Cook, well launched on his popular lecture tour, denied everything. Peary meanwhile arrived in New York to a reception the Herald termed “cheerless” and the Times called “triumphal.” The press and public were still on Cook’s side. (The Peary Club did their best to get Peary to tone down his anti-Cook comments because they did not sit well with the public.) But Gilbert Grosvenor of the National Geographic wrote to Peary from Washington on October 5 assuring him that sentiment was changing rapidly and predicting that he would soon be overwhelmed by a flood of appreciation. “Don’t let Mrs. Peary be disturbed,” he wrote. “I went to the Cook lecture here Sunday and want to tell you that his reception was tremendously exaggerated by the press.… The effect on the majority of the audience was very unpleasant and the applause at the end very little.…”
“We feel for you and Mrs. Peary in such a trying experience,” Grosvenor added, “but the end is very near; greater honors and rewards than you would otherwise have experienced I am confident will be showered upon you presently, from every quarter of the Globe.”
Thus did the National Geographic Society, which had seen no proofs from either Peary or Cook, make it unequivocally clear where it stood in the controversy. Meanwhile, one of Bridgman’s agents was approaching the Pinkerton detective agency to find out what it would cost to delve into the Mount McKinley affair. If the public attitude could be changed – if the country could be led to believe that Cook, already lacking credibility, hadn’t got to the Pole – then, by some curious inversion of logic, it would follow that Peary must have reached it.
In mid-October, George Kennan, a distinguished Arctic traveller (whose son became a distinguished American diplomat), published in Outlook magazine the second of three devastating articles analysing Cook’s food consumption on his polar journey. Cook’s original estimate of a pound of pemmican a day for each man and each dog, supplemented by 13.8 ounces of other staples, was meagre enough – Rae, M’Clintock, Schwatka, and Peary had all consumed a larger ration. But, even assuming Cook killed some of his dogs, Kennan’s analysis showed, his food would have lasted only forty-two days. To stretch it over the eighty-four days of his journey Cook would have to halve his daily per capita ration to eight ounces of pemmican.
“No man and no dog ever lived and worked for twelve weeks under polar conditions on eight ounces of pemmican or its equivalent a day,” Kennan wrote. He himself had sledged for three years between the Arctic Ocean and the Okhotsk Sea; if his diet had been restricted to eight ounces of pemmican, he declared, “I should have expected to perish on the ice in less than thirty days.”
At the same time, Cook was coming under increased criticism for the delay in preparing his proofs for the University of Copenhagen, whose rector was plaintively asking “why Dr. Cook cannot send us before two months have elapsed the observations he made at the North Pole?” Cook, unwilling to interrupt his lucrative lecture tour, claimed it would take three months to prepare his observations, “not a situation,” said the New York Evening Post, “in which a man of a delicate sense of personal honor would be willing to place himself.”
Then, on October 14, a worse blow fell. The Peary Arctic Club had finally located Big Ed Barrill, Cook’s sole companion on the Mount McKinley climb. General Hubbard’s New York Globe published an affidavit by Barrill, which Cook’s supporters charged, probably correctly, was purchased. In it Barrill swore unequivocally that Cook had faked the claim by persuading him to doctor his diary to make it appear they’d reached the summit. Barrill also swore that a photograph appearing in Cook’s book about the climb, showing Barrill waving a flag on the peak, had in fact been taken at another Alaskan peak, at an altitude of only eight thousand feet.
Cook denied it all, charging that the Peary Arctic Club had bribed Barrill. That may well have been true, since Barrill complained that Cook hadn’t paid him for his work. But when Cook was asked to produce his original diary of the climb, he equivocated. “I do not see that it is material,” he told reporters who asked for it, adding that it was hidden away in one of his trunks and difficult to get at. Instead, he referred them to his published account of the climb. Thus, as on his North Pole trip, Cook had no original details or observations to support his claim. He did announce, however, that he would organize and lead an expedition to climb the mountain and retrieve the brass cylinder he said he’d left on the summit as evidence he had been there. Like the other verifying expeditions he had promised – to interview his Eskimo companions and retrieve his lost records in Greenland – nothing ever came of it.
