What is in the lost notebook?

The content of Cook's notebook (Fig. 1) can be divided into four parts:

Fig. 1. The cover of Cook's lost polar notebook

1. 1. Cook's original diary entries, written in the field from the day he left his winter base until he approached his jumping off point over the Arctic Ocean to the pole from the northern terminus of Axel Heiberg Island.

2. 2. What Cook said were his ‘original field notes’ of events which ran from the end of the original diary entries until the day before he regained land in June after attaining the North Pole on 21 April 1908.

3. 3. A connected and elaborated narrative of events covering Cook's expedition from the time it arrived in Greenland until 18 March 1908, the day he said he started over the polar pack ice for the pole.

4. 4. Essays, notes, memoranda, observations and lists in no particular order.

As noted, the whereabouts of the original notebook are unknown. All trace of it was lost after it was returned to Cook's private secretary on 30 January 1911. However, the close similarity of material in the lost notebook to passages in My attainment of the pole and later writings suggests that the notebook was still in Cook's possession for some time after it was returned to him, perhaps even as late as the 1930s. Although the photographic copy made by the Danes makes the recovery of the original moot, the original might answer a few of the questions about the notebook that are still outstanding. For instance, it might be possible to tell exactly which pages were removed from it, or a comparison of the actual notebook with the photographic copy made by the Danes might disclose further ‘modifications’ made after it had been returned to him, and thus be irrefutable evidence of Cook's tampering with his original records.

The lost notebook and its relationship to Cook's other writings

It is often said that the truth of an unwitnessed assertion, such as Cook's claim to have attained the pole, is impossible to prove absolutely. However, evidence can be examined, and if there is enough of it, the likelihood of the truth of such an assertion can be arrived at with a high degree of certainty. The narrative of such a journey is key to establishing its relative truth and can be tested by evidence, to some extent, by examining the consistency of the narrative, in all its forms, presented by the maker of the assertion. Cook wrote no fewer than six published accounts that touched on significant parts of his polar journey. In addition, Cook penciled several ‘draft’ accounts that are preserved, to a greater or lesser extent, in the extant notebooks he kept between 1907 and 1909, now at the Library of Congress (Bryce Reference Bryce2013: 235).

Throughout his career, Cook could not resist while reporting his real experiences, unusual as they were, the temptation of embroidering them to make them extraordinary. Although comparing all of the versions Cook left is tedious and often confusing, having so many is a benefit to anyone searching for the truth that lies beneath his well-embroidered tale. The embroidered details, in fact, do not matter so much to a writer who has something to hide, except to the extent they aid him in hiding aspects he wishes to suppress. What concerns such a writer more is not to reveal details that throw the main outlines of his final story into doubt. Moreover, when someone writes many accounts, even embellished ones, of events that actually happened, he eventually includes most of the truth in the composite of all the accounts. And when he goes back over his drafts and realizes that perhaps he has said too much, since he is trying to obscure what actually happened in the specific, he leaves out conflicting details in his finished account. Therefore, a reader of such ‘draft’ or variant material needs to be more interested in what has not been used in the final narrative rather than the embellishments that have been added, and be alert to any differences that amount to subtractions from the draft in the finished product. The study of the content of the lost notebook when compared to Cook's finished narrative and his other notebooks reveals such significant unused material.

Aside from Cook's own writings, the only other literate eyewitness to Cook's expedition was Franke, who traveled with him the first six days of his polar attempt. He published an account of his experiences in Germany in 1914 (Franke Reference Franke1914). By then, Cook's own account had been published in German by the same publisher (Cook Reference Cook1912). Nevertheless, Franke's account differs from Cook's in some significant ways. Additionally, members of Peary's 1908 expedition who interviewed Franke in August 1908 also left records of what he said to them, acting as a check on his published account.

Of most importance, however, is the record Cook left in his six surviving manuscript notebooks which he kept during his expedition. A description of each of Cook's notebooks is available in Bryce Reference Bryce2013: 235 as cited above. It is these that hold the strongest evidence that Cook's story of how he reached the pole was a journey of the imagination and not one of fact. Still, Cook did travel a long distance between February 1908 and his return to Annoatok in April 1909. The facts of that actual journey are the object of this paper, and not the possibility that he attained the pole, which the content of his lost notebook positively rules out.

The key to unraveling fact from fantasy in this matter lies in establishing Cook's actual timetable, because a study of Cook's various accounts makes clear that he manipulated dates to fit the invented timetable he presented in his final narrative. Chronology is an all-important aspect of determining the reliability of any unwitnessed assertion. Frederick Cook was notorious in his writings for vague chronologies. Anyone just reading My attainment of the pole will have no hope of ever figuring out exactly where he was on a particular date on his polar trek with a few exceptions. But in any explorer's story of a journey to the North Pole, even unwitnessed, there are four points that have to be given fixed dates: the date he left his winter base; the date he started over the Arctic Ocean for the pole; the date he reached the North Pole; the date he regained land. Cook cites these dates as: 19 February 1908; 18 March; 21 April; 14 June. Once these dates have been set, any truthful circumstantial narrative must support each of these fixed dates absolutely. Any evidence that throws any one of them off even a day throws off the chronology of the entire connected narrative after that date.

