Frederick Cook and the Forgotten Pole

Before Peary could be acknowledged as the discoverer of the North Pole, he had to wrestle that honour away from Cook, who had won the hearts of the public. In one of Peary's first attacks, the Peary Arctic Club (PAC) issued a press release that included a map showing what Peary said was Cook's actual route (Fig. 1). Cook's companions on the journey, two young Polar Eskimos from Greenland named Etukishook and Ahpellah, had marked their route on a map for Peary when his ship had stopped at Etah, Greenland, on its way back from the edge of the Arctic Ocean. The PAC map showed that instead of going to the North Pole, Cook had gone only a short distance to the northwest on the Arctic Ocean before turning back. He reached land only a few kilometres west of where he left it. Cook saw and described the raw material for such islands in the mouth of Nansen Sound (Jeffries et al., 1992) and possibly in the Sverdrup Channel between Meighen Island and Axel Heiberg Island, where a massive plug of old ice with dimensions similar to those of Cook's glacial island sometimes forms (Jeffers et al., 2001). It sometimes has the typical wavy surface of an ice island, just as Cook described his "glacial island" (Serson, 1974). Cook could not determine whether this ice was afloat or resting on submerged land. If the ice he described was actually the ice plug in the Sverdrup Channel, his doubt about whether or not it was a permanent feature connecting Meighen Island to Axel Heiberg Island might have prevented him from incorporating Meighen Island into his story of reaching the North Pole. If some subsequent explorer proved that the new land was permanently connected, there would have been no reason for Cook not taking the easy route back to Greenland, up Nansen Sound. I believe that Cook's movements in the late winter of 1908 were related to his interest in Verne's fictional polar expedition and that his account of reaching the North Pole is based on his conquest of Verne's fictional pole. After returning to land at Cape Thomas Hubbard, he had time to kill and the means to sledge south to Verne's "Pole of Cold," so he went to experience Verne's landscape firsthand, just as modern tourists make pilgrimages to Prince Edward Island each year to see the farmhouse they read about as children in the "Anne of Green Gables" stories.