Peary Cook Controversey

Peary-Cook

Peary and Cook: The 100-year battle for the North Pole

In 1891, polar explorer Robert E. Peary was on one of the many failed attempts to reach the North Pole that defined his early career when disaster struck. He injured his leg, which could have been a life-threatening condition in the severe arctic cold. Fortunately, a young doctor on his expedition, Frederick Cook, was able to treat Peary and perhaps save his life.1

Out of such an experience, one might expect an uncommon bond of friendship to develop. Instead, Peary and Cook spent their later years as bitter enemies embroiled in one of the major controversies of the early part of the 20th century - both of the men claimed to be the first to reach the North Pole; Peary in 1909 and Cook in 1908. Both camps initiated a war to discredit the other side and the men took the fight to the grave and, in a manner, beyond it. Both sides continue to use the Internet, books and articles to wage a nasty war of allegations, accusing each other of everything from racism to outright fraud.

How did such an acrimonious battle develop and what has allowed it to persist almost 100 years later? The answers lie within the personalities of the men themselves, public doubts about each of their achievements, the politics of the time and the mystique of the North Pole.

Peary was, without a doubt, a man obsessed with reaching the North Pole. When he claims to have reached the Pole, on April 6, 1909, he wrote in his diary that he had achieved "the prize of three centuries, my dream and ambition for twenty-three years," and there was not an ounce of hyperbole intended in his words.2 Peary made several unsuccessful expeditions to the Pole before claiming success, letting its cold, inhumane temperatures and dangerous terrain push him to the brink of death repeatedly.3 His recurring failures seem to have emboldened, not embarrassed, him, and he returned to the Arctic each time more determined than ever to claim its elusive prize.

As Maeder points out, Peary was not only a brave explorer, but also an egomaniac.4 an honor student at Bowdoin College and an accomplished engineer whose work took him to some exotic places, Peary had a taste for adventure and was accustomed to success. And Peary was not, by many accounts, a team player. When Peary and Cook returned from their ill-fated expedition at the end of the 19th century, Peary forbade Cook to publish his scientific observations on arctic life, stifling Cook's scientific urges out of fear of increasing Cook's notoriety.5 There would only be one star on Peary's team: Peary.

Some historians have alleged that Peary's ego also prevented a critical African-American team member, Robert Henson, from receiving the recognition he deserved for assisting Peary's expedition.6 While race was a fairly obvious factor in history downplaying Henson's achievements (he was not awarded a medal from the National Geographic Society until 2001, long after his death), Peary's practice of keeping Henson's contributions in the background likely played a role as well.7 What should have been a great moment in African-American history remains somewhat obscured to this day, lost in the long shadow cast by Peary.

Partly because of Peary's ego and partly because of his many failures to reach the North Pole, we can imagine the sense of indulgence and pride he felt when he was finally able to telegraph in September 1909 that he had planted the American flag at the North Pole.8 So, imagine Peary's frustration when he learned that five days before he announced his successful expedition, his former pupil, Cook, claimed to have reached the North Pole the year before, in 1908.

While Peary believed he had achieved one of the great feats of mankind, little did he know that Cook was being celebrated in the press and wined and dined by European royalty.9 in fact, that same September Cook visited New York where he was greeted by thousands of cheering fans, driven in a motorcade, serenaded by a choir, and received telegraphed congratulations from Pres. William Howard Taft and the Pope.10

Cook initially congratulated Peary on his feat, saying Peary's observations would confirm Cook's, but the warm sentiments were not returned and hostilities simmered and then broke into an open, public war.

After parting ways with Peary, Cook had become an accomplished explorer in his own right, perhaps to Peary's chagrin. Cook's crowning achievement to that point was a claimed conquering of Alaska's Mt. McKinley, which had never before been climbed, in 1906. In the public's view, he had developed solid arctic credentials and his claim to have reached the North Pole was credible, even if the timing of his announcement was somewhat dubious.

Cook was honored by world dignitaries, made a small fortune speaking around the world, and authored several books about his arctic experiences. Cook was at the pinnacle of a long and arduous life journey, for he was the ultimate boot-strap man pulling himself up from difficult circumstances.

Cook spent a spartan childhood in New York's Catskill mountains, and was forced to care for his widowed mother while putting himself through medical school.11 He married, but subsequently lost his first wife during a difficult childbirth.12 His palpable need to exit reality for the surreal life of the explorer is almost understandable, and this life path brought him notoriety and wealth that must have previously been unimaginable.

Without question, there was fame to be had in becoming the first man to conquer the North Pole, but perhaps for Peary and Cook, the stakes were a bit higher still. After Peary's many failures and Cook's personal difficulties, the Pole held a promise of redemption for each man, and they both wanted badly to claim the achievement. The Pole was not big enough for both of them.