Of these four dates, we have a literate witness to only one of them, the start date. Franke says it was 25 February, not 19 February (Franke Reference Franke1914: 66). But even before his actual start, there is good evidence that raises doubts about Cook's reported chronology. This evidence comes in the form of the diary Cook kept over the winter of 1907–1908 (Cook Reference Cook1907). He wrote it almost daily, contemporaneously with the events it describes, and he left it at his box house when he departed on his journey. It is written in ink, and could not have been tampered with easily. It subsequently returned to the United States with Franke in August 1908, and Cook had no opportunity to amend it in any way until he returned to America in September 1909. By that time, his polar narrative was being published in The New York Herald and so had taken on a fixed form.

The chronology Cook gives in this diary for the movements of advance parties he sent to Ellesmere Island to look for a suspected shipwrecked crew and to lay a depot at the head of Flagler Bay, is not the same as the chronology he presents in My attainment of the pole. And Cook's diary entries leading up to his claimed departure date end on 17 February with repeated statements that he did not plan to leave until after his claimed departure date. Indeed, he even left two letters at his winter quarters dated 20 February, one to Knud Rasmussen, in which he stated he planned to leave ‘in a day or two’ (Peary Reference Peary1908 contains these letters that were seized upon Peary's arrival at Etah in August 1908). Clearly, he did not leave on 19 February.

Although Franke, in his 1914 book, says the date of departure was 25 February, when Peary's ship reached Etah in August 1908, he found Franke in deplorable physical condition and begging to be given passage back to America via Peary's supply vessel, Erik. Peary's contemporaneous notes on what Franke said about Cook's journey at that time record that Cook started for the pole on 26 February, not 25 February (Peary Reference Peary1908 contains these undated notes). John Goodsell, Peary's surgeon, who was a meticulous recorder of facts, also spoke with Franke and also recorded in his diary that Franke told him the date was 26 February (Goodsell Reference Goodsell1908: 10 August 1908). Cook kept the calendar over the winter, so Franke would have had the date of departure from Cook himself, and although the exact date cannot be established absolutely, 26 February seems very likely the correct date when all available evidence is considered.

If 19 February is not the actual date of Cook's departure, then the rest of his fixed dates must be moved up as well, because his narrative accounts for his actions for all the days between his departure and his regaining land. Therefore, if he left a week later than he said, he must have arrived at land's end a week later, and at the pole a week later, or on 28 April, not 21 April.

The date 28 April appears at several places in Cook's notebooks in ways that suggest that Cook's original notion was to have himself arrive at the pole on that day. The clearest of these occurs in a small memorandum book that appears to have once held the earliest outline of Cook's imaginary journey to the pole (Cook Reference Cook1908e). Although most of what once occupied a substantial portion of this book has been erased, an outline of his prospective book in 26 chapters remains intact. Each of these chapters is associated with a span of dates. One such span says ‘Apr. 19–27 88–90’ implying that on those dates he covered those latitudes, or that he was still on his way toward the Pole on 27 April. Chapter 17 is titled ‘about the pole.’ Turning to where this should be in the notebook, it can be seen that nothing had ever been written on the page except a date. Although erased, it is still clearly visible from the impress of the pencil to have been ‘April 28.’ Also, the corner of the page, that in accord with the rest of this notebook should have borne the title of the chapter, has been ripped off.

Before the perfection of aircraft, the problem explorers had in reaching the North Pole was the small window of time after polar dawn during which the circumpolar ice was stable enough to travel over before rising temperatures caused by the return of the sun detached it from the land-adhering ice. So, the later an explorer arrived at the pole on such a journey, the less likely it would be that he could return to land before the ice went out. Peary, who on his 1906 attempt claimed to have turned back about 130 miles short of the pole on 21 April, just barely escaped being stranded on the ice as it drifted strongly to the east above Greenland (Peary Reference Peary1907: Chapter VII). Although ice conditions could vary, sometimes radically, from year to year, if Cook claimed he reached the pole on 28 April, a full week later than Peary turned back in 1906, and therefore had 260 more miles to travel to reach safety than Peary had, his narrative would seem just that much more implausible. It is likely that Cook had this in mind when he decided to set back his definitive arrival to 21 April from 28 April. Or perhaps his setback of his arrival time by one week was merely his compensation to make up the difference of a week in his departure date from 26 February to 19 February. But why, if Cook set his time back a week, did he not choose ten days or two weeks, instead of seven days? There was an inescapable reason why 18 February was the earliest possible date Cook could claim for his departure.

