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.
Whether I was on a more southerly point of the globe than I believed or
not, I had not used the midnight sun, seen through a mystic maze of
unknowable refraction, to determine position; to do so would have been
impossible. With a constant moving and grinding of the ice, causing
opening lanes of water, from which the inequality of temperature drew an
evaporation like steam from a volcano, it is impossible at this season
to see a low sun with a clear horizon. One looks through an opaque veil
of blinding crystals. Every Arctic traveler knows that even when the sun
is seen on a clear horizon, as it returns after the long night, his eyes
are deceived--he does not see the sun at all, but a refracted image
caused by the optical deception of atmospheric distortions. For this
reason, as I knew, all observations of the sun when very low are
worthless as a means of determining position. The assumption that I had
done this seemed mere foolishness to me at the time.
Staggered by the blow that Whitney had buried my instruments in the
North, the recurring thoughts of these harassing charges certainly had
no soothing effect.
Alone, I was unable to cope with matters, anyway. I under-estimated the
effect of the cumulating attacks. Oppressed by the undercurrent feeling
that it was all a fuss about very little, a thing of insignificant
worth, and disturbed by the growing uncertainty of proving such a claim
to the point of hair-breadth accuracy by any figures, despair overcame
me.
I was so busy I could not pause to think, and was conscious only of the
rush, the labor, the worry. I no longer slept; indigestion naturally
seized me as its victim. A mental depression brought desperate
premonitions.
I developed a severe case of laryngitis in Washington; it got worse as I
went to Baltimore and Pittsburg. At St. Louis, where I talked before an
audience said to number twelve thousand persons, I could hardly raise my
voice above a whisper. The lecture was given with physical anguish. I
was feverish and mentally dazed. Thereafter, day by day, my thoughts
became less coherent; I, more like a machine.
I do not exaggerate when I say that there was practically not one hour
of pleasure in those troubled days. The dinner which was given by the
Arctic travelers at the Waldorf-Astoria pleased me more than anything
during the entire experience. I felt the close presence of hundreds of
warm friends; I was conscious of their good will.
I can recall the ceremony of presenting the keys of the City of New York
to me, but I was so confused and half ill that I was not in a condition
to appreciate the honor.
After I had been on my lecture tour for a few weeks, I began to feel
persecuted. On every side I sensed hostility; the sight of crowds filled
me with a growing sort of terror. I did not realize at the time that I
was passing from periods of mental depression to dangerous periods of
nervous tension. I was pursued by reporters, people with craning necks,
good-natured demonstrations of friendliness that irritated me. In the
trains I viewed the whirling landscape without, and felt myself part of
it--as a delirious man swept and hurtled through space.
I suppose I answered questions intelligently; like an automaton
delivered my lectures, shook hands. I have been told I smiled pleasantly
always--mentally I was never conscious of a smile. It is strange how,
machine-like, a man can conduct himself like a reasonable being when,
mentally, he is at sea. I have read a great deal about the subconscious
mind; on no other theory can I account for my rational conduct in public
at the time. Really, as I view myself from the angle of the present, I
marvel that a man so distraught did not do desperate things.
_Author's Note._--I have never attempted to disprove Mr. Peary's
claim to having reached the North Pole. I prefer to believe that Mr.
Peary reached the North Pole.
So avid have been my enemies, however, to cast discredit upon my own
achievement, by such trivial and petty charges, that it seems
curious they have never noticed or have remained silent about many
striking and staggering discrepancies in Mr. Peary's own published
account of his journey.
In Mr. Peary's book, entitled "The North Pole; Its Discovery, 1909,"
published by Frederick A. Stokes Company, on page 302, appears the
following:
"We turned our backs upon the Pole at about four o'clock of the
afternoon of April 7."
According to a statement made on page 304, Mr. Peary took time on
his return trip to take a sounding of the sea five miles from the
Pole.
On page 305, Mr. Peary says: "Friday, April 9, was a wild day. All
day long the wind blew strong from the north-northeast, increasing
finally to a gale." And on page 306: "We camped that night at 87 deg.
47'."
Mr. Peary thus claims to have traveled from the Pole to this point,
a distance of 133 nautical miles, or 153 statute miles, in a little
over two days. This would average 761/2 statute miles a day. Could a
pedestrian make such speed? During this time Mr. Peary camped twice,
to make tea, eat lunch, feed the dogs, and rest--several hours in
each camp.
