But the American public wanted something more than a hero. It demanded a winner, and the only one available was Robert Edwin Peary. The National Geographic Society had given him its seal of approval just a few weeks before the Copenhagen revelations. That was good enough for the public; at the time, it was good enough for the world.
The world was not aware at this juncture of the flaws in the Peary record, as it was of Cook’s. His sighting of a non-existent Peary Channel (twice!) and also of Crocker Land would be believed for years. Nor would the superficiality of the National Geographic’s investigation of his claims be known.
Cook’s reputation, on the other hand, continued its downward slide. In 1910, two separate alpine investigations confirmed that his claim to the ascent of Mount McKinley was a fraud. Two experienced mountaineers, Belmore Brown and Herschel Parker, discovered that the photograph Cook published in Harper’s, purporting to show Ed Barrill standing on the peak, had been retouched to remove a mountain in the background that might have identified the spot. The pair travelled to the area and, using the un-retouched photo as a guide, found the place from which it had been taken. That was twenty miles from Mount McKinley and no more than five thousand feet above sea level.
That same summer, a group of Cook’s supporters from the Mazama Club of Oregon followed his route hoping to prove him right and ended up proving him wrong. At a point ten miles southeast of the summit, his 1907 map “abruptly departed from reasonable accuracy into complete fantasy.”
In August, Peter Freuchen reported that he had found the box Cook left with Whitney at Etah. Cook’s former companion Etukishook had taken it in lieu of the pay Cook had promised but never delivered. (All the two Eskimos got for their work was a penknife and some matches.) The box contained a sextant, four burning glasses, a pocket barometer, and a Fahrenheit thermometer. Freuchen, who spoke the language and knew Etukishook well, asked him several times about books and papers. Had the children taken them as toys? Etukishook insisted there were no papers. “He always wrote in two little books and those he took along when he left us,” he explained, adding that Cook had done his writing during the winter at Cape Sparbo. As for the so-called polar journey, the Eskimo said they had never been out of sight of the mountains of Axel Heiberg.
With Cook out of the picture in the late fall of 1909, Peary began to push furiously for a promotion, employing a professional lobbyist to plead his case in Washington. He wanted, before retirement, to be advanced to the status of rear admiral, a rank generally reserved for officers of the line; it would mean an annual pension of $6,500. But Congress would have to approve, and that meant hearings before the House Naval Affairs Committee. It was these hearings that were to cast the first cloud over Peary’s claim to have reached the Pole. The explorer had enemies in the Navy, jealous of his repeated leaves and his celebrity, contemptuous of his appropriation of a rank to which he was not entitled and his furious efforts to be raised to flag rank. The Navy also knew how to lobby, and there’s little doubt that this disgruntled attitude prompted the hard questioning that Peary faced from some members of the congressional committee.
The hearings began in March 1910, were adjourned for nine months, and then resumed in January 1911. The long delay was caused by Peary’s refusal to produce his original records – the same kind of “proofs” that had been required of Cook – on the grounds that to make them public would be breaking faith with the publishers of his forthcoming book. This was patent nonsense – a delaying tactic. No narrative intended for the lay public was going to stand or fall on the basis of astronomical computations. Nor did Peary’s contract contain any pledge of secrecy. He could easily have submitted the material the congressmen asked for without any protest from his publishers. Indeed, since he was on the naval payroll, these computations could be considered public property. He chose not to submit them, and the committee didn’t press him. Instead, it adjourned the session until the book appeared. By then another year had passed, and Peary had solidified his position in the public’s esteem by producing a best seller of adventure and hardship on the frozen polar sea. The delay worked for Peary. With press and public weary of the dispute, the testimony received less attention than it would have at the height of the controversy.
Nonetheless, the seven-member congressional committee placed on the record evidence that later critics would examine in the re-evaluation of Peary that has since taken place. The chief revelation was the slipshod nature of the investigation carried out by the subcommittee of the National Geographic Society in October 1909.
