My attainment of the Pole

by Frederick Albert Cook

O. H. Tittman, chief of a department under which part of Mr. Peary's work was done.

With a flourish of trumpets, including pages of self-boosting news distributed by Mr. Peary's press agents, this commission began its important investigation. At the time, it was said that all of Mr. Peary's original field papers and instruments were under careful scrutiny. Later it was shown that one of the jury saw only COPIES. On November 4, 1909, was issued the verdict of this jury: "That Commander Peary reached the North Pole on April 6, 1909."

This verdict, at its face value, was fair; but the circumstances which surrounded it before and after were such as to raise a doubt that can never be removed. With the verdict came the insinuation that no one else had reached the Pole before Peary; that my claim of priority was dishonest. A nagging press campaign continued to emanate from Washington.

I have no objection to Mr. Peary's friends endorsing him—a friend who will stretch a point is not to be condemned. But when such friends stoop to dishonorable methods to inflict injury upon others, then a protest is in order. My aim here is not to deny that Mr. Peary reached the Pole near enough for all practical purposes, but to show how men sacrificed their word of honor to boost Mr. Peary and to discredit me.

The verdict of this jury which was to settle the controversy for all time was sent out on wires that encircled the globe. Soon after there was a call for the data upon which that jury passed. The public called for it; the Government called for it; foreign geographical societies asked for it. No one was allowed to see the wonderful "proofs." Why?

Officially, that commission said that Mr. Peary's contract with a magazine prevented the publication of the "proofs." But every member of the commission was on the Government pay-roll. Why, may we ask, should a Government official be muzzled with a bid for commercial gain? This contract was held by Benjamin Hampton, of Hampton's Magazine. If Hampton's contract muzzled the Government officials, Mr. Hampton thought so little of the so-called "proofs" that he did not print them. For, in Hampton's installment, with the eye-attracting title, "Peary Proofs Positive," the real data upon which the Peary case rests were eliminated. Why? In Mr. Peary's own book that material is again suppressed. Why? For the same reason that the jury was muzzled. The material would not bear public scrutiny!

The real difficulty is that, in the haste to floor rival claims, Mr. Peary and all his biased helpers fixed as the crucial test of Polar attainment an examination of field observations. Mr. Peary had his; he had refused to let Whitney bring part of mine from the North; and, therefore, he and his friends supposed that I was helpless, by assuming this false position. But when Mr. Peary's own material was examined, it was found that his position rested on a set of worthless observations—calculations of altitudes of the sun so low that it is questionable if the observation could have been made at all. So long as three men, behind closed doors, could be made to say "Yes, Peary reached the Pole," and so long as this verdict came with the authority of a Geographic Society and the seeming endorsement of national prestige, the false position could be impressed upon the pubic as a bona-fide verdict. But, with publicity, the whole railroading game would be spoiled. These three men could be influenced. But there are a hundred thousand other men in the world whose lives depend upon their knowledge of just such observations as were here involved. They knew publicity would bring the attention of these men to the fact that Mr. Peary's polar claim rests upon the impossible observations of a sun at an altitude less than 7° above the horizon. The three armchair geographers, seldom out of reach of dusty book-shelves, passed upon these worthless observations. Not one of one hundred thousand honest sextant experts would credit such an observation as that upon which Mr. Peary's case rests—not even in home regions, where for centuries tables for corrections have been gathered.

[29]A year later, at the Congressional investigation of the Naval Committee in Washington, Mr. Peary and two of his jurors admitted that in the much-heralded Peary proofs "there was no proof." Members of the Geographic Society acknowledged their "examination" of Peary's instruments was made in the Pennsylvania Station, when they opened Mr. Peary's trunk and casually looked over its contents. Therefore, Mr. Peary's claim for a second victory now rests upon his book.

In forcing the controversy, the press and the public have come to the conclusion that one or the other report must be discredited. This is an incorrect point of view. Each case must be judged upon its own merits. To prove my case, it is not necessary to disprove Peary's; nor, to prove Peary's, should it have been necessary to try to disprove mine.

Much has been said about my case resting in foreign hands. This came about in a natural way. It was not intended to convey the idea that my own countrymen were incompetent or dishonest. In the case of the National Geographic Society they have irretrievably prostituted their name; but the same is not true of other American authorities.