From Hero to Humbug

This is the fifth in a series examining significant unpublished documents associated with the Polar Controversy.
During most of 1914, Frederick Cook was followed by detectives from the Edward J. Burns detective agency and became “Case 2140” on their books. The intent was to learn who he saw and what his future plans were [...]

This is the fourth in a series examining significant unpublished documents associated with the Polar Controversy.
After his return from “exile,” in December 1910, Frederick Cook organized The Polar Publishing Company, headquartered in Chicago, to publish his forthcoming book about his conquest of the North Pole.   Also in Chicago, he made his film The [...]

This is the third in a series examining significant unpublished documents associated with the Polar Controversy. When the Crocker Land Expedition arrived in Greenland, the ship’s captain was unwilling to risk the crossing of Smith Sound to land the expedition near Bache Peninsula on Ellesmere Island, the preferred site of its winter headquarters. So [...]

This is the second in a series examining significant unpublished documents associated with the Polar Controversy.
We are now about halfway through the centennial of the Crocker Land Expedition, 1913-17. This expedition left Brooklyn in July 1913 with the intention of exploring “Crocker Land,” which Peary claimed to have seen in 1906 from the [...]

Over the 40 years your editor has researched the Polar Controversy, he has accumulated thousands of pages of documentation from the many archives, institutions and private individuals that hold significant material dealing with Cook and Peary. This is the first in an ongoing series featuring some of those documents.

Dr. John W. Goodsell was surgeon [...]

A few years back we were in Portland, ME, after climbing Mt. Kathadin in Baxter State Park, so we took an excursion to Eagle Island, summer home of Admiral Peary. Peary was captivated by the island on one of his trips to Casco Bay while a student at nearby Bowdoin College in Brunswick. [...]

It is now difficult to remember a time before the Internet was ubiquitous. It had been around, but it only came into wide usage about 1996 with the invention of practical search engines. Since then, the quantity, if not the quality, of information literally at ones fingertips has mushroomed to then unimaginable proportions. [...]

Anyone who purchased a copy of The Lost Polar Notebook of Dr. Frederick A. Cook between May 22, 2014 and March 1, 2015 should make note of these changes to the text. This is envisioned as the last major revision of the text. Any future corrections will accumulate on an errata sheet and [...]

While in Europe this past spring, there were chances to visit several places connected with Dr. Cook. The first was a drive past the Phoenix Hotel, where Cook stayed as guest upon his return from Greenland on September 4, 1909. Unfortunately, plans to visit this and other sites associated with the “Cook Days” [...]

Dr. David Welky, a professor at the University of Central Arkansas, who is working on a book on Donald MacMillan’s Crocker Land Expedition of 1913-17, recently brought to my attention that there is a different and apparently earlier version of MacMillan’s 1914 field diary in New York.
It differs from that now in the collection [...]