Up to this point a majority of public and press had taken Cook’s side, resenting Peary’s attacks on his rival. The Mount McKinley revelations turned public opinion around. The Peary Arctic Club was pressuring the American Geographical Society to force Cook to prove his story and Peary was telling Bridgman that “Cook should be handled without gloves.” Cook promptly announced that he was cancelling his lecture tour to present “the complete proofs of my trip to the north pole.”
Now the New York Herald all but abandoned Dr. Cook. Its reportage grew slimmer, its stories less frequent. The Times continued in full cry:
COOK WILL NOW TRY
TO PUNISH BARRILL
SCIENTISTS CALL FOR
MT. MCKINLEY REVIEW
PEARY SATISFIES
BOARD OF EXPERTS
Peary had indeed satisfied a three-man subcommittee of the friendly National Geographic Society, which, after a few hours of casual discussion, reported it was convinced that he had reached the Pole. The society responded with a gold medal and Hampton’s Magazine followed with a record forty-thousand-dollar fee for his ghost-written story. On Cook’s side, the scientist Knud Rasmussen, who spoke the Eskimo tongue and had interviewed several friends of Cook’s native companions, announced publicly that he now believed Cook had reached the Pole.
By this time, Cook was in seclusion, apparently working on his proofs. Actually, he was suffering from a nervous breakdown, brought on by the mental strain under which he had laboured and an unpleasant confrontation with his former associate Barrill during a lecture in Montana on October 28.
Walter Lonsdale, Cook’s secretary, who acted as his spokesman and who almost certainly prepared most of Cook’s data, announced that his employer would not be going to Copenhagen. In view of the voluminous details being dispatched to Denmark, Lonsdale said, Cook didn’t think his presence would be required. That was poppycock. Cook was in no shape to go anywhere – especially to face a probing academic committee and a swarm of curious newsmen. Lonsdale’s own role in the Cook affair was almost certainly based on an expected financial windfall. Aboard the ship that took them to America, the pair had figured that Cook might easily reap a profit of $1,500,000 from his polar venture in the shape of books, articles, lectures, and testimonials. Now, with his meal ticket fraying at the edges, Lonsdale continued to keep up a bold front.
On November 24, Lonsdale helped Cook cut his hair and shave off his moustache. With a black slouch hat half concealing his features, the embattled explorer left by train to take refuge in Toronto from the expected storm. The following day Lonsdale announced that he would take “the original records [!] just as they were made by Dr. Cook in the Arctic regions,” together with a fifty-thousand-word manuscript, to Copenhagen on the steamer United States of the Scandinavian Line, sealed in a strongbox, padlocked and guarded against interlopers. Later Lonsdale revealed that this package was merely “a dummy to trap conspirators who have resorted to every means to gain possession of Dr. Cook’s data.” The real documents, he said, had already been dispatched on a faster steamer. Lonsdale was bluffing – an indication of the paranoia of that time; the records presented at Copenhagen were the ones he took with him. There is no shred of evidence that anyone in the Peary camp had the slightest interest in appropriating them.
By this time the press was alive with rumours. Cook had disappeared – nobody knew where. Reporters tried to find him; one claimed he was at Billy Muldoon’s sanitarium
in White Plains. Cook’s lawyer, a man with the imposing if slightly bizarre name of H. Wellington Wack, claimed he had sailed for Naples. A close personal friend of Cook’s, Charles Wake, denied it. An irrepressible deskman at the usually sober Times couldn’t resist that:
COOK OFF SAYS WACK;
SAYS WAKE NOT SO
By November 27, the affair had taken on a dime-novel quality. Wack announced that he had evidence from “absolutely reliable sources” of “one of the most diabolical plots that had been hatched against an explorer or any other man.” The lawyer claimed that “some persons hostile to Cook” had hired three agents, a woman and two men, to poison Lonsdale. They had boarded the United States in New York, he said; the woman was to attempt to flirt with the young man while the others drugged his champagne. With Cook’s secretary out of action, they would ransack his cabin for the explorer’s data and make away with it.
