Polar Record 51 (257): 177–190 (2015).


c Cambridge University Press 2014. doi:10.1017/S003224741300082X 177

‘It proves falsehood absolutely . . . ’ The lost notebook

of Dr. Frederick A. Cook
Robert M. Bryce
12404 Linganore Ridge Dr. Monrovia, MD 21770, USA (lostnotebook1908@gmail.com)
Received October 2013 ; first published online 24 January 2014

ABSTRACT. With the completion of a careful study of a photographic copy of the original notebook Frederick Cook
kept on his attempt to reach the North Pole in 1908, now in Copenhagen, Denmark, many new details have been
added that allow a more accurate account of his actual movements and timetable than has been possible previously.
Because some records were altered or destroyed by Cook, however, a complete account still necessarily contains an
element of speculation, which must be the case when based on the only records that exist of an unwitnessed assertion.
But this uncertainty can be controlled to a reasonable degree by the notebook’s remaining content in concert with the
several other accounts Cook wrote of his expedition. One thing is sure, however: Cook was far behind his published
timetable. At the outset, he set his start date back by one full week. He failed to report a number of delays in his
journey and left out a lengthy detour that prevented him from reaching land’s end at Cape Thomas Hubbard until well
past 1 April 1908. This ruled out any chance to reach the North Pole in 1908. Frederick Cook was no fool; he was a
veteran explorer. He knew any attempt that late in the season would be suicide. Furthermore his efforts to lay caches
that would separate his own return route from that of his Inuit support party indicate that not only had he already
given up the idea of making a serious attempt, but also that he was preparing for his eventual hoax of claiming to have
reached the North Pole on 21 April 1908 long before he reached the Arctic Ocean.