Why I should never have gone out of sight of land for more than two
days, as he has charged, when such miraculous speed can be made on
the circumpolar sea, is something Mr. Peary might find interesting
reasons to explain.
On page 310, Mr. Peary says: "We were coming down the North Pole
hill in fine shape now, and another double march, April 16-17,
brought us to our eleventh upward camp at 85 deg. 8', one hundred and
twenty-one miles from Cape Columbia."
According to this, Mr. Peary covered the distance from 87 deg. 47', on
April 9, to 85 deg. 8', on April 17--a distance of 159 nautical miles in
eight day. This averaged twenty miles a day.
On page 316, he says: "It was almost exactly six o'clock on the
morning of April 23 when we reached the igloo of 'Crane City,' at
Cape Columbia, and the work was done."
Mr. Peary left 85 deg. 8' on April 17, according to his statement, and
traveled 121 miles to Cape Columbia in six days, arriving on April
23. This last stretch was at the rate of twenty miles a day. To sum
up, he traveled from the North Pole, according to his statements, to
land, as follows:
The first 133 nautical miles southward in two days, at the rate of
66 nautical miles, or 761/2 statute miles, a day; the last 279
nautical miles in fourteen days, an average of 20 miles a day.
According to Peary's book, Bartlett left him at 87 deg. 46', and Mr.
Peary started on his final spurt to the Pole a little after midnight
on the morning of April 2. By arriving at the point where he left
Bartlett on the evening of April 9, he would have made the distance
of 270 miles to the Pole from this point and back, in a little over
seven days.
In the New York _World_ of October 3, 1910, page 3, column 6,
Matthew Henson makes the following statement: "On the way up we had
to break a trail, and averaged only eighteen to twenty miles a day.
On the way back we had our own trail to within one hundred miles of
land, and then Captain Bartlett's trail. We made from twenty to
forty miles a day."
At the rate of twenty miles a day on the way up, which Henson claims
was made, it would have taken 6 days and 18 hours to cover the
distance of 135 miles from 87 deg. 47' to the Pole. Adding the thirty
hours Mr. Peary claims he spent at the Pole for observations, eight
days would have elapsed before they started back. Peary says the
round trip of 270 miles from 87 deg. 47' N. to the Pole and the return
to the same latitude was done in seven days and a few hours.
Why has Mr. Peary never been asked to explain his miraculous speed
and the discrepancy between his statement and Henson's?
Henson was Mr. Peary's sole witness. When Mr. Peary, in a framed-up
document, endeavors to disprove my claim by quoting my Eskimos, it
would be just as fair to apply Henson's words to disprove Peary.
Moreover, inasmuch as Mr. Peary's partisans attacked my speed limits
when I made my first reports, does it not seem curious indeed that
they now accept as infallible, and _ex cathedra_, the published
reports of the almost supernatural feat in covering distance made by
Mr. Peary?
THE KEY TO THE CONTROVERSY
PEARY AND HIS PAST--HIS DEALING WITH RIVAL EXPLORERS--THE DEATH OF
ASTRUP--THE THEFT OF THE "GREAT IRON STONE," THE NATIVES' SOLE SOURCE
OF IRON
XXXIII
ACTIONS WHICH CALL FOR INVESTIGATION
Aiming to be retired from the Navy as a Captain, with a comfortable
pension; aiming eventually to wear the stripes of a Rear-Admiral, which
necessitated a promotion over the heads of others in the normal line of
advancement, a second Polar victory, which was all that Peary could
honestly claim, was not sufficient. Something must be done to destroy in
the public eye the merits of my achievement for the first attainment of
the Pole. I had reached the Pole on April 21, 1908. Mr. Peary's claims
were for April 6, 1909, a year later. To destroy the advantage of
priority of my conquest, and to establish himself as the first and only
one who had reached the Pole, was now the one predominant effort to
which Mr. Peary and his coterie of conspirators set themselves. To this
end the cables were now made to burn with an abusive campaign, which the
press, eager for sensations, took up from land's end to land's end,
even to the two worlds. The wireless operators picked up messages that
were being thrown from ship to ship and from point to point. Each
carried unkind insinuations coming from the lips of Mr. Peary. The press
and the public were induced to believe that Peary's words came from one
who was himself above the shadow of suspicion. Their efforts, however,
as we will see later, did not differ from the battle of envy forced
against others before me, but it was now done more openly.