By a chance of fate, Cook had purchased a defective diary in which the signature starting with the pre-dated page for 18 February was missing. Therefore his winter diary (Cook Reference Cook1907) has entries to 18 February and then stops because of the missing signature. Cook certainly remembered that he had stopped his daily entries because of this defect, but may not have recalled the exact date of the last entry, and the diary was in Franke's possession with instructions to carry it home with him. He probably chose 19 February because that was the day the scout party he sent out before him had left Annoatok (Franke Reference Franke1914: 71) and he knew he had not recorded that memorable event in the diary.

The study of Cook's actual movements as reflected in the lost notebook show that his adjustment to his time schedule was not limited to this one-time loss of a week, however. Because Cook's actual timetable was far behind his invented one, he needed to lose actual days as often as he could to bring reality into alignment with his eventual narrative. To this end, Cook changed all the dates in his original diary throughout, but appears to have neglected to rub out two of the original dates, which act as checks on the actual day. A careful reading of the diary entry content allows a fairly close estimate of the actual dates, and a telling remark concerning the weather confirms that the date estimated in this manner is within two days on the estimated date 29 March. (Cook Reference Cook1908a: 135). In addition, although Cook's descriptions of moon phases in his winter diary are accurate through 17 February 1908, several mentions of the phases of the moon assure that Cook's dates as recorded in the lost diary have been changed, because the phases of the moon described there are nowhere near what they would have been on his substituted dates.

By this method of analysis, the diary reveals that Cook was still more than 300 miles from land's end by the shortest practicable route on the day he says he set out over the Arctic Ocean toward the pole, and that his journey just to land's end took nearly twice as long as he later reported. Although Cook's tampering with dates, his erasure of data, and his wholesale destruction of a portion of his original diary make it difficult to establish a reasonably precise chronology after a certain point, what remains in his various drafts shows that it must have been undoubtedly clear to Cook that he had no chance to reach the pole long before he arrived in Nansen Sound, some 120 miles from his jumping off point, and that, in fact, he had already given up on making an actual effort to attain the pole by then.

What follows is a brief summary of Cook's actual trip, which is necessarily partly speculative toward the end because Cook ripped out 18 of the original numbered pages from the back of his lost notebook. But everything it contains is supported by the written evidence Cook left in at least one of his accounts, either in his original diary entries (Cook Reference Cook1908a), the narrative account he added to the lost notebook (Cook Reference Cook1908a), the unpublished abbreviated account he made in a small memorandum book in the form of ‘field notes’ covering his overland journey to land's end (Cook Reference Cook1908c), which he omitted from those published in My attainment of the pole, or his final narrative as it appeared there. Conversely, many of Cook's assertions in his after-the-fact unpublished writings and in My attainment of the pole have been discarded in the following account whenever contradicted by his original diary entries, because its aim is to give as accurate an account as can be gleaned from existing records of the expedition on which he said he had been the first man to reach the North Pole. As such, it differs in some details from even the strict content of the pages of Cook's original diary, which were sometimes altered, truncated or destroyed to bring it into basic alignment with his eventual, improved story. All dates are estimated based on the content of the diary.

Cook's journey to Cape Thomas Hubbard

Before the main expedition party left, Cook had planned to send a scout party ahead to look for a possible route overland into Cannon Fjord from Flagler Bay. (This is its discoverer's original designation in honour of Henry Cannon (Peary Reference Peary1907: accompanying map). The name was apparently later confused with the old spelling of ‘Canyon’ and appears on modern maps as either Cañon or Canyon Fjord.) They were also to secure musk oxen in the game lands Otto Sverdrup had discovered beyond Flagler Bay and meet the main party there, but their departure was delayed by storms. Finally, three Inuit got away on this duty. In his book, Franke asserts positively that this party departed one week before the main party, or 19 February (Franke Reference Franke1914: 71). Cook puts the date as 5 February in My attainment of the pole (Cook Reference Cook1913: 154). Cook's progress can be followed on the accompanying map (Fig 2) and table of his camps (Table 1).

Table 1. Table of Cook's camps

13 April. Cook and 4 Inuit leave Cape Thomas Hubbard for the pole

Fig. 2. Cook's probable route.

The main expedition, composed of Cook, Franke and the eight Inuit, Koolootingwah, Ahwelah, Inugito, Puadluna, Panikpa, Etukishuk, Ahwelyah and Egingwah, driving 11 sledges pulled by 96 dogs left Annoatok on 26 February 1908. They were compelled by open water in Smith Sound to take a northerly course and camped on the ice in three igloos about 20 miles north of Annoatok as the light faded at 4 PM.

The next day they reached the coast of Pim Island near Payer Harbour; it was too dark to bring anything ashore except for the essentials. They spent the night and the next day at Peary's old house, in actuality a railroad caboose, feeding the dogs, nursing the dogs’ sore feet, and picking up the supplies left by a party sent there by Cook in early January to look for the suspected shipwrecked crew mentioned above.

Early on 29 February, to avoid the rough ice to the north, they headed southwest, and then turned northwest up Rice Strait. Progress was slow because of the overloaded sledges and a strong headwind. They paused to rest at Framhavn, where Sverdrup overwintered in 1898–1899, then pushed on before deep snow in Buchanan Bay caused them to stop about six miles north of Cape Rutherford and three miles short of their goal: a cache at Cape Viele, left by Franke and the depot party that had attempted to establish a forward base at the head of Flagler Bay in the middle of January.

