IT IS BEST THAT THE EPILOGUE OF THIS STORY PRECEDE THE ENDING.
By the time the Cooks returned to New York, several months later, the Danish Konsistorium had met in Copenhagen to reconsider Dr. Cook’s claim to have reached the pole. Their verdict was that it was “unproven.”
“So is Peary’s claim unproven,” Dr. Cook told reporters, and he pointed out that the Danes had revoked none of the honours they had bestowed upon him. His supporters noted the “world of difference” between “unproven” and “false,” while Peary’s said the two words were synonymous and claimed victory.
Bill Barrill, with whom Dr. Cook claimed to have climbed McKinley, came forward and said that Dr. Cook had faked the climb with “clever photographs.” Other climbers set out for McKinley to see if this was true. They presented their case that Dr. Cook had faked the climbing of McKinley in magazine articles that were themselves attacked by the Bradley-led supporters of Dr. Cook.
Although the U.S. Navy, in 1911, verified Peary’s claim to have reached the pole, there were many who remained unconvinced, so many that Peary’s supporters found it necessary to continue their attempts to discredit Dr. Cook.
The many years of controversy that followed are well documented. Even if you read everything that has been written, you will only rarely come across my name.
I never granted another interview after I moved out of 670 Bushwick. I was besieged by reporters for a while, as were Lily and Kristine after Kristine and I announced our engagement. But they soon left us alone, the last public word on me being, as I had predicted, that I had left Dr. Cook because I knew his claim to be a hoax, that I had been “hoodwinked” and had no more idea than Etukishuk and Ahwelah where Dr. Cook had really taken us.
Not long after the Danes declared his claim to be “unproven,” I attempted one evening to visit Dr. Cook at his new house. The butler who answered the door went inside, and Mrs. Cook came out and told me that her husband did not wish to meet with me again. “Not ever,” she said and slammed the door.
I was certain we would, sooner or later, meet by chance. Until then, I would write to him. Perhaps we would write to each other. Live two miles apart and never communicate except by letter. Cross-river correspondents.
But my letters to him went unanswered, and we did not meet by chance. A few years after returning from South America, he left Brooklyn for good.
I wrote hundreds of letters to Dr. Cook, but he did not write back. It was as though I were reversing the order of the one-way correspondence by which he had drawn me to him, to New York from Newfoundland.
I wrote the letters as if I knew that he was reading them. I told him what was new since I had written last. I related my life to him—the life from which he had exiled himself.
I imagined him eagerly looking forward to the letters in the manner of a prisoner who can have no visitors. The meaning of my letters was that I forgave him. But perhaps believing that he did not deserve it, he would not accept forgiveness from me.
I kept writing to him after he left New York and went out west to explore for oil. I thought he might write back to me when Peary died in 1920, but he did not.
Peary had spent his last years at his Cape Cod refuge on Eagle Island, off the coast of Maine, worn out, so the story went, from his efforts to prove his polar claim beyond all doubt. It was said that, knowing he would soon die, he had lain for days on a couch that was covered in muskox furs, looking out in silence across the bay.
I might have been content to wonder forever if Dr. Cook was reading my letters if not for a misfortune that befell him not long after Peary’s death.
He wound up an inmate of Leavenworth Prison in Kansas, having been sentenced to fourteen years in jail for oil-stock fraud in Wyoming. The polar controversy was still unresolved, and many felt that Dr. Cook was the victim of a malicious, or at least overly zealous, prosecution in which Peary’s supporters had had a hand.
By this time, 1923, Marie Cook had divorced her husband and he had not remarried. The thought of him alone in Leavenworth was more than I could bear, so I made a surprise journey to the prison in an attempt to see him. I was told that when he was informed that he had a visitor named Mr. Stead, he merely shook his head.
I returned to New York and began, in my letters, to implore him to reply, saying that I was greatly concerned about his health and state of mind.
He neither answered nor sent back my letters. Unable to stand it any longer, I wrote to the warden at Leavenworth, asking, as it had not occurred to me to do before, that someone ask Dr. Cook if he was reading my letters and if he wished me to go on writing to him.
I expected a reply from some prison official. Instead, six weeks after I wrote to the warden, I received an envelope that bore only my name and address, printed in pencil, the upper-left corner conspicuously blank. Inside the envelope was a single sheet of paper, blank but for one pencil-printed word in the middle of the page: YES.
This is the sole letter from Dr. Cook to me that still survives. It is pinned to the wall above my desk, a yellowed, fading affirmative, inscrutable to others.
Not long after Dr. Cook’s death in August 1940, I received, from Dr. Cook’s daughter, Helen, a letter telling me that he had died and thanking me “for being such a faithful correspondent all these years.”
It was clear that she thought he had been answering my letters, all of which he had saved and were now in her possession. They were full, she said, of “vague and cryptic references to unnamed persons and unspecified events” that she hoped I would one day explain to her. She still believed that he had reached the pole and presumed that I still thought so, too. She said she further hoped that despite my expressed intention never again to speak in public about the expedition—a reticence that she said she found mystifying—I would, as a co-expeditionary of Dr. Cook’s and the first man to set foot at the pole, join in her campaign to prove her father’s claim, a campaign that had been ongoing for years, but that she expected would gain “new life now from the recent developments of which you may have heard.”
I had. “DISGRACED EXPLORER RECEIVES DEATHBED PARDON FROM FDR,” read the headline of a story that had recently run on the front page of The New York Times. I had seen the story before I heard from Helen, and my first thought was that the president had pardoned Dr. Cook for pretending to have reached the pole. I had momentarily forgotten that Dr. Cook had admitted this pretence to no one but me. The pardon was for his stock-fraud conviction, however, which was by that time widely regarded as having been unjust. The story was a brief one, contained no mention of me and credited Dr. Cook with having perpetrated the most infamous hoax in the history of exploration. It concluded with the observation that this hoax, even though quickly discovered, had prevented the true discoverer of the North Pole, Comm. Robert Peary, from being accorded the full measure of credit and fame that he deserved. Other papers said the polar controversy was “still unresolved” or “unlikely to ever be resolved.”
Only the New York Herald Tribune maintained unequivocally that Dr. Cook and I had been the first to reach the pole, and the paper chided Peary and the Peary Arctic Club for their lifelong campaign to discredit Dr. Cook.
I replied to Helen that while I wished her luck in her efforts to prove her father’s claim to have been the leader of an expedition that had reached the pole, I planned, for personal reasons, to maintain my silence on the matter. She returned to me, unopened, my last two letters to Dr. Cook, which had arrived too late for him to read. I never heard from her again.