Walrus Tusk That Ended Up in Kennebunkport
This Walrus Tusk in our collection was donated to the Kennebunkport Historical Society by the Louis T. Graves Library in 1979 with no known provenance. The markings on it indicate that Commander Robert Peary, who was widely credited in 1909 as being the first to discover the North Pole on a voyage of the S.S. Roosevelt, presented it to Frederick A. Duneka, General Manager of Harper’s Weekly Magazine on September 20, 1909. We always wondered how it found its way to Kennebunkport.
After their separate Arctic expeditions, both Commander Robert Peary and Dr. Frederick Cook returned to the public eye in September of 1909 claiming to have been the first to stand at the axis of Earth’s rotation, the North Pole. Of course, nobody asked the Inuit people who had inhabited the Arctic regions for thousands of years if they had ever been there. The battle between the two American explorers became more of a popularity contest than a comparison of scientific evidence.
On September 1, 1909, New York physician Dr. Frederick A. Cook published his claim in the New York Herald that he had been to the North Pole on April 21, 1908. Several days later, Mainer Commander Robert Peary reported that he had been the first to reach the geographic North Pole on April 6, 1909. The two rival explorers had formerly sailed together on expeditions. Peary launched an all-out assault on Cook’s veracity. Cook defended himself with allegations that Peary had stolen his notes from an associate.
The controversy was good for newspaper sales and for the explorers’ pocketbooks. The New York Herald paid Cook $3000 for a written account of his expedition to be printed in twelve segments under the headline Conquest of the Pole. The New York Times supported Peary’s claims and printed every one of the numerous disparaging remarks he made about his former colleague. He also sent this walrus tusk to Frederick A. Duneka, as enticement for the Duneka to support his claim in the wildly popular Harper’s Weekly Magazine.
We were able to discover a few local connections to the controversy that might explain how the Arctic artifact found its way to Kennebunkport.
Frederick A. Duneka of Harper’s Weekly was married to the granddaughter of Captain William Jefferds whose house on Pearl Street Kennebunkport is now the Capt. Jefferds Inn. Lillian Jefferds Duneka summered at the Brooks Cottage at Cape Arundel.
While Dr Cook’s proof was examined by scientists at the University of Copenhagen for authenticity in December of 1909, he dropped out of sight by becoming the first patient of the newly opened Pine Tree Sanitarium at Well Depot, Maine. The news from Copenhagen was not good. Dr. Frederick A. Cook was discredited, and Peary was celebrated as a hero.
Capt. R. A. Bartlett, commander of the S.S. Roosevelt on the trip when Peary claimed to have reached the pole, spent the summer of 1911 at Beachwood.
Ultimately, neither explorer was able to scientifically prove their claims. Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen led the first properly documented expedition to the North Pole in 1926 onboard the airship Norge.
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