From Hero to Humbug

No legitimate publisher would touch Cook’s narrative in book form in 1911, so he formed his own “Polar Publishing Company” to issue and promote it and manage the lectures he planned to give after its publication.

T. Everett Harre was a subeditor of Hampton’s Magazine at the time Benjamin Hampton secretly contracted with Cook for a [...]

Peary had a falling out with Matt Henson after the return of his attempt to reach the North Pole in 1909 over his attempt to prevent him from going on the lecture platform. Peary was especially disturbed to learn that Henson planned to exhibit some of his own photographs, including one he claimed was [...]

On December 21, 1909, Dr. Cook’s “proofs” that he had reached the North Pole in 1908 were rejected by the special commission set up by the University of Copenhagen to examine them. Immediately he was branded nothing but a cheap fake, just as Peary had said he was. Merchants in New York City [...]

The author has recently published a new study drawing on original sources. It is now available on Amazon.com.
In 1907, Robert E. Peary first claimed that when he stood on the heights of Axel Heiberg Island in June 1906, he sighted a distant land to the northwest.
Peary named it “Crocker Land,” after the banker George [...]

This is the fourth in an occasional series that will examine the published literature in book form relevant to the details of the Polar Controversy. These books will be discussed in the order they were published.
The quintessential book of the Polar Controversy is My Attainment of the Pole, Dr. Cook’s narrative of his 1908-09 [...]

This is the third in an occasional series that will examine the published literature in book form relevant to the details of the Polar Controversy. These books will be discussed in the order they were published.

Peary always had a strict rule that no expedition member could write anything about his experiences until one year [...]

This is the second in an occasional series that will examine the published literature in book form relevant to the details of the Polar Controversy. These books will be discussed in the order they were published.

It took less than a year before the first book appeared doubting Peary’s claim with the questioning title, Did [...]

This is the first in an occasional series that will examine the published literature in book form relevant to the details of the Polar Controversy. These books will be discussed in the order they were published. The first is Peary’s personal narrative of his alleged “discovery of the North Pole,” a claim now [...]

After his conviction for using the US Mails to defraud in 1923, Dr. Cook spent 16 months in the Tarrant County Jail in Fort Worth, TX pending his appeal. There he came in contact with John Western, an Australian who was being confined there by immigration authorities until he could be deported. It [...]

Frederick Albert Cook was born on this day 160 years ago in the hamlet of Hortonville in Sullivan County, NY.  
“History will give Dr. Cook a place–this may be high, it may be low, but a place is assured”
– from the unpublished memoirs of Frederick A. Cook