Introduction: ‘ . . . such possibilities for dramatic
denouement!’
On 3 July 1907, John R. Bradley, a fishing schooner
recently converted into a yacht, slipped quietly out of
Gloucester, Massachusetts, and headed for Nova Scotia.
Aboard was Dr. Frederick A. Cook, the American ex-
plorer and president of the Explorers Club of New York.
The voyage had been announced as a big game hunting
trip by the yacht’s namesake, but the ship took with her
all the essentials of a polar expedition.
Cook had broached the idea of making a try for
the North Pole one evening over dinner in the famous
dining room of the Holland House in New York City.
John R. Bradley, who was a wealthy owner of gambling
establishments, was intrigued by Cook’s idea that a small
expedition, correctly furnished with the necessities of
Arctic travel, would succeed where others with mighty
expenditures on special ice-ships and tons of equipment
had consistently failed. Bradley, who naturally always
liked a good sporting proposition, liked even more the
idea of beating the professionals, for example Robert
E. Peary, who was then considered one, at their own
game and listened as Cook outlined his plans. These were
that if conditions in Greenland were favorable, he would
consider overwintering and making a try for the North
Pole the following spring. Bradley agreed to finance the
attempt. Peary was busily preparing yet another attempt
to reach the pole, so as not to give away their hand,
Bradley said they would say nothing about it, and if
conditions were not right, they would just return home
from their hunting trip and no one would be the wiser. He
gave Cook carte blanche to secure a proper vessel and all
the supplies he thought he would need for the attempt.
After stops at the Danish colonies along the west coast
of Greenland, Bradley crossed Melville Bay in a storm
and called at Cape York. From there she made her way
along the coast, visiting the villages of the Polar Inuit
with whom Cook had become acquainted on two previous
expeditions. These were Peary’s first North Greenland
Expedition 1891–1892 (Holland 1994: 372–373) and The
Peary Arctic Club Relief Expedition of 1901 (Holland
1994: 418). With their help he mounted hunts for Bradley
as the yacht sailed northward to Etah, the most northern
of the Inuit permanent settlements. Here the schooner was
beached to fix a bent propeller while Cook and Bradley
used the auxiliary motor launch to visit the summer
hunting camp of Annoatok, 23 miles northeast of Etah.
There Cook found the Inuit had had a prosperous hunting
season, had a wealth of surplus meat for the winter and
many skins to barter. Then and there, Cook decided he
would stay.
Returning to Etah, he took the entire population of
the village aboard the schooner and set out again for
Annoatok. There, on the night of 26–27 August, they
landed the substantial supplies Cook had brought for
his polar attempt. Cook chose Rudolph Franke, a young
German, who was Bradley’s personal chef, to stay with
him over the winter. Franke agreed to do so for the
compensation of $60 a month (Cook 1907: 26 August
1907; a note inserted under this entry says this was duly
paid in the amount of $800 about 16 October 1909).
After the yacht sailed, the two constructed a house
made of the uniform-sized wooden boxes in which the
stores had been packed. Over the winter they built sledges
from special hickory lumber that Cook had brought and
made 1,500 pounds of pemmican from dried walrus meat
and blubber. Cook also experimented with clever gear
including a ‘house sledge,’ which he planned to use on
the way to the pole for shelter, but it proved too unwieldy
and was abandoned after a trial run to the Humboldt
178 BRYCE
Glacier in October. In December, Cook journeyed to
North Star Bay and left his final messages concerning the
progress of the expedition to be sent back to the United
States via any ship that might call there. It was the last the
world would hear from him for nearly two years (Bryce
1997: 294–317 has a fully documented account of Cook’s
preparations).
In the eventual narrative of his expedition that ap-
peared in finished form in his self-published book, My
attainment of the pole, Cook claimed to have reached the
pole accompanied by two young Inuit on 21 April 1908
but regained land too far west to pick up his outward
caches and was forced to take a roundabout route in an
attempt to reach a whaler in Lancaster Sound. In doing
so, he was so delayed that he was compelled to spend the
winter at Cape Sparbo (now Cape Hardy) on North Devon
Island, and eventually returned to his headquarters in
April 1909 after enduring a ‘Stone Age’ winter, surviving
only by returning to primitive methods of shelter and
securing game (Cook 1913).
Cook reached civilization again at Copenhagen, Den-
mark on 4 September, touching off a frenzy of adulation,
which ended with him heaped in honours. The drama
increased when, during the celebrations, word arrived
from Labrador that Peary, after 23 years of intermittent
Arctic expeditions, had reached the North Pole on 6 April
1909. A few days later Peary intimated that ‘Cook’s story
should not be taken too seriously,’ (The New York Times,
9 September 1909) and before the week was out declared
that his rival had simply ‘handed the public [a] gold brick’
(The New York Herald, 11 September 1909). Thus began
the greatest geographical dispute of all time that has come
to be known as the ‘Polar Controversy.’ It was front page
news every day for the better part of four months, and
even today, a small group of ardent advocates of each man
still insists that they champion the true discoverer.
Cook was the public’s initial favourite because of his
modest and gentlemanly demeanor in the face of bitter
attacks that made Peary seem nothing more than a very
poor loser, but before long a skillful press campaign
mounted by Peary’s powerful backers began to under-
mine Cook’s credibility. As the controversy rolled on,
day after day, one editor marveled: ‘What author would
not have given a fortune for such a plot, such a setting,
such characters in contrast, such possibilities for dramatic
denouement!’ (Winchester 1911: 256).
First, members of Peary’s expedition swore they
had interviewed Cook’s Inuit companions while still in
Greenland. They were said to have denied they had ever
been out of sight of land on his recent attempt, and
therefore never closer than hundreds of miles to the pole.
Next, Edward Barrill, Cook’s only witness to his 1906
ascent of Mt. McKinley, made an affidavit declaring it a
hoax arranged by Cook, with his complicity, to help Cook
avoid financial ruin and thus ensure that Barrill received
his own back pay. Finally, two men came forward to
swear additional affidavits saying they had been hired by
Cook to manufacture a set of faked astronomical obser-
vations in proof of his having been at the pole. When
Cook’s polar ‘proofs’ were examined by a committee of
the University of Copenhagen, to which he had promised
them while in Denmark, it found no trace of the allegedly
forged observations among them. But neither could it
find in them ‘any proof whatsoever of Dr. Cook having
reached the Northpole’ (Copenhagen University 1914).
The negative verdict of the judges Cook had chosen
for himself instantaneously branded him in the press as
‘the American Munchausen,’ and ‘a monster of dupli-
city.’ This, coupled with the fact that Cook had apparently
fled the country, which was taken as an admission of guilt,
convinced many that their recent hero was nothing more
than a contemptible cheat. At the same time it allowed
Peary to step forward unopposed and claim the prize he
had sought for so long: the everlasting fame that belonged
to the discoverer of the North Pole.
The last thing Cook did before he dropped completely
out of sight for a year was to submit one of his polar
notebooks in support of his claim to the University of
Copenhagen. Originally he had only sent a copy of a part
of it, along with some narrative material very similar to
the account of his expedition that had been published as a
serial in The New York Herald in September and October
of 1909. The notebook was delivered to the Danes by
Cook’s private secretary, Walter Lonsdale; it had been
brought to Europe by Cook’s wife. The Danes were not
impressed. They said that the notebook did not alter their
previous verdict, and that, in fact, it raised further doubts
about the authenticity of the narrative it contained.
The entire affair was an acute embarrassment to Den-
mark, where Cook had received high honours, including
the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, and
a very rare honorary doctorate from the University of
Copenhagen. He had even been personally received by
the Danish monarch, who, with the Danish scientists,
were now being depicted as gullible fools in the Amer-
ican press. Although in turning over the notebook Cook
had specifically stipulated that no part of it could be
copied or published, the Danes made a complete pho-
tographic copy of the book, page by page, and stored
it away quietly in the Royal Astronomical Observatory
Library (Cook 1908a).
The original notebook was returned to Cook and has
never been seen since, but the copy remained, apparently
forgotten, until an inquiry from the author in 1993 turned
it up. A partial analysis of the lost notebook was included
in the author’s study of he controversy (Bryce 1997:
896–900), but a full accounting of the notebook was
not possible due to the poor quality of the reproductions
available at the time. However, now the notebook has now
been completely transcribed and annotated (Bryce 2013).
With this transcription, fuller details are available con-
cerning Cook’s actual movements and timetable, and they
disclose conclusively that not only was it not possible for
Cook to have reached the pole in 1908, but also strongly
indicate that he began to plan the hoax that he perpetrated
while still hundreds of miles short of the Arctic Ocean.
 ‘IT PROVES FALSEHOOD ABSOLUTELY . . . ’ THE LOST NOTEBOOK OF DR. FREDERICK A. COOK’
Fig. 1. The cover of Cook’s lost polar note-
book
What is in the lost notebook?
The content of Cook’s notebook (Fig. 1) can be divided
into four parts:
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. 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. A connected and elaborated narrative of events
covering Cook’s expedition from the time it ar-
rived in Greenland until 18 March 1908, the day
he said he started over the polar pack ice for the
pole.
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
179
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 irre-
futable 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 asser-
tion, 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 consist-
ency 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 2013: 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 ex-
traordinary. 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.
180 BRYCE
He published an account of his experiences in Germany
in 1914 (Franke 1914). By then, Cook’s own account
had been published in German by the same publisher
(Cook 1912). 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 2013: 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 mat-
ter 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 1914: 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 1907). 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 1908
contains these letters that were seized upon Peary’s ar-
rival 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 con-
temporaneous 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 1908 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 1908: 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 depar-
ture, 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 no-
tion 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 1908e). 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.
 ‘IT PROVES FALSEHOOD ABSOLUTELY . . . ’ THE LOST NOTEBOOK OF DR. FREDERICK A. COOK’
Before the perfection of aircraft, the problem ex-
plorers had in reaching the North Pole was the small
window of time after polar dawn during which the cir-
cumpolar 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 1907: 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 1907) has entries to 18 February and then
stops because of the missing signature. Cook certainly re-
membered 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 1914: 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 1908a: 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
181
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 1908a), the narrative account he
added to the lost notebook (Cook 1908a), 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 1908c), 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 1907: 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
182 BRYCE
Fig. 2. Cook’s probable route.
away on this duty. In his book, Franke asserts positively
that this party departed one week before the main party,
or 19 February (Franke 1914: 71). Cook puts the date as 5
February in My attainment of the pole (Cook 1913: 154).
Cook’s progress can be followed on the accompanying
map (Fig 2) and table of his camps (Table 1).
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 over-
loaded 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
 ‘IT PROVES FALSEHOOD ABSOLUTELY . . . ’ THE LOST NOTEBOOK OF DR. FREDERICK A. COOK’ 183