When both men claimed in 1909 to have reached the North Pole, they touched off a race that would prove longer and more grueling than any of their previous polar expeditions - the race for credibility.

Peary's expedition was remarkable for the speed with which he claimed to have reached the North Pole, particularly in light of his previous failures. but, in fairness to Peary, he made some key changes that seemingly allowed for better results. First, be brought a team of native Inuits on the expedition and used their methods of arctic survival, such as wearing the furs of arctic animals and building igloos for warmth.13 He planned his trip carefully, spending the winter on Ellesmere Island in Northern Canada before setting out for the North Pole with his team on March 1-1909. He claimed to reach the Pole just 37 days later, a speed considered remarkable by even today's standards.14

Cook, by contrast, claimed to have taken a route that was several hundred miles west of Peary's, accompanied by two Eskimos and allegedly reaching the Pole on April 21, 1908. The natural question, of course, was what took Cook nearly a year and a half to report his achievement? Cook claimed that he and his crew became bogged down by severe weather on the return to Greenland, and that he was forced to live with his companions in a dug-out barrow and to kill animals at knife-point to stay alive.15

It was an amazing tale of survival that would have made excellent dime-novel fodder, and, indeed, there was great interest in the tale. The New York Herald paid Cook $30,000 for the rights to his tale of courage and survival, and Cook was a hit in the publishing market and on the lecture circuit.16

Peary smelled a rat and he and his supporters sought to undermine Cook's claim - Peary even claimed that Cook's Eskimo guides affirmed that Cook came nowhere near the Pole.17 Still, there were already some interesting politics shaping up. As was mentioned, the Herald had $30,000 invested in Cook's story and the National Geographic Society, the definitive source on matters of world exploration, and the New York Times were sponsors of Peary's trip.18 Everyone seemingly had a stake in the outcome of the Peary-Cook war and the public was left unsure who to believe, as conflicting accounts were published by all three media sources.

The controversy created a public frenzy that both Cook and Peary were too happy to feed, waging their war against each other openly in the press. Cook even attended one of Peary's speaking engagements, to wide press coverage, receiving applause from attendees as he walked to take his seat in the front of the auditorium.19 a confrontation was avoided, but the situation only made the public more interested in knowing who had, in fact, reached the Pole first.

The truth was, there were problems with both men's versions of events. The problems with Peary's claims were centered on speed and geography. Peary's claim that he had reached the Pole in 37 days was labeled as impossibly fast by some arctic experts. In fact, many subsequent expeditions attempted and failed to follow Peary's route and reach the Pole in 37 days, and the feat was not accomplished until 2005.20

Peary's other problem was one of geography. The geographical data that he returned with, particularly as it concerned Greenland, was simply erroneous and there was debate over whether these were simple errors of science or outright fabrications.21 Henderson claimed that Peary's diary lacked the amount of wear and grease stains one might expect of an object that had been to the Poles, and that the penmanship was far too perfect to be written by a man whose extremities must have been numbingly cold.22

Naturally, none of these things add up to hard and fast evidence - for example, although the penmanship in Peary's diary is clearly quite tidy, there are in fact stains on the pages.23 What constitutes enough staining? That is clearly a matter of interpretation.

Perhaps the problems surrounding Peary's claims were lost in the house of cards that was collapsing all around Cook in the year after he and Peary made their claims. As was mentioned, there was suspicion surrounding the fact that it took nearly a year and a half for Cook to announce that he had reached the North Pole. Plus, Peary was openly doubting Cook and claiming that Cook's Eskimo guides claimed Cook's tales were a hoax.24 but the problems only grew from there.

Cook refused to provide supporting evidence or data to verify his claim. As Maeder points out, Cook repeatedly found excuses to avoid turning over notebooks, astronomical data or anything else that could prove his expedition had succeeded, eventually leading his own lawyer to stop defending him.25 When Cook eventually turned some documents over to the University of Copenhagen, which had previously feted Cook, they were considered so implausible that the university president resigned in disgrace.26

Rumors also began to circulate that Cook had never really climbed Mt. McKinley, which had been one of the defining moments of his career. A crew member (who may or may not have been in league with Peary) claimed that Cook had faked the photo that had been used to prove his ascent, taking it from a promontory much lower on the mountain.27

Was the McKinley photo a hoax? Cook was certainly a talented photographer who took excellent photos, particularly given the technological limitations of the time, during his expeditions. He may not have faked the photo, but the ability to do so was likely well within his ken, which is bound to only feed speculation.

And, really, it didn't matter much at the time. The speculation that Cook had faked the McKinley climb interacted dangerously with his hole-ridden story of having reached the North Pole, and the end result was that a picture of Cook as a fraud began to emerge. Cook was demonized in the world press, and even changed his appearance and fled the United States.28 Cook still had supporters, many of whom believed that the flaws in his polar claims were a result of his poor understanding of geography and astronomy, and not some master scheme. Still, the tide was turning against him and this was an opportune time to step out of the spotlight.

