Frederick Cook: The Dispute Goes On

Frederick A. Cook, (1865 – 1940)
American Explorer, Doctor.

Dr. Frederick Cook never produced detailed original navigational records to substantiate his claim to have reached the North Pole prior to Robert Peary. He claimed that his detailed records were part of his belongings contained in three boxes, which he left at Annoatok in April 1909 in the keeping of Harry Whitney, an American hunter who had traveled north with Peary the previous year. According to Cook's account, he was unable to bring back the boxes, because his two companions had returned to their village and there was insufficient manpower at Annoatok for a second sledge for the onward 700 mile journey south to Upernavik. When Whitney tried to bring Cook's belongings with him on his return to the USA on Peary's ship, Peary refused to allow them on board. So Whitney left Cook's boxes in a cache in Greenland. They were never found.

Cook intermittently claimed he had kept copies of his sextant navigational data and in 1911 published some, which have incorrect solar data. Ahwelah and Etukishook, Cook's Inuit companions, gave conflicting stories about where they had gone with him. Whitney, who spoke their language and spent considerable time with them, was convinced by their account that they had reached the Pole with Cook. The Peary expedition's people (primarily Matthew Henson and George Borup, who did not speak their language well) claimed that Ahwelah and Etukishook told them that they had traveled only a few days journey from land, although a map allegedly drawn by them correctly located then-unknown Meighen Island.

The conflicting, and possibly dual fraudulent claims, of Cook and Peary prompted Roald Amundsen to take particularly extensive precautions in navigation during his South Pole expedition to leave no room for doubt concerning his attainment of the Pole. Amundsen also had the advantage of traveling over an actual continent and was able to leave unmistakable evidence of his presence at the South Pole. Peary's claim that Cook could not have been at the Pole because he saw no evidence of his camp simply shows Peary's colossal ignorance of the shifting north polar ice cap, which would have drifted many miles in the year between the competing claims