Dan Snow's History Hit - The North Pole Scandal

Episode Date: July 10, 2023

In the autumn of 1909, the American explorer Frederick Cook arrived in Copenhagen, claiming to have become the first person to reach the North Pole. His dramatic return had been eagerly anticipated, but one young journalist was skeptical. Philip Gibbs contested Cook's version of events, calling him a fraud and starting a public relations war that captured the attention of the Western world.So was Cook a charlatan, bent on fame and fortune? Or was Gibbs merely trying to stir up scandal and intrigue? Dan is joined by Richard Evans, author of The Explorer and the Journalist, to find out which of the two emerged from this scandal with their reputation intact.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. In the autumn of 1909, a lost polar explorer, Frederick Cook, arrived dramatically back in Copenhagen claiming that he'd become the first human to reach the North Pole. The world's media went bonkers. It was thought that he'd perished on the expedition. He was a famous explorer at the time. He had claimed to be the first man to reach the top of what was then called Mount McKinley, now called Denali. And the results of his expedition to the North Pole had been eagerly awaited by his fans. Many of whom had started to give up hope and mourn the loss of the great explorer.

But in Copenhagen, one young, unsuccessful British journalist began to have doubts. His name was Philip Gibbs, and he bravely took on the hype and suggested that he'd made it up. What followed was a massive argument that eventually saw many of the geographical authorities around the world refusing to recognise Cook's claim. Later, it emerged that his claim to reach the top of Mount McKinley had also been false. Cook was a fraud. Yet, Roald Amundsen, the greatest high-latitude explorer of all time, the man who was first to reach the South Pole, always held up Cook as a brilliant explorer. He was a mentor. He said he, Amundsen, would never be the explorer that Cook was. So what's the reality of Frederick Cook?

Was he simply a charlatan? Or did he just make bad decisions? Always desperate to come back successful, knowing that success was the ultimate currency of explorers in that period. And without it, he would fade back into obscurity and economic hardship. This is such a great story. It's been written up by Richard Evans. He's written a book called The Explorer and the Journalist, The Scandal That Shook the World. And Richard's joining me now on the pod. Enjoy. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity.

Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Richard, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. This is an absolute barnstormer of a story. Tell me about the other... We know there's one famous explorer called Cook. Tell me about the other Cook. Who is this guy? after the Civil War, didn't have the fame of some of the other explorers that you might have heard of and be aware of their work, and lived in really grinding poverty in his early years,

before becoming an explorer when he saw an advert in a newspaper for a physician on Robert Peary's expedition to the Arctic, went there and got the bug for polar exploration for life, and really came to the fore for the Belgica expedition, where he was one of the first people to spend a winter in Antarctica, and was really the hero of that expedition in terms of his medical abilities, undoubtedly saving some lives, and in terms of them being stuck in the ice. It was his sort of brainchild that led to them getting out of the ice and getting back home again. So really the hero of the Belgica. A little bit of a shackleton there. The ship sailed into the ice, got stuck over the Antarctic winter. They've hunted for seals, but then the ice released

them and they managed to get home. And the interesting thing was that everyone else on the ship thought that ice was so strong and so powerful that you just had to wait for it to release you. Whereas Cook was the only one saying, we can't wait for it to release us. We've got to get out. And he hatched a plan, which was a brilliant plan, really, to get them out of the ice using a mixture of explosives, digging, and luck and hope, really. But it was his plan that got them out of the ice and back to freedom. Who knows what would have happened if he hadn't? First of all, what I love about it is you just get the sense that in the late 19th century, these explorers were like football players. I mean, soccer players to Americans. Stanley and

Shackleton and these people were just clearly just global rock stars, right? So he just wanted to be in that elite group, did he? I think so. I think he was a doctor in New York and was just slightly bored by his life and struggling to make ends meet as a family doctor. And I think for him, the Arctic just seemed like adventure and sort of boyhood adventure. He read the books by those kind of people and wanted to see it for himself. A few people have said this, that once you do polar exploration, it's kind of in your blood. And I think he said some sort of memorable quote about once you've been to the Arctic, you long for the rest of your days to return. So I think he became almost

addicted to it. And there were times when he sort of said, you know what, it's time to settle down now. My exploring days are behind me. But there was always that one more thing that he did and then went on after the Belgica to really sort of make even more of a name for himself by climbing or claiming to have climbed Mount McKinley, now known as Denali. So that's interesting. So he was the real deal. And then at some stage, he seems to have just started cutting a few corners. Do we know what happened there? In terms of the real deal, like Roald Amundundsen who i would say is probably the greatest of the polar explorers for the rest of his life he always looked at cook as the one explorer he really looked up to and admired and and felt like he had never been

