From Hero to Humbug

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 [...]

This summer I had the opportunity to visit the excellent Fram Museum in Oslo, Norway. Anyone who is in the area should not miss the chance to board this most iconic of all polar vessels.

The museum is a large A-frame building that houses Nansen’s ship, with a wing that houses Amundsen’s Gjøa, on which [...]

At last the “smoking gun” is found for Cook’s North Pole hoax.

After nearly two years of work, The Lost Notebook of Dr. Frederick A. Cook, the author of this website’s transcription of Cook’s polar diary is now available. The book is 426 pages long and contains a full annotated transcription of the [...]

Today is the one-hundred-first anniversary of Frederick Cook’s first appearance in Vaudeville.
On February 12, 1911, Cook appeared on the stage of Oscar Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera House as an “added” feature to a six-part vaudeville card directly after the Panklebs, an act billed as “Comedy Clay Modelers.” Herbert Bridgman, the secretary of the Peary Arctic [...]

How the mighty have fallen
In 2005 yet another attempt to resuscitate Frederick Cook appeared under the imprint of the once-respected independent publisher W.W. Norton Co., whose proud motto once was “books not for the single season, but for the years.” As a case study in how the print publication industry is foundering, Norton’s publication [...]

In 1910 Hampton’s Magazine paid Peary $40,000 for the rights to his serialized narrative of his conquest of the pole. This series turned out to be a financial disaster, failing to recoup even this, much less the additional $50,000 Benjamin Hampton spent on advertising it. Perhaps to try to recover his loses, he [...]

A Busy Week
A hundred years ago, this was a busy week in the Polar Controversy.   Peary’s long awaited “proofs” that Dr. Cook had not been to the North Pole were released in the form of a statement alleged to have been made by the two Inuit who accompanied him, along with a map on which [...]