BROKEN NEWS Author Darrell Hartman examines the 1908-09 effort to reach the North Pole in Battle of Ink and Ice through the biased and even fabricated accounts in newspapers of the period. Adriana Serafino photo

Polar opposites: the Cook/Peary controversy

Sullivan author chronicles the race to the North Pole

By Adriana Serafino | Manor Ink

If you lived 114 years ago, there was a raging controversy involving Frederick A. Cook, a Sullivan County native. Cook claimed to be the first man to reach the North Pole, and this controversy still continues today among scholars around the world.

Local author Darrell Hartman studied the controversy and recently published The Battle of Ink and Ice, a book about the captivating story of Cook and Robert E. Peary, both of whom claimed to make it to the North Pole first. Unlike other books about the story, Hartman’s narrative follows the press wars in New York City at the time, and how the news media fueled the account.

COMPETITORS Though they both claimed to have reached the North Pole by 1909, it’s now believed that neither Frederick A. Cook, left, nor Robert E. Peary, right, actually did. Provided photos

Hartman told Manor Ink that what grabbed his attention about the story was the mendacious reporting that surrounded it. “The most incredibly surprising thing is the idea that someone would lie about something as monumental as getting to the North Pole,” Hartman said. “This, in its time, was like discovering the moon.”

It took four years of writing and researching through dozens of archived newspapers to put the story together, and the more Hartman learned, the more surprised he became by how the story was manipulated by the press. He even found letters that showed how Peary had used some of his allies and press contacts to advance his cause. In fact, the New York Herald had provided financial support to Cook and The New York Times, having been recently purchased by Adolph Ochs, provided support to Peary, with each newspaper having exclusive rights to their explorer’s story.

Hartman explained this was the era of public fascination with great adventuring and exploration of the unknown, so the Cook-Peary story “was a huge headline-grabbing thing that had many serious people discussing whether this historic achievement had been completely fabricated.”

The Battle of Ink and Ice has received rave reviews, and indeed presents an engrossing story of both the explorers and the impact their quest had on the nascent newspaper industry. Spoiler alert: scholars now generally agree that neither American was the first to reach the North Pole – that the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen was the first to do so in May 1926. The New York Times even published a belated correction in 1988, finally giving credit to Amundsen rather than Peary.

LOCAL EXPLORER An exhibit of images and artifacts from the remarkable career of Frederick A. Cook was organized at the Sullivan County Museum by Executive Director Carol Smith. Adriana Serafino photo

If you’re interested in learning more about the effort to reach the top of the world, you don’t have to travel to the North Pole. The Sullivan County Museum in Hurleyville has an exhibition about Frederick A. Cook. Many of the artifacts on display in the Museum’s gallery were donated by family members, as Cook’s daughter and granddaughter preserved most of his papers, photographs and books.

“Frederick Cook is one of the most fascinating people I have ever studied,” said Carol Smith, executive director of the Frederick A. Cook Society. She worked on creating the new exhibition in the museum’s auditorium, and it will be there through November of 2024.

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