My attainment of the Pole

by Frederick Albert Cook

Mr. Whitney especially asked, as a personal favor, the honor of caring for my flag. Later, after his return, he said that as Mr. Peary had refused to let him take aboard my things, he had no alternative but to bury them at Etah. I have no complaint to make against Mr. Peary about this. He was at liberty to pick the freight of his own ship. But he later said: "His [Dr. Cook's] leaving of his records at Etah was a scheme by which he could claim that they were lost." If Mr. Peary knew this, why did he not bring them?

At the time I felt crippled; my feeling of disgust with the problem, with myself, and with the situation began. It would be impossible to give in my report a continuous line of observations. I had no corrections for the instruments. I knew they might vary. I had no means of checking them. I had some copies of the original data, but they were not complete. I should have to rest my whole case on a report with reduced observations, for I knew it would not be possible to send a ship to Etah until the following year. And I also knew that if Eskimos were not given strong explicit instructions all would be lost.

Meanwhile, many apparently trivial accusations against me were being widely discussed, which, never refuted, had their weight in the long run in discrediting my good faith. On every side I was attacked, not so much for unintentional error, as for deliberate falsehood.

In the bewildering days that followed—during which I traveled to various cities to fulfill lecture engagements—I felt alone, a victim of such pressure as, I believe, has seldom been the fate of any human being.

Friends confused me as much as the attacks of foes. Some advised one thing; others another; my brain staggered with their well-meaning advice. Most of them wanted me to "light out," as they expressed it, and attack Mr. Peary. A number suggested the formation of an organization, the work of which would be to issue counter attacks on Mr. Peary, to be written by various men, and to reply systematically to charges made against me. Such a course was distasteful to me, and, furthermore, the selfish, envious origin of all of Mr. Peary's charges seemed evident.

Many of the other attacks seemed so ridiculous that I felt no one would believe them—which was another of my many mistakes. The more serious charges I believed could wait until I had time to sit down and reply to them at length. I felt the futility of any fragmentary retorts. At no time did I have an intelligent grasp of the situation, of the excited and exaggerated interest of the public, or of the fluctuating state of public opinion.

In my many years of Arctic work I had gathered pictures of almost every phase of Arctic life and scene; on subsequent trips, unless for some special reason, I did not duplicate photographs of impregnable, unmeltable headlands, or of walrus, or icebergs which I considered typical. In the early rush for illustrative material I gave a number of these to the Herald, stating they were scenes I had passed, but which had been taken on an earlier expedition. By some mistake, which is not unusual in newspaper offices, one of these pictures was put under a caption, "Pictures of Dr. Cook's Polar Trip," or something to this effect. Whereupon, Mr. Herbert Bridgman, secretary of the Peary Arctic Club, shouted aloud, "Fraud!" and others took up the cry. A further charge that these pictures were not mine at all, but had been stolen or borrowed from Herbert Berri, was advanced—an absolute untruth, as I had the negatives, from which these pictures were made, in my possession.

What, in those early days, had seemed a serious criticism offered against my claim, was that I had exceeded possible speed limits by asserting an average of about fifteen miles a day. The English critics were particularly severe. According to their reading, this had never been done before. Admiral Melville had taken this up in America before my arrival; by the time I got to New York, Mr. Peary had made a report of twenty to forty-five miles daily under similar conditions, and I asked myself the reason of the sudden hush.

Much space was now given to the criticism by learned men of my giving seconds in observations. The point was taken that as you near the Pole the degrees of longitude narrow, and seconds are of no consequence. Therefore I was charged with trying to fake an impossible accuracy. I always regarded seconds as of little consequence, put them down as a matter of routine—for in that snow-blinding, bewildering North I worked more like a machine than a reasoning being—and now the inadvertent use of these was used to cast suspicion upon me.

With this attack, like echoes from many places, came reiterations of the criticism, which, polly-like, was taken up by Rear-Admiral Chester. Professor Stockwell of Cleveland had earlier brought out this academic discussion. Because I had seen the midnight sun for the first time on April 7 it was claimed I must have been at a more southern point of the globe than I believed. At the time it seemed the only serious scientific criticism of my reports which was used against me.