able to replicate some of the feats that cook managed to do when they were on the belgica together and really sort of almost hero worshipped him in a way that wasn't very amundsen like if you know what i mean so that's fascinating but even did Amundsen-like, if you know what I mean. So that's fascinating. But even did Amundsen find out that some of Cook's claims were false? So let's talk about Denali or what was known as Mount McKinley. He led an expedition up there. And there's a famous picture, isn't there, that you talk about that

was actually taken 19 miles away on a little rocky outcrop rather than on the summit of Mount McKinley. So he came down from the mountain saying he'd conquered it. And there were some doubts at the time, but it was generally seems to have been accepted at the time and only really started getting the kind of scrutiny that you might expect once he'd made the North Pole claim. And I think from Amundsen's perspective, he absolutely believed in Cook. I think he said to journalists at the time of the North Pole claim that he's one of the most trustworthy people I've ever met. And if he says he did it, he did it. So Amundsen was very much in his camp. And actually, in terms of the South Pole,

Amundsen had originally been planning to go to the North Pole. But then when he met with Cook in Copenhagen, when the controversy was sort of raging, the fact that Cook had now gone to the North Pole meant that Amundsen said, well, actually, there's not the lustre there anymore to be the first, so I'm going to head south instead. And apparently, as the story goes, I don't know, though the providence, that Amundsen was sort of saying, well, Scott's got the start on me. And it was Cook who said, Scott's not going to use dogs in the right way. You know how to use dogs properly. Even though he's got the start in terms of the preparation, you've got that advantage that will mean you can get there first. So maybe Cook did have a legitimate role to play in a real polar

discovery. And actually, you know, the famous tent at the South Pole that Amundsen put up, that was actually designed by Cook, because Cook was a really creative person. He came up with lots of ideas, and that design was his. And what I don't know is whether that was done because that was the best type of tent, or almost a homage to Cook and the role he played in making Amundsen the explorer that he was. Wow. That's the tent in which listeners to this podcast will remember that Amundsen left a letter for the Norwegian king,

which he asked Scott to post, which is one of the great bits of shade ever thrown. Okay, so let's get the timeline sorted. We've rushed ahead a bit. So he's arrived back from Mount McKinley, as he would have called it, climbing in 1906. He says he's climbed to the top.

His next mission in 1907 is to become the first human being ever to get to the North Pole. And this is the expedition in which he gains enormous notoriety. And as you say, which Amundsen thinks he achieved, and that's why Amundsen headed off to the South Pole. But let's talk about this North Pole expedition does he have funding what how's he putting this expedition together he has got some funding so the McKinley claim took him to the next level of fame and credibility and that unlocked the funding from a millionaire who said why don't we go to the Arctic together I can shoot big game while you can study the Inuit because

Cook was very interested in Inuit culture and kind of it was exceptional for explorers in the sense that he had a great respect and reverence for the Inuit. The original plan was to go there to do that but then Cook said why don't we go for the North Pole and they set off in 1907 with a very very quietly they didn't say they were planning to go to the North Pole because Cook's view was well let's see what the conditions are like and then let's make a decision once we're there. Rather than making a big grand, we're going to the North Pole. But then sent back a letter saying, I am going to go for the North Pole. And then wasn't heard from for a while. So the date by which he said he'd be back

came and went and there was no sign of him. And it got to the point where his friends were rallying around to try to raise money for a relief expedition to try to rescue him. And I think the general sense was that he probably died somewhere in the north because you would have heard from him by now. And then after no word for well over a year, a ship came to an unscheduled stop in the Shetland Islands. And from there, five messages were sent that all contained the one single message that he'd reached the North Pole and so started one of the biggest news stories of the new century. And I think from the perspective of the 21st century, it's really difficult to get your head around just what a big deal the North Pole seemed like at the time. It was something that people wondered what was up there and people had these fantastical views of what might be hidden up there. And also, it seemed like the moon 60 years later,

attaining it would say something about humanity and about the progress of humanity. So a really, really big deal. And Cook suddenly went from a relatively obscure explorer, probably not very well known outside of America, to suddenly one of the most famous people in the world. After the Shetlands, where does that world's media, where's the first interviews take place? So he heads from the Shetlands, the ship is heading straight to Copenhagen in Denmark, and the world's newspapers scramble to get journalists there to be there when he arrives. And that's where the other sort of protagonist in this sort of controversy comes in. One of those journalists was Philip Gibbs, then an obscure journalist who'd had four jobs in Fleet Street. All of them had ended badly.

