps unwittingly, sparked an unwelcome spirit of inquiry. Nobody had ever demanded proofs from Peary before; now they would.
Cook, now in New York, made another rash statement in which he insisted that “the Danish Government and the University of Copenhagen as well as the Danish Geographical Society, have … taken over the virtual guarantee for the sincerity and authenticity of my records. They have stood up for them, so to speak, before the world. They do not ask me to furnish any further proof or evidence of any kind, but in justice to Denmark it is my intention to place the first completed record of my polar journey at the disposal of the University of Copenhagen.”
The university, of course, had not “stood up” for Cook. It had simply, in the long tradition of exploration, accepted his unsupported word that he had reached the Pole.
Cook played down the importance of the records and instruments he said he had left at Etah. “The impression seems to prevail that Mr. Harry Whitney has records of importance with him. He may not know that he has them, for they are packed with my instruments which I left in his care. These instruments he will probably bring here in October. None of the records … are absolutely essential for I have duplicates of them.…”
After these assertions, Cook refused to produce proofs of his attainment of the Pole, arguing that the University of Copenhagen was entitled to see them first. After that, he said, he would be happy to make them public. At that point, he shut himself up in his hotel suite and refused to see the press. “Dr. Cook,” said Walter Lonsdale, “does not care to go into any discussion on the point of his discovery of the pole.”
Yet the explorer remained the man of the hour. A series of newspaper straw polls showed that the public was on his side in the mounting controversy. The Toledo Blade, for instance, polled its readers and found that 550 believed Cook had reached the Pole while only 10 believed Peary. A copy of Cook’s Herald series was sealed in the cornerstone of a Long Island church; New York moved to give him the freedom of the city; the Arctic Club tendered him a banquet at the Waldorf Astoria, where twelve hundred guests roared their approval. It was urged, in Brooklyn, that a statue be erected to him as a local hero; Harlem illuminated its streets in his honour.
It was agreed he would need time to work on his proofs. But Cook didn’t take the time. Instead, on September 24, three days after his return, he launched at Carnegie Hall a national lecture tour so lucrative that one city – St. Louis – was said to have offered him ten thousand dollars to appear.
The following day, a Times reporter collared Harry Whitney, who had arrived in St. John’s, Newfoundland, aboard Peary’s ship. Whitney revealed that the box Cook had left with him, presumably containing records and instruments, was still cached at Etah.
Cook, “considerably agitated” in the Times’s view, now contradicted his earliest statements that he had brought nothing with him. “I gave Mr. Whitney some of my original proofs and some duplicates … I took a copy of these and brought it back with me. The duplicates I gave him were not proofs that were all right – that had not been blurred. The originals of these proofs I brought with me. I have them now.”
This baffling statement suggested that, at best, Cook had been incredibly careless in dealing with a precious and irreplaceable set of documents. His explanation was as badly blurred as the records he said he’d left behind. Peary flatly refused to believe that Cook had left anything of significance at Etah. “I cannot conceive it possible for a man, under the circumstances, to have left such priceless things out of his sight for an instant,”
he said. As for Harry Whitney, he said he didn’t know what was in Cook’s box or boxes.
Cook continued to insist he had copies of all the essential records. “The presentation of the matter to the proper authorities will not in any way be affected,” he declared. It would take him some months, he added, to prepare his report and proofs. He was sure the missing instruments were safe and promised he would mount and personally finance an expedition to go north in the spring and retrieve everything. But he never did.
Meanwhile, with Peary due to arrive home in a few days, his supporters in the Peary Arctic Club, led by its president, General Thomas Hubbard, and its secretary, Herbert Bridgman, were working to discredit Cook. Bridgman’s paper, the Brooklyn Standard-Union, revealed that two of the polar photographs published with Cook’s Herald series were actually taken on a previous Arctic expedition. The Herald admitted that but explained it away as “an inadvertence.” The captions had identified the photographs as taken by Cook “on his North Pole trip.” But Cook was forced to admit that they had been taken seven years before.
There was worse to come. For some time, rumours had been flying around Alaska that Cook had faked his Mount McKinley climb. The matter had come up before the Explorers’ Club and had been dismissed after Cook threatened a libel suit. Bridgman was in touch with Ralph Stockman Tarr, a professor of geography and geology at Cornell University, who had just returned from Alaska and who told Bridgman that it was “the almost unanimous verdict of Alaskans knowing that country that the feat was impossible.” Tarr said that Edward “Big Ed” Barrill, the guide who accompanied Cook on the trip and who was still owed money by the explorer, had himself stated that the pair had not climbed above five thousand feet. Barrill would probably talk, Tarr wrote Bridgman, “if he could be sure of his pay.” Bridgman leaked the story to the Times, which put it on the front page.
The Arctic Grail Page 70