My attainment of the Pole

by Frederick Albert Cook

[22] When Captain Adams arrived off the haunts of the northernmost Eskimos, he sent ashore a letter to be passed along to Mr. Peary, as he was expected to return south during that summer. In his letter Captain Adams told of my attainment of the Pole. The letter got into Mr. Peary's hands before he returned to Labrador. With this letter in his pocket, Mr. Peary gave as his principal reason for doubting my success that nobody else had been told that I had reached the Pole. I told Whitney, I had told Pritchard—thus Peary's charge was proven false later. But why did he suppress the information which Captain Adams' letter contained? With this letter in his pocket, why did Mr. Peary say that no one had been told?

[23] Captain Robert A. Bartlett, of the Peary ship Roosevelt, has figured much in this controversy. Most of his reported statements, I am inclined to believe, are distorted. But he has allowed the words attributed to him to stand; therefore, the harm done is just as great as if the charges were true. He allowed Henry Rood, in The Saturday Evening Post, to say that my expedition was possible only through the advice of Bartlett. Every statement which Rood made, as Bartlett knows, is a lie. He has allowed this to stand, and he thereby stands convicted as party to a faked article written with the express purpose of inflicting an injury.

Bartlett cross-questioned my Eskimos about instruments. By showing them a sextant and other apparatus he learned that I not only had a full set, but he also learned how I used them. Peary, although having Bartlett's report on this, insinuated that I had no instruments, and that I made no observations. Bartlett knew this to be a lie, but he remained silent. He is therefore a party to a Peary lie.

In the early press reports Bartlett is credited with saying that "Cook had no instruments." A year later, after Bartlett returned from another trip north, faked pictures and faked news items were printed with the Bartlett interviews and reports. There was no protest, and at the same time Bartlett said that books, instruments, and things belonging to me had been destroyed. In the following year Bartlett announced that he was "going after Cook's instruments." Has the press lied, or has Bartlett lied? Next to Henson, Mr. Peary's colored servant, Captain Bartlett is Peary's star witness.

George Borup, in "A Tenderfoot With Peary," after repeating in his book many pro-Peary lies, tried to prove his assertion by an alleged study of my sledge (P. 300): "Except for its being shortened, the sledge was the same as when it had left Annoatok. It weighed perhaps thirty pounds, and was very flimsy."

This is a deliberate lie, for it was only a half-sled, reassembled and repaired by old bits of driftwood. After this first lie he says, in the same paragraph: "Yet it had only two cracks in it." The upstanders had been cracked in a dozen places, the runners were broken, and every part was cracked.

Borup shows by his orthography of Eskimo words that he knows almost nothing of the Eskimo language. Therefore he may be dismissed as incompetent where Eskimo reports are to be interpreted. He is committed to the Peary interests, which also eliminates him from the jury. But in his report of my sled he has stooped to lies which forever deprive him of being credited with any honest opinion on the Polar controversy.

[24] Professor Armbruster and Dr. Schwartz, of St. Louis, at a time when few papers had the courage to print articles in my defence, appealed to W. R. Reedy, of the Mirror, for space to uncover the unfair methods of the Pro-Peary conspiracy. This space was liberally granted, and the whole controversy was scientifically analyzed by the Mirror in an unbiased manner. Here is shown an important phase of the Peary charges, from the Mirror, April 21, 1910. As it clearly reveals the facts, I present part of it as follows:

The point made by Dr. Schwartz, that there is a contradiction between Peary's statements of September 28 and October 13, is well taken. The statement of October 13 is a point-blank contradiction of the previous one. Dr. Schwartz notes that when Peary made, on September 28, what Peary called his strongest indictment of Dr. Cook, Peary must have had with him at Bar Harbor the chart with the trail of Cook's route, and infers that, as the later charge was by far the stronger indictment of the two, there must be some other explanation of the contradiction.

Analysis of this contradiction develops one of the most serious propositions of the whole Polar controversy. Mr. Peary might now say that he was holding his strongest point in reserve, but such explanation would not be sufficient, for he stated that the indictment of September 28 is "the strongest that has been advanced in Arctic exploration ever since the great expedition was sent there," and no child is so simple as to believe that the indictment of September 28 is at all comparable in magnitude to the one of October 13. Upon analysis, we find that there is indeed another explanation, and only one, and that is, that when the indictment of September 28 was made, the one of October 13 had not been conceived or concocted, and it will show that Peary, Bartlett, McMillan, Borup and Henson, all who signed the statement of October 13, perpetrated a gross falsehood and imposition upon the public. All are caught in the one net.