Then an obscure journalist who'd had four jobs in Fleet Street, all of them had ended badly. So there was nothing to suggest he was going to be one of the leading stars of journalism of the early 20th century. But he was sent to Copenhagen and had one of the biggest lucky breaks that any journalist has ever had. When he got to Copenhagen, he had a coffee in a cafe and a woman walked in whose presence seemed to cause a murmur among the diners there. And a woman walked in whose presence seemed to cause a murmur among the diners there. And the waiter told him that she was the wife of another famous explorer, Knud Erasmussen. And Gibbs went over to her, started having a chat. And it turned out that she knew about a boat that was going off that night to meet Cook's boat before it reached Copenhagen. So from Gibbs' perspective, this was a chance to have an exclusive conversation with Cook before he reached land, which would just be a huge story and by far the biggest story he'd

ever covered in his life. So he seized that opportunity, managed to get aboard Cook's boat before it landed, have the exclusive interview that the world was after. But rather than just sort of thinking to himself, well, I'll just say what Cook said because it's such a big story, he went away from that interview just with that sense that I don't trust this guy. And he had this real dilemma about what to write in the article. Did he call him a liar and risk an expensive libel suit? Did he join in with the congratulations? And in the end, he kind of decided to split the difference by not going as far as calling him a liar but going far enough that you knew he was really skeptical about it and causing a real scandal in copenhagen which was really delighted to be at the center of the world's attention and flattered that cook had chosen it for his sort of arrival back in civilization

okay so let's start with what cook claimed where had had he been all this time? So he claimed he'd made the dash for the pole, got to the pole in April 1908, but that he'd struggled on the way back, nearly starved to death on the way back, and it had taken him much, much longer to get back, but had then sort of managed to get back down to sort of, I've stretched my knowledge here, but slightly southern Greenland, where he'd got the boat back to Lerwick and then to Copenhagen.

And he's travelling to the pole because of sea ice, he's on sleds, or is he trying to get close to it in a ship? How's he getting there? So he was very much of the view that rather than going sort of the big ship and use of technology, to get to the pole, you needed to live like an Inuit. So he believed in a very small party. And it was just him and two Inuit who made, in his view, the 460-odd-mile dash to the pole, along with some dogs. And he took the same sort of view that Amundsen took in terms of dogs being absolutely key, and had the sort of rather brutal but sort of efficient way of using dogs. He would start off with quite a lot of dogs, and then the dogs would be both transport and food for the other dogs. He would slowly sort of kill the dogs and feed food for the other dogs. He would slowly kill

the dogs and feed them to the other dogs to take him there. And why did the journalists start to suspect something was going wrong? I think it all boiled down to the fact that you meet some people and you just think, this just doesn't sit right. And I think Gibbs knew absolutely nothing about polar exploration. It was a complete mystery to him. But I think there was just something in Cook's manner that when he challenged him, he seemed quite defensive. And then when they were approaching Copenhagen, he seemed very nervous. And he just thought, this doesn't quite add up. This doesn't seem like the kind of person I think is telling the truth. And I think as well, Cook told him that he'd left his instruments and his records in Greenland. And Gibbs just thought,

why would you do that? Surely you cling to your records as your proof of your achievement. Why would you trust someone else to take them back to America, which is what Cook was claiming. Listen to Dan Snow's history hit. We're talking about explorers making stuff up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. To be continued... the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. The key thing is proof, right? I mean, obviously there's no gps the north pole the sea ice looks much the same in one place as another the only way of proving presumably is what sort of details

logbook notes celestial navigation when you could fake that days and days and days and months of that would at least be reasonably good evidence yeah and eventually when it all came to be tested, I think what you wanted was good records coinciding with sort of anecdotal stuff that sort of tended to fit together in terms of forming a picture. And certainly at that point, Cook didn't have any of that. His view was, well, you've trusted other explorers when they came back. Why don't you trust me? And I'm no expert on polar history, but the sense I get is that the Cook story was a real

sort of turning point in that before then you kind of did trust people because it was a gentleman's pursuit and people didn't lie about it. But then after that, you made sure you had the receipts because if you didn't, then people were going to suspect you of lying. Did Gibbs start to suspect that he just got the navigation wrong and he maybe hadn't quite got to the North Pole, but he had been wandering about on the ice cap for a long time. Or he'd just been in the pub, like chilling out. So I think Gibbs thought he was a liar. No one knows for sure what happened up there because he stuck to his story for the rest of his life.