Table 1. Table of Cook’s camps

Estimated
Dates that this Distance
Camp camp was Name given by Cook to this camp, if any, and from last
number occupied approximate location of camp camp
1 26 February 1908 On the ice of Smith Sound about 20 miles 20
northeast of Annoatok
2 27–28 February At Peary’s caboose at Payer Harbour on Pim Island 30
3 29 February 6 miles above Cape Rutherford in Buchanan Bay 18
4 1 March Between Cape Koldewey and the Weyprecht 20
Islands
5 2 March On a small island off Cape Koldewey 6
6 3 March In Flagler Bay on the coast of Knud Peninsula 18
7 4–6 March A mile from the head of Flagler Bay 25
8 7–8 March ‘Divide Camp’ 20 miles into Sverdrup Pass 21
9 9–10 March ‘Musk Ox Camp’ 25 miles into Sverdrup Pass 5
10 11–12 March ‘Storm Camp’ 45 miles into Sverdrup Pass 20
11 13–17 March ‘Glacier Camp’ on the east side of the glacier 7
blocking the valley
12 18 March On the west side of the same glacier above Bay 19
Fjord
13 19–22 March In Irene Bay, three miles into Bay Fjord 23
14 23 March ‘Bear Point’ 30 miles into Bay Fjord on the south 27
shore
15 24 March Near the junction of Bay Fjord and Eureka Sound 25
16 25–26 March Near the north cape of Vesle Fjord 15
17 27 March Northeast of Depot Point 35
18 28 March Near the north cape of Slidre Fjord 38
19 29 March Near the junction of Eureka Sound and Greely 21
Fjord
20 30 March In the upper reaches of Cannon Fjord southeast 40
of C. Lockwood
21 31 March Near Caledonian Bay on the eastern shore of 26
Cannon Fjord
22 1 April Near the location of Camp 20 26
23 2–3 April ‘Berg Point’ at the mouth of Greely Fjord 35
24 4 April On the west coast of Shei Peninsula 35
25 5 April At the cache site at the SW corner of Shei 20
Peninsula
26 6 April Near the cape of Stangs Fjord 40
27 7 April Off Grant Land northeast of Stangs Fjord 26
28 8 April Near the north cape of Otto Fjord 25
29 9 April Near White Point 20
30 10 April At the base of the Svartevaeg Cliffs 27
31 11–12 April ‘Cache Point’ near Cape Thomas Hubbard 22