After his return from the Arctic, Peary was reluctant to let anybody but his friends in the NGS examine his records. He was careful not to submit them to Copenhagen, perhaps because, as Dennis Rawlins has pointed out, he realized that some of the university committee’s sarcastic references to Cook’s failure to check his compass variations applied equally to him. Indeed, many of the charges against Cook – his lack of scientific proof, his reported excessive speeds over the ice, his reluctance to release his observations, the absence of any corroborative witnesses – applied also to Peary, who brought back nothing of scientific value from his final polar dash. He made no scientific report to the Navy, which paid his salary, and he ignored repeated requests from the Coast and Geodetic Survey for data that it could add to its Arctic charts. At best, he was highhanded and evasive; at worst, he was a charlatan.
None of this seemed to have bothered the three men who examined the Peary record for the National Geographic Society. They could scarcely be called dispassionate observers. All were partial to Peary. Two, Henry Gannett, the NGS’s vice-president (soon to be president), and Admiral Colby E. Chester, were close friends. Chester, in fact, was a member of the Peary Arctic Club and had already publicly denounced Cook as a fraud. The third committee member, Otto H. Tittman, was supervisor of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, which, at Roosevelt’s request, had sponsored Peary and kept him on naval pay. Both Gannett and Tittman admitted they believed in Peary long before they looked at his records. As Gannett put it, “everybody who knows Peary’s reputation, knows he would not lie.” All three sat on the dinner committee for the NGS award ceremony for Peary in 1906. All three were on the NGS committee that voted a thousand dollars to support Peary’s final North Pole expedition. Thus, the society was committed to Peary. Gilbert Grosvenor, a past president and editor of its magazine, was a close personal friend who had already assured Peary that his wife and family “have been confident from the first how this affair will end.” At that point – before the NGS made up its official mind – he had been making arrangements for a paid lecture that Peary was to give before the society.
In spite of this cosy arrangement, Peary was still reluctant to come to Washington, perhaps because he too had suffered a nervous breakdown. Certainly he had to be nudged by the committee. At last his lawyer turned up, bringing a document that fell far short of adequate evidence. It was, in fact, very similar to the report that Cook had submitted to Copenhagen: nothing more than a general account of the expedition – and only up to the time that Bartlett had turned back. There was nothing to cover the final polar attempt. The NGS committee demanded more.
About two weeks later, on November 1, Peary finally arrived. He lunched with the three committee members and then repaired to Admiral Chester’s home, where the most cursory examination took place. As Gannett later testified, “We simply sat down with him and read his journal from his original records; he had an original record made in a little book, a notebook you know, at that time, and it had all the earmarks of being the original.” It’s not easy to tell from the later testimony exactly what it was the three men examined or how much time they spent examining it. Tittman admitted he read very little because he “was very much occupied with other matters.” Gannett, in spite of seeing Peary’s notebooks, was so badly informed that he got the explorer’s travel statistics on the polar dash wrong and had to be prompted by Gilbert Grosvenor.
Fifteen months after this mee
ting, when the explorer finally appeared before the Naval Affairs Committee, he was remarkably vague and uncertain about the events of that day – events that should have stood out in his mind since they were designed to settle the question of his having attained the Pole. He wasn’t able to remember, for instance, how detailed the scrutiny of his notebook had been. “I will not say they read all of it carefully,” he testified. “It was passed around. I cannot say how much of it they read.”
After the NGS’s three appointees looked at the written record, they went to the Union Station to examine the instruments that Peary had left there in a trunk. In his later testimony Peary refused to say whether or not any of the NGS examining trio checked the instruments to see whether or not they were accurate. But dusk had fallen and “I should imagine that it would not be possible to make tests there.” As one of the congressmen, Ernest W. Roberts, later wrote in a minority report, “the fact that the incidents of the day made no sharper impression on his mind than is shown by his testimony is very conclusive evidence that the examination of his records was anything but minute, careful or rigorous.”
