In Greenland in , he ordered his men to open the graves of several natives who had died in an epidemic the previous year—then sold their remains to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City as anthropological specimens.
He also brought back living natives—two men, a woman and three youngsters—and dropped them off for study at the museum; within a year four of them were dead from a strain of influenza to which they had no resistance. Cook, born in , would join a new wave of explorers who took a keen interest in the indigenous peoples they came across.
For years, in both the Arctic and the Antarctic, he learned their dialects and adopted their diet. Differences between the two men began to surface after their first trip to Greenland.
In , Cook backed out of another Arctic journey because of a contract prohibiting any expedition member from publishing anything about the trip before Peary published his account of it. Cook wanted to publish the results of an ethnological study of Arctic natives, but Peary said it would set "a bad precedent.
Cook sailed north on a rescue ship, found Peary and treated him for ailments ranging from scurvy to heart problems. Cook also traveled on his own to the Antarctic and made two attempts to scale Alaska's Mount McKinley, claiming to be the first to succeed in Peary, for his part, made another attempt to reach the North Pole in , his sixth Arctic expedition. By then, he had come to think of the pole as his birthright. Any endeavor to reach the pole is complicated by this fact: unlike the South Pole, which lies on a landmass, the North Pole lies on drifting sea ice.
After fixing your position at 90 degrees north—where all directions point south—there is no way to mark the spot, because the ice is constantly moving. Cook's expedition to the pole departed Gloucester, Massachusetts, in July on a schooner to northern Greenland. There, at Annoatok, a native settlement miles from the pole, he established a base camp and wintered over.
He left for the pole in February with a party of nine natives and 11 light sledges pulled by dogs, planning to follow an untried but promising route described by Otto Sverdrup, the leader of an Norwegian mapping party. According to Cook's book My Attainment of the Pole , his party followed the musk ox feeding grounds that Sverdrup had observed, through Ellesmere and Axel Heiberg islands to Cape Stallworthy at the edge of the frozen Arctic Sea.
The men had the advantage of eating fresh meat and conserving their stores of pemmican a greasy mixture of fat and protein that was a staple for Arctic explorers made of beef, ox tenderloin and walrus. As the party pushed northward, members of Cook's support team turned back as planned, leaving him with two native hunters, Etukishook and Ahwelah. In 24 days Cook's party went miles—a daily average of 15 miles. Cook was the first to describe a frozen polar sea in continuous motion and, at 88 degrees north, an enormous, "flat-topped" ice island, higher and thicker than sea ice.
For days, Cook wrote, he and his companions struggled through a violent wind that made every breath painful. At noon on April 21, , he used his custom-made French sextant to determine that they were "at a spot which was as near as possible" to the pole.
At the time, speculation about what was at the pole ranged from an open sea to a lost civilization. Cook wrote that he and his men stayed there for two days, during which the doctor reported taking more observations with his sextant to confirm their position.
Before leaving, he said, he deposited a note in a brass tube, which he buried in a crevasse. Cook, like other Arctic explorers of the day, had assumed that anyone returning from the pole would drift eastward with the polar ice. However, he would be the first to report a westerly drift—after he and his party were carried miles west of their planned route, far from supplies they had cached on land.
In many places the ice cracked, creating sections of open water. Without the collapsible boat they had brought along, Cook wrote, they would have been cut off any number of times. When winter's onslaught made travel impossible, the three men hunkered down for four months in a cave on Devon Island, south of Ellesmere Island.
After they ran out of ammunition, they hunted with spears. In February , the weather and ice improved enough to allow them to walk across frozen Smith Sound back to Annoatok, where they arrived—emaciated and arrayed in rags of fur—in April , some 14 months after they had set out for the pole. At Annoatok, Cook met Harry Whitney, an American sportsman on an Arctic hunting trip, who told him that many people believed Cook had disappeared and died.
Whitney also told him that Peary had departed from a camp just south of Annoatok on his own North Pole expedition eight months earlier, in August Peary had assembled his customary large party—50 men, nearly as many heavy sledges and dogs to pull them—for use in a relay sledge train that would deposit supplies ahead of him.
He called this the "Peary system" and was using it even though it had failed him in his attempt, when the ice split and open water kept him from his caches for long periods. On this try, Peary again faced stretches of open water that could extend for miles.
He had no boat, so his party had to wait, sometimes for days, for the ice to close up. Peary's party advanced miles in a month. When adjusted for the days they were held up, their average progress came to about 13 miles a day. When they were some miles from the pole, Peary sent everyone back except four natives and Matthew Henson, an African-American from Maryland who had accompanied him on his previous Arctic expeditions.
A few days later—on April 6, —at the end of an exhausting day's march, Henson, who could not use a sextant, had a "feeling" they were at the pole, he later told the Boston American. He said Peary then reached into his outer garment and took out a folded American flag sewn by his wife and fastened it to a staff, which he stuck atop an igloo his native companions had built. Then everyone turned in for some much-needed sleep. The next day, in Henson's account, Peary took a navigational sight with his sextant, though he did not tell Henson the result; Peary put a diagonal strip of the flag, together with a note, in an empty tin and buried it in the ice.
Then they turned toward home. While Peary made his way south, Cook was recovering his strength at Annoatok. Having befriended Whitney, he told him about his trip to the pole but asked that he say nothing until Cook could make his own announcement.
With no scheduled ship traffic so far north, Cook planned to sledge miles south to the Danish trading post of Upernavik, catch a ship to Copenhagen and another to New York City. He had no illusions about the difficulties involved—the sledge trip would involve climbing mountains and glaciers and crossing sections of open water when the ice was in motion—but he declined Whitney's offer of passage on a chartered vessel due at summer's end to take the sportsman home to New York.
Cook thought his route would be faster. Etukishook and Ahwelah had returned to their village just south of Annoatok, so Cook enlisted two other natives to accompany him. The day before they were to leave, one of the two got sick, which meant that Cook would have to leave a sledge behind.
Whitney suggested that he also leave behind anything not essential for his trip, promising to deliver the abandoned possessions to Cook in New York. Cook agreed. In addition to meteorological data and ethnological collections, Cook boxed up his expedition records, except for his diary, and his instruments, including his sextant, compass, barometer and thermometer.
He wouldn't be needing them because he would be following the coastline south. Leaving three trunk-size boxes with Whitney, Cook left Annoatok the third week of April and arrived a month later at Upernavik, where he told Danish officals of his conquest of the pole.
It was not until early August that a ship bound for Copenhagen, the Hans Egede , docked in Upernavik. For the three weeks it took to cross the North Atlantic, Cook entertained passengers and crew alike with spellbinding accounts of his expedition. The ship's captain, who understood the news value of Cook's claim, suggested he get word of it out.
At the town's telegraph station, Cook wired the New York Herald , which had covered explorers and their exploits since Stanley encountered Livingstone in Africa 30 years earlier.
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