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 ill.u.s.trative material I gave a number of these to the _Herald_, stating they were scenes I had pa.s.sed, 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 a.s.serting 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 s.p.a.ce 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 a.s.sumption 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 hara.s.sing charges certainly had no soothing effect.
Alone, I was unable to cope with matters, anyway. I under-estimated the effect of the c.u.mulating 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 pa.s.sing 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 s.p.a.ce.
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, ent.i.tled "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 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 76 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 circ.u.mpolar 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 8", one hundred and twenty-one miles from Cape Columbia."
According to this, Mr. Peary covered the distance from 87 47", on April 9, to 85 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 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 76 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 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 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 47" N. to the Pole and the return to the same lat.i.tude 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 doc.u.ment, 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
x.x.xIII
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-a.s.sailing 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 att.i.tude. 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 a.s.sociates; editors devoted s.p.a.ce 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 mult.i.tude 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 att.i.tude. 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.