From Hero to Humbug

The author of this website is now well into writing a transcription of Frederick Cook’s polar notebook which he unearthed in Denmark in 1993. The notebook exists in a photographic copy made by the University of Copenhagen in 1910. The whereabouts of the original are unknown. This notebook contains a diary of Cook’s polar expedition from the time he left his winter base in February 1908 until he reached Cape Thomas Hubbard, the place from which he left land for his polar attempt. A partial analysis was published as part of Cook & Peary, the Polar Controversy, resolved in 1997, but a full transcription was impossible then because the copies available at the time were not fully legible. The author obtained a digital copy late last year and after evaluating it for legibility, now plans to publish a book containing a full transcription with annotations of this important document. Preliminary plans are to publish the book on Amazon’s self-publishing subsidiary Createspace, if that forum allows for the author’s vision of the book. He does not contemplate publication by a commercial publisher simply because such a book would have negligible commercial potential, though it should have real value to the community of scholars of polar history. If all goes well, the author hopes to have the book ready for publication sometime in 2013. As a result of the amount of work necessary to meet this goal, it is likely that the frequency of posts on this blog will be even less in the coming year than the three or four a year that has been the recent average of posts.