Peary, by contrast, was faring much better in his claim to assert his polar credentials. The National Geographic Society, which, again, had a financial interest in his mission, certified that he had reached the North Pole. A subsequent investigation by Congress produced the same finding, and Congress issued a proclamation in 1911 that Peary had, in fact, been first to reach the North Pole.29 Peary successfully lobbied for a Navy pension and retired, dying in 1920 with his credibility mainly intact.

And, after all, the battle between Peary and Cook was all about credibility - one man's word against the other's - and Cook spent many of the later years of his life further impugning his own credibility. Cook's data, for one reason or another, was always dicey, and whether you believed Cook reached the North Pole or climbed Mt. McKinley largely depended on how you weighted Cook's personal credibility. And Cook's credibility was in tatters in the last years of his life.

Cook spent most of the 1920s in federal prison for mail fraud for his role in running an alleged stock scheme. Cook served as president of a Texas oil company that essentially had no assets and no prospects, but he was able to trade on his notoriety to sell stock to people who eventually lost great sums of money. He was berated at his sentencing, with the judge calling his business "damnably crooked" and reflecting on whether Cook had any decency at all.30

As the scandal was snapped up by the press, it became increasingly easier for the public to believe that perhaps Cook also lied about his polar expeditions. and, really, it would have been as opportune a time as any for Cook to admit that his polar achievements were simply sprung from the machinations of his mind.

But he never did. Cook never relented on his claim to have been the first person to have reached the North Pole. He spent the 1930s trying to persuade Congress and the American Geographical Society to take another look at his claim, and he threatened to sue an encyclopedia publisher for issuing information that was not supportive of his claim.31

By this time, however, Cook was to some extent a broken man; still cheered by some, but a pariah to others. Cook still had enough star power to win a presidential pardon for his crimes from Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940, just months before Cook died. Cook took his battle for redemption to the grave - his headstone was inscribed with the words, "recognized by many as the first discoverer of the North Pole."32

But the conflict between Peary and Cook could not be ended by something as trivial as death. The war between both sides' supporters is waged to this day with a level of vindictiveness that is shocking for a century-old conflict and perhaps offers a modern-day glimpse at how contentious the fight must have been while Peary and Cook were alive.

The Frederick a. Cook Society, run by Cook descendents and other supporters, seems to exist with the dual aims of rehabilitating Cook's image while thoroughly discrediting Peary as an explorer and as a man. In the summer of 2006, the society's Web site at www.cookpolar.orgdevoted almost its entire home page to an article depicting Peary as a racist for his treatment of his African-American colleague, Henson.33

It bears mentioning that Peary's views on race are far from established fact. Other experts claim Peary considered a Henson a dear friend and the fact that he minimized Henson's contributions was more an issue of Peary's ego then Henson's race.34 Bear in mind that Peary also sought to minimize Cook's contributions when the two men were on an expedition together.

The Frederick a. Cook Society also specializes in providing information that rehabilitates Cook. An entire section of the society's Web site focuses on affirming that Cook actually summited Mt. McKinley the biographical section of the site even spins Cook's years in prison, claiming the land in Texas he was hoping to explore for oil eventually produced one of the country's largest reserves.35 the matter is in part glossed over and in part ignored.

One might expect the aggressive tactics of Cook's descendents and supporters, as they are trying to rehabilitate a man who was vilified by many at the end of his life. But Peary's supporters take an equally low road in defending his credentials. The Peary & Henson Foundation (www.pearyhenson.org) offers some interesting information about the lives of Henson and Peary, including biographies and original documents, such as articles and diaries. But the foundation's Web site spends far more energy, almost to a comical degree, assaulting the character of Cook, making sure his integrity is dead and stays buried.

The Web site repeatedly calls Cook a con-man and compares him to the disgraced executives of the former energy company Enron.36 the Peary & Henson Web site is not for the faint of heart. Visitors can learn Cook's prison identification number, read articles supporting the notion of Cook as a fraud, and read scandalous allegations about his family, such as a story about his relatives harassing elderly members of Peary's crew or paying off journalists and academics to write favorable articles about Cook.37

Quite clearly, passions are still running high on both sides and the personal animosity that existed between Peary and Cook during their lifetimes has somehow persisted to this day.

The ongoing vindictiveness of the battle between the Peary and Cook camps is perhaps best explained by the fact that, nearly a century after both men claimed to have reached the North Pole, there are many elements of both men's stories that are still unresolved. History has not selected either man as the winner of the race for the Pole, and, to some degree, has decided that perhaps neither man won. Whether there were ill intentions by Peary or Cook remains a hotly debated topic.