It was difficult to remain silent against such world-wide slanders. But
I reasoned that truth would ultimately prevail, and that the rebound of
the American spirit of fair play would quell the storm.
I had known for nearly a quarter of a century the man for whom the press
now attacked me. I had served on two of his expeditions without pay; I
had watched his successes and his failures; I had admired his strong
qualities, and I had shivered with the shocks of his wrongdoings. But
still I did not feel that anything was to be gained by retaliative
abuse; and the truth about him, out of charity, I hesitated to tell. No,
I argued, this warfare of the many against one, under the dictates of
envy, must ultimately bring to light its own injustice.
I had always reasoned that a quiet, dignified, non-assailing bearing
would be most effective in a battle of this kind. Contrary to the
general belief at the time, this was not done out of respect for Mr.
Peary; it seemed the best means to a worthier end. But I did not know at
this time that the press, dog-like, jumps upon him who maintains a
non-attacking attitude. In modern times, the old Christian philosophy
of turning the other cheek, as I have found, does not give the desired
results.
The press, which, at my home-coming, had lavished praise and glowing
panegyric, now, as promptly, swung completely around and heaped upon my
head terms of opprobrium and obloquy. Faked news items were issued to
discredit me by Peary's associates; editors devoted space to jibes and
sarcasms at my expense; clever writers and cartoonists did their best to
make my name a humorous byword with my countrymen. Much of this I did
not know until long after.
The suddenness of all this--the terrible injustice and unreasonableness
of it--simply overwhelmed me. Arriving from the cruel North, completely
spent in body and in mind, the rest that I was urgently in need of had
been constantly denied me. Instead, I had been caught up and held within
a perfect maelstrom of excitement. That excitement still ran like fever
in my veins. The plaudits of the multitude were still ringing in my ears
when this horror of a world's contumely burst on my head. I could only
bow my head and let the storm spend itself about me. Sick at heart and
dazed in mind, conscious only of a vague disgust with all the world and
myself, I longed for respite and forgetfulness within the bosom of my
family.
So, quietly, I decided to retire for a year, out of reach of the yellow
papers; out of reach of the grind of the pro-Peary mill of infamy, still
maintaining silence rather than stoop to the indignity of showing up the
dark side of Mr. Peary's character. Having returned, I hesitate to do it
now; but the weaving of the leprous blanket of infamy with which Peary
and his supporters attempted to cover me cannot be understood unless we
look through Mr. Peary's eyes--regard other explorers as he regarded
them; regard the North as his inalienable property as he did, and regard
his infamous, high-handed injustices as right.
I have now decided to uncover the incentive of this one-sided fight to
which I have so long maintained a non-attacking attitude. I had hoped,
almost against hope, that the public would ultimately understand,
without a word from me, the humbug of the mudslingers who were
attempting to defame my character. I had felt sure that the hand which
did the besmearing was silhouetted clearly against the blackness of its
own making. But the storm of a sensation-seeking press later so
thickened the atmosphere that the public, from which one has a sure
guarantee of fair play, was denied a clear view.
Now that the storm has spent its force; now that the hand which did the
mudslinging has within its grasp the unearned gain which it sought; now
that a clear point of observation can be presented, I am compelled, with
much reluctance and distaste, to reveal the unpleasant and unknown past
of the man who tried to ruin me; showing how unscrupulous and brutal he
was to others before me; with evidence in hand, I shall reveal how he
wove his web of defamation and how his friends conspired with him in the
darkest, meanest and most brazen conspiracy in the history of
exploration.
In doing this, my aim is not to challenge Mr. Peary's claim, but to
throw light on unwritten pages of history, which pages furnish the key
to unlock the longclosed door of the Polar controversy and the
pro-Peary conspiracy.
From the earliest days, Mr. Peary's effort to reach the Pole was
undertaken primarily for purposes of personal commercial gain. For
twenty years he has passed the hat along lines of easy money. That hat
would be passing to-day if the game had not been, in the opinion of
many, spoiled by my success.
For nearly twenty years he sought to be promoted over the heads of
stay-at-home but hardworking naval officers. During all of this time,
while on salary as a naval officer, he was away engaged in private
enterprises from which hundreds of thousands of dollars went into his
pockets. By wire-pulling and lobbying he succeeded in having the
American Navy pay him an unearned salary. Such a man could not afford to
divide the fruits of Polar attainment with another.
