Note 23 — COPENHAGEN TO THE UNITED STATES

Captain Robert A. Bartlett, of the Peary ship Roosevelt, has figured much in this controversy. Most of his reported statements, I am inclined to believe, are distorted. But he has allowed the words attributed to him to stand; therefore, the harm done is just as great as if the charges were true. He allowed Henry Rood, in The Saturday Evening Post, to say that my expedition was possible only through the advice of Bartlett. Every statement which Rood made, as Bartlett knows, is a lie. He has allowed this to stand, and he thereby stands convicted as party to a faked article written with the express purpose of inflicting an injury.

Bartlett cross-questioned my Eskimos about instruments. By showing them a sextant and other apparatus he learned that I not only had a full set, but he also learned how I used them. Peary, although having Bartlett's report on this, insinuated that I had no instruments, and that I made no observations. Bartlett knew this to be a lie, but he remained silent. He is therefore a party to a Peary lie.

In the early press reports Bartlett is credited with saying that "Cook had no instruments." A year later, after Bartlett returned from another trip north, faked pictures and faked news items were printed with the Bartlett interviews and reports. There was no protest, and at the same time Bartlett said that books, instruments, and things belonging to me had been destroyed. In the following year Bartlett announced that he was "going after Cook's instruments." Has the press lied, or has Bartlett lied? Next to Henson, Mr. Peary's colored servant, Captain Bartlett is Peary's star witness.

George Borup, in "A Tenderfoot With Peary," after repeating in his book many pro-Peary lies, tried to prove his assertion by an alleged study of my sledge (P. 300): "Except for its being shortened, the sledge was the same as when it had left Annoatok. It weighed perhaps thirty pounds, and was very flimsy."

This is a deliberate lie, for it was only a half-sled, reassembled and repaired by old bits of driftwood. After this first lie he says, in the same paragraph: "Yet it had only two cracks in it." The upstanders had been cracked in a dozen places, the runners were broken, and every part was cracked.

Borup shows by his orthography of Eskimo words that he knows almost nothing of the Eskimo language. Therefore he may be dismissed as incompetent where Eskimo reports are to be interpreted. He is committed to the Peary interests, which also eliminates him from the jury. But in his report of my sled he has stooped to lies which forever deprive him of being credited with any honest opinion on the Polar controversy.