Frederick Cook and the Forgotten Pole

Abstract

In 1909, Dr. Frederick A. Cook created a worldwide sensation when he announced that he had reached the North Pole. Although the debate about Cook's expedition still rages in some circles and new books are published on the controversy each decade, most polar historians and editors of encyclopedias agree that Cook never went out of sight of land, let alone to the North Pole. Robert E. Peary is generally credited with being first at the North Pole, although even his claim has detractors .... For those who accept the Peary version of Cook's travels, there are indeed several intriguing mysteries to explain. Why did Cook risk an unnecessary journey that added hundreds of kilometres and nearly a year to his expedition? Why did he lie about where he'd travelled after returning from the Arctic Ocean, when it seemed there was no reason to lead inquiry away from this area? And why did he fail to claim discovery of at least one large, previously unknown island that his companions charted seven years before it was officially discovered? Was there something about these places that attracted Dr. Cook and required this cover-up? In the last few years I have explored a simple but surprising explanation for Cook's apparently aimless wanderings. I have unearthed an arcane goal that might have been Cook's objective on the east coast of Amund Ringes Island. It is another pole, one that the world has forgotten. Perhaps Cook saw it as a consolation prize after failing to reach the North Pole. I believe that this forgotten pole is the key to understanding the enigmatic Dr. Cook. What follows is a brief account of my journey towards what I hope is true understanding, and not delusion. ... I believe that Cook's movements in the late winter of 1908 were related to his interest in Verne's fictional polar expedition and that his account of reaching the North Pole is based on his conquest of Verne's fictional pole. After returning to land at Cape Thomas Hubbard, he had time to kill and the means to sledge south to Verne's landscape firsthand, .... One contemporary anonymous review of a new Verne book, probably written by Verne himself, stated: "M. Jules Verne ... knows how to link fiction to reality in proportions so exact that one does not know where one begins and the other leaves off" (Evans, 1996:178). Fredrick Cook was clearly from the same school of writers. The author of a narrative of an expedition to this lesser pole, who claimed the much greater prize, would surely have wished to avoid comparison with Verne's fictional expedition. To that end, he might have sacrificed any minor discoveries made on that route. He needn't have bothered, as it turned out. Although Cook's actual route was widely published by Peary in 1909, the Verne connection was not suspected for another 90 years.