Читать книгу Adventures in Journalism онлайн

64 страница из 84

During the time I had been writing, Doctor Cook had been interviewed by forty journalists in one assembly. W. T. Stead, as doyen of the press, asked the questions, and at the end of the session spoke on behalf of the whole body of journalists in paying his tribute of admiration and homage to the discoverer of the North Pole. Spellbound by Stead’s enthusiasm, and not having had my advantage of that experience on the Hans Egede, there was not a man among that forty who suggested a single word of doubt about the achievement claimed by Cook. By a supreme chance of luck, I was alone in my attack.

I will not disguise my sense of anxiety. I had a deep conviction that my judgment was right, but whether I should be able to maintain my position by direct evidence and proof, was not so certain in my mind. I knew, next day, that my dispatch had been published by my paper, for great extracts from it were cabled back to the Danish press and they caused an immense sensation in Copenhagen, and as the days passed in an astounding fortnight, when I continued my attack by further and damning accusations against Cook, I was the subject of hostile demonstrations in the restaurants and cafés, and the Danish newspaper Politiken published a murderous-looking portrait of me and described me as “the liar Gibbs”—a designation which afterward they withdrew with handsome apologies.