The National Geographic Society did its best to make it appear that the tests were rigorous. The society’s president, Willis L. Moore, another friend of the explorer, announced that it was “absolutely conclusive.” In fact, the entire examination had occupied no more than the time between lunch and dinner.
The title “National Geographic Society” impressed the public, as it impressed many foreign organizations, all but one of which accepted its findings without further investigation. But the NGS, which sounded so official, had no official status. It was, in reality, a private publishing company, interested in promoting magazine circulation. The only official organization to examine Peary’s records was Britain’s Royal Geographical Society. At its request, Peary sent it copies of his journal and some of his observations. When his submission was considered, only seventeen members of the RGS board of thirty-five were present. Eight voted for Peary, seven were against, two abstained. The narrow margin indicates that the issue was in doubt.
Yet Peary couldn’t lose. In spite of his equivocations before the naval committee, most of the politicians (including the ex-president) were on his side. Congressman Robert Macon denounced him as “a fake pure and simple,” but neither the congress nor the country was in a mood for any more fakers. The naval committee approved him, and congress in 1911 retired him with the pension of a rear admiral and gave him an official vote of thanks. For the rest of his life, Civil Engineer Peary would be known to press and laymen as Admiral Peary, a spurious title that nobody bothered to dispute.
He was now listed in the history books and the encyclopaedias as the discoverer of the North Pole. At last he had what he wanted – the laurel wreath of recognition for which he had struggled with so much pain and so much personal sacrifice for most of his adult life. “I must have fame!” he had told his mother; now he had it, but it wasn’t quite what he had expected, for fame came accompanied by its disreputable cousin, notoriety. The unseemly controversy with Cook had left the nation with a sour aftertaste. The sudden dazzling triumph that should have been his had been clouded by doubt, postponed, and in the end watered down. Cook was still very much in the public eye. His name, popping up on the front pages from time to time (usually to his discredit), only served to remind the public that there was some argument about the quest for the Pole.
The embattled doctor continued to insist that his story was true. He returned to New York in December 1910, after a year-long absence in Europe and South America, in order to promote a four-part series in Hampton’s Magazine giving his side of the story. Characteristically, when he signed the contract, he had given no more than casual attention to the fine print in which he agreed that the publisher was making “no editorial guarantees whatsoever.” In short, they could tamper with his story; and tamper they did. The galleys were cut apart and certain subtle changes made. Cook, after noting the torments of Arctic travel, had explained that he couldn’t pinpoint the position of the Pole absolutely – no explorer could. But Hampton’s doctored that passage to read: “No one should discredit me until he knows what I endured during two and a half years of Arctic experience.… Not until then can he understand my mental condition at the time and appreciate just what I feel now and what I believe to be true. Did I get to the North Pole? Perhaps I made a mistake in thinking that I did; perhaps I did not make a mistake. After mature thought I confess that I do not know absolutely whether I reached the Pole or not.…”
That was damning enough. The promotion department of Hampton’s made it worse. On December 1, about a fortnight before the issue was due to appear on the stands, the magazine held a press conference in which it doled out a few tidbits from what would be billed as “DR. COOK’S CONFESSION.” The following day, readers of the Times’s front page were told that “in these articles Dr. Cook will admit frankly that he doesn’t know whether he reached the north pole. He now says that his privations during his travels toward the pole put him in a ‘mental condition,’ which the American public has not been able to ‘understand.’ ”
Poor Cook! Whatever his failings, he scarcely deserved this kind of shameless distortion or the damning headlines that pursued him: “DR. COOK ADMITS FAKE! … DR. COOK MAKES PLEA OF INSANITY.” When Cook’s book, My Attainment of the Pole, appeared in 1911, giving his version of the story, the Times damned it with a sarcastic headline: “DR. COOK CONFESSES HE DIDN’T CONFESS.” Four more years would pass before another confession, by a former Hampton’s subeditor, would reveal the truth.