On 1 March they were able to reach the cache igloo after an hour's travel. Here they took on the supplies left there by the depot party. It was late in the evening when they camped off Cape Koldewey near the Weyprecht Islands.

In the morning, they heard dogs barking on the opposite cape that Sverdrup called Fort Juliana. They suspected they were probably those of the scout party, and as they were having breakfast, Esseyou, Kudla and Metik came into camp. Esseyou reported that they were unable to find any way onto the icecap from Flagler Bay, and that they were only able to find and kill one musk ox in the valley beyond it, which they were compelled to feed to their dogs. He also reported little snow cover on Ellesmere Land, making sledge travel almost impossible, and very low temperatures. Esseyou said he was therefore going back to Annoatok at once. This news was devastating to Cook's plans. He had counted on a quick passage across Ellesmere Land and living off the musk ox herds reported by Sverdrup there. Without fresh meat, he would have to feed the dogs on the pemmican that he planned on using only once he reached the Arctic Ocean and had started over it for the pole.

Without game, Cook feared he would have to go as far as he could, cache his supplies and return to Annoatok to wait until the next year to try to reach the pole. If so, he would need Franke to safeguard the supplies left at the box house in case they had to live off them for the next winter. After a rearrangement of the sledge loads and an exchange of dogs, Franke and the three Inuit of the scout party started back over their outward route. With more dogs per sledge, but 800-pound loads, Cook and the same eight Inuit he started with headed into Flagler Bay, camped for the night, then reached its head in two days travel.

Because he encountered the same poor snow conditions that Sverdrup had reported, even so early in the season, Cook hoped to reach Ellesmere's icecap, cross it and descend into Cannon Fjord rather than crossing to Bay Fjord via the pass Sverdrup took across Ellesmere Land. That route was also much shorter, so Cook figured he would not have to use up as much of the pemmican that he needed to sustain him on his polar journey.

The ground was swept clear of snow, and they had to use frozen watercourses to advance their supplies to the divide in relays. They were able to kill three musk oxen and rested for a day on the divide. By then Cook had given up any idea of reaching Cannon Fjord, because there was no way to get the heavy sledges up onto the icecap over the bare, precipitous slopes, but he hoped that conditions would improve once over the divide and that he would experience little further delay and reach Bay Fjord by end of the next day via Sverdrup's route. But Cook's experiences crossing Sverdrup Pass were almost identical to Sverdrup's in 1899.

Delayed by a storm and the necessity of relaying, they did not reach the glacier that had barred Sverdrup's way until 13 March. After a reconnaissance, Cook decided the best course of action was to attempt to clear a sledge path along the face of the glacier near where it pressed against the valley wall, and settled into Glacier Camp while this was being done. This delayed further advance until 18 March. On that date in Cook's finished narrative, he claimed he left Cape Thomas Hubbard, at this point still more than 300 miles away by the shortest practicable route, for the North Pole.

On 19 March they reached Bay Fjord at 5 PM near Irene Bay. Here they were detained in camp until 23 March, hunting, resting the dogs, repairing gear, laying a cache on the north side of Bay Fjord for the return, and then by a storm that blew out of Sverdrup Pass. Once they got under way they traveled down the south shore of Bay Fjord to near Marie Island, crossed to the northern shore and camped at the opening of Bay Fjord into Eureka Sound. They traveled up it, and camped near the north cape of Slidre Fjord on 28 March.

Significantly, this is the point in Cook's diary account where he sought to obscure his true movements, because they did not match his eventual story and included actions incompatible with the necessity of starting for the pole as quickly as possible. He did this by rubbing out and writing over some of his original diary entries and renumbering or destroying the last 22 pages of his notebook. However, from what remains in the notebook, compared with his other accounts, his movements and timetable can be approximately reconstructed.

On 29 March Cook continued up the western coast of Ellesmere Island to the opening of Greely Fjord. His objective was Cannon Fjord. This is a detour no explorer whose goal was still the North Pole would have made, because the season was already very late, but Cook now had his reasons. He explains in the narrative account written in the lost notebook that he laid a cache at the head of Greely Fjord with the intention of returning to Greenland by crossing the Ellesmere icecap via Cannon Fjord and descending on the head of Flagler Bay (Cook Reference Cook1908a: 76). This route over Arthur Land would avoid having to return via the already snowless Sverdrup Pass even later in the season. Such a return route would also ensure that he did not run into his support party, who he had instructed to return along the outward route via Flat Sound. Separating himself from any other witnesses was important to a hoax because he needed to keep out of sight long enough to simulate a lengthy trip to the pole and back.

The coldest weather of the journey was now experienced, with the temperature falling as low as -69° F that night. Cook remarked in his diary that it was strange that the coldest days of the season would come ‘in the end of March.’ (Cook 1908: 135). This remark acts as a check on his actual date (Cook claimed it was 12 March) to within two days, because it rules out that it could be 1 April as yet. By the end of the next day they had traveled about 40 miles into the upper reaches Cannon Fjord.