Carefully skirting the laws of libel, Wack, with many a wink and nudge, made it clear who was behind the alleged conspiracy. The “opposition,” he said, had hired three detectives to spy on Cook. The opposition, of course, could only be the Peary Arctic Club. “We hired detectives to watch their detectives,” Wack declared, explaining how the plot had been discovered. This preposterous tale, which was quickly exploded, was only the most outlandish example of the unfounded suspicions that swirled about the Cook camp. The strongest card the explorer’s supporters had to play was to present their hero as a lone underdog, battling single-handedly against the power, money, and influence of an entrenched Arctic establishment.
But young Lonsdale arrived in Copenhagen unscathed, with his iron box containing Cook’s documents. He took the box to the university, accompanied by two detectives, and formally turned it over. In New York, meanwhile, the Times, which was not above seeing diabolical plots on its own, had a new anti-Cook scoop on its front page. Two men, also with Dickensian names – Loose and Dunkle – swore that Cook had hired them to fake his astronomical observations. George Dunkle was an insurance man, Captain A.M. Loose an expert navigator. They had certainly approached Cook with an offer of help, but whatever work they may or may not have done for him (and for which they too said they’d not been paid) never appeared in the documents that went to Copenhagen. But their accusations, however irrelevant, contributed to the public’s disillusionment with Frederick Cook.
The real blow fell three days before Christmas, 1909. The University of Copenhagen issued a report announcing that Cook’s submissions constituted no proof that he had reached the Pole. All that Walter Lonsdale had brought in his padlocked strongbox was a sixty-one-page typewritten report that he himself had prepared and a sixteen-page typewritten transcript made from what Cook claimed were copies of his original notebooks.
Lonsdale, who was about to return to his post in Copenhagen, had clearly fallen under Cook’s spell. The sixty-one-page report turned out to be virtually identical with the story the New York Herald had published under Cook’s by-line more than two months earlier. The second document, based on the copies of Cook’s notebooks, contained no original astronomical data – no calculations arrived at from readings of sextant, compass, and chronometer that should have been scribbled down on the spot and entered in the appropriate place in a journal. Such a journal – greasy, smudged, and often tattered – with its day-by-day chronology supported by regular observations in the explorer’s own cramped hand would have supplied convincing evidence that Cook had been where he claimed he was. But Cook’s papers provided no evidence that he’d been anywhere.
To produce these two typewritten documents, neither of which differed greatly from what was already known, Cook and Lonsdale had laboured for the best part of two months! For these they had padlocked a strongbox, indulged in an apparent deception, and engaged detectives as guards – all, presumably, in the belief that the public would swallow the myth that Cook was dispatching to Copenhagen records so secret, so valuable, and so persuasive that a mysterious Peary-inspired cabal would stop at nothing to lay hands on them.
The Copenhagen committee issued a curt statement declaring that the two documents were “inexcusably lacking” in information that would prove that any astronomical observations had actually been made; nor did they contain any details describing the practical work of the expedition that might enable the committee to determine their reliability.
Cook did not respond. But in his book, published in 1911, he affected to believe that the committee had simply returned a mild verdict of “not proven,” a claim echoed by his supporters through the years. Cook wrote that “they never said, mind, that I had not found the Pole; they merely said my … [proof] was not absolutely positive.”
In fact, the committee was indignant. There was lacking “to an outrageously inadmissible degree” proof that would suggest Cook had performed any astronomical observations at all. One committee member, Commander Gustav Holm, a noted explorer, declared that Cook’s papers “convict him of being a swindler.” Knud Rasmussen, who also signed the report and who had been a Cook supporter, called the matter “a scandal.” The papers submitted, he said, were “most impudent … no schoolboy could make such calculations. It is a most childish attempt at cheating.” Other Danish experts chimed in. Commander Horgaard, another explorer, declared, “I can only regard Cook now as an impostor.” The secretary of the Danish Geographical Society said it was the saddest event of his life. “As an explorer there seems to be no doubt that Cook is absolutely unreliable.” The Danes, who had wined and dined their hero, now turned on him. Peter Freuchen’s editor asked to have the anti-Cook article back; he was now prepared to publish it.