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

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 oppos-
ite 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.
184 BRYCE
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 condi-
tions 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 renum-
bering 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, be-
cause 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 1908a: 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 experi-
enced, 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 equip-
ment, 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 sub-
stantial 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.
 ‘IT PROVES FALSEHOOD ABSOLUTELY . . . ’ THE LOST NOTEBOOK OF DR. FREDERICK A. COOK’
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
1908b) records Cook’s actual journey (Bryce 1997: 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’
185
(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 1914; 127–128).
On 16 April the ice was far less troublesome, only in-
terrupted 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
186 BRYCE
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 1914:
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:
Although we had left caches of supplies with the
object of returning along Nansen Sound, into Can-
non Fiord and over Arthur Land, I entertained grave
doubts of our ability to return this way. I knew that
if the ice should drift strongly to the east we might
not be given the choice of working out our own return
(Cook 1913: 203).
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 round-
about 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 dra-
matic 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 1913: 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,
 ‘IT PROVES FALSEHOOD ABSOLUTELY . . . ’ THE LOST NOTEBOOK OF DR. FREDERICK A. COOK’
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 exped-
ition, 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 1908
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.
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 min-
ions 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.
187
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 fol-
lowed 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 1910) 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 un-
known 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
188 BRYCE
Fig. 3. The portion of Peary’s map showing Cook’s route.
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 1941). 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 Septem-
ber 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
 ‘IT PROVES FALSEHOOD ABSOLUTELY . . . ’ THE LOST NOTEBOOK OF DR. FREDERICK A. COOK’
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 1997:
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
1913: 569–577). There is also another version of these in
a small memorandum book inscribed at the front: ‘Copied
at Sparbo winter’ (Cook 1908c). 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 2013: 312).
Conclusion: ‘Truth is a uniform thing’
Captain Thomas F. Hall in the 1920 supplement to his
1917 book-length analysis of the Cook and Peary North
Pole claims, Has the North Pole been discovered?, wrote
this of the result of conflicting accounts in an explorer’s
writings:
Did all these various writings agree with themselves
. . . it would not prove their statements to be true,
because they might, nevertheless, be fabrications; but
as they contradict each other in every particular, it
proves falsehood absolutely. If one is true, the other
speaks falsehood. If the other is true, the one speaks
falsehood. There is no authority for believing either;
and if the author cannot be believed in what he sets
out to prove, the author is not entitled to be believed
189
in anything he may say at any time. Truth is a uniform
thing. (Hall 1920, 55)
However, Hall was writing of Peary’s accounts, not
Cook’s, which he maintained were consistent so far as
the narratives Cook put in print, but he allowed that
there might be other sources that might condemn Cook’s
account as well:
I have not seen a copy of the papers which Dr. Cook
left with the Copenhagen University. There may be
something in them that would indicate, or possibly
that might prove, that Cook has practiced deception.
But if this were true, I think that the University
would have considered it their duty to have shown,
for the benefit of science and of history, wherein the
deception exists. But having only the published report
that the University found nothing deceptive in the
papers—nothing that they could condemn, I conclude
that nothing exists in those papers that indicates
deception (Hall 1920; 57).
But Hall was wrong. Among the papers Cook left with
the Copenhagen University was the now lost notebook,
which the University did not use to condemn Cook’s
account in 1909, but of which they made a complete
photographic copy. It is filled with just the sort of con-
tradiction that ‘proves falsehood absolutely.’
Now, with the publication of the transcript of Cook’s
lost notebook, for the benefit of science and of history,
there it is for all to read.
The author’s full 420-page study of Cook’s notebook,
which includes a complete and fully annotated transcrip-
tion, has recently been published.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen, Den-
mark, for permission to reproduce the photographic im-
ages of Cook’s notebook. The base map on which Cook’s
probable route has been placed was drawn by Alexandra
Kobelenko and originally appeared in Jerry Kobalenko’s
The horizontal Everest, published by Penguin in 2002.
The map is used by permission. The modifications to the
base map are those of the author, but were also made by
permission.
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