Historian finds the pieces of paper that started the great Cook-Peary polar controversy
Precisely 100 years ago today, the New York Times newsroom must have been a gloomy place. The newspaper was a sponsor of Robert E. Peary’s polar expedition, but Peary still hadn’t been heard from as of Sept. 2, 1909. On that day, the New York Herald’s entire front page was devoted to the scoop that it had just received by telegram from Peary’s rival: “The North Pole Is Discovered by Dr. Frederick A. Cook.”
Now, just in time for the centennial anniversary, a historian has found the pieces of paper that started the great Cook-Peary polar controversy: Cook’s hand-written drafts of the telegrams that he sent to the Herald and to a European observatory from Lerwick, the capital of the Shetland Islands. The papers’ discovery is being reported in the October issue of the Polar Record, by Robert M. Bryce, who describes the papers as “nothing less than the ur-text of this controversy, the literary equivalent of the ‘Face that Launched a Thousand Ships.’ ”
Mr. Bryce, the author of the 1997 book, “Cook & Peary: The Polar Controversy, Resolved,” is a research librarian with a singular knack for recovering artifacts from Cook’s expeditions. He previously found an uncropped version of a famous photograph of Cook’s purportedly taken at “the top of the continent,” the summit of Mount McKinley — but which Mr. Bryce identified as a spot 15,000 feet below the summit, at about the altitude of Denver. Mr. Bryce found more evidence of fraud at McKinley by digging up the previously unseen diary of Cook’s climbing companion. And after unearthing a copy of a diary kept by Cook on the supposed trip to the North Pole, Mr. Bryce concluded that Cook’s polar expedition was also a “premeditated hoax.”
Read entire article at NYT
Now, just in time for the centennial anniversary, a historian has found the pieces of paper that started the great Cook-Peary polar controversy: Cook’s hand-written drafts of the telegrams that he sent to the Herald and to a European observatory from Lerwick, the capital of the Shetland Islands. The papers’ discovery is being reported in the October issue of the Polar Record, by Robert M. Bryce, who describes the papers as “nothing less than the ur-text of this controversy, the literary equivalent of the ‘Face that Launched a Thousand Ships.’ ”
Mr. Bryce, the author of the 1997 book, “Cook & Peary: The Polar Controversy, Resolved,” is a research librarian with a singular knack for recovering artifacts from Cook’s expeditions. He previously found an uncropped version of a famous photograph of Cook’s purportedly taken at “the top of the continent,” the summit of Mount McKinley — but which Mr. Bryce identified as a spot 15,000 feet below the summit, at about the altitude of Denver. Mr. Bryce found more evidence of fraud at McKinley by digging up the previously unseen diary of Cook’s climbing companion. And after unearthing a copy of a diary kept by Cook on the supposed trip to the North Pole, Mr. Bryce concluded that Cook’s polar expedition was also a “premeditated hoax.”