My view, which is sort of taken from the people whose views I tended to respect, is that he did try to the North Pole in earnestness and sort of wanted to genuinely do it. But that once actually it just became obvious that it wasn't going to happen, he was at the sort of point in his career where there probably wasn't going to be too many second chances. I know the feeling. So he thought, well, it's that or nothing. And if you think that this was a race that was really hotting up, if you like, the farthest north record had been broken a few times in the last 10, 20 years or what have you. And Robert Peary had just got the farthest north, apparently, in 1906. It really felt like if he didn't do it then, someone else was going to beat him to it, I think. So he made that decision and

probably made the same decision at McKinley in terms of wanting to genuinely climb it. But when it became clear it was not going to happen wanted to come back with a good story because he knew that that's the currency that explorers trade in. And talk to me about Copenhagen Sir Gibbs kind of breaks this half breaks the story as you say is it immediately I mean what rest of the press still just quite excited about this or does it quite quickly turn into a big controversy? So the press are extremely excited when he arrives. Cook does a press conference on his first day in Copenhagen with about 60 journalists, and they sort of interrogate him to the validity of his claim. And he really impresses them. And there's a quote from one of the journalists there who says, any doubts were absolutely assuaged. He comes across as a very honest man with great

integrity. And I think that was the thing about Cook. He really came across well and seemed very sort of self-effacing and modest and willing to share the credit with others in a way that wasn't always the case with polar explorers. And so he was a very likable person you wanted to believe in. So journalists all believed in him. And then when Gibbs's story landed like a bombshell, it really sort really made him the most unpopular person in Copenhagen. He was booed in a restaurant when he was trying to eat. He was challenged to a duel by one of Cook's supporters. Twice, he was accused of having lied about his story. From his perspective, he was a very sensitive person that was quite difficult to deal with.

But also, he really believed that Cook was lying and that this was his chance to prove it. So he really chased the story in Copenhagen and tried to build the case against Cook, even as the rest of Copenhagen was sort of still celebrating his achievement and sort of giving him accolades like the gold medal of the Danish Royal Geographical Society, the honorary degree from the University of Copenhagen. Just as these things were happening, he was being accused of being a liar. But as the days progressed, the tide seemed to be turning and the doubts seemed to be increasing. So actually, by the time Cook left Copenhagen about a week later, there were real doubts. And you could almost sense a sense of nervousness in Copenhagen that maybe the person that we've supported isn't all he seems to be after all.

Interesting. Now, a few years later, Cook does end up going to prison for fraud, but it's connected with some business dealings. The fact he ended up in prison for fraud over commercial dealings in the oil fields of Texas doesn't necessarily mean he was a liar, but it's not a great look, is it? It's certainly not, no. And I think even before that, he said to anyone who doubted him, look, I'm not going to get into a public slanging match with you. Wait till I've presented my data and my evidence to an august body of scientists and then let them decide. And he did exactly that

in December 1909, handed in what he said was his evidence. And there was a real sort of disgust among those experts. He'd handled them almost nothing that they could make any judgment on at all. So I think at that point, once the University of Copenhagen that had been so eager to acclaim him for having reached it came to the view that there was no evidence that he had reached it. At that point, the general view was that he was a liar at that point. And then, as you say, he went on the lecture tour to try to win back his favour in terms of convincing the world that he had reached the North Pole, but was largely unsuccessful in that. He tried to get Congress to pass a motion saying that he'd reached the pole, again, wasn't successful in that. Tried to climb Mount Everest, was very unsuccessful in that in

terms of he didn't even manage to set foot in Nepal. He got turned back because he was suspected of being a spy and then thought, well, the exploration isn't going to work for me. So, then reinvented himself as an oil man in Texas and was massively successful for a while. So he had revenues of millions of pounds, seemed to be doing really well. And people were slightly baffled by this because the more you sort of ask questions about his business model, the less it seemed to make sense. And essentially, it boiled down to that it was a massive direct mail operation where he would send people letters, ask them to buy shares, making overinflated claims about the possibilities or the likelihood of success,

