>     READ THE FULL ACCOUNT

The Frederick A. Cook Living Museum:
Cook’s 1908-9 Winter Den
Cape Hardy, Devon Island

by Louis O. (Lon) Constantini
 

Click on the picture to enlarge. Cook's winter quarters at Cape Hardy (Sparbo) as sketched by J. M. Wordie in 1937.	Click on the picture to enlarge. Cook's den, c 2003.  The site is about 200 ft from the Jones Sound shore line landfall, 1908.

Exploring the high arctic is a wonderful experience even when challenged by weather and terrain. However, there is a definable and recurring experience that I always enjoy the most. Upon arriving at some arctic location, on ice or gravel bank, the most pleasurable time is when the DiHaviland twin engine Otter has it’s engines rev’ed to takeoff pitch; the plane rolls forward and in a space less than I can kick a rugby ball, it’s huge tires leave the ground. The plane lifts off, and in this instance flies towards the cliffs, pivots on a wing tip and then, as is customary, roars over our heads. In the time it takes to lift a rucksack, it looks like a bird lost in a cloud. It would be gone, and we would still be there. 

>     READ THE FULL ACCOUNT

'My Attainment': same response to both reprints 

Same endorsements and reviews for both reprints on the Internet

The Polar Publishing Co. edition sponsored by the F.A. Cook Society

Bryce's cover:  First it was 'North Pole' then just 'Pole' reflecting the mixed agenda

---

While it may not be the first instance of "copycat publishing," it has without a doubt introduced confusion into the world of internet book buyers, with special emphasis on those who follow the new and reprint editions dealing with classic polar exploration.

My Attainment of the Pole, Frederick A. Cook's account of his 1907­09 North Pole Expedition, was published in 1911 by Mitchell Kennerley, a respected New York publisher. While Robert E. Peary's book, The North Pole, had come out a year earlier, the "Cook book" soon gained a popular audience on the explorer's Chatauqua lecture circuit and eventually would surpass his rival with three editions in the United States. Editions in the United Kingdom and Germany soon followed and Cook's book has long been considered one of the out-standing accounts of exploration, discovery and survival in the polar regions.

>     READ THE FULL ACCOUNT

---

Admiral 'Tommy' Thomas, Ice Captain of both polar regions in war and peace

He captured the first enemy ship in World War II, was called by Admiral Byrd as 'the best ice sailor alive' and became president of the reorganized Frederick A. Cook Society in 1957.

Charles Ward Thomas (1903­1973) was quite possibly the greatest "ice admiral" of the United States in the twentieth century. He claimed pioneering experience guiding U.S. Navy ships through the treacherous Arctic Ocean floes off eastern Greenland and then in the Ross Sea in Antarctica.

President Roosevelt awarded him the Legion of Merit for heroic service in capturing the first enemy ship in wartime since the Spanish-American War, and in overcoming a German weather service base in eastern Greenland in October 1944 with the surrender of all of its personnel.

> READ THE FULL ACCOUNT 

---

What happened to the original Andrew Freeman manuscript in 1937?
.

.
The perspective of a youngster not quite nine years old is different from that of an adult, so my reflections on the summer of 1936 in the Hudson River community of Brewster would be far different from those of my parents. They were literary people, well traveled and sophisticated about the world which judged the lives and deeds of their contemporaries in harsh standards.

My father had obtained the notes of a previous manuscript on Dr. Frederick A. Cook by a contemporary of Cook, Felix Riesenberg, who had served as the navigator with Walter Wellman in his famous but abortive airship expedition to the North Pole. This took place in the same year that Cook departed for his expedition to the Pole in 1907. Riesenberg had tried to write about the Cook­Peary controversy, but all his sources were secondary, and he found that there was an extreme reluctance by those who knew both explorers to provide their conclusions or even recollections.

> READ THE FULL ACCOUNT 

The Woman Assistant U.S. Attorney General and the Prisoner at Leavenworth, 1928-29.

Called the "most influential woman in America" in the 20s, Mabel Willebrandt was a key advocate for prison reform and a player in the pardon of Cook in 1930.

The trial, imprisonment, appeals and pardon applications of Frederick Albert Cook occupied thousands of pages of Federal Court proceedings for eight years of the second decade of the last century. And those same years involved the career of the highest ranking woman in the federal government, Mabel Walker Willebrandt, the first woman Assistant Attorney General of the United States. Possibly dismissed by many political historians and those who would later chronicle the women's movement, Willebrandt had the unpopular call to enforce the equally unpopular 18th Amendment, which amounted to enforcing Prohibition at its highest legal levels in the "roaring Twenties." Born on the Kansas prairie in 1889, Mabel Walker Willebrandt began school at 13, was a teacher at 17, a principal at 22, and a lawyer at 27. Five years later, at 32, she was appointed an assistant attorney general by President Harding, heading the division in the Justice Department responsible for prohibition, prisons and taxes. Arguing before the Supreme Court, she compiled a winning record seldom equaled. > READ THE FULL ACCOUNT

Mabel Walker Willebrandt, the first appointed woman Assistant Attorney General, served from 1922 to 1929.