From the extant content of the diary, it took until 4 April to reach the northern point of Shei Island after laying their cache in Cannon Fjord and returning to the tip of Fosheim Peninsula, where they rested, repaired equipment, hunted and laid the cache of freshly slaughtered musk ox meat at the mouth of Greely Fjord before crossing Eureka Sound.

After an especially successful hunt, they took a substantial portion of the meat and headed down the western side of Shei Island to lay a cache in Flat Sound. Again, in doing this, Cook went completely out of his way to ensure that the support party's return route was separated from his own planned return route into Cannon Fjord. In the process of laying the cache he discovered that Shei Island was actually a peninsula, attached by a low, narrow land bridge to the mainland of Axel Heiberg Land at the supposed island's southwest corner, and that Sverdrup's Flat Sound was actually a bay bounded by two capes. Ironically, this discovery, one of the few for which Cook retains credit, proves that he did not take the outward route he claims in My attainment of the pole. There he says he crossed Eureka Sound from near Slidre Fjord and via Flat Sound reached Nansen Sound, leaving out the detour into Cannon Fjord and the near-circumnavigation of ‘Shei Island,’ both incompatible with his published route and time schedule.

From Flat Sound, Cook started up the eastern coast of Axel Heiberg Land on 6 April, and it appears, though it cannot be said certainly from what remains in his diary and his account in My attainment of the pole, that he crossed Nansen Sound the next day from the point of Stangs Fjord because the lower elevations of Grant Land looked more like musk ox habitat than the precipitous country along Heiberg Island's coast. But finding no game along the Grant Land coast in several days travel, he recrossed the sound to arrive at the black cliffs of Svartevaeg on 10 April. In lowlands to the south of them, they killed their last musk oxen, bringing their total kill to 78. They had also slain six polar bears and several hundred arctic hare along their route.

On 11 April they moved on and reconnoitered the double cape that is the terminus of Axel Heiberg Island, looking at the sea ice conditions from its heights. Here, for the first time, Cook set eyes on the chaos of the Arctic pack ice. After a short trip south of the cape, Cook decided to take Ahwelah and Etukishuk, both young, strong and able, with him out onto the ice. He selected the 26 best dogs to pull the two sledges of his own design he planned to take over the ice pack. He also pared down his equipment and supplies to only the essential, caching the rest at the camp he called Cache Point. To help him get over the rough ice pressed against the cape, he decided to take a support party composed of Koolootingwah and Inugito, 20 extra dogs and two additional sleds for the first two days. This would give him a reserve in case he needed to make adjustments to his forces once out on the ice, or if one or more of the sledges met with an accident.

On the morning of 13 April the other four Inuit turned back for Greenland over the outward route. A half-gale was blowing, so the pole-bound party returned to their igloos for a few hours’ sleep. At noon the wind died down and the horizon cleared enough for them to start over the sea ice: five men, 46 dogs and four sledges.

Cook's journey after leaving land

Cook knew he no chance of reaching the pole so late in the season, but he had, nevertheless, several reasons to go out on the dangerous sea ice. A separate notebook (Cook Reference Cook1908b) records Cook's actual journey (Bryce Reference Bryce1997: 970–973 contains a transcription)

The support party stayed with Cook for three days instead of the two he had planned because it took longer than expected to get over the rough ice. These three days on the sea ice had been an ordeal. Cook rated the ice conditions the most difficult he had ever experienced, but they still made an estimated 50 miles and by dead reckoning were now at about 82°10’ N latitude at 95° W. After helping to build an igloo, the support party got ready to head back on 15 April. After the evening meal, Koolootingwah and Inugito left with light sledges hoping to reach Cache Point in 36 hours. Before they left, Cook gave Koolootingwah a letter to take to Franke. In it, Cook said he would return to Annoatok via a ‘shortcut’ (referring to his plan to go over Arthur Land via Cannon Fjord) and estimated that he might arrive by the end of May, but if he was not back by 5 June, Franke should go south on a whaler, taking with him the trunk he had left on the bunk containing his winter diary and photographs, along with the valuable furs and walrus ivory they had bartered for over the winter (Franke Reference Franke1914; 127–128).

On 16 April the ice was far less troublesome, only interrupted by low pressure ridges and leads running more or less east to west that caused little delay. Consequently they made their best distance yet, estimated at 32 miles by dead reckoning, in ten hours. In four days they had made good 82 miles, for an average of just over 20 per day. But it had been exhausting. That night they simply threw themselves onto the sledges and fell asleep.

They were unable to get under way the next day until noon and traveled for six hours before coming up against a wide expanse of open water. Cook took this to be the ‘Big Lead,’ which Peary had reported divided the circumpolar pack and the land-adhering ice. They explored along its shores without finding a way across and finally decided to camp for the night, hoping the lower night temperatures would cause it to freeze over. Cook estimated they had made good 22 more miles, and were now 104 from shore.