and really made the money through more people buying shares rather than actually making significant discoveries in oil. And he was charged with fraud and ended up spending six and a half years in jail for that, yes. Crikey. And what about Gibbs? What about the journalist? Was this the launch of an exciting career for him? He went from being an obscure journalist to being one of the leading journalists in the UK. And that really sort of gave him a ringside seat to some of the big stories of the early 20th century. So he was at the siege of Sydney Street, where Churchill was directing operations against a group of Latvian revolutionaries inside a house. He was one of the very first people to learn of the death of Edward VII when he saw the Prince

of Wales coming out of Buckingham Palace with tears in his eyes, went in to ask what was happening and was told, you know, that would never happen these days with the type of media control we've got, but said, oh, the king's just died. He got the news an hour before it went on the notice board outside Buckingham Palace. He covered the Balkans Wars in 1912. And he also did an expose of conditions in Portuguese prisons after the revolution there. And that seemed to lead to an amnesty for political prisoners in Portugal. And he had this strange experience that Portuguese would arrive at his home and kiss his hand because they wanted to thank him for having been instrumental in freeing their relatives

from prison in Portugal. And all this set him up for the First World War, which was the biggest story of his life. Right from the beginning of the war to the end of it, he was sending back reports about the fighting there and really became a sort of household name both here and in America for his work in terms of reporting on the Western Front. That gave him huge professional success, but also came at a price in terms of his mental health. It's really clear from reading his work that he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after the war in terms of struggling to find happiness and became desperate to campaign for peace in the 1920s and the 1930s. I'm not surprised. I mean, did he feel that when Cook was imprisoned,

it was a moment of triumph for him? Or did he keep an interest in Cook up after those tough times in Copenhagen? Not really, no. So you've read a couple of autobiographies and told the story in those. There's no sense that they ever had any connection after the events in Copenhagen. Although intriguingly, they were both at the events for the funeral of King Edward VII. So it's just interesting that they may have been not too far away at that point, but never came into contact with each other again. Although Gibbs did become more interested in polar exploration in terms of Shackleton was a good friend of his news editor and used to often come into the office and sort of exchange stories.

And Gibbs was lucky enough to be able to sit in on those conversations. And after Shackleton's death, one of the things that he really regretted was he'd not written those conversations down because he found them absolutely fascinating and thought they would have made a fantastic book if he could have noted down what Shackleton was saying at the time. I guess we just finish up by mentioning Amundsen. So he thought Cooker reached North Pole, so he went to the South Pole, became world famous as a result of doing that. And then actually lots of people don't remember this about Amundsen. He was probably the first person to reach the North Pole as well, if only by aircraft. Exactly. And interestingly, so Amundsen, when Cook was in prison, came to visit him in prison and really caused a big controversy in

the US by making the case that actually I don't think that Robert Peary, who at the time was seen as definitely having reached the North Pole, I don't think he necessarily had a better case than Cook. And by saying that to journalists as he came out of the prison after visiting Cook, he caused this controversy. He had to leave the US early and just added to the bitterness that Amundsen had around how he was treated, but really told journalists as he left that prison that Cook was one of the most extraordinary explorers he'd ever worked with and felt very sad at that point that Cook had obviously ended up in a situation where he was now in prison but still stayed loyal to his old friend. And then when he went to the North Pole, it was a huge success and really sort of cemented, in my view, his position

as the greatest of the polar explorers. He was one of the greatest explorers of all time. South Pole, Northwest Passage. And then he flew the airship Norge, Norway, from Spitsbergen over the North Pole and then landed in Alaska. I mean, a total legend. And it was a few days after the Robert Bird exhibition, which I think is now seen as not credible. So yes, as you say, if you had to say someone reached the North Pole, Amundsen would be your best bet as the person who would have the claim. And then when Amundsen, he fell out with the guy that he went to the North Pole with, Nabele, I think his name is. And then when Nabele had a crash a couple of years later, Amundsen went to try to rescue him and obviously died in that attempt. And apparently when Cook was given the news, he was absolutely sure that Amundsen would survive and would get back. And even after the world as a whole had given Amundsen up for dead

and assumed that he must have died, Cook still held on to the belief that, no, he's going to get back. And that was the strength of their friendship and I guess the strength of the respect that Cook had for Amundsen as well as Amundsen had for Cook. Well, it's an incredible story of journalists pricking celebrity claims. I love it. And also just a reminder of this,

the febrile atmosphere, the late 19th, early 20th century in terms of high latitude exploration. I love it. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast, buddy. Tell everyone what your book's called. So my book is called The Explorer and the Journalist and it's published on May the 25th.

And please read it. Please read it, everybody. Go for it. Richard Evans, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thanks so much.