Return from the Pole

10 June 1865 – 5 August 1940

Frederick Albert Cook was an American explorer, physician, and ethnographer, noted for his claim of having reached the North Pole on April 21, 1908. This was nearly a year before April 6, 1909, the date claimed by the American explorer Robert Peary, and the accounts were disputed for several years. His expedition did discover Meighen Island, the only discovery of an island in the American Arctic by a United States expedition. After reviewing Cook's limited records, a commission of the University of Copenhagen ruled in December 1909 that he had not proven that he reached the pole. In 1911 Cook published a memoir of his expedition, continuing to assert their success. His 1906 account of ha…