The next day the lead was still wide open, but at noon they found a possible crossing place covered by elastic young ice. The crossing was made successfully, but once across this obstacle, they were compelled to cut through pressure ridges with an axe, and it was midnight by the time they camped after making only ten miles for the day. Cook estimated by dead reckoning that they had now traveled a distance of 114 miles northwest of their starting place at an average speed of 19 miles per day.

On the morning of 19 April Cook surveyed the ice ahead from the hummocks just beyond their camping place. Although he had felt the ice looked smoother in the afterglow of midnight, in the better light of morning, ice that looked even more difficult than that of the previous day stretched as far as the eye could see. Cook had known for some time before he started over the sea ice that he had already lost any chance of reaching the North Pole. He had moved his substantial supplies 400 miles to the edge of the polar sea, living off the land as he planned. Progress had been too slow, however, but it could not be helped. He had made his preparations carefully, but he did not count on such a lack of snow on Sverdrup Pass or the difficulty of crossing the glacier that blocked his progress for four days, and he had underestimated the extent of the practical delays needed to feed the dogs on freshly slaughtered meat in order to save the pemmican supply. He had now gone perhaps 60 miles of the straight-line distance of 520 that lay between him and the pole when he left land, but there was not enough time left to reach it and get back before the circumpolar ice separated from the shore-bound.

Even though he knew when he left land that he had no chance, he had gone on anyway. Cook always tried to base his imaginative writings on actual experience, and he lacked experience on the polar ice pack. He needed to go far enough to get a practical idea of the rate of progress he could make over the sea ice with the personnel and equipment at his disposal, so he could realistically describe what the monotonous journey over the polar pack would be like and get some photos of his polar party traveling alone on the pack and of the igloos they built there. He also needed to go far enough to convince his Inuit companions that he had reached the place he sought. But he needed to go only so far. After all, the rest of the way to the pole and back would be just like the 114 miles he had traveled, with perhaps only a glimpse of the unknown land many scientists believed lay in the vast unexplored zone to the west of his route to interrupt the endless fields of purple snows and the lifeless ice-scape that they had covered, only it would be nine times as long. Why endure the monotony of such a journey and the exhausting struggle to get the sledges across the icy barriers to reach a point that looked exactly like the place he stood at that very moment? Why risk going any farther? To risk one's life to reach such an imaginary mathematical point was madness, as he himself would say upon his return. When asked whether he expected to get back when he started and was told that Bradley had rated his chance of success at one in a hundred, Cook replied, ‘No man has any right to take such chances as that’ (The New York Times, 11 October 1909). And after his experience of the last six days, he probably felt it was a physical impossibility as well, even if the season were not already so late.

His experience on the ice had already shown him that the pole was not attainable by dog sledge, but he now had what he needed to achieve his new goal. Much to the Inuit's relief, who feared the leads behind them were already opening, he said he had attained what he had come for, and ordered the sledges turned back for Axel Heiberg Land and home.

Unlike other explorers, Cook had taken care not to leave any dated records along his route to the same purpose that he carefully separated his return route from that of his own supporting party. He must stay away long enough to give the illusion that enough time had passed for him to have been to the pole and back. He left just one dated record, the letter he sent back with the Inuit to Franke, dated 17 March, in which he placed himself on the ‘Polar Sea North of Cape Hubbard’ (Franke Reference Franke1914: 127). His statement in this letter that he expected to be back by 5 June at the latest, and his stated anxiousness in it to go to the Danish settlements immediately upon his return indicate that at the time he wrote the letter he hoped to do just that. But after his brief experience on the polar pack ice, he must have reconsidered. In My attainment of the pole he said as much:

This is an amazing revelation in itself, in that Cook does not mention anywhere else in his published writings his planned return route via Cannon Fjord and Arthur Land, though he makes this quite clear in his narrative account in the lost notebook (Cook 1908a: 76), where he explicitly says he left a cache near the mouth of Greely Fjord, far off his officially reported route. And it also hints that he saw that to claim that he could have gone to the pole from the position stated in his letter dated 17 March and still have returned to Greenland by 5 June would have been absolutely incredible. So he decided upon an alternate plan: he would not go back to Greenland at all.

Instead, he would go south, along the uninhabited western coast of Axel Heiberg Island, and by a roundabout route attempt to reach Lancaster Sound. There, Cook knew, whalers from Dundee, Scotland, visited every year without fail.

Everyone who followed Arctic explorers, and many who did not, were familiar with Fridtjof Nansen's dramatic chance meeting with Frederick Jackson on the desolate shores of Franz Josef Land in the spring of 1896, and his return in triumph to Norway. It caused an absolute press sensation. What better way to raise interest and lend authenticity to his own tale than to have a similar ‘chance’ meeting with a whaler and be taken back to Europe in the autumn of 1908, a full year before Peary could possibly return and put in a claim? In preparation for such a meeting, Cook, against his Inuits’ vigorous objections, even abandoned his dogs and one of his sledges and took to his folding boat once he reached Jones Sound so as to look as though he had been on an arduous journey. But his plan failed. He got only as far as the end of Jones Sound by late August, and so never could make his planned ‘accidental’ rendezvous. By then, he also could not hope to return to Annoatok before winter set in.