Suddenly, Cook was anathema. In New York on December 24, the big Christmas shopping day, the stores reported that Cook toys had suddenly gone out of vogue. Dolls dressed in white furs and bearing some resemblance to the explorer, small sledges carrying a fur-clad figure and labelled “Dr. Cook on his dash to the Pole,” and a series of mechanical devices bearing Cook’s name had become a glut in the market.
The affair was further confused by Walter Lonsdale’s announcement that Mrs. Cook would arrive shortly in Copenhagen with the “original” notebooks that Cook had once claimed he hadn’t brought with him from Etah. These, Lonsdale declared, had been sent separately in case of foul play. Cook’s casual attitude to his own documents had long since been replaced by a paranoiac obsession to preserve them, even when it turned out they weren’t worth preserving. The so-called original notebook – the only one Mrs. Cook turned over to the university committee – was found to contain nothing new. In fact, the university announced that it appeared that “important parts of it are manufactured.”
This was too much even for H. Wellington Wack, the exposer of dark and sinister plots, who was forced to face the truth that Cook’s “proofs” weren’t worth stealing and never had been. The flexible Mr. Wack tried to salvage some scraps of integrity by confessing, belatedly, to a certain scepticism. He revealed that he had seen the diary in question before it was sent and thought the handwriting remarkably even, especially as Cook was supposed to have been wearing two pairs of mittens when he held the pencil.
Wack, Wake, and Lonsdale scrambled to dissociate themselves from the discredited explorer, now travelling incognito in Europe. So did the Arctic Club, which Cook had helped found, and the Explorers’ Club of New York, which had once elected him president. Both summarily kicked Cook out. In just eight months he had made the dizzy descent from hero to pariah.
As Cook tumbled, Peary soared. He was the hero of the hour, enriched by Hampton’s record-breaking fee, engulfed by lecture offers (he wouldn’t speak for less than a thousand dollars), honoured by testimonials, elevated to honorary membership in the New York Chamber of Commerce and, shortly after, given a triumphal welcome in England followed by an extraordinary reception by the Royal Geographical Society.
The reasoning was flawed, but, given the circumstances, understandable. If Frederick Cook hadn’t got to the Pole, then, surely Robert Peary
must have.
But had he?
5 The end of the quest
The quest for the Arctic Grail, which had occupied most of the nineteenth century, ended early in the twentieth, not with a bang but with a long, distasteful, and often farcical whimper. That is not the way knightly quests are supposed to finish. The canons of romance dictate neat and noble endings – high sacrifice (Scott, in the Antarctic); gallant rescue (Stanley, in Livingstone’s Africa); brilliant triumph (Burton, at the source of the Nile). When Cook reached Denmark in May of 1909 he seemed to have capped the long search with a stunning climax. That was what the world wanted but didn’t get. From the moment Peary reached Labrador, both stories began to unravel, like a frayed sledge thong. The process has continued until this day.
Cook and Peary were opposites in almost every way, but they had one thing in common – a desire to win at any cost, fair or foul. In this obsession, they were the harbingers of the new century – the American century – in which winning is everything and it matters not how you play the game. The nineteenth-century explorers, British and American, who ventured into the frozen world were of a different breed. They were ambitious, certainly; they wanted the prize of Passage or Pole; but their enthusiasms were those of the amateur. They stopped along the way, as the modern song has it, to pick the flowers. The phrase is more than a metaphor, as anyone who has read the long appendices to their journals – jammed with Latin names for new species – will understand. They were explorers in the true sense in that they explored in a way that Cook and Peary failed to do. Peering at new life forms, scribbling down names for unknown plants and lichens, chipping away at chunks of gneiss and feldspar, recording water temperatures, ocean depths, and tidal movements, they added to the world’s store of useful knowledge. The new Grail was as impossible to reach in the Victorian Age as the old one had been in Arthurian days, but it acted as the lure that caused the mysterious archipelago of bald and forbidding islands to be exposed. In turn, it made saints and heroes out of flawed but courageous human beings, from the ambitious Parry and the incautious McClure to the passionate Kane and the eccentric Hall.
The Arctic Grail Page 71