Cook’s book did not restore his reputation; it was too late for that. In it, he toned down some of the more expansive statements he had blurted out on his arrival in Denmark before he learned that Peary was also claiming the Pole and thus before he realized that he would be forced to provide irrefutable data for his claims. His descriptions of Bradley Land were less specific; he no longer pinpointed his positions to the last second of latitude – impossibly precise calculations that caused the scientific community to scoff; and he tried, not too successfully, to explain his first rash and confusing statement to the Herald that “a triangle of 30,000 square miles has been cut out of the terrestrial unknown.” (If, as he tried to explain to Philip Gibbs, that was what he had been able to see for fifteen miles on each side of his route, he would have had to be plodding along a ridge 150 feet above the general ground level.)
Cook’s fierce attempts to restore his own credibility – he tried, vainly, to sue anyone (including his rival) who questioned his veracity – continued to irritate Peary and rob him of the peace that might otherwise have accompanied his retirement. The full report of the naval committee, with its embarrassing testimony, lay like an unexploded bomb in a congressional archive. It had never been made public – was, indeed, guarded from distribution – and was almost impossible to find. But in 1916 Congressman Henry Hegelsen of North Dakota located a copy and read the most devastating portions into the Congressional Record. Hegelsen’s analysis of the evidence took up 120 columns of small print and would provide much of the underpinning for the anti-Peary books that followed.
For this Peary had no one but himself to blame. He had lobbied hard in congress for a rear admiral’s pay and pension. Now the results of that lobbying were coming back to haunt him. Hegelsen followed up his attack in July of 1916 with a second blast, tearing apart Peary’s book The North Pole and urging (vainly) that Peary be removed from the retired list and his pension stopped because the explorer’s “claims to discoveries in the Arctic regions have been proven to rest on fiction and not on geographical facts.…” But Hegelsen got nowhere. Four years later, Robert Edwin Peary was dead at the age of sixty-four.
Cook outlived him by twenty years, but these could not have been happy. In 1923 he was convicted of stock fraud in Fort Worth. In the judge’s remarks, there is a broad hint at earlier deceptions: “Now, Cook, you may stand up.… This is one of those times when your peculiar an
d persuasive personality fails you, doesn’t it? You have at last got to the point where you can’t bunco anybody. You have come to the mountain and you can’t reach the latitude; it’s beyond you.… Oh, God, Cook, haven’t you any sense of decency at all …?” On and on he went, attacking Cook’s “monumental” vanity and nerve. Then he sentenced Cook to fourteen years and nine months in prison and fined him fourteen thousand dollars.
Peary’s ghost continued to haunt Cook. When he became eligible for parole in March 1930, one of his rival’s chief supporters, Professor William Hobbs, author of an uncritical biography of Peary, tried to organize a protest to keep him behind bars. It failed and Cook was free.
In the years that followed, the discredited explorer tried to sue a variety of writers for claiming that he had faked the polar trip. He lost every case. In 1940, Franklin Roosevelt pardoned him as an act of mercy towards a dying man. Cook had just finished another book about his adventures, Return from the Pole, when he suffered the stroke that killed him. The book was published posthumously.
One can feel compassion for Cook, the Prince of Losers – so casual that he left his precious instruments and records behind, so inattentive that he didn’t read the promotional letters his agents were dispatching (even though one of them had already been convicted of fraud), so naïve that he didn’t understand the implications of Hampton’s “no editorial guarantees.” He has been seen by some as an anti-establishment hero (the establishment being represented by Peary and his powerful friends) – a sympathetic albeit a tragic figure. But he is also a maddening one, and it must be said that most of the tragedy was of his own making. There are some significant parallels between the Mount McKinley charade and the polar venture. Cook’s attempt to climb the mountain – his second in two years – was a spur-of-the-moment decision; so, to a considerable degree, was his attempt on the Pole. In both cases he returned without bringing corroborative evidence. In both cases he announced that he would provide positive proof – a new attempt on the mountain to support his case, another expedition to Etah to interview his native companions and retrieve his records. In each instance, it was pure bluff.
The Arctic Grail Page 72