Having noted the rich game lands near Cape Sparbo (now Cape Hardy), he backtracked along his outward route and settled down for the winter in a comfortable underground shelter after shooting all the game he needed with the ample ammunition he had taken with him from Cape Thomas Hubbard on 13 April (Cook Reference Cook1913: 198). Once settled, in retrospect, he was probably happy that he had to overwinter. What could be more convincing than that? What faker would spend a ‘Stone Age’ winter with only a couple of ‘savages’ as companions, when he could have perpetrated his hoax much more easily by returning immediately along his outward route to comparative civilization? Because Cook had a rich inner life and an infinite capacity for self-expression and embellishment of his already extraordinary experiences, he no doubt was content to have the winter to try out his story in his five unused notebooks, and with each successive version, perfect the details he would tell the world upon his return. Such a course of self-isolation, and such a fabrication as his notebooks show evolving in meticulous detail in tiny writing, sometimes several lines to the rule, might not have been possible for an ordinary man, but Frederick Albert Cook was no ordinary man.

Cook had an amazing capacity for work, which was evident during any enterprise he undertook. This can be seen in his toils in several occupations as a youth, in his estimable service on Peary's first North Greenland Expedition and Adrien de Gerlache's Antarctic expedition, in his voluminous studies of polar literature, in his endless travels on the lecture and vaudeville circuits portraying himself as a wronged man, robbed of his polar achievement by Peary's ‘Arctic Trust,’ in his work as an oil promoter and in his almost single-handed writing of the prison newspaper at Leavenworth after his conviction for oil shares fraud in 1923. Cook's polar notebooks show that same amazing capacity, as he put version after version of his journey down on paper by the light of a blubber lamp in his winter igloo at Cape Hardy, and as he made a draft of the book he would write asserting his attainment of the North Pole.

In addition to all his talents, Cook had a very high degree of self-confidence that led him to feel he could actually attain the mythical spot that so many had failed to attain, and when he himself failed in his well-planned, genuine attempt to do so, to believe he could convince the world that he had through his experienced-based, but imaginative writings.

Peary's allegations

Peary alleged that Cook's Inuit companions said that after leaving Cape Thomas Hubbard, Cook had traveled only ‘two sleeps’ from shore, which could not have encompassed the 114 mile trip described in the notebook summarized above. But even Peary's own notes on what the Inuit who accompanied Cook said contradict this representation of the length of Cook's trip (Peary Reference Peary1908 contains these undated notes) The notes on Inugito's interview say that he himself went ‘two sleeps’ from shore, which matches Cook's account, because he and Koolootingwah left Cook on the third day out, but after the evening meal and did not sleep in the igloo they helped build that evening. But how close to the truth the entire route Peary claimed the Inuit traced on a copy of Sverdrup's map (Fig. 3) is still debatable.

Fig. 3. The portion of Peary's map showing Cook's route.

On 15 October 1909, the Peary Arctic Club published this map in The New York Times and many other papers serviced by the Associated Press, to whom Peary's minions had mailed it in advance. It was to be held until Peary released his statement concerning what Cook's only witnesses to his poleward journey allegedly told him at Etah after he arrived there in August 1909 on Peary's return from the expedition on which he claimed to have reached the pole on 6 April of that year.

In many respects the route the map shows does not match well with the route Cook's diary and Franke's eyewitness account delineate to land's end. At the start, Peary's map shows a straight-line journey from Annoatok to Cape Sabine, when Cook actually deviated far north to avoid open water at the centre of Smith Sound; it shows him going north of Pim Island rather than up Rice Strait; it leaves out his detour into Cannon and Greely Fjords to lay caches to enable his anticipated return ‘shortcut’ to reach Flagler Bay by crossing Arthur Land. It shows him going through Flat Sound, when his diary indicates he went around ‘Shei Island,’ top to bottom. It also shows him traveling through Nansen Sound up the east coast of Axel Heiberg Island rather than along Ellesmere's coast, which may or may not be accurate, because Cook destroyed the original entries he made during that portion of the trip, although there are a number of suggestions that he crossed Nansen Sound from Stangs Fjord in his other accounts. And on Cook's journey from Cape Hardy in the spring of 1909, it leaves out the detour he had to make to the north to avoid open water in Smith Sound before reaching Annoatok again in April 1909.

