338 STORY OF HARRY WHITNEY 



were sewn to me ; fastened to me ; and would have gone to the bottom of the 

 Arctic with me before I would have turned them over to a soul." 



Aside from his scanty equiptment, his lack of experience, the condition 

 of his sledge when I saw it at Etah," continued Peary, "aside from the clumsy 

 and poorly made snowshoes that afterwards were alleged to have traveled 

 over 1,700 miles of Arctic ice; aside from the fact that no other explorer ever 

 had negotiated more than eleven degrees, I have further information from 

 all the Eskimos to back me up in my assumption that Cook has not gone over 

 the sea ice to the pole." 



"What is your strongest line of proof that Dr. Cook was not at the North 

 Pole?" 



"One of my main points will be the strongest that has been advanced in 

 Arctic exploration ever since the first great expedition was sent there — that 

 is, the recognized custom of an explorer, when reaching a point attained by 

 an explorer previously, to make a copy of the records in the cairn there, put it 

 in place of the original, and bring the original back with him. Dr. Cook did 

 not do this. 



"At Cape Thomas Hubbard I left a record in 1906. Dr. Cook declares 

 after he left Annotok he went to Cape Thomas Hubbard with his large party 

 of Eskimos. Although he had men enough to make a thorough search he did 

 not do so. He passed the cape twice to the pole as he outlines it, but neither 

 time did he say that he had looked for the cairn. My record is still there. If 

 he can show that record I will accept it as positive proof that he was at Cape 

 Thomas Hubbard. 



"It was at Indian Harbor that I received a message saying that Cook 

 was at Copenhagen, and that he was making the claim he had reached the pole. 



"It was then that I sent my message saying that I knew Cook had not gone 

 far from land. The two Eskimos who had been his company had assured me 

 of this, and their statements had been corroborated by other Eskimos. I had 

 seen every one of every tribe all the way from Cape Columbia to Cape York. 

 I had visited every settlement in Eskimo land, and had complete corrobora- 

 tive evidence from all as to what the first two had said." 



Shortly after this talk, the Peary charges against Cook were lined up as a 

 sort of formal indictment, the "counts" in which ran as follows : 



"i. Mr. Peary and Matt Henson, either individually or together, talked 

 with every member of the Smith Sound tribe of Eskimos and obtained testi- 

 mony that corroborates that of E-tuck-a-shoe and A-pel-lah, the Eskimos who 

 accompanied Dr. Cook, that Dr. Cook had not been out of sight of land. 