In 1891, as the steamer _Kite_ went north, Mr. Peary began to evince the
brutal, selfish spirit which later was shown to every explorer who had
the misfortune to cross his trail. Nansen had crossed Greenland; his
splendid success was in the public eye. Mr. Peary attempted to belittle
the merited applause by saying that Nansen had borrowed the "Peary
system." But Peary had borrowed the Nordenskiold system, without giving
credit. A few months later, Mr. John M. Verhoeff, the meteorologist of
the _Kite_ expedition, was accorded such unbrotherly treatment that he
left his body in a glacial crevasse in preference to coming home on the
same ship with Mr. Peary. This man had paid $2,000 for the privilege of
being Peary's companion.
Eivind Astrup, another companion of Peary, a few years later was
publicly denounced because he had written a book on his own scientific
observations and did work which Peary had himself neglected to do. This
attempt to discredit a young, sensitive explorer was followed by his
mental unbalancement and suicide.
About 1897, Peary took from the people of the Farthest North the
Eskimos' treasured "Star Stone." At some remote period in the unknown
history of the frigid North, thousands of years ago, when, possibly, the
primitive forefathers of the Eskimos were perishing from inability to
obtain food in that fierce war waged between Nature and crude, blindly
struggling, aboriginal life because of a lack of weapons with which to
kill, there swiftly, roaringly, descended from the mysterious skies a
gigantic meteoric mass of burning, white-hot iron. Whence it came, those
dazed and startled people knew not; they regarded it, as their
descendants have regarded it, with baffled mystified terror; later, with
reverence, gratitude, and a feeling akin to awe. Gazing skyward, in the
long, starlit nights, there undoubtedly welled up surgingly in the wild
hearts of these innocent, Spartan children of nature, a feeling of
vague, instinctive wonder at the Power which swung the boreal lamps in
heaven; which moves the worlds in space; which sweeps in the northern
winds, and which, for the creatures of its creation, apparently
consciously, and often by means seemingly miraculous, provides methods
of obtaining the sources of life. As the meteor and its two smaller
fragments cooled, the natives, by the innate and adaptive ingenuity of
aboriginal man, learned to chip masses from it, from which were shaped
knives and arrows and spearheads. It became their mine of treasure,
more precious than gold; it was their only means of making weapons for
obtaining that which sustained life. With new weapons, they developed
the art of spear-casting and arrow-throwing. As the centuries passed,
animals fell easy prey to their skill; the starvation of elder ages gave
way to plenty.
The arm of God, it is said in the Scriptures, is long. From the far
skies it extended to these people of an ice-sheeted, rigorous land, that
they might survive, this miraculous treasure. It seemed, however, that
the arm of man, in its greed, proved likewise long; and as the strange
providence which gave these people their chief means of killing was
kind, so the arm of man was cruel.
In 1894, R. E. Peary, regarding the Arctic world as his own, the people
as his vassals, came north, and a year later took from these natives,
without their consent, the two smaller fragments. In 1897 he took "The
Tent," or Great Iron Stone, the natives' last and one source of mineral
wealth and ancestral treasure. That it was these people's great source
of securing metal meant nothing to him; that it was a scientific curio,
whereby he might secure a specious credit from the well-fed armchair
gentlemen of science at home, meant much to the man who later did not
hesitate to employ methods of dishonor to try to secure exclusive credit
of the achievement of the Pole. Just as he later tried to rob me of
honor, so he ruthlessly took from these people a thing that meant
abundance of game--and game there meant life.
The great "Iron Stone" was hauled aboard the S. S. _Hope_, and brought
to New York. Today it reposes in the Museum of Natural History--a
bulky, black heap of metal, which can be viewed any day by the well-fed
and curious. In the North, where he will not go again to give his
mythical "abundance of guns and ammunition," the Eskimos need the metal
which was sold to Mrs. Morris K. Jesup (who presented it to the museum)
for $40,000. That money went into Mr. Peary's pockets. In a land where
laws existed this act would be regarded as a high-handed, monumental and
dishonorable theft. One who might attempt now to purloin the ill-gotten
hulk from the museum would be prosecuted. Taken from the people to whose
ancestors it was sent, as if by a providence that is divine, and to whom
it meant life, it gave Mr. Peary so-called scientific honors among his
friends. In the name of religion, it has been said, many crimes have
been committed. It remained for this man to reveal what atrocious things
could be done in the fair name of science.