Peary, after all, knew from questioning the Inuit who had gone with Cook that he undoubtedly had reached Cape Thomas Hubbard. Therefore, Peary was not at all interested in the particulars of the route Cook followed to get there. Peary's notes taken after questioning Etukishuk, Ahwelah and Inugito give no details of the route toward Cape Thomas Hubbard. For that portion of Cook's route, Peary may have just filled in the shortest route himself, feeling that would be the one any serious explorer would follow. Given all of this, it is probable that the first portion of the journey was not actually mapped for Peary by the Inuit. This is bolstered on the Inuit map by the fact that they noted none of the musk ox or bear kills along the outward route, but documented other game secured on the journey once they headed down the west coast of Axel Heiberg Land and on Devon Island. But when it came to Cook setting out for the ‘Splendid Jewel of the North,’ as Peary called the object of his ambition (Peary Reference Peary1910) he was very much interested in exactly where Cook went.

Peary's map places the then unknown Meighen Island (‘small low island’ on the map) almost precisely at the position it was ‘discovered’ in 1916, and it shows the Fay Islands below it, as well as the two small islands Cook discovered off the southwest coast of Ellesmere above Cape Tennyson and named after his Inuit companions, now called the Stewart Islands, all of which were unknown at the time of Cook's trip. Therefore, the portion of Cook's journey after he returned to Cape Thomas Hubbard is probably as it was described by Cook's two Inuit, except that Peary tried to minimize the distance Cook actually traveled north to make his ‘Inuit evidence’ most damning, because it would not even be far enough to be out of sight of land.

The route outlined by Peary down the uninhabited coast of Axel Heiberg Land guaranteed Cook would not encounter his support party and would enable him to reach Lancaster Sound. Also, such a course would certainly take long enough to simulate a polar journey and use up the ample supplies still on the sledges before reaching his planned ‘rescue’ there. He could have then returned to Europe to pick up honours and acclaim, which he felt would assure the general acceptance of his claim to have reached the North Pole once he returned to the United States. This would allow him to profit in the short term from his writings and lectures and set him up in the long term in a role similar to that later assumed by Vilhjalmur Stefansson as the ‘Prophet of the North’ (Hanson Reference Hanson1941). However, he was unable to reach Lancaster Sound and so was forced to overwinter at Cape Hardy.

So much the better, Cook may have thought; he needed time to put his story in good order. Certainly there would have been advantages to have presented his claim a year before Peary could possibly return, but even if Peary claimed the pole, he would still have priority. And he would have much more time to perfect his story over an entire winter than would have been afforded him on the return voyage to Scotland aboard a whaler. He used this time well, writing the multiple versions of it that appear in his various polar notebooks, and which eventually took its final form in the version of his polar journey that appeared first in his newspaper reports of 1909 and was finalized only in My attainment of the pole in 1911.

However, the fact that his draft for a large portion of his book was written on the reverse sides of the pages on which he had written his original diary entries on his journey to Cape Thomas Hubbard, prevented him from simply destroying the whole notebook. And his eventual loan of it to the University of Copenhagen, where it was filmed, has now led to his final exposure.

Unfortunately for Cook's plans, Peary arrived back at almost the exact time Cook arrived in Europe in September 1909, called Cook's story into question and set the world press running after the ‘proofs’ of polar attainment even Cook's vivid imagination never imagined being asked of him. His subsequent rejection by the forum he chose to examine his records cast Cook in the light of the greatest faker of his age. But, ironically, the controversy Peary set in motion called his own story into question. The brilliant efforts of C.E. Rost, Cook's Congressional lobbyist, paid by Cook to get a hearing of his polar claims before Congress between 1913–1916, eventually led to Peary's claim of reaching the North Pole on 6 April 1909 to also be considered a hoax (Bryce Reference Bryce1997: 573–603). Nevertheless, Cook made a good living off of his claim until World War I placed the importance of the question of who first reached the mathematical point called the North Pole into its true perspective as a non-issue in a world order on the brink of cataclysm.

Cook's ‘original field notes’: a footnote

The lost notebook also contains a version of the ‘original field notes’ printed in My attainment of the pole (Cook Reference Cook1913: 569–577). There is also another version of these in a small memorandum book inscribed at the front: ‘Copied at Sparbo winter’ (Cook Reference Cook1908c). These three versions of the ‘original field notes’ raise the unexpected question of which one is actually the ‘original.’ The fact is, although Cook claims that My attainment of the pole's field notes are an ‘exact copy from original field papers,’ they are not an exact copy of either of the notebook versions. And although Cook claimed to have copied the ‘original’ into the small memorandum book during the winter of 1908–1909 that he spent at Cape Hardy, his ‘copy’ is not an exact copy of the ‘field notes’ written in the lost notebook either.

Most of the field notes are nondescript, repetitious statements about ice and weather conditions, and, for the most part, these are virtually identical among the three versions. However, when it comes to the crucial ‘discoveries’ of new land and a possible expanse of ice that might be covering submerged land as indicated by the best scientific guess of the time, none of the three versions exactly match. These discoveries proved to be nonexistent.

If the memorandum book ‘copy’ came first, as many of its features strongly suggest, this is the ultimate ‘story in the making,’ the ‘original field notes’ being written from the ‘copy’ into the original diary after the fact. A careful comparison of the two in detail suggests this was most likely the case (Bryce Reference Bryce2013: 312).