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Landing on the quayside, I had to fight my way through an immense surging crowd, which almost killed the object of their adoration by the terrific pressure of their mass, in which each individual struggled to get near him. I heard afterward that W. T. Stead, the famous old journalist of the Review of Reviews, which afterward I edited, flung his arms round Doctor Cook, and called upon fellow journalists to form his bodyguard, lest he should be crushed to death.

On the edge of the crowd I met the first English journalist I had seen. It was Alphonse Courlander, a very brilliant and amusing fellow, with whom I had a close friendship. When he heard that I had been on Cook’s ship and had interviewed him for a couple of hours, he had a wistful look which I knew was a plea for me to impart my story. But this was one of the few times when I played a lone hand, and I ran from him, and jumped on a taxi in order to avoid the call of comradeship. I knew that I had the story of the world.

In a small hotel, distant from the center of the city, I wrote it to the extent of seven columns, and the whole of it amounted to a case of libel, making a definite challenge to Cook’s claim and ridiculing the narrative which I set forth as he had told it to me. When I had handed it into the telegraph office I knew that I had burned my boats, and that my whole journalistic career would be made or marred by this message.