From Hero to Humbug

The ongoing series on the “Eskimo Testimony” will resume next month.

In early 1997 I was asked to submit a paper for a symposium to be held at Ohio State University in Columbus. The aim of the symposium was to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the Belgian Antarctic Expedition, led by Adrien de Gerlache. The symposium was jointly sponsored by The Frederick A. Cook Society and the Byrd Polar Research Center at OSU.

In 1993 the Cook Society and OSU had held a symposium on Dr. Frederick A. Cook as an explorer which attracted a number of distinguished presenters, including the polar explorer Wally Herbert and the French anthropologist Jean Malaurie. This venture resulted in the decision of the Cook Society to deposit most of their collection of materials related to Frederick Cook in OSU’s Archives.

The Cook Society’s interest in sponsoring the 1997 symposium was that Frederick Cook was the physician and anthropologist of the Belgica expedition, and they saw another opportunity to boost their namesake’s reputation by recounting his positive role in the expedition’s safe return after it became the first expedition to winter inside the Antarctic Circle.

I was invited to be a presenter because the Cook Society had convinced itself that the book I had been writing on Cook since 1989 would vindicate him and establish his later claims to have been the first to climb Alaska’s Mt. McKinley in 1906 and to have attained the North Pole in 1908. There expectations proved unfounded. When my book appeared on February 17, 1997, it did neither of those things. Indeed, it soundly refuted both of those claims after a careful examination of many key original sources that had never been examined before, which showed each to have been a knowing fraud.

If the society had known my conclusions in advance, I would not have been invited, but the invitation had been extended before the book’s publication and could not be withdrawn. Although the society published the proceedings of the earlier 1993 symposium, none of the papers from the 1997 symposium were ever published, possibly because it would have had to include my paper. So now, on the 125th Anniversary, I take this opportunity to publish that unpublished paper for the first time anywhere.