My attainment of the Pole

by Frederick Albert Cook

The world now seemed brighter. The most potent factor in this change was food—and more food—a bath and another bath—and clean clothes. Mr. Whitney offered me unreservedly the hospitality of my own camp. He instructed Pritchard to prepare meal after meal of every possible dish that our empty stomachs had craved for a year. The Eskimo boys were invited to share it.

Between meals, or perhaps we had better call meals courses (for it was a continuous all-night performance—interrupted by baths and breathing spells to prevent spasms of the jaws)—between courses, then, there were washes with real soap and real cleansing warm water, the first that we had felt for fourteen months. Mr. Whitney helped to scrape my angular anatomy, and he volunteered the information that I was the dirtiest man he ever saw.

From Mr. Whitney I learned that Mr. Peary had reached Annoatok about the middle of August, 1908, and had placed a boatswain named Murphy, assisted by William Pritchard, a cabin boy on the Roosevelt, in charge of my stores, which he had seized. Murphy was anything but tactful and considerate; and in addition to taking charge of my goods, had been using them in trading as money to pay for furs to satisfy Mr. Peary's hunger for commercial gain. Murphy went south in pursuit of furs after my arrival.

For the first few days I was too weak to inquire into the theft of my camp and supplies. Furthermore, with a full stomach, and Mr. Whitney as a warm friend at hand, I was indifferent. I was not now in any great need. For by using the natural resources of the land, as I had done before, it was possible to force a way back to civilization from here with the aid of my Eskimo friends.

Little by little, however, the story of that very strange "Relief Station for Dr. Cook" was unraveled, and I tell it here with no ulterior notion of bitterness against Mr. Peary. I forgave him for the practical theft of my supplies; but this is a very important part of the controversy which followed, a controversy which can be understood only by a plain statement of the incidents which led up to and beyond this so-called "Relief Station for Dr. Cook," which was a relief only in the sense that I was relieved of a priceless store of supplies.

When Mr. Peary heard of the execution of my plans to try for the Pole in 1907, and before he left on his last expedition, he accused me of various violations of what he chose to call "Polar Ethics." No application had been filed by me to seek the Pole. Now I was accused of stealing his route, his Pole, and his people. This train of accusations was given to the press, and with the greatest possible publicity. A part of this was included in an official complaint to the International Bureau of Polar Research at Brussels.

Now, what are Polar ethics? There is no separate code for the Arctic. The laws which govern men's bearing towards each other in New York are good in any part of the world. One cannot be a democrat in civilized eyes and an autocrat in the savage world. One cannot cry, "Stop thief!" and then steal the thief's booty. If you are a member of the brotherhood of humanity in one place, you must be in another. In short, he who is a gentleman in every sense of the word needs no memory for ethics. It is only the modern political reformer who has need of the cloak of the hypocrisy of ethics to hide his own misdeeds. An explorer should not stoop to this.

Who had the power to grant a license to seek the Pole? If you wish to invade the forbidden regions of Thibet, or the interior of Siberia, a permit is necessary from the governments interested. But the Pole is a place no nation owned, by right of discovery, occupation, or otherwise.

If pushing a ship up the North Atlantic waters to the limit of navigation was a trespass on Mr. Peary's preserve, then I am bound to plead guilty. But ships had gone that way for a hundred years before Mr. Peary developed a Polar claim. If I am guilty, then he is guilty of stealing the routes of Davis, Kane, Greely and a number of others. But as I view the situation, a modern explorer should take a certain pride in the advantages afforded by his worthy predecessors. I take a certain historic delight in having followed the routes of the early pathfinders to a more remote destination. This indebtedness and this honor I do now, as heretofore, acknowledge. The charge that I stole Mr. Peary's route is incorrect. For, from the limit of navigation on the Greenland side, my track was forced over a land which, although under Mr. Peary's eyes for twenty years, was explored by Sverdrup, who got the same unbrotherly treatment from Mr. Peary which he has shown to every explorer who has had the misfortune to come within the circle he has drawn about an imaginary private preserve.

The charge of borrowing Peary's ideas, by which is meant the selection of food and supplies and the adoption of certain methods of travel, is equally unfounded. For Mr. Peary's weakest chain is his absolute lack of system, order, preparation or originality. This is commented upon by the men of every one of his previous expeditions. Mr. Peary early charged that my system of work and my methods of travel were borrowed from him. This was not true; but when he later, in a desperate effort to say unkind things, said that my system—the system borrowed from himself—was inefficient, the charge becomes laughable. As to the Pole—if Mr. Peary has a prior lien on it—it is there still. We did not take it away. We simply left our footprints there.