From Hero to Humbug

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 [...]

On September 21, 1909, Dr. Frederick Albert Cook arrived in the United Sates from Europe aboard the Oscar II. The liner had lain off Fire Island since three in the afternoon the day before so as not to upset the welcome plans for the Discoverer of the North Pole. She dressed in flags and proceeded [...]

It all began with these words sent in a telegram from Lerwick, Shetland Islands, on the morning of September 1, 1909:
REACHED NORTH POLE APRIL 21, 1908. DISCOVERED LAND FAR NORTH. RETURN TO COPENHAGEN BY STEAMER HANS EGEDE. FREDERICK COOK.
It will be 100 years ago tomorrow that those fateful words broke upon an unsuspecting world. For [...]